The Flame of Life Read online

  It was the one unblemished piece of generosity that had ever been bestowed on him, and he was grateful that it had come from Mandy, and not from someone he had grown to hate. He wanted to tear the night out of the sky for her and remake tomorrow with a sweep of his arms. But the stubborn stars held on, glittering studs keeping the black cloth down. Mandy’s great attempt to get away from the paralysing Handley dragnet had landed her with that blood-filled vampire Ralph, a failed country gentleman who was only good for the bright prospect of sponging off his rich parents. Since his marriage they had disowned him anyway, so that Handley had to take him in.

  He shut the window and turned to the room, a wan and shabby memorial that made him think of smashing it to bits. A tin-chest tool-kit under the table had a stout hammer in it – but violence wasn’t Cuthbert’s way. It was a sure method of having no permanent effect. Leave such dark avenues to senseless Dawley, he thought, for whom brute force towards others was only an attempt to keep his own dead spirit alive.

  The tempting hammer was balanced on the radio set, but he knew that he would lose all power of speculating on violence if he used it. It would be a bad bargain, to give up so much and achieve so little for a few lead-heavy blows of the hammer. But he went as far as he dare to the brink by rubbing the steel head slowly down his cheek and feeling the flat cold surface pressing into his flesh.

  John had used the tools to make bookshelves, and keep his radio gear in good order. Cuthbert lifted a tray of nails and screws and brackets, brass hinges and fuses and small rolls of copper wire, and underneath was a large cigar box covered with an impressive label, a picture of a multi-chimneyed tobacco factory. Above it was an olive-skinned, green-eyed, smooth-haired young woman wearing a plain collarless common labouring shirt, her smooth thin lips meticulously engraved. He pulled down the hundred-watt Anglepoise for more light.

  Who was she, with such a noble and sensible face? Did she work in the cigar factory, or did she own it? Since the cigars were Cuban he could make a case for both, but he wasn’t really interested in that. He was entranced by her face, the faint lines going from the mouth which showed that certain facets of life occasionally worried her. She had a sense of humour, though was not smiling at the moment. Faces he passed on the street or glimpsed behind a car wheel on country lanes floated or jerked by so that he could only feel contempt or pity for such utter lack of expression and inner life. But here was a small picture, a mere part of the cigar-label pageantry, and it fascinated him to the extent that he felt sorry for his own unworthiness.

  The only way he could get closer to this woman of the cigar box was to prise open the lid and hope to find another good Havana inside, to sit a further half hour smoking it, and gloat on her inadequate though enticing portrait. Not that he believed she’d ever been real, yet her vulnerable improbability looked at him, her eyes fixed on the deepest inlays of his soul, a stare which affected him so deeply that he could not even think of anything cynical by which to turn it aside.

  He could no longer take the picture in. It went dead on him. Wanting the promised cigar, he tried to lift the lid, but the small chromed nail held firm in the wood, and he searched the radio operator’s bric-à-brac for a knife. He forced it open, and the overhead lamp flooded the sharp grey line of the barrel, the curved trigger-guard, the rounded corrugated butt of a heavy revolver. Circling it, like torpedo-shaped sleeping tablets, were six rounds of ammunition. Along one side was the last cigar waiting to be smoked.

  He stared, unable to believe, stricken at the picture of it. He now remembered the woman on the lid as if she had been real. His glazed look went to both in turn, Would this woman have made John happy? He laughed at the thought. It couldn’t have been the gun John blew his brains out with, for the police had nicked that. Maybe it was a twin, for John had certainly left it here, or hidden it where Handley had found it and returned it to the shrine. Cuthbert felt sick at a sudden uprush of love and death: he sensed danger – returning childhood mingled with smells of shit – the bite of knowing that decisions came from sources totally outside oneself. The change and destruction they brought might be more powerful than any man could withstand.

