The Flame of Life

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The Flame of Life

A Novel

Alan Sillitoe

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The present novel was begun in August 1967, and finished in January 1974. This is a long time for one book, though during that period other items were written that were more urgently pressing. They elbowed the present work aside, which may have been compliant in this because the plot and form of the book weren't so absolutely clear in my mind as they subsequently became over the years.

During its progress three other novels were written, as well as two books of short stories, two filmscripts, and a volume of poems.

Earlier versions of chapters three and four were printed as part of a novel in progress entitled CUTHBERT in
The Southern Review
(Louisiana State University) in the summer of 1969.

CHAPTER ONE

Albert Handley left his car in a meter-bay behind Oxford Street, and went into a shop to buy a transistor radio.

‘How much is that?' he asked.

‘Costs twenty-seven guineas,' said the young salesman.

Ash dropped from his thin cigar. He'd smoked all the way down that morning. His daughter Mandy had asked him not to, otherwise he might die of cancer. ‘Who'll make the money to keep us in the sort of idleness we've got used to if
you
get carried off? The trouble is, you think of nobody but yourself.'

‘Looks good.'

He twiddled a knob though it was not switched on. There were no batteries in any, and they were chained by their handles to the wall. He was eating himself so hard that cancer wouldn't get a look in.

‘It's very fine,' the salesman told him, as if he weren't a serious customer, but was passing the time before going to a pornographic picturedrome down the street.

Handley unbuttoned his short fawn overcoat. He was tall and spruce-looking, with brown eyes, and a face more reddish than the ruddy glow it had when he'd been poor and walked everywhere. Yet he was still thin. No matter what food he shovelled down, and in truth it was never much, he did not put on weight. There was something intelligent and ruthless about his face, until he smiled and spoke, when whoever he was addressing might make the mistake of thinking him an easy person to get on with.

‘I want something powerful,' he said. ‘A good radio with lots of short-wave. I live in the country, and like to feel cut off from the one I'm in!'

His brother John had been a wireless enthusiast, and so Handley wasn't as unfamiliar with radios as the salesman thought. But John's dead, you fool, he snapped at himself in his momentary abstraction. What do you mean dead? Of course he's not. Why do you say that? He never was dead nor will be dead. He can't be. If he died I wouldn't paint another picture. I'd die myself, in fact. But he
was
dead, all the same. Killed his bloody self.

He saw a black, complex, heavy model with a multiplicity of wavebands, switches and aerials. ‘What do you rush for that one?'

‘A hundred and ten guineas. It's a Philips, from Holland.'

‘You look as if you could really communicate with it. Turn it on, will you?'

He unlocked the chain, and fixed in batteries.

‘It's a good smart model.'

‘Can you get police-bands?'

‘Everything. Fire-brigade, aircraft, radio-taxis, ship-to-shore in morse and telephone. Anywhere in the world, providing you adjust the aerials.'

The tone was good, trilled with spikey clearness when he spun the wheel over short-wave. ‘Pack it up, then, I'll take it with me.'

He got back to his car and found a ticket fixed on the windscreen. He supposed it must be a two-pound fine because – as he now realised, looking at the meter – he'd forgotten to put money in. He drove off without touching it and, going smoothly along Oxford Street, flicked on the wipers till the little cellophane envelope flew out of his sight forever.

He cursed his carelessness – as well as the vindictive warden so assiduous in his packdrill duty – and picked his way through the traffic. His sleek black Rambler Estate made easy progress, but it still took some time getting to the Arlington Gallery after finding a vacant bay in Hanover Square.

String-wire-and-tinfoil sculpture that formed the basis of the current exhibition looked flimsy but interesting, something between Futurist muck, Surrealist crap, and a heap of socialist-realist junk thrown out of a builder's yard. In other words, it didn't lack imagination but had no talent whatsoever, only a demonic persistence on the part of the artist to create something or die. The man's name was famous in the art world, and though Handley couldn't begrudge him that, he was annoyed at the fact that he didn't know what it was about, feeling insulted because the sculptor hadn't done something that his by no means simple intelligence could understand.

Still, maybe it was only a bit of obstinacy on Handley's part, because many people were paying high prices for it, and countless critics were vomiting words in order to explain it to each other. It kept them out of mischief, though he felt that the more words a picture needed the worse it was.

