A Tree on Fire (6 page)

‘You'd better stop losing,' Handley said.

‘After the A-flash over London and Liverpool, government troops are hounding all guerrillas into the Midlands. I don't like the look of it.'

‘Break it off then,' Handley said. ‘Melt 'em away and pull back through the Marches. Re-form in Wales. The Black Mountains'll make a good base – plenty of blokes to draw on from the valleys. Good lads, them Taffies. Promise 'em self-government when it's all over.'

Richard began to argue, the only way to find out what was on his father's mind. ‘I'd thought of that, but …'

‘Got a better plan?'

‘What about some in the Lakes and Devon?'

‘No good. Keep 'em together at the moment. Wales is big enough. They'll be too busy cleaning up to bother with us for a while. Then, but all in good time, we can come back, take Shrewsbury, and make for the Black Country. Like fish in water. Move in with the spring tides, with the people. They'll rise for the bait, don't worry. If not, we'll suck our rings and drop dead.'

Richard was moving the pins, and Handley bent over the map with a feeling of satisfaction. ‘Sent off the plans of the secret bases yet to Moscow?'

‘Last week. Rolled them in a bundle of
New Statesmans.
Printed matter, unregistered, surface mail – to make sure they'll get there.'

‘Send another batch then, this week.'

‘All right,' Richard said. The telephone rang, and he listened.

‘Well?'

‘They're liquidating the Coventry group. Regular army.'

He straightened up from the map, threw his cigar out of the window. ‘What did I tell you? Get them to melt, turn into carol-singers or poppy-sellers. I'll call in this afternoon when I'm back from the pub. Maybe you'll have better news.'

‘Father, there's just one thing. Adam and I found a beautiful old printing-press in Louth. We can get it for fifteen pounds, then go ahead with the magazine. It'll cost fifty pounds an issue if we set it up ourselves.'

He thought for a moment. They'll be the ruin of me, if I'm not too stingy with them. And the same if I am. ‘Win that civil war to my satisfaction, and I'll do it.'

‘That'll take weeks. We could print some subversive leaflets in the meantime. I know a way to get them handed round factories in Nottingham. Also at Scunthorpe.'

He took half a dozen ten-pound notes from his pocket and, in mint-condition, they swallowed down onto the Thames valley. ‘Get the press, then, and we'll see how it goes.' Richard stood back to consider the overall situation. Handley's head showed in again. ‘Shove the poetry out of your mind for a bit – do you hear me? – and get them fucking Welshmen up from the valleys.'

‘Yes, father.'

He walked aimlessly around the garden. Furrows underfoot were muddy, ridges of salt-loam beaten in by sea-wind, this part of the garden scarred by miniature craters where cabbages had been ripped out from mother earth. It smelt good, felt soft and rich, tender to his elastic-sided boots hardly meant for the treading of such intense soil. The fruit-trees – apple, plum, pear – were empty and withered. He felt dead, snuffed out by too much winter and isolation, as if his soul were drifting and he was unable to pull it back under control. Let it drift, he thought, let me go, idle and blind, stricken and numb. I don't mind floating like a brainless fool: the quicker I get to the end and die, the sooner I'm born again. I don't believe in death, at least not in life, not for me. But oblivion is breathing close unless something happens.

Hoping to throw off such thoughts, he went in for dinner. Enid put veal and salad before him. ‘That journalist didn't seem in a very good mood when he left. Walked down the hill as if he had an eagle on his back. He didn't even talk to Mandy, and that's rare.'

He cut up his meat, appetite good. ‘I gave him what for. He wanted to draw me out, so I let him overdraw me. That's the only way.'