  The fixed monochromatic picture of the woman made him smile, and the steel flesh of the gun brought down sweat. His finger itched towards it, touched the barrel and shot back as if it were new from a blacksmith’s fire. But heat was in his fingers, not the gun, and to someone thrown out of theological college, fire was more important than metal, because fire is alive and metal is dead, and if metal does come alive it is only through fire.

  There was little hope of peace when Handley strode away from Dawley. A thunderclap of curses came from John’s room, followed by a crash of glass, as if a head had been used to break a window. He couldn’t make out the actual words of recrimination, and when something plopped at his feet he saw it was a cigar that had hardly been smoked.

  Mandy’s bellowing scream was followed by a smack of fist on flesh. The moon covered itself with cloud to hide from Handley’s petulance and Cuthbert’s shallow taunting. Dawley felt he would be able to sleep if he went in now. He picked up the cigar that had survived the long fall, and tasted the first sweet lungful of Cuban tobacco. John’s room darkened and, after a final door slam, all was quiet.

  Cuthbert came downstairs with Uncle John’s revolver in his pocket.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  He weighed five thousand tons, not feathers but concrete – the weight of weights when it came to scales. He’d have got up in spite of it, but there was an ant sleeping on top of the five thousand tons, which made such a difference that he couldn’t shift a limb, not a hair, not a fingernail. He loathed that slumbering ant which stopped him moving.

  Yet he didn’t want to get up. Time went quickly. When you were out of bed it went slowly because you were expected to do things. He could not get up because he liked lying there, though the sensation of staying in bed was edging slightly towards pain. Whether this far-off ache was due to the weight on him, or because his moral fibre was out of control, he did not know. He was too tired to find out.

  Last night he’d been starving-hungry, and thought of the delicious breakfast he’d have when he got up – knowing that when he did he might be too idle to eat. But feeling ravenous had made him think of his past life, so he didn’t mind it at all.

  A blur of sun made a slit at the curtains. If they were drawn back it would flood in, warming the carpet for flies to play on. He would sweat then, unable to throw back the blankets. These irritating thoughts lessened the five thousand tons of concrete on top of him. Maybe the ant would jump off.

  At the same time, and perhaps because of this weight, he took pleasure in his helplessness, a fair indulgence when living in a community. What else was such a place for? The disadvantages were otherwise so great they could never outweigh the shame that a man with pride must feel at being here.

  A black cloth-like bluebottle woke from the ceiling and made towards him like a rocket pulled by the sun. It touched his right temple, picked up the ant from the concrete, and flew away, a morning bout of nature that seemed all it could do at the moment.

  He smiled at the decrease of weight. The door snapped open, kicked against the wall where a knob-dent had already been worn. Mandy came in with his breakfast tray. ‘You idle bed-rat. When are you going to get up?’

  It was two weeks since her miscarriage and, he was glad to see, it hadn’t left a mark on her. She was thinner than before her pregnancy, which might not be saying much, since she was almost plump again instead of merely gross. Mandy’s glory was her long straight hair, tied with a purple ribbon and swaying down her well-padded back.

  At eighteen her face had lost that live pale marble of early youth, though the newly sallow look gave her a more attractive waywardness. She was continually forced into brash assertions of independence so as to bring out that pure sense of her own dignity which all during childhood she had been unable to show in such a large family. And now this community
stunt, she thought, had thrown her back to square one, forcing her once more to open her mouth loud every time she wanted something.

  In spite of his five thousand tons Cuthbert was able to turn his head and smile. ‘It’s nice to be awakened by such a charming sister. Did Ralph roll on top of you last night and forget to get off till daybreak?’

  She stood over him, lovable, beautiful and foul-mouthed: ‘I’ll tip this hot coffee over you if you don’t stop calling Ralph, you bone-idle two-faced queer.’

  ‘I suppose anybody is queer,’ he said, ‘if they don’t go to bed with you. But I’m your brother, remember? Dad wouldn’t like it. And he’s your father. He’d be jealous. I know what goes on between you.’

