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

by Alan Sillitoe

  They sat quiet. At the dimness of each tunnel, glad to be leaving the locality of Uncle John’s death, he looked at the illuminated vision of her face in the window, while she sat by his side with unfeeling blankness after a twenty-four-hour spirit-shaking journey from Barcelona. He was nagged by the feeling that he’d seen her before, and he couldn’t fathom where.

  The precious trunk was in the van, that heavy and sole reason why she had been sent for. As soon as Dawley and his father had their hands on the notebooks they’d kick her out – providing such humanitarian revolutionaries could contrive to get her pregnant and arrange for six-foot snow drifts to surround the house. He saw through their game all right. To fill up John’s museum and shrine they wanted the word-picture of Shelley Jones’ revolutionary soul fixed into a glass case.

  But first they would put every last phrase and statement under the glare of their gritty logic, work on it like medieval alchemists to transmute the raw wires of ordinary metal into the purest gold of future example. Handley was running a country, not a community, and needed an historical museum to justify it. His first martyr was Uncle John, and a second had come along like a windfall in Shelley Jones. He wondered who was lined up for the third.

  They wouldn’t admit this, would swear to inviting Maricarmen for reasons of international solidarity, and affection for poor Shelley who had died fighting for the downtrodden inhabitants of the Third World. She would need a place to rest in and recover from her ordeal. If the first reason for enticing her to England was icy and heartless, the second was poisonous with sentimentality.

  But he also wondered about Maricarmen’s motive for coming to this island and latching on to the Handley roundabout. Some solid plan existed beneath the pronounced swell of her breasts – more visible now that her coat was open. The idea of bringing the notebooks hadn’t been made till she accepted their invitation and had applied for a passport. The High Command of Dawley, Albert, Richard and Adam had made a chart of STEPS TOWARDS INVEIGLING MARICARMEN INTO ENGLAND and pinned it on the wall, filling in a coloured square every time a certain move had been accomplished. Well, not quite, but he was sure it would have been if they’d thought of it. He would struggle single-handed to protect this strange and unique woman beside him.

  She was tired, but wondered what it would be like fulfilling her expected role – until she showed her true purpose for going there. Shelley’s last letter had been posted from Tangier, and she knew one paragraph by heart: ‘There’s this Englishman coming south for a little tourism (gun-running) beyond the mountains. He’s hard, and as solid as a rock – especially in the head, I reckon. But he’s the right meat, because this kind of travelling can be tough. We’ll be back in ten days, and if he turns out well, we could do more sight-seeing later. He seems ideal for the job, a Limey worker who claims he’s not long out of a factory. Providing he can read and write (and I think he can) we should make a good team. There is something about his eyes, a sort of abstract grey, but I can’t decide whether such empty hardness will be better or worse for us. But since we don’t intend shacking up, but only making this one trial run together, it doesn’t much matter.’

  Being an atheist she could not speak to the dead. So they were separated forever. Death proved and finalised her atheism. They had once lived in Malaga for three months, shared a cold and barrenly furnished flat on a cobbled street that led to a bald piece of rising ground behind the city called El Egido, into which were built many gypsy caves. The flat was so cold that some nights they would take food and wine and eat with the gypsies, the poorest of the poor who had been hounded and murdered by fascists during the Civil War.

  Or they would go to Vicente’s bar in town and drink Amontillado at one of the wooden tables, talking for hours, playing Ludo and Checkers. The walls of the cafe were decorated with pictures of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, showing his pathetic visage as he sat undiscouraged under the broken windmill sail. They grew warm with vino y tapas, and the flat seemed no longer desolate when they went back to it.

  Walking through the square before the illuminated cathedral at midnight they saw a tree with tiny green leaves just breaking out of bud, points so livid and infinitesimal that it looked as if a cloud of green fireflies resting on all the tips of the branches before taking off into the dark blue sky towards Africa.

