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

by Alan Sillitoe

  He picked a cigarette-end from under the briar, not an ordinary nub, but one so small it had been smoked to the bone. The plot thickens, he thought, like chicken soup with barley. Cuthbert smokes pot, but he wouldn’t be doing it out here with Maricarmen because she’s too much of a straight-laced revolutionist to let him. Her knickers would catch fire at the merest whiff of it.

  So who was Dean’s lady-friend? Who had driven him to fashion out his love-pad with the utmost cunning of his squirrel-brain? When there was a mystery to be solved Handley lost his sense of humour, as if the only way to get to the bottom of it were through the swamp of his self-esteem.

  ‘Who indeed would lay here with Dean, that scrag-end of a William Posters who had stumbled so unerringly on a cushy billet? He sucked blood from his finger, and walked away more thoughtfully than when he’d come.

  It was obvious that the two large platters of hors d’oeuvres for lunch should have a centre column of salami, with black olives and spring onions spread to left and right. What other art was left to a woman? It got more like Mrs Beeton every day.

  Salads were made with lettuces pulled out of the garden. Dishes of potato, cheese cubes, tomatoes and cucumber were laced with mayonnaise. For the main course there was veal in the oven, and water was heating on the Aga for rice. Fruit salads were fortified with muscatel – helped down by double cream for dessert.

  It wasn’t a special day, just her turn on the new domestic schedule, and Myra was nothing if not conscientious, intelligent and imaginative, working with a free hand because Dean was amusing Mark by playing the car radio.

  The new arrangement had simply increased her discontent, the slight let-up giving her a glimmer of wider freedom. She even began to regret that the community was lodged in her house, for if it had been at somebody else’s she could have walked away without deflating it completely. Yet she couldn’t gainsay that this style of life had grown on her, and it was impossible to imagine what her existence would be without it.

  Why were all arguments good, even the bad ones? Domestic slavery had palled, but at the beginning, when there was a real sense of community among them, she hadn’t noticed it. Now she sensed the silences that lay so thick around, people pairing off, and secrets brewing up.

  Maybe the conflicts that had brought them together were healing, or going underground, which meant that it was settling down and not, as she feared, in danger of blowing apart. She was fundamentally pessimistic, but hid it by a generosity that made everyone think they could not do without her. The pessimism remained – the inability to make up her mind – but the work she did was doubly blessed in that it benefitted her even more than the others.

  She was reluctant to investigate too far, yet saw it as a miracle that the community had held together so long, being a marriage of such disparate characters. But she believed in it still, and would do her best to keep it firm, even if it meant the eternal organising of the kitchen. And if by such speculation she discovered flaws in the mechanics of the community, it was only so that she would be able to stop any rift in time.

  It was obvious that Maricarmen had been weeping, and was struggling not to show it. A handkerchief grasped in her hand was no bigger than a marble. Her breasts were gently moving, her blank stare still fixed by some shock. Cuthbert took cutlery and plates from the cupboard to set the dining-room table.

  ‘What is it?’ Myra asked, but Maricarmen lifted a platter of food to follow him: ‘I’ll tell everyone at lunch.’

  Myra was puzzled by such a melodramatic pose, wondering whether it could be so serious if they had to wait till lunch to hear. She sent a chute of rice into the water: why had she never before seen how stern and discontented Maricarmen’s face could be?

  The sky was darkening, as if thunderstorms promised by the radio were about to grumble on the horizon. Maricarmen put two olives on her plate, then chewed at one as if it were a stone. Handley was the first to comment on her distress: ‘Is the weather giving you a headache?’

  She was silent.

  ‘You might as well tell everybody,’ Cuthbert said.

  Handley took salami, and pushed it with bread and butter into his mouth. ‘Anything bothering you?’

  ‘Give her time to speak,’ Enid said. Dean turned to make sure that Mark, perched on his high chair, spooned up his food without spilling it.

  Maricarmen stood. ‘I was cleaning my room just now, and pulled out Shelley’s trunk to vacuum under the bed. It didn’t seem heavy, and when I opened it I saw it was almost empty. Someone has stolen the notebooks.’

