The Flame of Life: A Novel (The William Posters Trilogy Book 3)

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘While things are bright and beautiful for some,’ said Richard, when the talk rambled on, ‘they are not so cheery for others. I don’t expect the Smith children who go to your school without overcoats and with only plimsolls on their feet in winter feel it’s like that.’

  ‘That’s because their dad’s idle,’ said Janet. ‘He’s no good.

  ‘He’s allus in the pub,’ Rachel giggled.

  ‘But we have to ask ourselves why he drinks,’ Richard said quietly.

  ‘He likes it,’ Simon suggested.

  Richard tried again, when they stopped laughing. ‘Why does he like it, do you think?’

  ‘It’s lovely,’ said Simon. ‘Dad gen me some beer once, and I liked it. So he don’t gi’ me any no more now.’

  ‘You was sick,’ said Janet.

  ‘It’s all right to sing hymns,’ Richard went on. ‘You might even enjoy letting yourselves go. But I want you to know what the words signify.’

  ‘They mean what they say,’ said Simon, scraping his boot along the concrete.

  ‘They do,’ said Richard, ‘but people don’t even know that much. They think they mean something else.’

  Simon grunted. ‘I know what they mean, though.’

  He was the most promising child of the group, in spite of being a Dawley. Or maybe it was because of that. He hoped not, but there was no point of going into it. Simon was an entity on his own. He doubted few things at the moment, so one couldn’t press the anti-lessons too far, but let his schoolteachers do it, so that when he turned from their indoctrination he would do it with a useful sort of finality. Handled carefully, it would certainly not be a kindness to let him loose on the world.

  At the same time it hurt Richard to regard him like this. For all his knowing remarks he seemed an unprotected bundle, lively but vulnerable, a child to be looked after even more than the others – not something regarded with favour by this egalitarian community. He followed its rules nevertheless, but made the anti-lessons easy and humorous half-hours for the children.

  The idea of them had started after Handley looked through Paul’s notebook one day, and read from his Scripture jottings that: ‘The Jews fought the Romans because they were forced to pay taxes.’ The words rankled, and later he read in Rachel’s history book that ‘the Jews in medieval England were all money-lenders.’ In the first case Handley was rabid because the statement was untrue, since the conflict between the Romans and the Jews, as far as he understood it, was one between paganism and monotheism. In the second place nothing seemed to have been told to the children about why many of the Jews in England, before their expulsion, became money-lenders.

  When he wrote to the headmaster politely pointing out these anti-Semitic tendencies in his educational system, he received an irate reply telling him in effect to mind his own business. They had children of every race in his school, and it was nonsense to accuse him of racialism.

  Handley went back to his pen and informed the headmaster that his own opinion was different, and that he knew racial prejudice when he saw it, and that furthermore he would take care to see that his children weren’t poisoned by it. He’d give them a talk every day on the lies they were told at school, and thought all parents ought to do the same if they valued their children’s minds.

  There was no reply to this, but certainly Handley hadn’t since then seen anything similiarly offensive in his children’s notebooks – though the talks had been kept up just the same to deal with what other lies and false information English schools still disseminated.

  ‘We’ll leave the hymns for the moment,’ Richard said, ‘and get back to where we left off yesterday. If you remember you told me about a film at school on life in Spain. I’ll tell you something about the history of this place, and how it’s governed at the present day.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The moon was in disparate parts of the car while crossing the yard to reach the sky. Adam felt crazy till he realised he was drunk, so pulled deep breaths into him for the alcoholic daze to wear off.

  Eric Bloodaxe, that ancient bulldog and probably best friend of the Handleys, snored loudly in the kennel, dragging its overfed body across the coconut-matted floor to avoid troublesome dreams leaping from the dark imaginary trees above its head. Ever alert, it gave a growling throaty bark when Adam slammed the car door, then went back to those dreams which it had long regarded as more interesting than real life.