Sir Edward Greensleaves, large and affable, stood up from his desk. Handley was a few minutes early and this disturbed him but, due to reasonably good breeding, it got no further than his own thoughts. Known as Teddy to Handley and his friends, he was at the pinnacle of several hundred years of family history – a genealogical cutting tool. The Greensleaves had one of the oldest pedigrees in England, which meant they came over as vicious-narrow-eyed plunderers with Norman from France. Handley could have reminded him, however, that his clan were in England even before the Norman Conquest and even, maybe, prior to the Roman Invasion, but such length of service can be a positive disadvantage especially if, instead of mixing and breeding only with the best names as Teddy's lot had done, you mucked in with all the jailbirds and riff-raff feeding on fur, feather and fin that happened to come your way. Teddy was the last of the Greensleaves, and being of a certain nature, was not likely to extend the name for another generation. Handley, with a family of seven kids, seemed set for a few more centuries at least, unless the world blew itself up in the meantime.

Greensleaves often boasted how he had pulled Handley from the gutter of direst hardship and turned him into a man of the world. He had given him his first show two years ago, and made him rich and famous. Handley didn't see it like that. He had always been a man of the world, and was no different now in either talent or spirit to when he was without money or recognition. His wife and seven kids had got along on national assistance, poaching, begging-letters, and raffling paintings now and again in the Lincolnshire village they'd lived in. He shook Teddy's warm, pudgy hand. ‘I need money, that's why I've come to see you.'

‘You had a thousand last month. Are you sure?'

‘There are a score of us living in our self-styled community, and that means twenty idle mouths to feed. I'm
not
idle, because I happen to be the breadwinner, but I don't mind that because it stimulates me for my work.'

‘I wonder if you're making a mistake, living in a community?' Greensleaves ventured.

‘Of course I am,' Handley said. ‘I'm just one big twenty-two carat mistake like any other human being. It's not many months since my brother John died, and it seems like we buried him only yesterday. Living in a big group helps me to get over it a little bit.'

Edward didn't like Handley to be so much at the mercy of ordinary emotions. If the artist's brother died he should swiftly absorb the fact, however tragic it might be, into the mainstream of his creative powers – he suggested.

‘We'll never see eye to eye,' Handley said. ‘I enjoy coming to see you because it makes me feel so civilised. I mean, it amazes me how cultured people like you can live so far down in the mud.'

Teddy laughed. ‘Let's not go into that.'

‘Or we'll never get off it,' Handley said, pushing his face close, ‘will we?'

‘I mean,' Teddy said, ‘wouldn't it be better for you to live in Majorca, or some place where the sun is warm, and living cheap?'

He grinned. ‘You want to get rid of me?'

‘I want you to be happy.'

‘I thought so. You want me to stop painting.'

Greensleaves flushed, as if caught in a secret criminal thought, which deepened when he realised there was no basis for it.

‘Don't take me seriously,' Handley said, ‘or I'll cry. I'm the only one who knows how I can live.'

‘You're painting well?' Teddy said, pouring two brandies. He had the look of a man who had his vices under control, but who also knew exactly what they were – which was something.

Handley sat in a leather chair, his feet on the long mahogany desk. ‘Never better, in my humble opinion. You can put another show on as soon as you like.'

‘It's only three months since the last. We don't want them to think you're too prolific.'

‘Afraid they'll stop buying?' Handley jibed.

‘They may want them cheaper. We can't afford that.'

‘Why not? It'll hurt you but it won't hurt me. I'm working as if I'm on piece work. Bull week, every week. Grab, grab, grab. Call it inspiration if you like.'

Teddy pushed the brandy over. ‘Leave the tactics to me.'

‘Cheers! I suppose you might get thin if you didn't make so much money.'

He sipped and laughed. ‘I don't think you realise it, Albert, but I like being fat.'

‘There'd be nothing left of you if you weren't.'

‘It's good to be fat in this business. A thin art dealer isn't trusted. A thin partner, yes, but not someone like me.'

He's trying to reassure me, Handley thought, that he'll never run away with my money. He's devious and corpulent. His eyes are shifty and incompetent. I'm sure he's robbing me. But he's good-natured, and I like him. ‘Have you always been fat?'