  The curtain of death came over her memories, and a row of faces made up the safety-curtain of her mind. She didn’t know where she was. A young man gazed out of the window with such a forlorn expression that she wondered if he too were thinking about death. A tight-lipped, severe, thin-faced woman looked into a book, while the man beside her was asleep. Another man tried to get a glimpse of her, but turned away when she met the gaze. They seemed a very far-sighted nation with such empty eyes.

  Cuthbert took her to the dining carriage for tea, and they faced each other. Away from home he made it a rule to eat whenever food was available. You never knew where your next meal was coming from in this shifting world of frivolous uncertainties. If he were on his own he would eat and drink as if some invisible person were threatening to snatch the cup and plate away, but with Maricarmen so close the second and civilised Cuthbert took control.

  She wondered why he put on such a smile as soon as they sat down, but he wasn’t aware of having altered his lips. She seemed to be in a land where people did not speak. Being exhausted after a journey was no excuse. Perhaps they simply had nothing to say.

  Cuthbert had always seen silence as slightly ridiculous, unless it was used as a weapon – when you had to make sure it didn’t look like a fit of sulking. Pouring tea for them both, he used it as a way of getting her to talk about herself. Some people thought it bad manners to be silent with another face near by, and you rarely had long to wait before they spoke.

  But now, such ploys were blown away like dry leaves in a gale. He was aching to talk to her but wasn’t able to. The irrational was taking its revenge on the rational. He thought of pouring tea over his hand in order to force something out, but the spout veered towards a cup.

  She pulled the soggy cake from its cellophane wrapper and broke it in two. The attractive sight of her appetite cured him of a temptation to reach out and take her hand, though he tried hard not to stare at her. If they were destined to live the first hours of their meeting without much conversation, so be it. He respected himself, and also her. It occurred to him that they were weighing each other up.

  ‘I don’t smoke much,’ she said, but taking one. Warmth and food had softened that haughty and beautiful façade. She took off her coat. He looked at her as he lit the cigarette. Her eyes, engrossed in the flame, were almond-shaped and turned down slightly towards high cheekbones. When she sat back he wondered what she saw, what her eyes showed, what range, ocean, road, cell. He frightened himself by speaking when he had no intention of it. He couldn’t afford such gestures if he wasn’t to lose faith in his own shaky strength. Yet one could not go on believing for ever in the power-politics of the unspoken word.

  In the taxi crossing London she said: ‘Mr Handley didn’t mention that his son was a priest.’

  ‘I’m not. I almost was one, but I didn’t finish the course.’

  ‘Why do you wear that collar?’

  ‘As a disguise, when I go out and face the world.’

  She laughed, in a throaty uninhibited way and he did not know whether to be glad at amusing her, or resentful at being mocked. Maybe she often showed off a ready sense of humour at another’s expense, with an attractive, almost sexual laugh which he began to see as the only vulnerable part of her that was likely to be revealed till you knew her better. To her, the fact that he wore a priest’s collar when he had no right to showed that she’d have no difficulty luring him into her cause against Dawley when the time came.

  She dipped her head to glimpse the Houses of Parliament. ‘Is that what you call the “cradle of democracy”?’

  ‘The cradle of democracy is the coffin of religion,’ he said. ‘Thou
gh I suppose it’s not a bad idea at have one.’

  ‘Most countries do,’ she said contemptuously. ‘Heaps of stone to keep people in their places.’

  He wanted to laugh at such socialist rubbish, having had too much of a bellyful from birth. ‘There’s a certain sort of beauty,’ he said, ‘in such vast spaces being covered and enclosed by so much stone. You have to think about the shape of the inside, and the roof over it showing the limits of men’s ideas and ideals. Space wrenched from the elements to prove that you can’t have civilisation without religion.’

  ‘Landscape,’ she said, as the taxi swung into Trafalgar Square, ‘that’s my idea of beauty. Earth, space. I suppose that’s what drew me to Shelley. He liked it as well. Not cities and buildings. Cities eat up beauty, buildings digest it. After being in prison I never want to enter any again. I like Gaudi’s cathedral in Barcelona because workmen are still there, cursing and shouting. When they’ve gone and it has doors and windows I won’t go near it. A finished church imprisons the soul as well as the body. But I went to Gaudi’s temple with Shelley. He was interested in unusual buildings.’

