A Tree on Fire (34 page)

For two hours they played with the baby, and then she wanted to go home, to get away before she stifled – or stayed for a week. The grip of ease was on her, and that was a sure mark that she must be off. Tomorrow they would quarrel, or she would be bored. It was better for them to go on liking each other than that she should stay.

‘Come again,' they said, as she wrapped Mark in his shawl. ‘We love having you both.'

‘I enjoy it as well,' she admitted. ‘I'll see you next week, and phone you on Friday night.' They stood by the front gate, her car moving from the kerb and gliding up the road, hidden by the Humber which her mother still drove.

Back at the house she telephoned Albert Handley to say she'd like to come to Lincolnshire – if it were still possible. It was a month since they'd seen each other, and she spoke of her visit as a break from her loneliness at the house, not particularly as a means of seeing him. ‘Don't bring your car,' he said. ‘I'll send Richard for you. You'll enjoy the journey that way. If he takes the route I tell him to you'll see so much beauty in this clapped-out country it'll make your heart race.'

‘When shall I come?' – hoping he'd say soon.

‘When can you be ready? Make it at ten in the morning. You can? Richard will set out at four o'clock, and be there in plenty of time. No, it's all right. He'll be glad to. Loves being sent on errands in the Rambler, and you're perfectly safe with him. Not a better driver anywhere. A very cool lad. Don't let him charm you, though. No news, I suppose? Oh well, don't worry – just wait. It'll be all right in the end.'

‘Is there anything I can bring?'

‘Only yourself, and Mark. I'd come and get you myself, except that I'm doing a painting I can't leave. If I left the house while I'm working my heart would drop out. So I'll see you about three tomorrow, right? Right.' He went off quickly, as if some menace were advancing on him at the other end, and she sat down to wonder how convenient her visit would be. Beyond the jollity of the telephone line she picked up trouble, then doubted her sharp senses, because it could have been the automatic feedback of her own low spirits after the few hours at her parents.

She had been buzzed by the same red Mini on the way back, and this time got a better look at the girl driver, with long fair hair and snubbed nose, an attractive fleshy face until it turned and the delectable lips shaped vile words through the greenhouse windows, and continued for half a minute while they were dead level at seventy miles an hour with only a few feet between them. Myra thought they wouldn't forget each other's face for a long time, each so vividly seen. Her own expression had been one of steady concentration, coolly observing the masterpiece of dumb obscenity from such a good-looking girl.

Chapter Twenty-four

The house was quiet for a few weeks, everyone locked in their various occupations. Handley painted and prepared for his exhibition, brooded on Myra, and the diabolical brewing up of disturbance whose root-cause one could never find when things appeared peaceful. He wanted to write to Myra, phone her, but always drew back at the last moment, because work was stronger than love. He painted in shirtsleeves, skylight open with the coming of summer, intent on blocking out white squares and oblongs with his demanding visions.

Mandy left three weeks ago, as soon as the red Mini had been delivered. She'd sent picture-postcards from various rest-stations on the M1 showing dramatic views from bridges, and wide-angle shots of complex entrance points – the eighth wonder of the world that crumbled under the mild frosts of winter. She'd headed for Nottingham and Leicester and had been three weeks going up and down the motorway, day and night, non-stop, nothing else, spending a fortune on petrol. He'd sent Adam to get her off, but Adam came back white-faced and shattered saying how many times he'd been near to cremation or manglement trying to hedge her into a service station and get her to listen to reason. She had no driving licence either, though judging by her skill at the wheel she had no need of one. Albert calculated that if she'd driven up and down the M1 since setting off with the car she'd already done over twenty thousand miles and slashed the car's value by two-thirds, so the company wouldn't find it worth their while taking it back when they realised that no more payments on the hire-purchase would be forthcoming. He at least expected her to come crying home for a new set of tyres.

