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

by Alan Sillitoe

  He picked up a palette knife, as if about to carve his initials on his chest: ‘Under Cuthbert,’ he said, ‘it would have gone Fascist. Or he’d have had us wallowing in Primitive Christian Nihilism in no time. He’s got no political sense whatsoever. He’s just interested in destroying the community. He as good as told me.’

  She liked being in his studio, because not only was it so much part of him, but it often calmed her to be there, since it had all the tools and bric-à-brac, talent and smell of him, that he’d accumulated over twenty odd years. It meant as much to her as to him, those stacks of canvasses, paint and turps, paper and bits of old board, books and reproductions gone pale and shabby from flies and sunshine.

  ‘Give me a cigarette,’ she said.

  It was her life as well as his, but now for the first time she realised that really it was only him and not her. In a sense he had everything and she had nothing – apart from him and the family, and herself, which was supposed to be everything but wasn’t.

  He lit a cigarette, and a long thin cigar for himself.

  ‘If the community can’t hold together in spite of what Cuthbert can do against it,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t deserve to survive.’

  ‘It’s got to be protected,’ he said, ‘and that’s my job. It should be yours as well, but it seems you’re leaving it all to me. I owe it to Myra to look after it.’

  ‘The knight in shining armour,’ she jeered, swinging back. ‘You’re a bloody hypocrite right to the depths of your soul. That’s all that’s in you: hypocrisy, oceans of it, and the worst thing is that you love it because it stops you seeing anything. It’s blinded you in both bloody eyes!’

  But she spoke as if every word injured her and not him. She stopped by a collage called ‘The Angel of Mons’ – a big old trench map he’d picked up in a junk shop, covered with photographs of soldiers ripped out of her family album and cut up – without asking. Sunset and blood colours smeared it at various angles – chaos around the eye of a cyclone, at which the only conflict was a matter of life and death. It was sharp and precise at the centre, and calm. All his paintings managed to be so much like himself that she didn’t know where he ended and the paintings began, a feeling which rubbed her to the bone.

  ‘You set your son on to me,’ he said, quietly enough. ‘It takes us back to the house of bloody Cadmus. It really is about time I slung my hook and packed this farce in. I’m tired of it. It’s eating me away. It’s hungry, that man-eating mouth you set loose inside me. Call it off, for God’s sake, before I become hollow and drop down dead like a pack of dust.’

  To leave her and go would do him no good, to give into that dream that he dreamed every day, because to wilfully get it would be like a child having a great toy it had always wanted. He’d enjoy it for ten minutes and then wonder where the real and only life had gone. He knew more than Dawley about things like that.

  ‘Can I sit down, Albert?’

  He pulled up a chair and one for himself, and placed them by the unlit stove. He was often afraid he’d gone too far in their arguments, but when he found he hadn’t he started in again.

  ‘It used to be so good between us,’ she said.

  He tried to sound honest and reasonable. ‘It was all right. But we starved often enough so that the kids could eat. That wasn’t so good.’

  ‘I know. But we lived in our own house in Lincolnshire. We were on our own. I know this community idea is working, but it’s not the same, Albert. I still think how much better it used to be.’

  He was calm about it. ‘John put paid to our life in Lincolnshire. He burned the house down.’

  ‘I wish you’d never met him.’

  He jumped. ‘John was my brother.’

  ‘You know who I mean. Dawley. He was the beginning of our troubles.’

  ‘I never thought of it like that.’

  ‘You never do. But if we hadn’t got to know him, John wouldn’t have had the hair-brained idea of going off to Algeria to pull him out of that war. He wouldn’t have set the house on fire as a parting gift.’

  ‘He would still have been a sick man,’ Handley said. ‘Bad in the head.’

  ‘But good in the heart. He’d still have been alive.’

  ‘You worked it out too bloody pat.’

  ‘It’s true, though,’ she said patiently.

  ‘I suppose you brooded on it long and good about Dawley?’