  ‘Didn’t he want to blow them up?’

  ‘Only the ugly ones.’

  ‘I thought he was a Communist?’

  ‘He was many things. No real Communist is a simple man.’

  He was irrevocably naïve. She didn’t show the respect for his priest’s collar that he was used to. That old subconscious was getting too big for its boots. He’d been relying on a falsehood to give him confidence. ‘How old are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Twenty-five.’

  Her wry expression put him back into the world of non-talk. The complexities in her were as deep and varied as those within himself, and he would have to learn how to handle them. Honest and forthright in her opinions, he didn’t know how to counter her scorn, which may still be the main part of her. His active suspicion created lurid pictures. She was honest only in the way lively and attractive people could afford to be. In the lit-up dusk of Charing Cross Road she lost some of her classical Iberian beauty. What was it made her seem so reliable except his own dishonesty of soul? – which meant she was not.

  The one thing in life, he mused, but with a shade of regret and sadness because Maricarmen sat warmly beside him, is to be dishonourable, ungrateful and plain wicked. Not in order to benefit oneself – that would be merely selfish – or to do harm to others – that would be simply vicious – but as a clean way of living, in other words to live by the naked law having the rest of the world exist for your especial benefit. Only in this way could one be anti-bourgeois and anti-life, and eventually move in all humility towards God.

  The main thing is to give every rotten action a false label, to call it either bourgeois reactionary wickedness (in the name of the Revolution which you didn’t believe in) or Red Communist Bolshevik wickedness (in the name of the Good Christian Capitalist Western Freedom-loving way of life which you could never believe in, either). Pretend to the way of life that you act vilely in the name of. Be a man of no principles – that change every day. Only in this way will you extend the limits of your horizon and retain your integrity in the pitted face of all systems. Teach yourself not to care, and do it quickly. He’d tell this to anyone foolish enough to ask for advice while his white collar was on. It is essential for survival to retain the complexity of your nature. And to a man of principle integrity and survival were the same thing.

  ‘People are often broader in spirit than you think.’

  ‘I know,’ he answered, vulnerable in spite of what he thought, and unable to dislike her for making him feel so, in case his vulnerability one day turned into love. ‘I’m glad you came to England.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. It’s good you’re here, that’s all.’

  At the station he saw to the unloading of Shelley’s trunk. The fact that he felt elated could mean nothing to her who made him feel so – not yet, anyway. He imagined every man experienced something like love in her presence, but that she didn’t know much about such things herself. The trunk should be draped with a hammer-and-sickle flag, and flanked by a Red Guard of Honour as it went into the station. She looked at it too, studiously and sad, as if the same thought occurred to her. It’s going home, he smiled, to its final resting-place: the spiritual incinerator of a half-baked museum.

  Sitting opposite her in the train, he knew where he had seen her before. He remembered the cigar box in Uncle John’s room, and through the orange and white lights of London’s outskirts saw again the impressive labels on its lid, with the picture of a multi-chimneyed tobacco factory, and the crude engraved portrait of the olive-skinned, green-eyed, smooth-haired woman wearing a plain collarless common shirt with a low neck. Her lips were smooth and thin, and the meticulous details fitted perfectly the real features of Maricarmen, whose face softened when her eyes closed from exhaustion.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Handley thought that to paint the soul of England you had first to paint the soul of Europe.

  What shape the soul should take he wasn’t sure about. What colour the heart, what composition the mind, had yet to be transmuted into real paint and colour, pain and choler. It was no use relying on inspiration. You mixed the paint with your sweat of fear, perspiration of labour, blood of vision, and let the energy take the hindmost or the rindpest as your heart expanded, chose for you, and finally took over.

