The Flame of Life Read online

  Dawley, with the same ideas, forced him into Algeria at gunpoint. There was no other explanation. There were many such hardliners who talked about equality of people and the redistribution of the earth’s necessities – but they were monsters who did not believe in real freedom, in real love, in real women. Locked in the prison of their deprived hearts, they could not even know how much they fought against themselves. They believed in the power of the gun over the individual, till finally it was the gun that wielded them. Power did not corrupt such people, but reduced them utterly to an inhuman bit of steel called a trigger. It did this as surely as if they allowed tradition and society to crush them into a man with nothing more to his emotional credit than a stick of bone and gristle called a penis. It defiled them. They enjoyed it.

  Dawley was as responsible for Shelley’s death as if he had murdered him deliberately for his own twisted purpose. He had accepted the way of violence, and let go the reins of humanity. She had often talked it over with Shelley, and though her arguments had had sufficient effect on his reason, they had never got through to his dreams.

  All she had to do was confront Dawley and, if he were as guilty as she knew him to be, indulge for the first time in the violence she had always tried to talk Shelley out of. There were some people in the world who killed in the name of innocence and purity, and they called it love of humanity or Revolution. Their feelings of innocence increased the more they were taken up by the force of their own unquestioning violence, and those whom they couldn’t kill they corrupted instead. They had to be killed, therefore, so as to save the innocent they came daily into contact with. Such people had nothing to do with socialism.

  Dawley was this sort of person, and his innocence was a menace to the good people of the world. Her own life’s love had been destroyed because of it, and so it would be the most perfect justice to kill him.

  The choice was not easy, and she didn’t know where it would lead, or even whether she could do it, but as the train stopped at the frontier station and she stepped down from the high carriage, she knew that her made-up mind ought not to be altered. It was a new way of making a decision, with her heart instead of her head, and though this method was too much of a novelty for her to feel easy about it, she nevertheless sensed it to be a sort of letting go because it was something that she wanted with all her soul to happen.

  She moved as if in a dream, as people do when they believe their minds are made up. That was the only way to act if the dream were to come true. She waited in the large hall for her trunk and other luggage to be brought to the customs counter by a porter. To anyone but herself and, for various reasons, to Mr Handley and Dawley, the trunk was valueless, but through its formidable presence Shelley seemed to be telling her that she had made the right decision. She was happy at the moment to stay in her dream, to take refuge in it. No one knew of the dream that was in her except herself and therein, she thought, lay its strength.

  It was difficult to get a trunk and suitcase such a distance through Europe, travelling at full speed towards Paris. The trunk contained Shelley’s belongings: a lightweight suit and a few shirts, several pipes and an unopened tin of Raleigh tobacco. But the few dozen notebooks, which she had been too locked in her grief to read, took up most space, and formed the deadly leaden weight that porters shied from – showing great regard for their limbs and sinews till she offered them fifty pesetas to take it out of train or taxi and hump it bodily through its next stage.

  She had registered its contents, as careful and anxious as if Shelley’s actual body were inside that she was for some weird reason taking to England. His soul was in those notebooks that he had pleasurably and laboriously written in during the years they had known each other. She did not know where his actual flesh and blood body was, though hoped that Dawley, his fellow-revolutionary and travelling companion, would tell her when she met him in England, describe the place and put it on the map in such detail that one day she would set off for Algeria, to find it and bury him properly, when Dawley was dead.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The raw sky made Cuthbert feel hungry. Purple clouds were clawing their way from nowhere to nowhere. Some were in rags, trying to climb over one another. The expressive English summer held a faint uneasy smell of decay.

  He pandered to the fragmentation of his mental state by strolling among the traffic islands around Victoria Station. The day felt so heavy after a sleepless night that even the onset of afternoon didn’t bring the usual sharpening of his faculties.

  The widespread brick warrens of south London looked squalid and cosy. Would the towers of flat-dwellings blow over in a wind? The train cut through rows of small houses rubbed with the burnt cork of industrialism. Food and fruit and gaudy clothes made a patchwork snake in the street-market below. Backyards and slanting chimneys went on forever.

