The Flame of Life: A Novel (The William Posters Trilogy Book 3)

by Alan Sillitoe

  Handley had picked up her thoughts: ‘Nobody can moan about the breadwinning side of things. We pull in a few dozen rabbits and plunder the odd field, so we’re fattening up nicely, especially Cuthbert. He had a haircut last week, and we were surprised to see how fat he’d got at the back of the neck. Once upon a time he was so thin he only farted twice a day. Now you have to be careful not to get too close.’

  ‘If you’re trying to drive me away,’ Cuthbert sneered, ‘you won’t succeed. You won’t ever break my calmness with that sort of boorish talk.’

  ‘You’ve got such presence of mind,’ said Handley, ‘that you’re dead from the chin up and the neck down. I’ve seen icy people like you before, but I never thought I’d have the bad luck or foul judgment to breed one.’

  ‘I bred it into myself,’ said Cuthbert, ‘so as not to be ground down by you.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re coming out of your sock,’ Handley said. ‘Most of the time you’re not with us. You’re over the hills and far away.’

  ‘I’m communing with my precious and immortal psyche, if you want to know,’ he mocked.

  The ash fell from his father’s cigar. ‘You haven’t got a psyche. It’s just one big powder-burn.’

  ‘You’re becoming grotesque and ludicrous by the cancer of conceit that’s destroying you.’

  ‘Leave each other alone,’ Enid said, while Dawley stared and the others sighed. ‘Both of you make me sick.’

  ‘If I stay here much longer,’ Handley said with relish, ‘I’ll strangle that preacher. I’ll get ulcers. I’m more relaxed in a London traffic jam than in this place. How can any artist exist in such a death trap?’

  Cuthbert regretted having set his father off. A few years must rush by before he’d win any clash of words with him, but he had a good try: ‘It’s a pity you aren’t thirty years older, then maybe you could find a nice cosy railway station to die in!’

  Handley fixed him: ‘And it’s a pity you’re not thirty years younger, then you might never have been born!’

  ‘What about the meeting?’ Enid spoke softly and slowly. ‘Or shall we let somebody else have a say?’

  Such a threatening mood in her could not be ignored, but he was amiable at having got the last word with Cuthbert. ‘Well then, Adam, Richard and Frank can pursue their tactical studies in subversion. Use the 2½-inch map and put groups of ten men in every wood and coppice in the county. Given the normal number of police, and troops in barracks, devise an insurrectionary exercise for taking control of all communications and public buildings. And don’t forget the power stations, like you did last time. Have a mortar for each five sections – 120 millimetre. They’ve got the range. Any gunnery snags, come to me.’

  Richard made notes. ‘I’ve a 6-inch plan of the town, to work out the urban stuff. That’s always the tricky bit. We’re still writing that manual of “The Complete Street Fighter”. Adam put in a couple of days last week in the British Museum, getting quotes for us to look over.’

  ‘I’ve got two copies of the latest Manual on Infantry Tactics,’ Handley said. ‘Only just published. John’s army contacts are still working for us. The red-hot bits are on fighting in built-up areas. We’ll make a special pamphlet of that. The rest ain’t much cop – except the parts on radio communications.’

  ‘These Army manuals are written for idiots,’ Dawley said. ‘Two hundred pages can be packed into a dozen.’

  ‘I thought of sending one copy to the Soviet Embassy,’ Handley put in, ‘in case the “Infantry in Nuclear War” stuff will be useful. It’d be breaking the official secrets act, but I’d do anything to foul up the idea of the nation-state. Pity nobody in Russia sends out any Red Army crap. Disloyalty to the state is the highest form of respect for the individual. If everybody thought so we might get somewhere.’

  Dawley stood up, and interrupted him. ‘I heard an interesting thing the other day from the Military Academy in Jerusalem. They were trying to find out who’d make the best jungle guerrilla fighter. All known data was shaken into a computer, such as character studies from various armies, place of birth, historical details, physical endurance, localities, etc. It turned out that the best bloke would be a young nineteen-year-old brought up in London, or any industrial sprawl – though not a coastal city. His quick thinking, sense of direction, cunning, guts, and artful dodgery against the forces of law and order (or counter-insurgency force) stick that label on him.’

