The Flame of Life

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘Why did you give it to me, then?’ Maricarmen asked in a normal voice.

  ‘I didn’t know till afterwards what you wanted it for.’

  She looked at him, her face as he’d seen it in the railway carriage after their meeting at Dover. ‘I can’t trust you,’ she said quietly. ‘And you won’t trust me. If you loved me you’d trust me.’

  ‘You don’t give me the feeling that I can,’ he said, knowing it was useless to hide anything from her. ‘But I still love you. I always shall. But I must know where the gun is. Give it back to me. I’ll let you have it when you go to Spain.’

  ‘Search your father’s studio. Who knows what you’ll find there?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he snapped, ‘and you know it.’

  ‘Who do you think has stolen the notebooks?’

  He laughed, and forced out words he’d no intention of saying: ‘I expect Ralph burned them on his bonfire.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ she cried. ‘Ralph would never steal anything.’

  He hid his smile. ‘You think not?’

  Her eyes were half closed: ‘You know where they are. If you didn’t you’d already be searching your father’s studio.’

  ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘But I’m lazy, and don’t believe in wasted effort. My father hasn’t had anything to do with taking them. He’s not that sort of man – whatever else he is. I stayed behind to ask for the gun back.’

  ‘I’m not giving it up.’

  The door clicked. ‘You two sound as if you’re having a lovers’ tiff,’ Mandy said scornfully. ‘Why don’t you get married so that you can really fight?’

  Maricarmen walked into the kitchen and Cuthbert followed. ‘Brew me some coffee while you’re at it,’ Mandy called. ‘Looking for them notebooks has made me as thirsty as a dying camel.’

  ‘Get off your fat arse,’ Cuthbert said, ‘and make it yourself.’

  She came into the kitchen and sat on a stool, saying venomously: ‘I’d love to see you get married. Why don’t you?’

  ‘Shut up,’ he shouted, standing over her with his fist lifted, a terrifying and pleasurable desire to batter her to the end of his strength. But his cowardice got the better of him. There were some things which were too open to do.

  Her face looked as if a bottle of crimson ink had been poured into her head. ‘Something’s burning you,’ she sneered, a smile following. ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘Leave her alone,’ Maricarmen said. ‘Go and search the studio, and leave us together.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Dean felt internally injured on being told not to take part in the search, saw it as a positive slur on his good character. He brooded on what a shame it was that no one trusted such an easygoing person as himself.

  He couldn’t understand what Handley’s motives were, and was shocked that after so many weeks the community still didn’t have confidence in him. If Handley had shown that he could trust him Dean would not have considered stealing anything. Since arriving in the community, and imagining he was thought to be as reliable as any other member, he hadn’t laid hands on a thing that wasn’t his own.

  It didn’t pay to get humpy, because it stopped you smiling and staying on good terms with the whole wide world around you. But when people didn’t trust him there was no telling what he would do.

  During his threading-and-bobbing days in the factory he’d been on the best of terms with the women workers, and they liked him because he’d always got a smile and sometimes a fag for them. On slack days he’d go down to the basement where George the mechanic had his workroom of tools and gauges, and talk with him and drink his tea for as long as he thought he wouldn’t be missed upstairs. He called him ‘Engineer’ which made George smile because he’d been a stoker in the navy till he was sunk in the Atlantic and got oil on the chest.

  The square room whose benches were lit by long bars of strip lighting seemed separate from the rest of the factory, warm and cosy with pipes running along three of the walls, turning and coiling in and out, elbows and junctions and Ubends carrying their water and power and steam, various dials and clock faces showing pressures and current which George glanced at now and again to see that all was faultlessly running. He was a medium-sized man with a pale face and short hair still black for his age, and a pipe set in his teeth. Even the foul twist he smoked was a comfort to Dean as he took the bacon sandwich that was offered and slowly munched it.