  This, he thought, unable to leave the window and read his Times, is where the English would have stopped the Germans in 1940. Twenty Stalingrads. Even Hitler hadn’t got such nerve or stomach so early on. Patriotism would have caught on like television. Cunning forms of self-immolation would have enabled them to ‘take one with you – even two’. The good old expendable working class would, in its generosity, have bled itself to death – at least so my father asserts, though he’s a bit old-fashioned where history is concerned.

  Better to save their souls by the God of Heaven than smash their bodies by the God of War. The train ran over a putrid stream, a factory near by, then a sports stadium, then modern factories and fewer but neater houses, a football field, rubbish tips, factories, more backyards, a mildewed shed, a patch of earth, cuttings and tunnels, birch trees, barbed wire, huts, swamps, squalor again. Orpington. A fire blazed on the banks of a cutting. Hop poles. Thank God we’re out of it. Smoke in the sky.

  He enjoyed the slight burn of sun on a far-off patch of field. It brought the dazzling emerald closer than the dull hedges broken now and again by blades of scruffy chalk. If he opened the window he’d throw his dregs of tea on to it, but drank it instead, and went back to his first-class carriage, empty because he’d scattered newspapers over the seat space, and the sunlight came right across. He was glad to be alone, hating to wonder why people on English railways didn’t talk to each other.

  Being away from the family, he felt a man of the world: Handley had put enough cash in his pocket for him not to appear mean and give the community a bad name to Maricarmen. Tall, fair-haired, chisel-nosed Cuthbert with the sardonic mouth and pale forehead had faint lines around his light blue eyes that gave an impression of uncertainty to anyone who got a close look. He’d noticed this defect while shaving, but his physical presence and quick speech rarely allowed anyone to see it. He wore an old grey suit, a black shirt and his clergyman’s collar.

  People in England made way for a parson. Even the most noxious middle-class atheists were finally deferential if you looked at them with the authority of ruthless and magnanimous sympathy. People might nail you with their sordid problems, but he had learned to deal with them in such a way that his victim would never again confide his or her troubles to a parson. He twitched his nostrils so that they moved more than his lips, and while this alarmed those who were timid, it enraged others who had more spirit. It separated the goats from the sheep.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he intoned, ‘I’m sad to hear your mother died today. Or was it yesterday? Well, you really should know, shouldn’t you? It is a trying time. My own father died last week, and I’ll never forget it. Or was it the week before? Have a cigarette, and don’t think about it. What? You can’t smoke at such a time? They’re very good. Not at all expensive. Anyway, it’s on the Church. You might as well get something out of it. Just back from the funeral? How shattering. I can’t tell you how moved I am that you should turn to me at such a time. I shall do all I can to help. It’s my job. Sure you won’t have one? It’s an unusual kind. Do you listen to religious broadcasting on the BBC? You should. A great lift in the early morning, though not, I might s
ay, as great as you might get from these innocent-looking cigarettes. Calm yourself. If you don’t smoke, you don’t smoke. Far be it from me to force you. Hope you don’t mind if I have one? Your mother was ninety-seven! They say that those who die of old age become flowers in God’s garden. Isn’t that a beautiful thought? It is for me, anyhow, though I haven’t just lost my mother. Am I drunk, did you say? You should be ashamed of yourself, bursting into tears like that just because your vile old mother cracked out and you can’t bear to live alone at sixty. You’re a disgrace to the human race. Hey, don’t get rough. I may wear a dog-collar but I’ve still got enough muscle to bash your face in. Get your hands off me or I’ll call the police and tell them you’re soliciting, you queer-eyed gett. For Christ’s sake let me get away from this raving maniac!’

