A Tree on Fire (49 page)

He managed to close the door, sweat shining on his face. The train drew into the town and towards docks. Tonight he would be talking to Albert, Enid, Richard, Adam, Ralph, Mandy, Myra and perhaps even Frank if he was back already from Nottingham. He had neither sent nor received news since leaving two months ago, so was anxious to get the late train for Lincolnshire and bask in their congratulations for a great job safely done.

Yet when the ship crept out of Calais he considered staying in London for a few days. The delights of the wolds, and of his family, seemed as empty and unacceptable as the rest of the world. He did not even want to see Frank. There was no hurry, unless you lacked confidence and did not believe in what you were hurrying towards. He stood on the top deck of the ship, case at his feet, alone. A strong cold wind that rocked it among the waves buffeted him and played weird tunes in the aerial wires. Morse sang from the radio-operator's cabin telling of gale-warnings and rising seas, the incoming weather of the final world in a language he understood. The last word was weather, elemental weather fearful to ships ploughing the white-green waves, a ship that bucked and furrowed, engines burning underneath it all.

The gullshit cliffs loomed out of drizzle and mist, sending a pain of hopeless love through him. England, he thought, if only you could begin again from nakedness, become a green infant born from the soil and salt sea, put a coat of all colours on your back of all colours, and start in intelligence and gentleness, but without me, without me.

He opened his suitcase on a wooden bench and hastily searched through it. Under the clothes lay stacks of loose papers in foolscap sheets, years of radio-logs compiled in his Lincolnshire room out of loneliness, a tenacious persistence in taking down radio-messages from a thousand sources in the hope of finding and hearing and recording for himself and everyone a message from some non-existent God or god-like fountain beyond all the layers of the stars that might contain the precious message of life that would fill him with energy, imagination and intelligence.

As the hundreds of sheets of paper covered with his neat writing scattered like birds and snowflakes and dead leaves over the arms of the harbour that the ship now entered John's hand gripped the butt of his long guarded and loaded revolver. Forgive me, Lord; I know what I am doing. He opened his mouth wide, as if to shout at the pampered disputatious gulls of Dover and tell them to watch out for what was coming. Placing the barrel of the gun well inside, he tilted it to what he hoped in his final lucid moment was the correct angle, and pulled the trigger. The nearest gulls wheeled away sharply at the noise, and the humble abrasive boat-siren announced that he was home at last.

Chapter Thirty-three

‘Where have
you
been?' Nancy demanded, as if he'd gone to the pub for some fags and come back two hours after the dinner had burned to a cinder. She stood aside so that he could set his suitcase in the hall. ‘The bad penny turned up again.'

‘How are you, love?' he said, kissing her.

‘I'm all right. What the bleddy-hell was you doing all this time? How are you?

‘Going around Algeria. I'm fine, fit enough. Won't you make me some tea?' She'd altered little in thirty months, a few lines by the side of her hazel eyes, oval face paler – though everyone seemed pale in this country.

‘You've got a cheek,' she cried, ‘leaving me all this time and then walking back in here as large as life and asking for a cup of tea.'

‘You didn't expect me to crawl in, did you, and sup at the dog-bowl?'

She was trembling with surprise and anger, but managed to get the kettle under the tap and on the stove. ‘Why didn't you send a telegram at least?'

‘You might have thought I was dead or something. I don't like to frighten people.'

‘I suppose you wanted to see who I was living with?'

He noticed a uniform tunic hanging on the wall. ‘You live with who you like. I left
you
.'

‘You can hardly deny that.'

‘I don't want to.'

She set out two cups. ‘Do you want some cheese on toast?'

‘Please.

‘I'm not living with anybody, except the kids, if you want to know. One bloody man's enough in my life, especially if his name happens to be Frank Dawley.'

He pointed to the tunic. ‘Who's is that? Where are the kids?'

‘The third degree. That tunic's mine. I work on the buses, and I'm due on the afternoon shift in an hour. The kids are at school and when they finish they go to Mary's for their tea. Then she comes and puts them to bed, so they're fast asleep by the time I get home at eleven.' She sliced dried-up mousetrap cheese onto toasted Miracle Bread and slid it back under the grill.