  Stop and start, trial and error, he painted them all from the very beginning: emanations from the swamps of the dead in France and Belgium, poppy dung, Brecht music, German swamp songs, Elgar’s sewer-tunes, sadistic misery, cock-eyed teutonic intelligence, Ophelia in the mud of Passchendaele, Lady Morphine of Vimy Ridge, the Howling Crone of Hill 60, the Angel of Mons. Roses, the Lions and the Donkeys of the Somme: those flowers of the bowels still blooming in Picardy, hectares harrowed and sown and perpetuated in the bone and blood of all countries, the final international fraternisation of the battlefield where the corpses of the world unite because they had nothing to lose but their lives.

  Handley’s large hut in the back of the garden served well as a studio, as far from the dog and bird noises of England as he could get. He slammed up a window to breathe fresh air, yet despite its advantages wished he still had the attic of his Lincolnshire house, where he could stand at an open window and contemplate throwing himself to his death if the painting didn’t go well. Thinking about suicide cleared the head.

  Large sketch-books were full, drawings of landscapes in pencil and charcoal blocked by statistics and notes. Cartoons abounded, geopolitic maps and scrawls and crossings out, Piccasso and Haushoffer, enormous motorways traversing saps and wire and dugouts and a thousand interdenominational faces fixed in the pavé of the road leading to the front – those sacred spokes leading to the axel-hub of death.

  He threw the book across the room. Inspiration drove him to work, to keep out the cut of its fangs – or it left him a while to belly-crawl off to pastures new. He walked up and down.

  The unsettled wetness of summer weather, with its air of fecundity that had often inspired him in Lincolnshire, made for restlessness here, and gave a leg-ache that wouldn’t let him stand in one place. He burned to go, but didn’t know where. He longed to settle down into tranquil happiness, but didn’t know how. He wanted to work, but couldn’t.

  Birds of summer sang in the trees. The house was busy. The grocer’s van was unloading by the back door. Bourgeois placid life was running its accustomed course. Life had to be lived, one way or another. You called it ‘bourgeois’ if it went on too long and started to rot your soul. They’d lived in Lincolnshire twenty years, and here in this place less than one, but already the gangrene was eating him in vital places. The only thing left was a career of crime, or to sleep till better feelings came.

  He regretted not having gone to fetch Maricarmen from Dover, but he’d wanted Cuthbert out of the house so that they could bring in a constitution. Cuthbert’s voice wo
uld have gone against him, so he’d sacrificed a pleasant trip through London, and a possible visit to Lady Ritmeester. After an hour’s speech a near unanimous vote at the meeting had brought in a constitution, declaring Albert Handley to be president of the community, with the power of veto on any decision. Let Cuthbert unravel himself from that one. There was no point in not being clear about it. Any room for doubt and you’re being unfair to the rest of them. One must never shirk responsibility. At least there was that much satisfaction in life.

  If one doesn’t face problems one might just as well go out and get a job as a milkman – which didn’t sound a bad scheme to him, though not at the moment. In the old days, when he’d got no money, such an idea would never have entered his mind, but he was so bored he’d consider anything. Even manipulating the community held no further fascination now that he’d won control of it, though he’d yet to see Cuthbert’s face when he got to know, and sit back to watch his futile machinations as he tried to alter the course of history. He couldn’t, and that was the joy of it. As long as you lived from day to day the filthy claws of time couldn’t get at you. Courage was all you needed.

  Enid strode across the lawn from the house, and came up the garden steps towards his refuge and resting-place. Wind blew strands of her fair hair about, the most wayward being tucked ruthlessly into place as she pushed open the door.

  So, he thought, standing by his half-finished picture, my long-wedded wife is going to make me eat wood for what I just did at the meeting. The ascent made her breathless. It’s summer, she thought. If it were spring I’d finish him off for what he did. He gave a finely chiselled smile that he hoped would not infuriate her, while knowing for certain that it would.

  She stood by the door, holding it shut. ‘Why did you do it?’

  There was no use denying it. ‘If a man can’t be boss of his own house, who can?’ he said lightly, hoping she would appreciate his jest.

  ‘It was running very well. We were happy – after our fashions, but you have to become President of the Handley Democratic Republic. You wanted to spite Cuthbert, but it’s a ridiculous way for a grown man to carry on.’