‘Is it?' she said, setting her own plate down. They'd fallen in love when she was seventeen and he nineteen, in those far–off days on the Lincolnshire coast, and Enid was well pregnant at the marriage, soft-faced and big-bellied, earnestly looking at him, and he shy with a wide-open smile at being dragged into something that made him the butt of his mates' jokes while also marking him down for some special unspoken respect. She had a slim straight nose, small chin, full mouth. Her light-blue eyes had a slight slant, upper and lower lids never far apart, Tartar almost in shape, one of those rare English faces that looked as if they had come from central Asia, then full smooth cheeks and fair hair, a face on which the troubles of life do not fall too hard, though Enid had been familiar with every one. Loving Handley, she wasn't even aware of having ‘put up' with him, which may have contributed to Handley's youthfulness, while hers was certainly rooted in it. Her long bound-up hair was as pale as when they'd met, and her skin had an unchanging attractive pallor, in spite of bitter Lincolnshire winters and the never-ending work of seven children. Handley loved her also, and in some way they had never stopped being afraid of each other, but during their quarrels they loathed each other so profoundly that it couldn't even be said that they were in love any more.

‘Why go out of your way to make enemies?' she said. ‘If you try not to make them you'll still have more than you can handle. You're not sly enough. You let these people make mincemeat of you. They've only got to stick a pin in and you jump a mile. And they always get what they came for, whether it's the posh papers or the gutter press. At your age you should know better.'

He spread butter over black rye-bread. ‘At thirty I'd have been as cunning as hell, and was, but what's the point any more? I'm getting old enough not to bother about disguising my feelings.'

‘Too famous, you mean. It's gone to your head.'

The house was stonily quiet, children at school, others either asleep or set on various pastimes. A cow moaned from the neighbouring field. ‘Whose side are you on?'

Whenever they argued it was as if a third and impartial person were present, taking down all that they said to each other – as if they would be ultimately judged on this. She stood up to change his plate. ‘See what I mean? Yours, but you're too locked in your fame to know it.'

‘Fame!' He spat. ‘I don't have any.'

‘You do.'

‘I ignore it.'

‘You don't. You can't. I wish you did, but they've got you.'

‘So what? Is my work any the worse for it?' He hated the word ‘work' and knew that she knew it, and had made him use it, by angering him on this touchy subject. Art was not work, since it was something you were not forced to do in order to earn a living.

‘Not yet it isn't,' she said.

‘It won't be. When I'm working I'm completely myself.'

‘And when you're not working,' she went on, eyes gleaming because a real quarrel was coming up, ‘we've all got to live with you.'

‘You mean
you
have. Why don't we keep personal relationships out of this?'

‘You can't live without them, that's why.'

He ate his bread and Stilton, cut up an apple. ‘Stalemate. Let's pack it in. Divide the spoils and go our different ways.'

She sat down and looked straight at him, a bad sign, portent of saying something unforgivable and bitter. ‘If you want to give in, you can. But I won't surrender to all this muck you've dropped into. If you want to go, go. Kill yourself. If you left me you'd never paint another stroke, and if you don't believe me, try it. We've suffered too much to fly apart just when the going gets difficult. It might have been possible before, but not now, not any more.'

‘I don't want to leave you, but what gives you the idea that you're my strength and mainstay?'

‘Because I am, though not any more than you are mine, I admit. You've got me, but you've also got your freedom. I don't ask questions when you go to London for weeks at a time, so if you can't manage in those limits you wouldn't exist in any others.'

She boiled his coffee, poured it out. ‘We've got such a bond, Albert. It would be a pity if you smashed it. We've burned in this love and torment since we were almost kids, grown up while our own kids were growing up. If I were sentimental I might call a lot of it suffering, but there was too much love for that. It's made me hard as well, but in a way that makes me sure of myself, and the more sure I am of myself the more I know that being together is the only thing that matters. We've never killed each other in a rotten married way. We've been very big about it, right above the rest of the world, and it can't be shown to anyone else, or passed on, but we own it far more than this piece of property we've bought. It's valuable and unique. It used to be the suffering that ennobles, but now it's the sort that degrades. So ruin it if you like with your black heart. You can destroy your part of it, but not mine. My part of it's out of your hands. And it's safe in mine.'

‘I wasn't serious about ending it. Stop this talk.'

‘I shan't. You were thinking it. You've often hinted it. If you want to run off with some girl for a dead and comfortable life, it's up to you, but I'd never forgive you your lack of backbone in doing it.'