‘You look smart,' he said, ‘in that shirt and skirt.'

‘I had to earn some money. I't rather be independent than rely on a rotter like you.'

He embraced and kissed her. ‘It didn't do either of us any harm.'

She snapped away. ‘The toast'll burn. You do look altered, though, I must say. You've got less meat on you. And your hair's gone grey. Did you have a lot to put up with out there?'

‘Not more than I could manage.'

‘So it seems. But still, you look in the prime as well.'

‘I had to get to it some time. Phone up the bus depot and tell them you've got flu.'

‘Pull up your chair and eat this. You make impossible demands on me.'

‘I don't want you to dislike me, that's why.'

They sat at the small kitchen table. Nancy drank tea. ‘I can't dislike you, though that's what you deserve.'

‘Is it? It's not. You've never been out of my mind, you and the kids. In the tightest spots in Algeria, when I was close to being killed a dozen times – I don't suppose you believe it – but you were all in my mind, you and others. I had to go out there for the sake of people like us, as well as to do what I could for the Algerians – all equally. I'll tell you something about it soon. I'm not sentimental, but I couldn't have kept up that sort of life for long if I hadn't thought about certain people, good people whom I'd see again when it was over and if I got out of it.'

She looked at him, and their hands touched on the table. ‘Don't let your toast get cold. You'd have wolfed that down at one time, without me telling you,' she said. ‘I believe what you're saying. But it's been hard for us here. I'm not complaining though. I'm just telling you.'

‘I know, love, I know.'

‘But I won't give up my job,' she said. ‘Whether you've come back or not I'm going to stay independent. That's one thing I believe in. If a man can be, a woman has a right to be. Nobody can take that from me any more.'

He stood to hang up his coat, then finished his meal. ‘Have you got four pennies for the phone?' she asked.

Alone he wandered into the living-room. It was roughly tidy, the children's toys swept into a corner. There was a new television set, and a transistor radio on the windowsill. The stair-carpet was badly worn. In their bedroom his record-player was closed up and wedged between the wardrobe and the wall, with a cardboard box of his books secured by string and set on top. On the dressing-table was a photo of himself taken three years ago, when he was twenty-seven, sporting his best suit and looking grim but youthful, a tight squat unopened face when compared to the grey middle-aged visage facing him in the mirror. Nearby was another photo, of a plain mannish sort of woman he did not know, with: ‘To Nancy, affectionately from Laura' scrawled along the bottom. He assumed it to be some pal of hers from the bus depot – as if there weren't enough men: though maybe not if they nipped off to Algeria and such places. The window looked on the untended plot of housing-estate garden, barren and frozen under the bitter haze of winter.

He went down and sat in the kitchen, poured himself another cup of tea, then ate an apple. He had come back out of friendliness to Nancy, and to see the children, and did not know what would come after this. He had undergone the discomfort of travel and war in order to obliterate and avoid the greater discomfort of life at home, she thought. But if that was so, why should he come back when the journey was finished? The truth was that for him it would never be ended.

She walked in, reddened by the cold air outside.

‘O.K.?' he asked.

‘Just for today. I don't like to let them down.'

‘Are you glad to see me back?'

‘You're a stranger to me. I never expected to see you again. But the kids haven't stopped asking for you, so they'll be glad.'

‘That's one thing'

She smiled. ‘Of course I'm happy to see you, you damn fool.'

‘I hoped you might be. You can't kid me.' Not that he would stay long, but he had gifts, and perhaps plans for them all. ‘Nobody ever leaves for good,' he said, ‘unless they kick the bucket somewhere.'

In the living-room he emptied the scuttle onto the dying fire, moved coal around with the heel of his shoe, which he drew back to the carpet when a cloud of white smoke shrouded it. He remembered how he had left her two summers ago, packed and walked out one Saturday afternoon with few words, only the feeling of an unexploded bomb inside and the simple stark message that he had to go. His silence and her bitterness corroded all communication, so that the parting was inevitable and somehow too easy.