  The factory wasn’t too unpleasant, seeing as how you had to earn a living, but the foreman didn’t trust him, and so trouble was always simmering. Dean was generally hardworking enough never to let it come to a head, while in his wisdom the foreman realised that if he chucked Dean out he might easily get somebody worse, and then have to put up with him because he’d be afraid of getting somebody worse still.

  Dean gave in his notice one Friday night and left a week later. Everybody was sorry to see him go, even the foreman, but when a William Posters had to move nothing could stand in his way, because it was his blood that spoke. Admitted, he hadn’t yet come far from Nottingham, but it looked like he’d be pushing on soon, away from this community, because the first clear sign that he wasn’t trusted had just been given.

  He walked upstairs to see what progress there was, thinking he wouldn’t like to be in the boots of whoever nicked those notebooks, because a family like this would rend him or her in pieces, even if it turned out to be one of their nearest and dearest – which it surely must.

  The only person he liked was Enid, the woman and mother and wife who was so beautiful he was always wanting to tell her he loved her in the hope that she’d let him kiss her. But he was afraid to say too much, or make too many moves, in case he offended her and she too turned against him. You never could tell with such a mob.

  Through an open door on the first floor he saw Myra pushing a bed back to the wall. He went one flight up and into the room where Enid was, which belonged to Maricarmen who was arguing downstairs with Cuthbert.

  Enid heard him, and closed the cupboard she was looking in.

  ‘Any luck?’

  Her face had a worried expression. ‘I expect they aren’t in the house or anywhere near it.’

  ‘You shouldn’t let it bother you.’

  ‘It’s bound to, isn’t it? Especially the gun.’

  ‘Well, not so much, then.’ He looked at her across the bed, thinking that her face had got slightly thinner since first meeting.

  ‘A thing like this could be the end of our community experiment,’ she said, sitting down.

  ‘Be a shame if it is.’

  She smiled at his unexpected concern. She was touched, and liked him for it. ‘I’m always sorry when something breaks up. When my brother-in-law went away and the house caught fire, it was terrible. It turned us into refugees, and I still don’t know why it did.’

  She felt at the end of her tether, and didn’t know what to do. It seemed as if she could only wait for a catastrophe to change her life so completely that whatever happened would be for the better. Things couldn’t go on as they were, and that was a fact. She was stuck in the blackest of cul-de-sacs with Albert, worse than it had ever been – and it had been bad at times. Yet the diversion of the notebooks, and the necessity of looking for the gun, had in a strange way lightened her mood. It was this slight sense of relief that made her smile at Dean, and suddenly enjoy seeing him there.

  He was a child, really, or only a youth (if she were honest with herself) but the protectiveness she had felt on first seeing him in Hitchin market had turned into something that she could not define.

  He was the age of her own children, and she remembered needing to hold them lovingly when they were like him, but not being able to because they wouldn’t want it and because it would do them no good. But though it had been impossible with them, it certainly wasn’t out of the question with Dean who, after all, was not her own son and so needn’t be afraid of it.

  ‘I hope it don’t happen,’ he said, breaking
the silence. ‘It’s a nice community. I could gather moss in this place, but I don’t want to stay much more, or else I’ll never leave. I wouldn’t a bin here so long if it hadn’t a bin for you.’

  He went around the bed and sat by her.

  ‘Don’t go too soon, then,’ she said.

  The bed creaked when he put an arm over her shoulder, ice melting in his stomach for fear she’d shrug it away. He didn’t know whether to be glad or afraid, but felt no doubt as to what he wanted. ‘You ought to come with me. We can travel away together.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ she told him, but smiling happily.

  He laughed softly, as if they were getting into each other’s secrets at last. ‘I know. But it’s great, being mad like that!’