  ‘It occurred to me, Albert.’

  ‘In one blinding moment?’

  ‘Yes, Albert.’

  ‘Because he’s my friend?’

  ‘Oh don’t be daft.’

  ‘This is all I need: somebody to turn me against my friends.’

  ‘That’s not my idea, Albert.’

  ‘What is, then? I expect you’re still working it out.’

  He walked to the window. ‘Your honesty appals me. It’ll be the death of me. And don’t keep saying Albert like that. When you do I know you’re up to no good.’

  She stood, flushed red. ‘The only time you have a good word for me is when I tell you there’s something to eat on the table, or when you want me to open my legs at night.’

  ‘What else can I do? I’ve got to do this painting. It brings the money in.’

  ‘Money! You never used to say that. You thought you hadn’t got enough on your shoulders with a wife and seven children so you had to take on this community as well. But I know why you did it.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Tell me, then.’

  ‘You want me to?’

  ‘Get on with it.’

  ‘To be close to Myra, that’s why. You made it out you were full of high principles, wanting to find a new way of life, make a pattern for others and a framework for yourself, and all that bloody rubbish, but you can’t fool me. I’d rather you got caught up in politics than this. I know you’re in love with her.’

  He trembled with rage at her accuracy. Subtlety was never one of his strong points, and so he’d always underestimated hers – out of laziness mostly, because he didn’t doubt his own ability to be subtle with those he thought too clever for him.

  ‘It’s nothing but an old man’s folly,’ she shouted, ‘I should have known it would come to this. You’d send us all to the wall for a single flick of your randy tail. You disgust me. Oh I can take it, to a certain extent. And I have done these last months, but now and again it gets too much.’

  Her agitation shook him to the marrow. He picked up a brush, worked it round a mustard-glass of red paint. He threw the whole lot like a hand grenade – smash through the window, leaving a comet-tail of paint behind. He had lost the ability to quarrel, the art of give-and-take, the humanity of living repartee that was full of love even when steeped in hate. He felt like a rock about to be finally loosened from the sandgrip and swept away. There was a point at which you must shift and flee, and now that the time had come he was unable to do anything. He must get away from her, because if he only breathed, or lit a cigarette, or put food in his mouth, it was to spite her. If he went on living she thought it was only to spite her. Yet to walk away would be the final injustice also – to spite her. Even if he was prepared to commit this injustice he would still be unable to walk away. He was beginning to feel that his spirit was broken.

  ‘You can’t answer me because you’re tongue-tied by your own black guilt,’ she went on. ‘But I’m not asking you to be guilty. That’s not what I want at all.’

  According to the ritual this was the moment for her voice to soften, and start to blame herself, and Handley felt it was time either to walk away or kiss her. The idea of the community had been fine, as he told her now, to try and extend the limits of the family with a few select friends, and not for the reason she imagined. He had no wish to turn it into a graveyard of crushed desires, neither for her nor for him nor for anybody. It was a good scheme that could still succeed, and he was determined to go on trying, if he could get the necessary co-operation. Even if he didn’t
he would continue working for the commune, because he realised it was in their best interests, and that was the only thing that mattered as far as he was concerned.

  ‘You’re not at a meeting now,’ she said wryly, an impatient wave. ‘You’ll have me cheering in a bit. Or crying. I don’t know which.’

  He laughed, all blackness gone, easy again, and no one knew the reason. He kissed her, and they went down the garden path to see if Myra had finished making lunch. They had gone up the garden path hand in hand many years ago, and had been walking up and down it continually since, and neither of them knew how to get off it.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Richard waited in the front garden for the children to come from school.

  His parents had been shouting at each other in the studio, but calm had now settled on the house. Handley needed such bust-ups to crumble the clogged energy that kept him from painting, and it was plain that his mother also thrived on arguments, for he noted how carefree she became afterwards. Such quarrels made his life a misery.