  She set the tray on his bedside table. He’d gone so far into the sludge of his mind there was nothing left to be angry about. ‘You’d better get up. The meeting begins’ in half an hour. Dad says if you aren’t there they’ll come up and lob you out of the window. You’re such a rotten bastard you’d burst when you hit the ground, even if you fell on soil. Or you’d dent one of the caravans with your dead weight. Be a pity. Cost a bob or two, them caravans did.’

  The more she wanted to rile him the viler her accent got. She could put on a posh tone with no effort at all, speak speech in fact so purely demure that no one would guess her true base lingo. But she brutalised her tongue to remind him how he used to talk, and still wanted to from time to time but didn’t for fear of giving himself away. Often he’d curse his luck at being born in England instead of France or Spain where, he’d heard, a beggar’s accent could be the same as the king’s. At college he’d choked back any trace of picturesque dialect or voluble argot, though when he’d perfected his aural neutrality and could expatiate with fair surety without giving himself away he discovered to his delight that if in an argument he switched into rabid and aggressive slang his opponents, where once they had been contemptuous of his voice, now became wary and impressed by it. They knew his self-assurance in their language and habits, but they could never be at all confident in his.

  ‘Sweetness and light,’ he said, pouring coffee.

  She stood by the door. ‘Myra set your breakfast out, not me. I only brought it up to please her. She don’t want any trouble. I don’t know why, though. It’s liver and chops to this family. We’d starve without it. When there’s no more trouble we’ll pack our cardboard suitcases and go our separate ways. If she wants to get rid of us, all she’s got to do is bring about a state of peace. The place ’ud empty in two minutes. Maybe that’s what she’s aiming at. I wouldn’t blame her. I bet she rues the day she let our lot in.’

  ‘You’re too rational,’ he said, spreading butter over the toast, his mouth full of bacon. ‘I don’t like you in that mood. You forgot the newspapers, by the way.’

  ‘They didn’t come. There’s a strike on.’

  A twitch in his knee almost jerked the coffee over. ‘What are the lousy bone-idle improvident working-class shirkers downing tools for this time? It’s shameful. When my National Theocracy gets in you can say goodbye to strikes. They’ll be working double time at the incense factories, and building cathedrals in every street.’

  ‘Roger and Richard,’ she said, to needle him more, ‘know the man who led the walk out. They even sent money to his strike committee.’

  ‘They’re on strife,’ he mused, cutting up his egg, ‘not strike. That’s what it is. They’ve got no god left, and they get bored. I understand. Well, why are you standing there? Why aren’t you downstairs pushing that vacuum cleaner around in your useless way? Or are you on strife, too?’

  The pips of her eyes seemed to split two ways: ‘One night, when you’re asleep, I’m going to come up here and cut you into little bits. ‘You’re so dead from the scrotum up you wouldn’t know till it was too late. You’re just a sponging marauder living off everybody’s good nature. You always have been and always will be. I hope I’m wrong, but I know I’m not. We all know where you go for hours at a time. You go to Uncle John’s room. I expect you’ve got a corpse up there that you’re sucking the blood out of and wanking off at.’

  He appealed to her in an amicable voice: ‘Get me some more coffee. I can’t do with less than a quart in the morning.’

  ‘You don’t deserve it.’

  He leaned on his pillow, and bellowed in a voice no one would suspect in him, so that the bedrail shook: ‘Get out then, you useless slut, and leave me alone. They can hold their meeting without me.’

  The skin on the left part of her forehead, and towards the bridge of her nose, wrinkled in a charming manner. It showed him that she was disturbed, and didn’t know how to act. It marked the edge of her tolerance, the beginning of vulnerability. It was nice to know she had limits, that there was a point at which her shame and pride (and even modesty) came out. As a very small girl her skin had wrinkled at this position when anyone indulged in undue spite or injustice towards her, and it was always the prelude to tantrums or tears. But now she simply walked away, and it almost made him feel sorry for her.

