A Tree on Fire (2 page)

She was early off the boat, and three came towards her. A pale long-lined face with bluebottle eyes, holding a notice in front of her saying what she could and could not bring into the country, asked her to read it. The baby cried, and two of the customs men frowned. The one who didn't must be a Welshman, Handley thought, or a Scot.

‘Open that,' Jack Lantern said, tapping one of her cases with his notice-board. Albert bent to do so. ‘Are you her husband?'

‘No,' he said. ‘We don't live together, either. We do it by post – registered.'

The man looked at her underwear, Moroccan slippers, a Moslem robe, filigree daggerwork from Fez. ‘Can I see your passport?'

‘I don't have one,' Handley said, ‘on me.'

‘How did you get into the country?' A faint smile, as if seeing him already marched screaming back to the ship.

‘He came to meet me,' Myra said, quietening Mark. More people were spreading bewildered into the enormous shed.

‘You're not allowed in here,' Jack Lantern said. ‘You know that, don't you?'

‘My car's outside,' Handley told them. ‘I had a word with the AA man and the RAC man as I came in. They'll vouch for me.'

‘How are we to know you're telling the truth?' Jack Lantern's pal put in with a sneer.

Handley made a genuine appeal. ‘Would you do me a favour?'

Now they'd got him. He was begging for something, the first stage towards tears and breakdown. They lightened in feature: ‘What exactly do you mean?'

‘Deport me. Go on. Get me on that ship so that I can leave when it turns round, away from the servile snuffed-out porridge-faces of this pissed-off country. It goes to Australia, doesn't it? There's a bit of the Ned Kelly in me, so send me there. Not to mention a touch of the tarbrush and a lick of the didacoi. I'm an alien right enough. I don't even have one of your seed-catalogue passports. So deport me if you don't believe me, and see if I grovel and scream to stay in this senile dumping-ground.'

He picked up Myra's cases, and she followed him towards the exit, expecting at any moment to be pounced on and dragged back towards some sort of aliens' pen. Albert didn't look round, his neck and face, every pore and inch of skin, fighting to keep the blood from bursting out of him: ‘Frank was right. How can you start here? You can't. It'll be so desperate though, when it does start, that you'll need the training-grounds of Algeria to stand any chance at all.'

His car was parked in the sunshine, a low-slung black American station-wagon with rear red indicators as round as traffic-lights. ‘I need this monster for my mob. Seven kids I've got, or did have when I last counted them, and they'll never leave me now that I've struck money. Before, I thought there was a chance they might starve to death or get run over, but now they're with me for life.' He assembled a carrycot in the back. ‘I thought you might need it. It was Enid's kind thought, really. We've got a dozen or two around the house and gardens. You can keep it till he walks. A coming-home present.'

Chapter Two

Because of his bellicose mood he drove slowly through the patched-up flat marshland of Essex. The radio played, the heater warmed, the baby slept after his psychic shouting at the customs. ‘They couldn't touch me,' he said. ‘They could deport me, they could put me inside for a bit, but I wouldn't bat an eyelid. Whatever happens boils up the old paint-pot for when the keel gets level again.'

‘You wouldn't talk like that if you weren't a well-known painter,' she said, though knowing that he would.

He overtook a giant bowser full of milk-shake: ‘It makes me bitter, the way they treat people. All I did was scale a wall, snap open a door, and walk under a crane to get to the ship. When I meet people I meet them, not wait behind a gate as if I know my place. If I wasn't a well-known painter I don't suppose I'd be meeting somebody like you at all, coming off a big posh liner. I was at a party last night, and bumped into a publisher – Arbuthnot by name – who's got your husband's book on his list – George Bassingfield, isn't it? – and he was raving about how superb it was. You're a woman of the world, even if you have had a baby by my best gun-humping pal!'

There was no way to stop him ripping open wounds like letters with a paper-knife. She had sent George's manuscript to the publisher he'd mentioned while still alive, and would sign the contract now that she was back in England.

She fed the baby in a pub, Handley tasting his first pint of the day at the bar, as the baby supped the milk of Myra's nowadays ample breasts in a private room upstairs. They were taken for man and wife, Handley lean, sardonic and domineering; Myra cool, dark-haired, attentive to her baby – a couple who, being so hard to place and travelling in such a car, were thought by those who served them to have inherited vast amounts of money they could never have deserved. ‘Do not define yourself. Other people can do that,' she thought, holding Mark high on her shoulder for his glass-eyed paradisal belch.