  Adam was sober at the wheel, though the two-ton car became frighteningly light when it went along the lanes above sixty. But he stayed cool, as he’d been trained all his life to do, open windows bringing smells of grass and fresh soil against his cheeks. Headlights lit the lane that cats and rabbits crossed at their peril, and he kept a safe speed in spite of too much sherry since teatime.

  He pushed on the radio to hear the final bars of a magnificent symphony. It was always like that, and to avoid endless unnecessary clapping he switched off and drove with only the engine to lull his thoughts. He’d grumbled at having to fetch Cuthbert and Maricarmen from the station, but much good it had done him. He’d have preferred staying in the warmth and light, drinking wine, and playing liar-dice or laryngitis-brag with Frank and Nancy Dawley.

  But it was no use complaining about the things you were asked to do while, living in a community, where what you did was supposed to be for the good of everybody else. He’d rather go and chop down the gibbet on Hangman’s Hill, to strike at the emblem of oppression so that American tourists couldn’t take photos of it anymore with their friends standing underneath to send back home. The Handleys had spent days over maps and timetables working out the gibbet’s disappearance with a thoroughness that would have been totally successful, except that a gang from London beat them to it, drove it off sticking from the back of a van – as one eye-rubbing farmer witnessed it.

  Cuthbert took off his parson’s collar as he stepped on to the platform, being too well known to wear it near home, the tip sticking from his pocket as he turned to help Maricarmen. Adam went forward to take the cases.

  ‘My brother,’ Cuthbert told her, ‘will drive us to the house.’ Adam took a soft hand offered, and would have expected it to be warmer judging by her face in the shadow of the station lamps. He was always uneasy when introduced to someone, but this time he was intrigued as well, and envious of Cuthbert who had already spent a few hours with her.

  They stowed the trunk and cases in, and set off along the lanes in silence. Adam saw Cuthbert as a man of experience because, as the eldest son, he had been pushed while still a raw youth to schools and college. The rest of them hadn’t expected to go, for after the effort of getting Cuthbert out, no more resources had been left. But now that there was money in the family it wasn’t the case anymore, and nothing need stop either him or Richard going to university – a thought which had lately occurred to them both.

  Handley was waiting on the lit-up doorstep. Eric Bloodaxe barked its welcome, shortlived as it slid back kennel-wards when Handley’s boot made the usual half-loving gesture. Dawley stood in his shirtsleeves, arms folded, and came over to help get the trunk down. Maricarmen, surprised at no greeting, thought them more like a gang of efficient railway porters, but when her things were stacked near the back door Handley held out his hand: ‘You’ve met my sons. I’m their father. And this is Frank Dawley.’

  Lights were on in upstairs windows, and others glowed from the caravans. She looked at Dawley, but did not shake his hand, unwilling to waste observations in the half light, merely noting his strong head and short greying hair, and powerful but harmless stance which gave no clue to the personality he was supposed to have.

  Handley led her into the house. ‘We put off supper till you came. I hope you managed to sleep on the train.’

  He was fazed by her silence, but put it down to exhaustion after her trip, and meeting strange people. She followed Myra upstairs to the room got ready, and ten minutes later came into the dining-room. She wore a white blouse, dark skirt, brooch
at the throat, and held her head high as she walked to a chair, placing a bottle of Fundador brandy on the table.

  ‘That’s not necessary,’ Handley said, ‘though it’s beautifully polite!’

  She’d been safe on boat or train, locked in the actual journey and cut off from people packed around her, but now she felt isolated, and it put an added touchiness and pride into her face, which caused those who noticed it to speculate on how she would get on in the commune. Handley, with a small ironic smile, was curious as to who would fall in love with her first. His smirk dropped when she turned and wondered what it was for. He poured wine: ‘All I want to say is: welcome to Maricarmen. But we’re hungry, and she’s tired, so I suggest we get down to eating before any of us drop in a dead faint.’