  ‘No surprise to me,’ Handley said. ‘I knew we were on the right track. It’s part of the struggle that’s been neglected. What do you think about that stuff from the Police College on crowd control I got for you?’

  ‘Worth a bob or two,’ Dawley said.

  ‘In the meantime,’ Handley continued, ‘I want to talk about the subject of a constitution. There’s bin plenty of argument to say we don’t need one. Some of the best came from me, I admit, but the way I look at it now is that a constitution will give more freedom to the community. How can one be free unless there are rules? A community without a constitution is like a bird without wings. It can’t even get off the ground.’

  What would take a normal being like Cuthbert a day to figure out came in a complete plan to Handley between one brush stroke and the next, and that was what made him so dangerous to the community. Maybe there was no place in it for an artist. ‘We’ve done very well without a constitution so far, but I suppose you’re getting bored and want something to chew on. The community would slip from benevolent anarchism to a state of absolute despotism in two flat weeks.’

  Handley was disingenuous and amicable. ‘I won’t force anything. It would be voted in – or not, as the case may be.’

  A long set-to between father and son could only end in one of them leaving, and that would be the time, Dawley thought, for going into action and getting more say over what happened in the community. Meanwhile, he could sit back and watch.

  ‘I’m not sure whether that sort of proposal can be put forward at all,’ Myra said. ‘And it’s far too serious to be over and done with in one session.’

  ‘I don’t agree with it,’ said Ralph, who saw change as a menace wherever it came from. Such a feeling had tormented him from the beginning. Face to face with the whole Handley clan he’d never been able to let out any part of the true personality which he felt shifting around somewhere below his consciousness. The fact that he was trying to get to his personality proved to him that he actually had one, which was enough as far as he was concerned, though to others it was an issue still in the balance. At twenty-six, he assumed some fulfilment was about due, and saw tranquillity of mind as the way in which it would come about. And now, having only just learned to manage his meat and sleep in a community without rules, Handley was threatening an innovation which would turn his protective devices upside down, so that he’d have to learn how to survive all over again.

  Handley, tired of a smooth-running community, missed the excitement of earlier days. Order was a threat to him, and only chaos brought security. By his craving for peace at any price Ralph could deduce this – while not really understanding it. He was young enough to believe that a quiet life was the one thing of value, while Handley, having lived most of his years in strife and penury, was too glad to throw it off now that he was threatened with the mediocrity of it. Even during the worst periods of anarchy and deprivation Handley had never wanted peace. It had been a vague dream whose realisation was viewed as an atrophy of the spirit. In any case what peace was ever peace? There was only a void filled by the violent hugger-mugger of everyday life, in which his own black dog would never leave him be.

  His desire to put the shadowy basis of a constitution firmly on paper leapt up because it seemed necesary to keep Cuthbert in his place. Noble Anarchy was too easy: he needed the simmering violence of order. Most of the others were against a constitution being slipped edgeways into the system, so today he’d merely circulate the idea, hoping that next time it might not be looked on so unfavourably. ‘There’s one fina
l thing,’ he said. ‘A fortnight from now we shall have Maricarmen Frontera-Mayol with us.’

  Cuthbert marvelled at his quick change of topic:

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘A Spanish woman,’ said Dawley, ‘an anarchist not long out of prison.’

  ‘What’s she coming for?’

  ‘If you’d bothered to attend the last meeting you’d know,’ said Handley tartly. ‘We must have a constitution, otherwise the whole bloody ship’ll be on the rocks in another six months.’

  Dawley broke in, before Handley got going on his son: ‘Maricarmen was Shelley Jones’ girlfriend. He was with me running guns into Algeria, and he died there. I promised him I’d contact her, so the community is inviting her to stay for a while.’