On the road again, gliding between frosty March fields to the almost silent sewing-machine engine, Myra thanked him for coming all the way down from Lincolnshire to meet her.

‘Let's say it's in memory of Frank, and at the same time to show hope that he'll come back from Algeria. I only feel really generous when I'm walking in the rain to tell you the truth, not on a frosty day like this. I'd give all I've got, then, including the coat off my back. The rain makes me feel good, even when I start sneezing. It's only when the sun comes out and I've got pneumonia that I feel foul. I haven't done much in the last fortnight, so I came down to London for a break. I don't paint so easily as I used to. Success is a funny thing: can eat your guts out. But the secret of beating such an enemy is not to regard it as success, to keep on thinking of yourself as an exiled, unemployed nobody – which doesn't need much effort from me – though I suppose I was a bit brash and unnerved by it at first, as Frank no doubt told you. I've been so broody lately, that Enid was glad to get rid of me. It's rough on her these days, though. In the autumn I'm hoping to go to Russia for a month if nothing goes wrong with my house and brood. Teddy Greensleaves, the man who owns the gallery, doesn't want me to. Not that I'm finally decided about it. Says they'll turn me into the tool of international communism – or some such thing – but I said it would take more than Russia to do that. I'm nobody's tool, anyway, and certainly not his. I'm an artist, which means that nobody can tell me what to do. If they advise me to do the opposite of what they want me to do in the hope that I'll go against them and so do the right thing they'll still be disappointed because they can't dream just how subtle and independent I can be.'

He roared his car along an empty hundred-yard stretch of dual carriageway, heading for the next narrow bottleneck of the woods. ‘I'll drive to Russia if I go, through Berlin and Warsaw, strap my canvases to the roof, get a bit of work done while I'm there. Might paint a couple of tractors if they stuff me with caviare.'

Myra listened: the subtleties of a rogue-elephant flattering himself that he had enemies. He had. They'll get him, she thought, by making him continue to the blind end the role they had forced him into. Or maybe they wouldn't. Frank hadn't been able to make him out – though that needn't mean much, since they'd been friends for such a short time.

‘What are you going to do with a baby and without Frank?' he asked.

‘Get home,' she smiled. ‘And ponder things for a while.'

An AA man acknowledged his car, and he gave the clenched fist salute. ‘I was going to say and I talked it over with Enid, that if you'd like to come up to Lincolnshire and muck in with my mob, you're welcome. I'm having an extension built on, and I've got two big caravans in the garden. You'll find it friendly. Maybe Frank told you: we're a bit rough, but don't let that put you off. There are seven kids, a bulldog, six tom-cats and two
au pair
girls (one of them pregnant already) so you and the baby will be well looked after, fixed up in a room like the Ritz. The air's good, walks lovely, and people say good-morning again now that I've stopped tapping them and stealing their rabbits and cabbages. You won't even see me from one weekend to another, because though I complain, I'm working all the time for my next show. I'll send one of the lads to fetch you if you like.'

‘After a fortnight at home,' she said, ‘I might feel like a change.' She couldn't force herself to say much, though her mind was full. A bomb had fallen on her life, and the pieces hadn't yet come together. Handley, for all his affluence, was rooted in the earth, a tree that died and flowered frequently but never changed colour or character, and she thought he wouldn't understand the recent fragmentation she had undergone. Yet being an artist perhaps he would, though she still couldn't begin to tell him until she could with absolute clarity begin to tell herself. Maybe the baby had completed the powerful outspreading flower of the explosion. Life before he was born seemed purifyingly simple, but now she was not only geared to her own unanswerable complexities, but also to Mark's creature-like timetable wants that occupied her till midnight and claimed her again at six in the morning. His darkening hair and Dawley-blue eyes kept her body and soul separate from each other because they dominated both. He was her life and suicide, the great divider and conqueror that would not allow her to use the fragments of her past life in order to construct a future. With husband dead and lover missing he warmed her, an organism fully alive but not yet conscious, eyes to see and lungs to shout with, the facility to eat, excrete, inexorably grow yet everyday seem exactly the same. She was stunned by this ruthless parcel of give-and-take that nature had put into her arms. She could now understand how certain natives of the South Seas had never thought to connect childbirth with sexual intercourse, whereas before such an idea had seemed hilarious.