  ‘If you’ve been robbed, the community’s been robbed.’ That was all Handley could say. There was some devil loose, that had taken the gun, and now the precious notebooks. He wanted to stand but didn’t think he’d be safe on his feet. He was being pushed under by forces outside his control.

  ‘You’ve stolen them,’ Maricarmen said accusingly, a look of misery on her face. ‘You deceived me into bringing them. Shelley wouldn’t have been tricked.’

  Dawley threw down his knife and fork. Everyone looked in his direction. ‘Just because there’s one mad dog running loose there’s no need to brand everybody.’

  ‘We were going to do research on them,’ Adam said, trying to feel the enormous loss of it. ‘They’d have been priceless.’

  ‘You talk as if they’ve been buried or burned,’ Handley said. ‘But I’ll find them if I have to take the house and grounds apart, stick by bloody stone. I’ll not touch another bit of paint till they’re found. So get plenty of grub down you, because after coffee we’re going to form into search parties. We’ll leave nothing unturned.’

  ‘I know it’s too late,’ Maricarmen wept, tears on the soft skin of her cheeks.

  Enid stood behind and took her hand. ‘They’ll be found. Albert would have been a policeman if he hadn’t become a painter!’

  Ralph felt as if an enormous stone had been lifted from his heart. After suffering a slow-burning attack of asthma and indigestion in the last few days he now, suddenly and miraculously, found the oppression gone. They could spend ten years looking for the notebooks, but all the perverted revolutionary data written in them had gone up in holy smoke to England’s blue air.

  The rice and veal came, and the news had certainly blighted no appetites. ‘We’ll find who took them,’ Handley said, ‘and whoever was bloody responsible will be publicly booted out never to return. By God, I’ll know who it is. But as we’re on the subject of thievery some light-handed lunatic has nicked the revolver and ammunition from John’s room.’

  Enid turned pale, and shouted in a frightened voice: ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘A while.’

  ‘You should have called the police,’ she said. ‘Why have you been so tight-lipped about it? Do you want to get us killed?’

  ‘I thought somebody had taken it for a few sporting potshots with bottles in the woods. Or that it had been mislaid and would turn up. But now that the notebooks have been snatched I think things are getting a bit more serious – shall I say? I’m putting one and two together.’

  Cuthbert looked on at the ants-nest he had kicked over, worried that Handley would suspect his uncontrollable silence. Giving in to a purely nervous twitch he smiled, then turned his head away too quickly. Dawley, hating the reason behind Cuthbert’s smile, saw him as a man without honesty or generosity, a carcass of plot and counter-plot, out to do what damage he could to all and sundry because it was his only form of amusement or feeling.

  Then he despised himself for such thoughts, and was angry at Cuthbert for making him have them, aware that he might be no better than Cuthbert if he were thus a prey to his diabolical twists. He had tried to be friendly but it was impossible. His amicable remarks were seen as weakness, for a smile to Cuthbert was an insult that had to be avenged.

  Cuthbert surprised Mandy by offering her a cigarette. His look had produced the desired result of hatred and confusion in Dawley – not very difficult since those who were dull and honest
, and therefore strong, were easily broken down. But Dawley was the lynchpin of the whole rotten fabric of both family and community, so he had a grander fate in store for him than a disdainful turning away of the head. Dawley was the idol of the family now that Uncle John was no longer alive, a guerrilla-fighting idiot who had come to his throne like any upstart king – over the dead body of Myra’s husband, of Shelley, and of Uncle John himself. Cuthbert often saw events in such medieval shifts of power.

  He had worked out the trio of deaths with Maricarmen, always returning to the fact of how Dawley had ‘forced’ Shelley into Algeria, so that Shelley had died of gangrene. Once when Dawley was out for a walk he had strolled into the caravan and read the manuscript in which Dawley admitted guilt at Shelley’s death. He had not claimed a similar credit with Uncle John – and in truth he couldn’t be blamed for it – but Cuthbert had only been interested in Shelley’s unnecessary demise, which he whispered to Maricarmen in her room at night, burying his poison into her undying Iberian righteousness.