  She kissed him lightly on the cheek, and he looked at her, holding himself back. He never had difficulty in believing his luck, but he always saw an end to it. So he looked at her face and kept it in view till she lowered her eyes modestly (that’s how it seemed to him, and he was right) and turned her head away. These gestures made her more beautiful to him, vivid features enhanced and increased by all he knew of her: her good ripe age (though she wasn’t too old), and her seven children (whom he hoped she wouldn’t bring with her), and even her husband (whom he prayed would walk out one day soon and conveniently never come back), and her life and long experience of being a mother (which he wanted turned entirely on to him).

  His grey eyes had a powerful animal stare, and she could barely meet them, yet knew it was her own heat that put such intensity into his stare. He was more of a man than she thought, and she wondered how she had got into this situation of him tightly clasping her on the bed. But the heat became greater when she saw him also as even more of a child than he was, and when he eased her down she knew that she was pulling him towards her with just as much passion. His confidence was that of a child, which made his manhood so irresistible that, as it came down, she felt something of what rape must be like.

  Dawley had been through the attics and storage rooms with a flashlight and found nothing. He sat in John’s old armchair before the altar of radio equipment.

  It was a restful place, and he remembered his first encounter with John, on a bleak snow-deep Lincolnshire day after meeting Handley in the village pub and being invited back to the house. Handley was bone-poor in those times, and having enough money to live on nowadays hadn’t altered him, because it had come so late in life.

  Dawley lived in the same village with Pat Shipley the district nurse, whose door he’d knocked at for a drink of water during his zigzag hitchhike after leaving autumnal Nottingham. Instead of searching John’s room he seemed to be searching himself, remembering that the only thing he didn’t do on that far-off Saturday afternoon was tip the table up before saying good-bye. Being the traditional thing, was it a mark of progress that he hadn’t done it, or merely a slip of his shattered mind?

  He had wandered upstairs at Handley’s place looking for the toilet, and by chance opened the door of John’s room, seeing a bald-headed thin-lipped man of about forty, illuminated by a desk lamp because the blinds were drawn, sitting with earphones on and fingers tapping at a morse key. John wore a good suit, he noticed, and was shivering as if in a hard stage of malaria. He turned a panicky glare on Frank’s intrusion, and swivelled from the radio with a gun in his hand.

  He saw him next when he came to get him out of Algeria. Only an insane-idealistic-socialistic-epileptic-Englishman, who weighed the problems of the world as clear and simple, could have done it, who imagined the earth as a battleground of good and evil – one of which would eventually reign forever. The good of the world was lost when John lifted the gun to his mouth as the cross-Channel steamer entered the welcoming arms of the breakwater at Dover.

  In Algeria John had seen that the pursuit of equality brought nothing but death and suffering. He realised that almost anything was preferable to the annihilation or crippling of people.

  No one doubted that he had been the unfortunate and tormented possessor of a finer organism than themselves. He was the person who could bear his calamities least, that rare being whose sensibility was in fact increased by them. Unable to put up with it any longer, he realised that the onset of further agony might make him callous, and therefore alter him to himself and those among whom he lived. He did not allow it to happen.

  Dawley had gathered all this from long talks with him in Gibraltar. He thought John’s last letter must deal with it, a letter that he was soon to open before the assembled family, part of John’s final instructions to him. In the last few weeks he had often felt a need to read it, but would put it off for as long as possible, as John had said he should.

  But whatever John proclaimed about the futility of violence, whether they were his dying words or not, Dawley was unable to wipe away the last few years of his existence in order to suddenly believe in them. Such sentiments had no connection with the realities of the earth – though they made him uneasy nevertheless, as if one day they might have some influence on the raw wound of his soul.

  He’d tried to make things good with Nancy and their children, but when he’d walked out on her three years ago he hadn’t realised how final a move it had been. Maybe we never do, he thought, until the irrevocable steps of time cement the issue into something dead and gone forever. Nancy had tried to live in the community, but it hadn’t been possible. What he’d so thoughtlessly destroyed was not easily rebuilt. He couldn’t blame her for it, nor himself, either. If things turned out to be so irredeemable it only proved that he’d had good cause to make the decision in the first place.