He sat by her on the sofa, drawn close to the flames. ‘You'll have to tell me about Algeria,' she said. ‘It must have been interesting doing something you'd always talked about. You are lucky. But I suppose you have lots of plans.'

‘Some,' he said.

‘Do they include me? I'm not begging, don't think that, but I just want to know.'

‘They'll have to, I think. I'm glad the kids are all right.'

‘They're fine.' Simon was seven and Janet eight, and he saw a photo of them above the fire, augmented shadows of the smaller bodies he'd known yelling for first turn on his knee when back from work. He kissed her. Something had to take place before they could enter the sea of conversation both felt boiling inside and unable to break loose. ‘Let's go up to bed, until they get back from their tea.'

She stood. ‘You won't go for a few days though, will you? I'm glad you're back for a while, anyway. Give me a few minutes, then follow me up.'

He didn't wait for the bus, but made his own way to Myra's from the station. He had grown accustomed to walking, finding the cross-country tracks and going from A to B in a straight line. It felt like a game he'd bought in a shop, a one-inch map from the bookstall and off he went on a seven-mile jaunt of mild English Trackopoly. Winter time, sludge on the footpaths – go back six squares; leave luggage at station – go forward ten. The space was small, but there was no one to run from yet, no need for lying low in copse or wood. Yet he was singling out patches of forest for the assembly of ambush groups, hideouts for murder gangs, secret routes for lone assassins, areas for concealing arms and food dumps, rearguard defence lines. At the edge of the town a car stopped and a man's hand waved to give him a lift. ‘No thanks,' he shouted. ‘I'm walking for my health.' But the cold made his various scar-wounds ache, and he sat on stile or gate now and again for a smoke.

It was hard to believe all this rich land was his, that it belonged to him and everybody else. It was a good thought, yet false, though if anyone had tried to scare him from the footpath now, saying he was on private property and had no right there, he would have murdered them in a light-hearted revolutionary way, counting him the first casualty in his own personal war of national liberation. He cut a yew stick and walked along, musing on Handley's surprise and maybe pleasure when he visited him next week in Lincolnshire. He'd come down that morning from Nottingham on the train, after spending a week with Nancy.

A woman rode along an intersecting path on a bicycle. She wore a blue mackintosh, and a knitted hat was pulled over her ears. On a special seat behind sat a young child, comfortably tied in, looking up and around at blackbirds crossing a field as his mother pedalled along, her body bent for more leverage. Frank stood and shouted after her. She rode on. By the farm was a large compound of pigs, the sun glistening on their pink backs. He called again, and started to run, but she hadn't heard. The rasping sound of a machine-saw came from a close-by wood, and the lazy noise of a jet-engine filled the momentary space when it stopped, echoing high beyond the low hills. She had come from Wingham direction and was heaving along a flat unfenced cart-track, wobbling slightly to avoid ruts. There was a brown field to one side and a green one on the other, and she went towards Parkwell by her own short cut.

He stopped running, but gave a final shout ‘Myra!' She came to a paved lane, and pedalled out of sight. His mountain eyes were mystified by damp fields. He had lost his desert certainty, and the split-second assurance of wide-open spaces. The calamity of narrowness made him doubt that it had been Myra. The longer you look the less convinced you are, because that which needs looking at for a long time is most open to doubt. The clear winter vision baffled him, and he walked on along the path, hoping he would find her at home. He'd telephoned from the station but had been answered by some childish shuddering idiot who said that Dad had gone to the funeral at Dover. She'd obviously changed her telephone number from the one two years ago.

He walked into the village street of thatched houses, and bus-shelter opposite shops and grey stone church, remembering his injuries when her husband had tried to kill them both. In the side-garden of her house were two large caravans, and the once impeccable lawn had been trodden into bare earth. A four-year-old girl in duffle-coat and pixie-hood smiled as he walked along the path. He recognised Myra's old car standing beside a red Mini and a new M.G. A dark-haired girl came down the caravan steps and gave the younger one a glass of milk.