  A warm humidity rose from the fields, almost as sweet in its smell as on the hillside in Lincolnshire. The road outside the gate was quiet, and the field behind the paddock lush and snug, safe and untouchable, eternally green, enticing alike for cattle and children – the land on the other side of the fence, beyond the realm of this incestuous bailiwick in which he was beginning to loose faith.

  He wished Uncle John were alive, for he had radiated not only spiritual authority, but shown actual example on how you should accept it, as if he were living under some form of divine guidance. It was different now that he had gone, and committee meetings had taken the heart out of any satisfying life. The richness had left it, and he continually asked himself if it could ever be brought back.

  Engrossed in revolutionary tactics and all manner of civil discord he compared the matrimonial antagonism of the family that had bred him to the social and political animosity of people in general; wondered, as he leaned on the gate, whether Handley would have been so obsessed with revolutionary strife if he hadn’t been an artist with a wife and seven kids. Children provided him with resentment – against society which made his life so hard because he wanted to live as an artist.

  Richard didn’t think his father was eaten up by class conflict, at least not more than was healthy in such a country. He was too well off to justify such rancour, and too absorbed in his painting to be bothered. It channelled his spleen from the warping prison of the family in which he lived, yet he could not exist without his wife and children, and loved them so much he felt desperately fettered by their need of him and his of them. Combined with the occasional black frustrations of his art, this made it necessary for him to indulge to an infinite degree in the passionate pastime of revolution.

  Richard had worked this out, and it worried him. Encouraged all his life to study revolution and rebellion it was natural that it should one day turn him against this indoctrination. Nothing stood still. You either learned, or you died. It was an ever-fascinating theme, and he had the sort of mind which led him to see the end of it. What better weapon had been put into his hands than the long training already received?

  Paul, Rachel, Janet and Simon got off the bus. Simon Dawley was fuming and kicking. His short white bristle-hair seemed about to turn the same beetroot pink as his face because Janet had taken his marbles and would not give them back, held her lips tight as if the sky were about to fall down on her. A cool wind scattered them towards the gate.

  Paul Handley put his arms round Simon. ‘Don’t cry. She’ll give ’em up.’

  ‘Finding’s keeping.’ Janet was rigid with possession.

  ‘It’s not, you know,’ said Paul, with his fifteen-year-old gravity.

  ‘They’re mine,’ she maintained.

  ‘No, they’re not,’ said Simon, who did not know how to right an injustice except by bursting into tears, or punching somebody. And when he saw that hitting out would not be tolerated it looked as if he were willing his head to burst. Paul turned to Rachel: ‘Get the marbles, and give ’em to him.’

  Dark-haired Rachel walked up to cringing Janet, thumped her soundly on the back, and prised opened her hand. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  ‘He’s my brother,’ Janet cried in her rage, as if that gave her a right to be mean to him.

  ‘They were his marbles,’ said Paul. ‘He got them with his spending money.’

  ‘He’s still my brother, you rotten Handleys,’ said Janet Dawley.

  ‘Well, you ought to treat him like a brother,’ said Paul quietly.

  ‘We’re not rotten,’ said Rachel Handley, ‘so don’t say it. It’s not right.’ They sorted out their differences in a reasonably short time, considering they were human beings. Paul opened the gate and they filed, with a ravening afternoon hunger, into the kitchen for bread-and-butter and milk.

  Richard played his part in the system that Handley had created, and carried on working even when he no longer felt that satisfying ray of faith from Uncle John’s time. He had spent weeks with Adam listening out on VHF radios to the county police patrol frequencies, noting all call-signs, deducing the number of cars, and drawing a coloured map to show the operations area of each group. In this way he could tell at any hour where the various cars were, and get news even before it reached the newspapers or police courts.

  He wondered whether Handley wasn’t trying to mould him into a new Uncle John, for any change of role in the household never came about by decree, but always by a slow unwitting half-conscious acceptance of something only fate could have turned you on to. Though feeling this strongly, he had enough moral fibre not to be put off by it, but what really made him uneasy was that Handley seemed to be welding them into one single generation, denying them the differences in age and outlook due to some need for safety and security in himself.

