The Flame of Life

by Alan Sillitoe

  She stood a few feet from him, her face turned away, listening to his measured words while a thin rain fell. He could have gone on talking. When he once began, it sounded even more natural than not talking. But he stopped, and stepped over to her, took her by the shoulders and kissed the back of her neck. ‘You weren’t listening?’

  She turned, which he was glad of so that he could kiss her lips. ‘What have you left for me to say?’

  She looked at him, a faint apprehension on realising from the set of his face that she was likely to be with him for a long time. Luckily, she was in love, and so was he, but how long could they make it last? She would never think it wrong to ask such a question of herself.

  ‘Tell me your side of it whenever you like,’ he said.

  ‘I will.’

  He took her hand. ‘If ever it’s necessary.’

  ‘It will be,’ she said, ‘time and time again. I think I’m a normal sort of person, and I live my life trying not to be alarmed by it.’

  They walked down the hill and, half-way to the village, had to stand in towards the hedge to let a car go by. It was the Morris Traveller from the house, and Myra waved when she saw Enid at the wheel. Dean was sitting beside her, and in the back were several suitcases, and Dean’s bulging rucksack.

  Frank stared, but they did not look at him, or give any sign of having seen Myra – though the car passed within a foot of them. The windscreen wipers were going against the rain, but Enid’s beautiful and slender face was stony and set at the road, an expression of misery and determination from which her blonde hair was swept back neatly into a tail.

  Dean beside her looked happy, though bemused, and rubbed a hand over his bunched features as if rain were falling directly on to them. The windows were partly open, and the radio was playing a song by that new group called The Beatles.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Maria was in the kitchen, and he asked her where Enid was.

  ‘Don’t know,’ she said sulkily.

  He put the perfume on the dresser, and saw some letters resting against a mug. The first had no stamp on, only his name in Enid’s handwriting. He took this and several others into the living-room, and saw at a glance that none conveyed the overdue cheque from Teddy Greensleaves, so he ripped Enid’s letter quickly open.

  ‘Dear Albert,’ he read, ‘I have gone away with Dean and I’m not coming back, not to live with you, anyway. I’ve left you and the children so that I can live another life, because I’m in love with Dean and he’s in love with me. By the time you get this we’ll be on the sea for Ostend, because we are going to Turkey, to live there a while. After then, I don’t know where. I drove the Morris to the station at Bedford, and left it in the car park to collect whenever you like with the spare keys.

  ‘I suppose you’ve found out by now about the cheque from your gallery. I signed your name on it, and put it into my account, so that we’ll have a bit of money to start us off with. We also took the money from the tobacco tin in your studio. I hope you don’t mind, but I had to do it this way because I didn’t want any fuss. I know you’d have given me the money if I asked for it, but I couldn’t face the bother when I told you what it was for. In any case, I have worked for it all these years.

  ‘I’m sure you won’t mind me going away, because it was finished a long time ago. There’s no more we can find out’ about each other. It’s plain a mile off, and we both know it. It’s a big wrench for me to leave the kids, but I’m sure you’ll take care of them. I know I can rely on you for that at least. Well. Dean is waiting in the car, and getting impatient, so I have to go.’

  He threw the letter aside. It was fairly short for such good riddance. He could hardly believe his luck. Free at last. Locked into the domestic prison at eighteen and now, at forty-four, liberated by the armies of adolescent passion! Released by a curt letter from his skedaddling all-in-all wife! But did she think you only lived as man and wife so as to get to know each other? She must have got such a shallow idea from that flat-faced little bastard Dean.

  What a noble creature she had proved herself at last, going away with the first mug she falls for. He really couldn’t think too badly of her, though they had been a long time together, and she had taken a lot of his life with her, just as she had left a good bit of hers behind.

  He sat for a while, till he heard Rachel and Paul coming in from school. Myra was calling them to order, and he thought that at least there was one good woman in the world. A spiky bomb was lodged in his entrails, pressing on every pipe and vein as if, should it explode, his eyes would be the first to go. Maybe she had taken none of his life with her at all, and that as soon as the boat left England the full weight of what she was doing would cut every minute she had spent with him out of her system forever.

  Obviously they had been planning it for weeks, and he had been so blindly engrossed in his painting that he’d not noticed a thing. Yet even if he hadn’t been working they’d have been brewing it up. He couldn’t blame his art for everything, and that was a fact. They’d hated each other at times, but he loved her, just the same, and loved her still when the pain wore off for a moment, and before it came back.