  She looked at the scalding and meaty soup, asking who made it. ‘It’s one of mine,’ said Enid.

  ‘Do the men cook?’

  Handley’s head jerked up: ‘We have study groups going, and do work in the garage. I paint all the time. There are one or two idle bastards among us, but we pull our weight – by and large.’

  Ralph looked over his soup, wondering whether he could afford to ignore this slight on his honour. To let it go would disarm Handley sooner than any other reaction.

  ‘If the tin-hat fits, watch out for shrapnel,’ Handley called.

  ‘Oh stop it,’ Enid said.

  Ralph decided to copy Cuthbert who, for the moment, was unaware that his father was getting at him. ‘But cooking, and washing up, and looking after children, and things like that?’ Maricarmen kept on.

  Handley decided that if anyone did fall in love with her it wouldn’t be him. She’d only just arrived and was already getting the boot in. Cuthbert saw that she’d immediately put her hand on the weak spot of their society, a point which he’d never thought of. Myra saw the danger: ‘Enid and I look after the domestic side. It works well, and we’re willing.’

  ‘I’m not bloody-well willing, though,’ Mandy called. ‘We’re glad there’s another woman in the place to set to and give us a hand.’

  Cuthbert was amazed at how danger to the Handley machine was immediately deflected by its hidden wheels within wheels. It moved into action with such precision that the threat itself was clumsy and Neanderthal by comparison. ‘I thought three women were enough,’ he said, too much struck by Maricarmen to see her standing by a stove or sink all day.

  ‘She’ll want a rest first,’ Handley put in, for once in agreement with his firstborn son. ‘Then we’ll go through those notebooks of Shelley’s to see what revolutionary wisdom we can get from between the lines.’

  ‘I’ve not read them,’ Maricarmen explained. ‘They were put into the trunk by Shelley, and I couldn’t bear to look at them. I just kept them safe, expecting him to come back for them. I wouldn’t want him to think I’d been prying into his personal papers. He was very easy-going, and very proud at the same time.’

  She felt a devastating loneliness, wondering why she was among these people. It was impossible to remember much of her journey, as if she’d been spirited here by magic. The lights were too bright, and she thought they’d arranged to have the greatest glare over where she sat.

  ‘We won’t look at them if you think we’ve no right,’ Handley said, delicately, ‘or if it would upset you in any way. Relax for a few weeks, and then see how you feel.’

  Myra fetched in a huge joint on a platter, which she put before Handley to carve. ‘It’s good of you to make it easy for me,’ Maricarmen said.

  Like hell it is, Cuthbert thought.

  It was a floating world she lived in. The more she wandered the more settled she felt. Three months in one place and she began to feel rootless. Her head swam and she became dizzy, as if there were nothing to hang on to. Movement was stability. When she was on the move she didn’t notice the spinning of the earth. She could be happy and confident on her own firm level.

  But having to stay in one place made her cling to the world for fear of falling off. She’d once changed her address every week for a year, delivering street-fighting pamphlets to underground workers groups, and felt absolutely cool and normal. It was easy to merge with the crowd, and one man who took the inflammable tracts from her was so shocked at seeing this ordinary young woman handling such firing-squad material that he sweated about it three nights running, and even wondered why he had joined the revolutionary movement.

  Surrounded by the strange people of this extended family who, through Dawley, had some remote connection to Shelley, she felt able to control and even enjoy the situation. With them, she could be herself, so was indeed at home. And her tiredness from the journey had diminished now that there was food inside her.

  Her observations were not analytical, merely her customary musings out of which useful truths often came. Because of this born ability to be herself she didn’t suspect that they in turn were wary of her, and that she might be at a disadvantage when set among people who, like the Handley’s, found it even easier to be themselves. She noticed this, but only vaguely, because she was invariably ready to see good in people rather than anything else – and always condemned them more harshly afterwards if they didn’t come up to her expectations.