  The idea alarmed him, not so much for his father, as for himself and the others. It was the most basic threat to the young community so far – and also a danger to the existence of the family, to which the normal troubles of the community discussed at meetings were nothing. These suspicions occurred to him while watching the children quarrelling their way from the bus. It came while the cool wind blew downhill from the opposite field, and brought the smell of damp herbage into his senses, making him momentarily a child, and lighting his brain as if he’d been smoking pot. He knew then what his father was up to, not by reason, but by an almost religious instinct that, five minutes later, he felt ashamed of.

  They came out with their bread and butter – Paul, Rachel, Janet and Simon: the Handleys and the Dawleys, fair and dark, young and growing-up. Paul leaned against the Rambler, hands in jean pockets, the last bread fast in his mouth. Fair thin hair came evenly over his forehead and his grey eyes stared in front. At thirteen he had been set to govern the younger children, a responsibility which in no way put him out, for he had a gift of tact and strength that no other Handley had.

  He grinned, as if his job were finished for the day, whistling a secret and tuneless tune to himself as he led them into the garage for the after-school talk which it was Richard’s daily duty to give.

  They placed a bench by a wall marked with map-like stains from the fumes of exhaust pipes. The cars were outside, and they sat away from the wind and any stray noise that might interfere with the anti-lesson.

  ‘Stop whistling, Paul, and listen to me.’

  ‘Has Cuthbert come back with that Spanish woman yet?’ he wanted to know.

  Richard smiled. ‘Why are you so interested in it?’

  ‘We just are. We can’t wait to get a peep at somebody new.’

  He wondered why the children were so bored, with such a variable set of people perpetually around. The atmosphere of the community was usually one of flux and impending change, of activity and rumour, yet when this heady atmosphere relaxed, and life threatened to subside into calm orderliness, everyone grew restless and moody. The children got it sooner than the others. ‘They’ll be here this even
ing.’

  ‘Before we go to bed?’ asked Rachel, with such curiosity in her voice that he almost caught it himself.

  ‘Depends on the trains. But forget it for the next half hour. When you got to school this morning what hymns did you sing?’

  ‘Horrid,’ Janet said. ‘I hate hymns.’

  ‘I hate her as well,’ giggled Simon Dawley.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ wailed Rachel.

  ‘Tell me which ones you sang, Janet.’ Hating things did not look good, when you considered that hatred made an even deeper impression than what you liked. It was positively bad that she was so virulent. Indifference was safer to work on.

  ‘I just sing other words to them,’ Paul said. ‘It’s fun.’

  ‘I used to do that,’ said Richard, ‘but the teacher could lip-read, so I got caught out. It’s safer to mouth the words but make no sound.’

  ‘That’s what I do,’ said Janet.

  ‘I like hymns,’ said Simon. ‘I can sing loud. And if I mek a mistake, nobody knows.’

  ‘What number hymn was it?’ Richard persisted.

  Nobody could remember. Maybe they wouldn’t say which one it was in case they’d noticed more than was necessary. Simon Dawley spoke up. ‘All things bright and beautiful …’

  Richard reached into a tool box and took out a hymn-book, flipping quickly to the right page. He read the hymn as a piece of verse.

  ‘It’s nice, though,’ said Rachel.

  ‘That’s because it rhymes and has a strong rhythm,’ he explained. ‘But you have to look through, to what the words mean. Take the bit about the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate. The God who made that up was invented by the people who live in the castle. It was written to keep the man at the gate from getting inside.’

  ‘They chuck boiling oil on ’em when they scramble up the walls,’ said Simon.

  ‘It don’t stop ’em, though,’ Paul said. ‘When they get in they kill the barons and set fire to the castle. They don’t have to pay rent for the fields then.’