He smashed his fist on the table, shaking half his coffee out. ‘You've said enough. Stop it. You're poisoning it. I can't stand to have my love killed. The ancient feminine wrecker is on the move again!'

She stood by the sink, hands shaking, turned on a tap to stop them. Water ran out uselessly. ‘I've said all I want, but if you think I was raving like a lunatic, and that what I've said doesn't mean anything, you're a fool.'

‘You open your mouth, and kill things. It's disgusting.'

‘Go on. I'll never stop you. Why don't you just go outside and throw up that rotten bile that's choking you? Just because some tuppenny journalist has been twisting you around his little finger you have to come in and vent you spleen on me. Not, I notice, until after you've had your dinner. Oh no! Food usually sweetens people, but it makes you bilious and sour. I won't put up with your tantrums. You're not dealing with those spineless people from London who only say “What a genius!” but never see you as you really are.'

‘So that's it! Jealous, are we? Jealousy brings out the spite, and all the things you weren't quick enough to get out in our other quarrels but remembered afterwards when you brooded on them. Jealous! I thought you were bigger than that, sweeter and bigger, more intelligent, perhaps. But no.'

‘Life's full of disappointments for the poor of spirit,' she mocked.

‘Turn that tap off. You're wasting water.'

‘I'm not the gallery owner. You don't have to act the knowing peasant with me!' But she turned it off, and wiped up his coffee mess. He snatched the rag, and threw it like a dead cat into the sink. ‘You're going right to the bottom,' she said. ‘One move and down you go, right into the mud. And once you're there you're like an alligator that rips at any living thing.'

They stood at each end of the kitchen. ‘You can't run my life,' he said. ‘You never could and you never will.'

‘It's not worth running. Keep your life and foul it up in your own way. But leave mine alone. I want it for myself, out of what's been good between us.'

‘Have it, then. I'm making you a present of it, tie it up in an old chocolate-box with blue ribbon. I'll get the undertaker to make you a coffin, bury it with a bloody prayer book, send it to the bottom, all your love and ideals. You can have them, mine as well, when they take a turn for the worse like this.'

He didn't see her hand shift. A full dinner-plate seemed to cut off the top of his head, stutter and break on the doorpost behind. ‘I don't want this sort of marriage,' she raved. ‘It's nearly twenty-five years, and I've not put up with this. It's low. It's ignoble.'

He staggered, eyes closed, a wetness above the left eye. The salt of blood stuck like a leaf on his palate. ‘I know,' he said. ‘We had fine instincts, but you want to alter all that, crush it, destroy it.' He spoke calmly, a ribbon of blood on his face. ‘You can't do such a thing to me. I'm even more in the real world than you are.' Keep away from it, he said to himself, a precipice in front of him, don't throw anything. Smile. For Christ's sake lick away the blood and smile, or it's over for ever. Twenty years in jail and only bars to paint.

‘You're weak,' she cried, ‘bone weak. Your whole life's been built up on weakness. You can't pit your will against the ordinary hard life of the everyday world.'

His hands pressed onto the heavy kitchen table. ‘That's what you always wanted, me going out to work every morning and bringing money in on Friday night, a nice steady husband with a nice steady job, an aspirin-wife and crispin-haired kids, a bungalow and little car. I've long suspected this.'

‘It's not true. I mean weak in a better way than that. The way I mean is just not in your consciousness. You don't
know.
You're of poor material. You never could understand, because you're idle, unreliable, a liar …'

He reached her with clenched fist, brought it at her, then emptied the sink of dishes, a demon scattering all the confetti of Sheffield and the Potteries at wall and window. ‘Go on,' she cried. ‘What else can you do? This is the end, though, the end, I tell you.'

He spun like a windmill. Chairs shook and toppled, the table flew, drawers skimmed and blocked off the door. Deafness and blindness, the awful force of his own movements crushed him, caught him up so that he couldn't stop. ‘I'll never forgive you,' she wept. ‘Never, Never.'

‘You've got absolutely what you wanted at last,' he said, sitting on the floor. ‘Are you satisfied?'