John had his tea at four-thirty precisely, brought in on a large tray by one of the
au pair
girls. With a prolonged eye-giving smile as she walked from the door to his desk she set down a huge pot of tea, plate of bread and butter, ham and pork pie, jam and cakes. His only other meal was breakfast, and the occasional celebration-dinner.

He sat at His radio-set at certain hours of the day and night, impeccably dressed because he could never forget the rags of his prison-camp days, filling faint-lined limp-covered school exercise-books with messages which he filed away sadly when the vital link of his existence stayed unexplained, and when various reports on Algeria or Laos had been culled from them and passed on to Handley or his sons. His benevolent heart tuned in to the waywardness of the world made him the conscience and nerve-centre of the family, and they respected his knowledge, age, past sufferings, malarial fits and occasional epileptic violences, or his inexplicable choler at the sudden appearance of strangers who threatened his ordered life and whose stench of the jungle threw his delicate psychic balance out of true. Family turmoil was as much as his frail spiritual condition could stand. He had no wish to see the outside world, and this isolation had so far been his only way of learning to understand it again. And by thus pulling himself back from the precipice of disintegration he also became able to understand himself.

His amiable and highly educated presence had dominated the Handley household for longer than most of them could remember. He had educated Richard and Adam from the age of five in the romance and ethics of revolution, in the mechanics of insurrection. Being Handley's children, born in chaos and brought up to fend for themselves, they had been willing learners, less likely to repudiate the teachings of a kind uncle than if the same laws had been poured out by their father. He had also passed on to them his saintly amiability, though this was sided with Handley's strength and ruthlessness, and so gave a peculiar breadth of character that was unlikely to weaken with age. John's library was a unique collection of War Office manuals, police instruction books on the handling of demonstrations, French tomes on the psychology of masses and crowds, German and Russian texts on street-fighting and revolution. His favourite words were from the Book of Joel: ‘Beat your ploughshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong.'

He switched off his high-powered receiver, laid down his earphones, and passed an hour eating, and idly looking through his notebook: ‘Turn your back on politics,' it said. ‘Politics have nothing to do with Revolution. And civil disobedience is useless unless its principles are stiffened by the backbone of Revolution.' On another page: ‘The American rocket and bomber bases must be treated as were German bases in occupied France during the war. Adopt the attitudes of the French Resistance to the Nazis. And not only the land of the bases, but also the land of the fox-hunters must come under the hammer. The police, the armed forces, civil defence personnel are an army of occupation. Those who join their ranks are traitors. Those who sit on jury service are traitors. Those who hold state secrets and do not try to divulge them to an enemy or to make them public knowledge are also traitors.' He read more: ‘The people, by acquiescing to the possibility of nuclear war are giving in to their own death-wish, since they have allowed themselves to be diverted from their ability to become large in spirit and carry out a revolution. The ruling class prefer this death-wish to permeate and operate rather than that the will to revolution should develop. That is presumably what they mean by being better dead than Red. They are already dead. But are they dead beyond the powers of resurrection?'

‘All the time one must be ready. All through life one must educate and train oneself for the Revolution, imagine it in all its detail and in a thousand permutations. One must breathe and live for the Revolution, because a revolution is a mystical occurrence as much as something which is brought about and controlled by organisation. It is a healthy state of mind. The perfect and ordered world around one can crumble in a week, and one must be ready to step in and stoke up the fires of destruction in order that you may build when they have gone out – but not until.'

‘A revolution is not an impossible pipe-dream in this small old-fashioned country. One must make a career of helping to bring about the Revolution in face of the imponderable forces of inanition. This modern world could become prehistoric and half-empty in four flat minutes, and until that time the only political philosophy will be that of Positive Nihilism.'

He pursed his thin lips between cups of tea, smiled at his sense of humour. Revolution must become a religion, civil war a religious war. Ideological was a poor word for it and didn't state the case well enough. A man who died for a political cause was a deeply religious man, though one should not ask too closely who his god was.