The integuments of passing landscape drifted by: layers of brown field and lead-green wood, cottages smoking like old men, a countryside at rest as if it had never worked to deserve it, peaceful, apathetic and full of beauty. The sky was clouding, as if they were driving towards rain, a softening watery grey that made the green grass picturesquely livid by the roadside, a piebald emerald covering the pre-Raphaelite soul of England. She existed in it, felt the cool grass-air on her cheek, merely by looking at it, still familiar after her years in the country with George.

‘I expect you're glad to get back,' Handley said, ‘orange-juice and cheap milk.'

‘There's always some reason to come back,' she answered, ‘usually unimportant. I need to put my house in order – literally.'

‘Then what?'

‘I don't know. But I shall.'

‘Come up to us for a while. There's nothing like violent change to shake perspective into place. Not that I'm suggesting our place is violent. I hate violence because there's so much in me. I love an ordered life – never having had one. I used to think that once I got money I'd achieve this peace that pisseth out understanding, but no such luck. My daughter Mandy banged at my studio door the other day. She's seventeen: “Dad, can I have a car?” When I looked at her as if my eyes were hand-grenades she pouted and said: “Only a Mini.” I tried to throw her out, but she threw a fit and tipped paint on a big job I'd been working on for weeks and that I might have bought two Minis with. Then she shouted: “Do I have to go on the streets before I can get what I want, you tight-fisted rat?” That's only one thing. I could go on, but why bother? Richard – one of my sons – he's more devious. Wants to set up a magazine, devoted to pacifism and the arts – poems and things. Promised a whole issue to an intellectual assessment of my
own
work! My own son! I could have battered his skull in. But my life's bloody-well plagued. I didn't know how mean I was till I had money. But I'd be in the gutter again if I wasn't. I'm thinking of buying a shotgun and mounting guard over my cheque-books. My wife's all right, the angel in the house, so we could do twelve hours on and twelve off. As soon as the money started rolling in I began to really get into debt. There's not a radio, furniture, books, clothes or food shop for miles around at which I don't owe a few hundred pounds. My instinct told me this was right, for if ever the money stops rolling in I shan't be the only one to suffer. The whole economy will go under with one terrible groan. I used to live by sending out begging letters, but nowadays it's me that gets them, floods of them every morning. In fact if I get another begging letter I'll do my nut, because I suffer when I read them. Not long after my money started to roll in all my relatives came up from Leicester to say hello, poured out of their cars and hinted how I ought to give them a few bungalows for holidays in summer. They didn't notice the rural slum I was living in. I soon pushed that snipe-nosed lot off. They still drop in in ones and twos. One of the best begging letters I ever penned bounced back to me because Mandy had spent the stamp-money on sweets, so I had it mounted and framed, hung above the mantelpiece for all of them to see. Of course, then they said: “Aw, old Albert's a bit of a lad! Likes a joke,” as they knock back some more of my whisky. Money
is
a bloody curse, when you think about it. They say that a fool and his money's soon parted, but I wouldn't regard him as a fool – though I'm learning to hang on to mine just the same. I used to think that what an indigent artist needed was money, until I'd got some, when I thought that all he wanted was to be indigent. But as long as he's hard as iron it don't matter what he wants nor what he gets. It's being hard that's made me an artist, nothing else, and it's being hard that'll keep me one. When I was poor a local bigwig who bought a picture now and again asked me if I was a catholic because I had so many kids. “You're an artist, so you have plenty of other things to do besides that.” “Maybe,” I told him, “but it's the Chinese you want to get at, not me. We can pack another fifty million into this country yet. Don't talk to me about the population boom. I don't mind sharing my dinner with you if you'll share yours with me.” He got offended at that and humped off for good. I'm not saying they were fine days, but I was anybody's equal and still am. Many's the time I took off my watch before walking into the National Assistance Board. I was interviewed not long ago by some putty-faced pipe-smoking chubbyguts from that magazine
Monthly Upchuck of the Arts
and all he could do was try to needle me about “class”, wondering when the day was going to come when my “origins” – that's his sickly word, not mine – were going to show more clearly in my work. So I asked him when his origins were going to stop showing in his stupid questions. I nearly puked over his snuff-coloured suit. The article never came out, thank God. Teddy Greensleaves was disappointed: “If you aren't careful,” he said, “the critics will give you the kiss of death.” “As long as it's a big kiss,” I said. “Why do you keep on acting the fool, Albert? It's just that little bit
passé
, you know, to go on talking about money, and be forever ranting against the critics.” I didn't answer, because that would be playing his game.'