  ‘If I’d got that gun I’d sell it,’ Mandy joked, to whom the disappearance of both gun and papers was of absolutely no importance.

  ‘When I get my hands on it,’ Handley said, ‘I’ll take the bloody thing to the middle of Gould’s Lake and drop it where it can’t cause any bother.’

  ‘Like King Arthur’s sword,’ Adam laughed. ‘Maybe a hand’ll come up and grab it.’

  ‘And fire a few shots,’ Richard giggled, ‘before pulling it under for good.’ They laughed at the joke, as if the deeper the trouble the more light-hearted they became. Maricarmen again doubted the probity of this community she’d been trapped into joining. They gave you refuge, showed what good hearts they had, spouted of ideals to lull you into safety, and even into feeling affection for them – when, without warning, you saw them laugh together as if they were wolves who had drawn you into their den by posing as human beings.

  Enid was the only person whom she trusted, and felt something close to love for, yet given the jungle-logic of this house she was the one who should be suspected of stealing the notebooks. It was enough to drive you mad – unless you did quickly what you had come for and then got far away from the place. She would keep silent till they recovered the notebooks. Then she would kill Dawley, and go back to Spain, where life was perhaps better than the chaos around her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  It seemed strange to Handley that Cuthbert should volunteer to wash the kitchen floor when he could selfishly leave it for the next day’s shift, but he was out of the door and half-way across the yard to look for a bucket in the garage before he could call him back.

  The rain had spent itself – after laying pools of water which Cuthbert jumped across so as not to get his slippers soaked. Myra’s dead husband George, a man of high standards and much dexterity, had spent a few Saturdays excavating a repair pit in the garage floor, giving the rectangular hole a lid of two neat doors which closed it off completely.

  Cuthbert blessed him for it, got into the Morris Traveller parked above, and let down the handbrake. He’d planned on doing it in a leisurely fashion, but also with desperate hurry if necessary. The floor was on a faint slope, and he sweated as the car rolled clear of the trap doors. Half-way out of the garage, he noisily yanked up the handbrake ratchet. They were still too busy in the dining-room, deciding who would search where, to hear him. Minor decisions were swamped in such time-wasting debate that three hundred years would be needed to live a full life under such conditions. Only a guiding brain to give firm orders – even if occasionally the wrong ones – would get any good out of such an organisation.

  He pulled up the doors and leapt into the pit, where Shelley’s notebooks in a plastic sack had lain since he switched them for a false lot which his brother-in-law had incinerated in the paddock. Poor Ralph, he thought, had lived with the triumph and guilt of having burned them, while still leaving him the means by which to destroy Dawley and the community for good.

  The bag seemed heavier than when he’d first dragged it from the garage and let it drop there. He pulled and sweated before it eased up the side. Time was not with him. The discussions in the house might end, and a search party wonder what he was up to. Not that he didn’t have a good reason for tidying the garage and ‘accessory spaces’ – a good phrase, appealing to any community heart – on his duty-day.

  His luck held, and the bag was by his feet. He got back into the car, and let it roll right out of the garage. For a full minute it had been unobserved in its suspicious position, and now he pulled on the brake and went back to use more strength on the bag. He didn’t fancy himself as a toter of bales and humper of sacks, but had enough muscle in his arms to perform all that was called for.

  Using the Morris to cover him from the house, he went across to the caravan, where Dawley had his quarters, and began stuffing the notebooks under the bed. It was difficult to stop them slipping out, there were so many, but soon they stayed hidden – yet not hard to find.

  He dropped the sack in a corner of the garage. Picking up the bucket he was supposed to have come for, he ambled to the house, expecting to be met by people setting off in all directions. They hadn’t yet finished coffee.

  ‘We were waiting for you,’ Handley said. ‘You can cast your eyes over my studio. As for the rest of us – the details are all worked out. Maricarmen and Dean don’t search anywhere because they don’t know the ins and outs like the rest of us.’