Tea finished, he lit a cigarette and sat back with the restfulness of sanity and good health, laying aside the turned-up papers of his notes. Flies landed and took off from the vertical landing-grounds of the window-panes above rows of books, but he saw no reason to kill them and still their engines. They flew where warm sun heated the glass, summer bluebottles at liberty to annoy him with their touch and noise, thoughtless and helpless innocents feeding from the effluvia of the rotten earth or refuelling on his jam-stained spoon. Flame crawled up the matchstick, and he let it fall into his waste-paper-basket. Worn-out carbon-paper soaked in thousands of words twisted under invisible heat. He should douse the fire out, but wondered how much the flame would eat before he grew afraid and leapt on it. Every man who owned a pen, shoes, a slice of bread, was an enemy of the Revolution he envisaged, if he did not consider that it also belonged to someone else. Everything on your back, feet, in your mouth was common property. There was to be no ownership whatsoever, and no state to distribute it, either. Your house was everyone's house, provided everyone's house was your house. Abolish private property, and you abolished privacy, for who would want privacy if they had no property. Privacy is piracy. The prime sin of the world was the ability and opportunity to possess, to have and to hold till the heart grew cold and became an object from which all evil sprang. Privacy was the root of compounded malice and evil. The only time privacy was essential was in order to preach all this, but even then you had no right to such privacy for long, even to the extent of owning a wastepaper-basket that was about to catch fire.

He opened the window, and bluebottles flew out, then picked up two dusters and lifted the basket at arm's length before sending it down the side of the house like a missile to repel invisible invaders. It landed by a blackcurrant-bush, that did not take fire, though the noise brought forth frenzied growls from Eric Bloodaxe around the corner.

His hands shook, unable to plug in the earphones, so he listened from the loudspeaker instead. Signals fell over themselves to get at him, each with a different pitch and music. Fifteen years had gone by since he came to this house, and though he was wiser and steadier in the heart, he seemed no older, felt in fact more full of vigour and youth than he ever had.

He stood by the open window looking down at the charred basket and flakes of paper leaping in the wind. Sweat glistened below brown calm eyes that gazed beyond the garden at fields rising and falling towards knots of wood and coppice. At first it had repelled him, that vegetable charnel-house of the earth. Distance chilled him, space horrified. All he had wanted was four walls, the self-imposed limits of his own world. Yet without reason he thought of getting out, going on some journey to a place where he could put his so far wasted life to some ultimate use. Perhaps the impulse now set on him was what he had waited for all along, began as a vague but irresistible restlessness that unconsciously clarified itself while he continued his normal life and only occasionally brooded on it. The calamity of his existence came upon him as he stood by the window, the enormous gap of full consciousness that now gave back a promise of his native strength.

Hands under control, he switched off the radio, disconnected himself from the exterior telegraphic signals of common affairs and business scything and chipping and pulsing through the air, and pondered on the various world situations to decide in which direction he must go.

Chapter Twenty-five

Half-way across England they stood in a lay-by hoping for some fresh air, but all they got was a petrol reek whose rainbow stains beautifully coloured the road. ‘It's foul,' said Myra. ‘How long can one go on living in it?'

‘Get a mile up one of these side-lanes and it's sweet enough,' said Richard. ‘I'll take a detour in Lincolnshire, and the air will be so clear you'll faint. It'll cut you in two. I like living in cities, though. I'm kinky for factory-smoke and petrol-fumes and plenty of machine-noise. I love it. It's blood and gold-dust to me. Two years I spent in Leicester working in a factory were the best of my life. Factories, power stations, machines – that's all that matters. When I look up and see a four-engined jet sliding across the sky I want to go and see my best girl-friend. I think of love.'

They drove on, and he continued talking. ‘I hitch-hiked to Cornwall last November to have a look around. Father thought of moving there, heard of a house, and wanted me to look at it. On the way back I got a lift and reached Oxford late at night, and I went into a place for some coffee. A group of students were standing at the counter, and when I went up they made sneering remarks about scholarship boys. I was amused. It was rather a nice experience to be taken for an undergraduate. The more roles I have in life the better.'