  The ticket-collector looked in, heard his melodious bawling and dragged the door to because you can’t disturb a parson rehearsing his sermon. It sounded so fiery that the bloody fool might turn like a holy lion and rend him if he insisted on bothering about such earthbound items as tickets. Just as well, thought Cuthbert, who only paid second-class when wearing his dog-collar.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he would say, ‘you’re quite right. I’m so absent-minded these days, with parish affairs in such a tangle. I’ll have to find the right compartment. Wouldn’t do to spend too much of the parish funds on a business visit to raise money for the new scouts hall. I may stay? How very kind of you. It’s a delight to find some goodness in the world. Only five minutes before we get in? Oh dear, I simply must finish this report on juvenile delinquency.’

  Once nearly a priest, always a priest. A woman gave him five pounds when in a similar quandary: ‘Please take it,’ she said, ‘for your church.’ Such a nice young curate. While discussing the ethics of his possible acceptance the ticket-collector quietly withdrew. That train, unique in his memory, had been on the Norfolk run, and with an hour of the afternoon still left, the rhythmical convenient clack of the wheels hid the rustlings and whispered nothings of the forty-year-old woman whose half-buried dreams took her by merciless surprise and guilt and pleasure. Later at her house (husband on business and kiddies at boarding-school) he discarded his priestly habit entirely, and passed two days with his partner that she ought not to forget either.

  He paced the platform at Dover Marine, and took out the photo of Maricarmen – who didn’t look the type for anything of that sort. The way to the quayside was marked by an enormous composite war memorial, of a soldier with a rifle and bayonet pointing his deadly gear towards any tourists (especially German) who might come to this country with anything but goodwill in their hearts and hard currency in their pockets. The forlorn figures had been erected and left there as a warning to the incoming hordes whose forefathers had shot and blown to bits them and a million others.

  There was time to spare for a quick look around the group. With those sharp eyes inherited from Handley he saw that such statuary was, in truth, fit only for the rubbish tip. The soldier (to the right of the sailor) was in full Great War rig of helmet and rifle, pouches and boots, looked daxed or drunk. The two were held or half sheltered by a bare-breasted woman who seemed to represent Mother England or some such tosh. She’d got wings as if to fly (should it be necessary) from the common warriors if they got funny ideas. The soldier looked undersized, as if he belonged to one of those battalions of runts and midgets nicknamed Bantams by taller specimens, the fierce scouring of the slums let loose at the Germans when all else had failed and something – whatever it was – still needed to be done. Mostly, of course, it ended in several hundred poor wretches dead or howling in the mud – which was considered better than having them stay on the streets at home getting their hands on the property of the better-off. Cuthbert wondered what the young Germans thought of it when they came through. Trust the old country to be so welcoming.

  He walked into the customs sheds. ‘I’m to meet one of my domestic staff from Spain,’ he said briskly to a slate-eyed passport official of his own age. ‘Mind if I wander along? Might spot her coming down the gangway. Be no end of a help. Wouldn’t like her to take the wrong turning at an awkward moment!’

  The man smiled. ‘That’s all right.’ He was going to add ‘sir’, but decided not to, a slightly disrespectful omission that made him feel better, and added pleasantly: ‘Go and wait on the left.’

  Cuthbert set off beyond the specified point, on to the actual quay, where the ship was bumping into its berth. Seagulls peeled off strips of sky as they slid over the sheds and water. Uncle John’s last sight of earth must have been this, before the addle-brained fool went to heaven. He’d opened his suitcase, wind scattering papers up among the seagulls, took out a monstrous revolver, and put it into his mouth. The last hunger of life. The real bite of a starving man. A final look showed gulls flying over Dover Beach, before the armies of the night rushed in.

  What else can you do when you’ve sensed too much, and can’t take any more? Maybe it wasn’t such a lot he’d seen. One man’s much may be another man’s little, but it makes no difference in the end.

  Suicide is the final act of infantilism, he thought, by those who are still so close to the womb they think they can double back into it when they can’t go on. Such a memory spoiled the solid view he’d always had of himself, wondering why Maricarmen had been booked via the fraught place of Dover. Maybe Handley had machined it, to put him at the mercy of a dark omen which would rattle him if he tried to win her on the way home. Yet he sensed that his weak point was the belief that everything Handley did was conscious and calculated. It needn’t be so at all, and he would rather have had anyone for a father than an artist, though there was nothing to do but learn how to live with it.