  To appear straightforward was a sure way of putting people on their guard once they thought you were doing so. Though not sensing this sudden alertness among them, especially in Cuthbert and his father, she did have the perspicacity to detect a slight change of attitude as she sat at the table.

  Dawley was observing her in a cleverly unobtrusive way. This was as it should be, for he after all was her reason for travelling to England. Another aspect of being herself was that her set purpose would never falter – of finding out how he had tricked Shelley to a sure death in Algeria, and then pay him back in kind.

  While the ways and means of it unrolled, she would be careful of him, knowing from experience in the organisation to which she had belonged in Spain, in the years before meeting Shelley, that when a man who happened to be her lover was taken to prison, or escaped to permanent exile in France or South America, the person to show love to her afterwards was often the man’s best friend. And it was just as usual, in that sort of life, for her to be drawn strongly to him, for the casual reshuffle of love worked in as immutable a way as any social cohesion.

  And Dawley was the last man in the world she would want as a lover, or even as a friend. To say that he was the sort of intelligent man who kept all power to himself only because he was selfish, and that he was therefore his own worst enemy, would be to underestimate his qualities, especially if he were an enemy of yours. She had seen this aspect in many men, for they usually ended, if they could, by making an enemy out of her, even if only to take the pressure off themselves. She had a firm belief in first impressions, and clung to them even when the initially accurate vision receded into a more general picture.

  But outside her sense of mission regarding Dawley, was a feeling of well-being and happiness, and the certainty – as more food and wine was set before her and conversation spread in a friendly way – that she had reached a peaceful haven of sympathetic people whom she in turn liked and understood and, in some comforting way, was understood by, not in the style of old comrades but, weirder still, as if she were some distant cousin who had just come in from Gibraltar.

  They were foreign and strange, yet because of these qualities, and not in spite of them, they were close to her. Was it only during this first meeting that she would feel such a thing?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Day after day he bent close to the intricate colour and detail of the large-scale maps of the Algerian wilderness that covered the caravan table, trying to equate their contours and empty areas to the actual journey made on the ground.

  Between reality and the pretty picture, memory posed its special problems when it came to fusing both into dull deadbeat words. What picture ever agreed with reality? Reality was one and indivisible, and the representative fraction of Dawley’s split mind as he ga
zed at his maps – more detailed and expressive by far than those used on the trek itself – showed little sign of coming together and recreating the vanished though recent past.

  He was in England, and safe, and the war was over, and his memories had no clarity though they still, somewhere, had meaning. Having more or less marked out the course of his footslog from the Moroccan frontier to the Khabylie Mountains near the northern coast, and re-knit a daily account of what happened, much of it was nevertheless inaccurate because he felt that his recollections were not to be trusted, and possibly never would be.

  Knowing that reality and the past were so bound up that they could not be brought back, created a larger drier desert in himself than the scorching sand and stone he had walked over. It made him see that, returned to the safety of England’s green and truly pleasant dead land, he did not know with any surety why he had gone to fight for the rebels in Algeria.

  True, out of a sense of idealism, and to help the downtrodden of the world after a lifetime of believing that the international socialist brotherhood of man could cure the evils and inefficiencies of capitalist-imperialism, he had agreed to join Shelley Jones in driving a lorry of guns to the frontier beyond Tafilalet – a practical action that could never be confused with any dream.

  After a successful ambush, he persuaded Shelley to go on to the war in Algeria. Shelley knew his limitations, and did not care to enter the battle-zone. But Dawley, drunk on the tactical superiority of the fighting, and the intoxicating though diminishing noise of their own gunfire, forced him to embark on the most stupid enterprise it was possible to concoct.

  They struggled across desert and rocks and mountain ranges, hunted and hunting, half dead from sickness, hunger and thirst, yet somehow recuperating and surviving. Each day the sky altered, from darkness through scorching heat to darkness. Even now, it came back real enough when he descended down into the dream to think about it. During a night attack, Shelley was wounded in the foot, and died of gangrene a week later.