  As the door closed he leapt out of bed, the five-thousand-ton-weight of sloth dissolved by Mandy’s humanity in deigning to quarrel with him. He would go to the meeting, in spite of misgivings as to why it had been called. He put on a black collarless shirt over his vest, and fished a pair of old flannels from the bottom of the wardrobe. This garb was sure to ripple their communal equanimity, though he saw only innocence in it, especially when he wrapped a red cravat around his neck. One didn’t want to go too far and leave everything black. As for the rule that one should not lounge in Uncle John’s room in case its sanctity was blasted by too much common breath, such ordinances could only come from God – either direct, or through His Chosen Representative On Earth, he decided, moving the gun to another hiding-place.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Cuthbert shuffled in wearing carpet slippers. ‘Morning, everybody,’ he said genially, a fair imitation of his father. Then he touched Mandy affectionately on the shoulder, and took a seat as far from his father as he could get.

  She pushed her brother’s hand off as he went by along the wall. ‘I hear you stopped my papers this morning,’ he said.

  Richard turned: ‘And those of a few million others. We helped. Let’s not claim too much. The final decisions are always in the hands of the workers.’

  ‘The bishop didn’t get his Times,’ Handley called above the chatter, half-way through his first cigarette of the day.

  Seeing both windows open, Cuthbert complained of the cold. Handley looked at him scornfully: ‘Put a coat on, if you’re nesh.’

  Dawley passed a cigarette to Nancy, his wife. She took it, and allowed him to light it for her, but sat stiff and quiet, being too shy or uncaring to take much part in these gatherings. To say what she thought before all and sundry had never appealed to her. In fact she just couldn’t do it in front of people she hardly knew, so merely sat there and tried to look interested. But her silence at meetings had passed beyond them and into her life with Dawley, and so he could never tell what she was thinking, even when they were in bed and as close as they would ever get. She’d turn morose or sharp if he tried to talk to her about the way they lived now. The passion of their getting back together had come and gone in a few days.

  The au pair girls, Maria and Catalina, appeared with trays of coffee cups. ‘Ask them to close the window,’ said Cuthbert.

  Enid wanted to do it, and get on with the meeting, but Handley pushed her down with his left hand: ‘We’ll vote on it’ – unwilling to let Cuthbert off with an easy victory, even on such a small matter as this. Cuthbert noticed how smooth and cynical he looked, as on every occasion when he took to the vote-meter.

  ‘Say yes – those who want the windows open.’ Handley put three spoons of sugar into his tiny cup of black coffee like a real Turk, Enid noted. The vote-meter had been rigged up soon after Cuthbert’s arrival, and on the floor by each chair was a button that could be pressed whenever a motion was put, buttons so
hidden it was impossible to say who assented and who did not, On the wall behind Handley was a huge clockface, a circle with ten divisions, so that if two members voted for a proposal the needle swung over that number of segments, and on the rare occasions of unanimity it turned full circle. Agreement was reached if six of the ten parts were covered.

  Handley was proud of his democratic installation, but Cuthbert suspected it was fixed in his father’s favour, suggesting at each session that everyone sit in a different place to the one they had held before, especially Handley, since Cuthbert believed that his foot-button had several times the lighting-power of any other. The proposal had been defeated, as any would while Handley kept his present seat. But even if the gadget did not cheat it seemed an insult to the more subtle mechanics of the human make-up, a typical innovation of his father who fell for any modern contraption that came along. Cuthbert thought that one day, when his father was in town, he’d call an electrician and have the wires checked.

  Seven segments filled with light. He had lost. No one had ever yet defeated Handley on that device, nor ever would, for he played it like a master – as if he were God in heaven, though Cuthbert reflected that he hadn’t thrown in his hand at theology just to be kept in place by this ten-bob Yahweh facing him through two lines of faces.

  Dawley had voted with his father, and so had his wife Nancy who always did because it was the easiest way out. He’d have to get rid of her, which wouldn’t be difficult because she was obviously unhappy in the community. Her eternal silence at meetings was proof of that. All he had to do was drop the hint that Dawley was going to bed now and again with Myra, and she’d be off to Nottingham by next morning’s train.