  He took a pipe out, and a rubber tobacco pouch, part of his parson’s kit that he loathed but had trained himself to work convincingly. He rattled around his pockets for the stubby box of matches, and the policeman walked by without returning his friendly nod. He lit up, but let it fade as the first passengers trod curiously down the gangplank.

  He watched Maricarmen carry two suitcases along the quay without struggling, thinking it just as well that she was strong. He caught her up at the passport counter, heard her explaining with an American accent that someone was coming to meet her, and so introduced himself.

  Letters were shown, and they allowed her through. One bridge crossed, he thought, silent as they walked to the custom sheds, even false words blocked for the first time in his life. She opened her cases, and the trunk that the porter set down. The customs man slid his hands between the books and papers as if, to warm his frozen self, he was putting them up the skirt of a beautiful woman – a look of distaste at being landed with such a job.

  ‘A lot of papers.’

  ‘I may study while I’m here.’

  He opened a book called Warfare in the Enemy’s Rear.

  ‘Politics and history,’ she said.

  He flipped through it, as if the title suggested an esoteric treatise on sodomy. ‘All these notebooks yours?’ he asked, disappointed that it wasn’t.

  ‘Yes.’

  Cuthbert stepped in, but he made a chalkmark on the lid and walked away, leaving them to close it. The bland official atmosphere of England’s well-guarded gates had no effect on her, as it had on a few of the English returning from their holidays who could not yet show the confidence that having had it so good for so long should have given them.

  She was far from revealing whatever there was to hide, carrying herself with an air of Iberian dignity that made everyone around her seem physically warped. She had high cheekbones, and long black hair smoothed back from her forehead, but there the resemblance to a typical flamenco dancer ended. Her face was pale and thin, her nose small. There wasn’t much beauty, he decided, but her pride shook his heart. She was tall, and her eyes had that look of sensibility that does not draw pity from anyone, though they are able instantly to see the marks of suffering in others. She wore a light grey overcoat none too heavy for t
he gusty day.

  He was wary of getting too close for fear he wouldn’t see her properly, yet wanted to be nearer so that people would know they were together. He enjoyed them looking, and wondering what a young parson had to do with such a woman. He wished he hadn’t donned his dog-collar before leaving home – touching the small of her back to point their direction along the platform.

  A porter had gone on with her luggage. ‘It’s not far to London,’ Cuthbert said. ‘A couple of hours. We’ll get a taxi across town, and another train from St Pancras.’

  ‘I seem to have been travelling for ever,’ she said. ‘It’s a good feeling, though.’

  He opened the carriage door. ‘You’ll get there soon. England lies before you like a land of dreams!’

  He paid her porter five shillings – rather less than he should have done – and got a dark look at his white collar before the man pocketed the coins and walked away. He regretted his meanness, which gave the wrong impression before this new and striking acquisition to the community. His hands were trembling as he pulled out his pipe and tobacco.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The carriage was full and stuffy – a light rain gusting along the foot of the cliffs, grey window-flashes of the sea as they threaded several tunnels.

  He wondered what she was thinking, knowing that if he couldn’t guess with the sharpened intuition of fresh acquaintance it would be far more difficult in the future. His priestly bent of mind could only get at somebody’s thoughts by hearing them speak: having nothing on which to frame questions did not inspire him to use his imagination and make up something which, though colourful, might not be accurate. He thought too much of himself to want anything but the truth.

  They sat quiet. At the dimness of each tunnel, glad to be leaving the locality of Uncle John’s death, he looked at the illuminated vision of her face in the window, while she sat by his side with unfeeling blankness after a twenty-four-hour spirit-shaking journey from Barcelona. He was nagged by the feeling that he’d seen her before, and he couldn’t fathom where.