  ‘She’ll bring Shelley’s trunk,’ Richard said, ‘full of notebooks which he kept for the years. They should contain interesting revolutionary writings.’

  ‘A grim notion,’ said Cuthbert.

  ‘I’ve yet to see an idea that appeals to you,’ said his father. ‘Anyway, I want you to go to Dover and meet her. Look after her as if she’s a queen. Make sure the immigration police, who do their vile work in the name of every good citizen of this island, don’t treat her like the low-down weasels they are themselves.’

  ‘I can’t schlep all that way,’ said Cuthbert, not wanting to let his father know that he did in fact enjoy travelling. ‘It’ll take a whole day.’

  ‘You’ll go,’ said Handley, menacingly.

  ‘If you insist.’

  ‘Or you’ll be out on your bloody neck.’

  ‘It’s the easiest thing in the world to set you off,’ Enid said.

  ‘Contention is meat and drink to him,’ said Cuthbert. ‘He doesn’t care about anybody but himself.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Handley said, his voice dispirited but calm. ‘There are some accusations I resent so much I can’t even get angry. I don’t like the way you go on about me. It’s not that I can’t take it, but I sometimes think you forget all the good things I’ve done, and the help I’ve given you out of the goodness of my heart. I don’t mind admitting: it makes me sad. You were like a miracle to me when you were born. I loved you more than you’ll ever know. You loved me, as well. We went everywhere together. You sat in my studio for hours, and painted to your heart’s content. I’ve always done the best for you, and I want you to know it, and I want everybody else to know it. I don’t have anything against you, and in spite of this bickering that goes on most of the time I have every regard for you both as a person and as my eldest son. I just want you to know that.’

  Handley was sincere. Their judgements told them that no man could be more so, and they were not easy to deceive in that respect. Cuthbert, while listening to his reasoned voice, had turned white with apprehension. He was filled with a sense of dread, yet he too, somewhere, had been glad of his father’s words. But he didn’t trust any phrase of them, though he knew he would be the loser if he didn’t.

  ‘All right. I’ll go to Dover and fetch her.’

  ‘Good lad,’ Handley smiled. ‘I just wanted you to know I cared.’

  Or do I? he wondered. I thought I’d got a community on my hands, and find it’s a monster. I feed it a bit of my flesh and blood every day, but it still threatens to eat us up.

  The sky was brightening outside, and he felt like a walk. ‘Let’s get back to work,’ he said, ‘if there’s nothing more to say.’

  And there wasn’t, for the moment.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The steamship trunk was a jig-saw of hotel and liner labels, some faded, others half torn off and in part scuffed through. Shelley had used the trunk, a log book of his meanderings over the world. The fat-faced surly man at the weighbase stuck on one more ticket – Port Bou and Paris Nord – and she opened her purse for the money. With its rusty lock it had been all winter in her mother’s damp house, a cloth spread over it like a table. Her brother’s record player blared out jazz on the frozen bulk of Shelley’s profoundest thoughts.

  Back from prison she found that the music had not been hot enough to hold back rust and decay. Catalonian rain had tainted its corners – though an early spring had dried them and left mapstains as part of the fading labels.

  Dawley’s letter held an open ticket to England. He seemed unwilling to give long explanations, only mentioning the community in which he lived, and asking her to bring the trunk which Shelley had talked about in Algeria.

  To queue for and cajole a passport was a blight on her anarchist soul. Begging for the right to leave your country, and permission to enter another, was a bleak tyranny. She was twenty-eight, and during the last ten years had been twice out of Spain with false papers – once on foot over the snow into France. She was followed, and would be pulled back into prison at the first move. The Fascists treated you like a cripple. She filled in dozens of forms so as to take up domestic work in England, with the family of a famous painter whose triplicate letter in Spanish and English was shown at all the offices she waited in.