  Nancy was working as a conductress on the Nottingham buses, and he’d got a letter saying that she’d taken up with her old boyfriend, who was still single and now wanted to marry her. In effect, she asked if she could divorce him for his desertion of her. He should have been happy at her civilised proposal, but it depressed him, made him feel that the world was not as secure as it had been when his options were open. Yet he was strengthened by his closeness to Myra and Mark, an attachment which was now as firm as all the others he had made in his life.

  Fatigued, he stretched his arms, and looked along John’s books. Among them was a Bible from which the New Testament had been ripped. A verse had been ringed by a dark soft-lead pencil: ‘And Solomon said, If he will shew himself a worthy man, there shall not be an hair of him fall to the earth: but if wickedness shall be found in him, he shall die.’

  The impression was vivid and profound, and he stood unmoving, his soul blacked out painfully with peace. When his senses reopened he thought of death, and there was less agony in it than in the emptiness. Such ideas were not easy to resist, sitting in John’s studio. He recollected that John, in Algeria, at the point of embarkation on a black and turbulent night, had wanted to stay behind, perhaps because he wasn’t sure what his future would be. But Dawley fought with his remaining strength to get him down the hill and on to the boat, a struggle which put off only by a week John’s final bleak victory.

  He sat in a vegetable state, mulling along the lines of circular thought, knowing it was no use searching John’s room and hoping to find anything unless he first searched his own heart.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Adam read to make certain there’d been no mistake. Having pulled a notebook from under Dawley’s bed, and made three ricketty piles on the floor, it was hard to see what all the fuss was for, because there was nothing subversive about these unhallowed slabs of prose.

  Skimming the spidery open handwriting, he saw it might have been better if they’d been burned instead of stolen. Each story, sketch, paragraph and page of notes was signed by Shelley Jones, otherwise he’d have thought the books belonged to someone else. There were a few heavily marked quotations from some authority on guerrilla warfare, a clumsy sketch on how to lay explosives under railway sleepers, and one describing a silencer for a pistol, but mostly the writings were lewd, vivid, and humourless pornography that could never have bee
n looked into by Maricarmen – or read by whoever had taken them from the trunk. He felt such awe at being the first to broach their covers that he broke into a goggle.

  Richard stood on the step. He was tall and swart, with black curly hair, a year younger than his brother. ‘I’ve had no luck.’

  Adam was red at the face. ‘I found the golden hoard, that’s why – the sacred mysteries, Shelley’s notebooks as I live and breathe! I don’t think we’ll get much out of them.’

  ‘So Dawley did it?’

  ‘Seems so. Can you see Dad anywhere?’

  Richard bent his head to look. ‘Leaning on the front gate having a pleasant smoke. Shall I get him? I always feel guilty if I disturb an artist in his meditations!’

  ‘We’ll need somebody’s wisdom to sort this one out.’

  ‘His experience, anyway,’ Richard said, going down the steps. Adam opened another notebook. Four men were having a go at each other. On the next page, a group of women. It was abominable. How could a dedicated revolutionary indulge in such horny nonsense? Judging by the names they even belonged to the same family. Maybe Shelley had been preparing a long plain tome on the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity, believing so much in the harmony of people living together in peace and love that it was necessary to work out every possible permutation of sexual congress in order to see if any snags cropped up. What right had he, Adam, to judge his motives? Either he’d been amusing himself, or his mastabatory musings were simply another twist to his idealism.

  The caravan boards creaked under Handley’s walk. ‘In Dawley’s bloody quarters, too. That’s awkward.’

  ‘I suppose he needed them to help with the writing of his book.’

  ‘He’d ask for ’em,’ said Handley, ‘not nick ’em’ – taking a ball of string from his pocket and giving it to Richard. ‘Tie ’em up and let’s get ’em out of here. Neatly though, or they’ll slop all over the place.’