  She stood by the window, pale, but smiling now, convinced at last that her loss was being taken seriously. Cuthbert wanted to go and hold her, but preferred to be cool till his plans had worked themselves out. Walking back to his accustomed place at the table he folded his arms truculently: ‘I’m not rummaging anywhere. Who’ll clear up the squalid mess from lunch?’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Handley demanded. ‘Gone conscientious about your duty-day all of a sudden? Are you trying to hide something?’

  His face reddened. ‘Why should I join this farce? It’s nothing to do with me. I’ve never known anything so stupid.’

  ‘Listen, you emotional juggernaut,’ Handley cried, ‘those notebooks have got to be found, not to mention the gun. I expect you to realise that. I suppose you’re playing awkward because you think it’s a black mark on the community, and that makes your rabbit-heart jump with joy. But Maricarmen is a guest, and she’s been robbed, and it’s bad for the family if they’re not found. Don’t you see that?’

  Cuthbert sat down, afraid to go on standing for fear his knees would shake. His father seemed absolutely sincere in what he said – as usual. Maricarmen picked up a tray from the dresser and stacked cups and saucers on it: ‘I’ll stay behind and clear up lunch.’

  ‘All our problems can be tackled and solved,’ Handley smiled, ‘with a bit of goodwill.’

  Cuthbert was becoming uneasy at what he had set going, a feeling of exhilaration and potent terror – held well down for the moment. His father was right. The family honour was at stake, though being his father, and unscrupulous to the end, he touched exactly the nerve to put uncertainties into Cuthbert’s scheme of things. His father was rotten, but was nevertheless right. The damned community had blasted them all, and Cuthbert had been trying to destroy it from the beginning because the sort of family he had been born into had set him against it. He might accidentally end by destroying the family as well. Had that been his intention all along? His head spun. Who was to know how deep and far back this terrible corkscrew went?

  If he spoke out now, that he had put the notebooks in Dawley’s caravan, that he had already given the gun and ammunition to Maricarmen, then peace would return and let them go back to living again. He was strong enough to set the machine in action, but too weak to stop it. Vanity wouldn’t let him tell what he had done. He would appear a fool, and be scorned for the rest of his life. He would lose what love Maricarmen had for him if he didn’t give everything up. In her, with both strength and weakness, he could live and find himself, s
omething which mattered to him at last. All he had to do was get the gun back before she killed Dawley. ‘When do we begin?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s my son!’ Handley called, really happy now that this petty issue of Shelley’s lost notebooks was turning out as he wanted it to. Cuthbert waited till no one was in the room except Maricarmen, who stayed to clear up the pots and debris. ‘I want that gun back.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ she said, ‘Mandy will hear you.’

  He went into the hall. Mandy was searching the cupboards with a bored air. He went back to the dining-room: ‘I want that gun.’

  Her mouth was set hard. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Go and get it for me.’

  She set the tray down, and stood before him. ‘Why don’t you look for the notebooks?’

  ‘I want the gun back.’

  She smiled, and kissed him lightly, without an embrace, a mockery of whatever feeling he wanted her to have for him: ‘You think they’ll find the gun as well? Don’t worry. I’ve put it where nobody can.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course.’

  His manner alerted her when he demanded: ‘Where?’

  His expression was tense, his voice about to break – she thought – into hysteria or tears. His pale face was not quite clean, as if he had been sweating. ‘It’s safe,’ she said.

  ‘Where is it?’

  She had no intention of telling him – stacking plates and cutlery on her tray. He grabbed her arms: ‘I want that gun.’

  ‘You’re hurting me.’

  He knew he was. ‘I’ll twist your arm off if you don’t hand it over.’

  ‘You gave it to me.’

  ‘I want it back.’

  She snatched herself from his grip. ‘You don’t need to be afraid. I told you what it was for.’ Her voice was breaking, too.

  ‘I know what you want to do,’ he whispered, but not daring to say it. He went silently to the hall and looked into the lounge. Mandy was sitting in an armchair reading a copy of Nova, so engrossed that she obviously had no intention of going on with her search. They wouldn’t be overheard.