  The passport was her book of servitude. On the train back from Barcelona to her home village, huddled in a corner of the shaking carriage like an animal that did not know which lair to flee to after the tight-lock of prison had been opened, she had been tempted to throw it into the heavily racing river below. The idea was overwhelming, but she pressed teeth and lips so hard that an elderly woman sitting opposite thought she was a mad person just out of the manicomio. The effort brought her close to fainting, in the smoke and steam heat, with rain-water sliding zigzag down the glass. Oak groves riding up the valley pinned her into herself.

  The sky was churning with rain and more rain, the train shaking as if it would throw her into it. Two years of prison would take much time going from her spirit, and the passport was necessary if she were to survive and get to England. She gripped it tight, for fear it would fly of its own will on to the stony soil, and wear away under mouldering rain.

  She loved Shelley as if he were alive and was to meet her next week in Sitges – as he’d done in former days. No love was ever lost. It buried itself into you, and could not disappear so that you didn’t feel it any more. He was that rare person who’d been able to love her as much as he was capable of loving himself, so she lived now with the smarting memory of his tenderness. They had regarded each other as equals, and the feeling that linked them was like that of brother and sister, but without the built-in destructiveness of sibling rivalry.

  The simplicities and complexities had been there from the beginning. Perhaps belonging to different countries meant something after all. She did know why, but ease with him had become such a stable fact that she felt all people could learn to treat each other in the same way, so that the world might gradually save itself by creating its own utopia. Only the patience and the will were lacking. From childhood she had grown with the principles of mutual self-help, had been taught to work for universal sisterhood and brotherhood – equality, labour, abundance, and happiness. Her father had died in one of Franco’s prisons when she was six.

  But the reality of society kicked such beliefs out of you, or eroded them by the fact of its monolithic presence. Or it turned its back on them. It did not matter. Civilisation – if that was the name for it – could be swept away in ten minutes, and if you were destroyed with it, you had no more problems. But if you survived, and others with you, perhaps only then could you build the new society in which you had always believed.

  But society was stronger than you thought. Its nihilist underworld could never be contained or tamed. Society was modelled on its meanest jungle, and turned a blind eye to it. The cheeks and balances knitted themselves together, forming a locked mass of great strength, that could hardly be ripped apart.

  She had walked up the Rambla and into the Plaza de Cataluña wondering: ‘How can I change it?’ It had been tried so many times. The foreign tourists came and went. It was a new thing. They also would try to stop you, no doubt, because they wanted the old Spain, the
old world. They loved the butchery and torment of bullfights, these pink-faced unthinking tourists.

  You had to try. She had thought so a long time before meeting Shelley, and believed more strongly after being in prison. But nothing was simple any more. Shelley had attempted it, and been killed. It was her belief that he’d never wanted to go into Algeria and fight for the FLN. His attachment to violence, though sincere, was sentimental. He had his weaknesses. His principles and inclinations were never finally formulated. His philosophy was ruptured at the base of the tree. In the beginning was the Word, and in the end was Action, he used to say. He had talked about destroying the property of the oppressors, whereas other left-wing parties wanted to preserve the buildings of their oppressors so that they could inherit them for their own ends – in the name of the people, of course. A genuine revolutionary party would not only open the gaols, but would blow them up and build no more.

  He talked, he argued, he intrigued, but never shot or bombed directly. If others did it, in order to bring about a society based on equality and justice, he was always willing to help as a line-of-communications or logistics man. The possibilities of giving actual assistance to revolution or civil war were not numerous, so he had run guns from Tangier over the Atlas Mountains to the edge of the Sahara desert. On one such delivery he had Frank Dawley as his co-driver. Shelley had not come back, but had done something entirely out of character by continuing into Algeria and fighting for the National Liberation Front.

  Their affection for each other enabled her to form correct conclusions. If Shelley had been the typical man who made love regardless and then vanished into the safety of himself or joined his male friends at the nearest bar or café, and if her feelings had been those of a woman who accepted this with inner resentment but without complaint, then her senses may not have led her to such plain truth. She may not have cared that he was dead, not gone on feeling an unrelenting sexual want for him month after month, which concealed what was truly happening, and only slowly drew her numbed brain towards the final, bitter fact of their parting.