  But he had to pay some price for getting rid of her, and if that price was to have his love destroyed then long live love! It was good that life could be lived again and again no matter what happened, providing the love of life remained. He was glad it had stayed long enough with Enid to let her go off for a new start with a youth of eighteen. She deserved happiness after the bleak decades with him. And if he wanted revenge for her going away, he was already assured of it in the sort of person she’d decided to live with. It was an unworthy thought, and he was sorry it came, but it was some comfort at this desolate moment.

  She’ll be back, he thought. Maybe she changed her mind at Dover, when the sea breeze hit her, and will come haring home again. Not if I know it. I hope not. I don’t want her. Enid’s not one to suffer making up her mind for nothing, and neither am I. The older you get the more you learn not to waste anything. Waste not, want not, as the terrible old adage goes. She’s on her way. I’m not on mine, though. She’d had a few weeks to get ready for this, so I expect she’s further on the road to recovery and change than I am, but my road will lengthen, as soon as I come out of this black spin, and then there will be no more turning back for me, either.

  Life felt strange. He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to get up from the armchair and go to the garden, to savour his newly awarded freedom, but he couldn’t, because Enid wouldn’t be there for him to tell his impressions to when he came back afterwards. It was like thinking what an interesting experience dying would be, but then realising that you’d have no one to share it with.

  He stood, and put the letter in his pocket. He swayed, as if about to sit down again, then he straightened his back and walked into the kitchen – the hub of the house.

  Dawley saw him, upright and pale, but with a smile on his lips, and Handley could tell that Dawley knew when he looked at him. ‘She walked out,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you see ’em?’ – as if Frank might have stopped them.

  He poured Handley some tea. ‘They drove by me and Myra when we went for a walk up the hill. We realised what was happening, but there was nothing we could do.’

  ‘Who walked out, Dad?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘Your mother.’

  ‘Shall you tell her off?’

  ‘She won’t be coming back.’

  ‘Dean as well?’ Paul asked.

  ‘Him too,’ Handley spat. ‘Lace that tea with whisky.’

  Frank opened the bottle. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ Handley said. ‘It’s all God’s work. That is to say, mine. We ask for whatever happens to us. But I’m still sound in wind, limb and brainbox.’

  ‘That’s fine, then.’ Handley had been dealt a near mortal blow, but Dawley knew he would survive – as one had to.

  ‘I’ll sit for an hour or two in John’s room,’ he said. ‘There’
ll be a bit of comfort there. If you see Mandy or Adam, tell ’em their mother’s gone on a trip with Dean – to Turkey. They’ll understand. I’ll explain it to ’em though, if they don’t come in till later.’

  He walked upstairs, slowly, one step at a time, not so much out of shock and grief, but so that he wouldn’t upset his teacup brimming with whisky. He stood for a moment by John’s door, then opened it and went in.

  The first subliminal flash showed him the old room, the altar and shrine and relics of his saintly brother’s life, among which he’d wanted to efface himself and take comfort in recalling that more cosmically devastated love. He needed to sooth his own galling hurt that to his shame and chagrin was taking him over more and more. But he stepped back almost to the landing.

  The room was spare and neutral, and had nothing to do with John or any memories at all. Books, maps, radio gear had gone. Only a small photograph of John had been left on the shelf. It was as if the room had been scooped out by lightning. The neatness and order had created a prison – or a hospital.

  He wondered who was trying to drive him mad, but laughed at the idea and drank half his whisky-tea. He took out a long thin cigar and lit it, then sat in the wooden armchair. He was proof against madness. One shock destroys another. This desecration of John’s life could only be the combined work of Cuthbert and Ralph. It was a cauterisation of memory.

  He sat with hands over his head, as if shells were exploding all around him. They were bursting thick and fast. He’d have to get away from this house and go to Lincolnshire, back to the ancient battlefield now grown over and green where he had spent most of his life with Enid and their children. He didn’t really want to be close to her any more, but he needed some connection with reality – which was always the past.

  He regretted John’s revolver being dropped into Gould’s Lake. If it had still been in the cigar box he might have used it, and followed his brother’s footsteps along the only road that honour and a cure for pain demanded. But he pissed on honour: he didn’t need honour to show how brave he was. Such pain as this could be over-lived, though he didn’t think so at the moment.

  Yet it was a pity the revolver had gone, he thought, lifting his head, because no matter what his arguments he might still have killed himself. There was something to thank Maricarmen for, after all.

  He finished the whisky in a few more minutes, and the stripped room began to feel spiritually healing. In the old version he might have given himself up to the agony of his loss, but in this strange chamber he was not so sure that there would have been any good in that, because there were certain people on earth who had lost far more.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  With such an inheritance Ralph was at last able to show what kind of man he could be. As the owner of five hundred acres of the richest agricultural loam in Lincolnshire he soon became reconciled with his parents. He took their advice on how to buy and what to plant, and where to invest the lump sum he had acquired – though he had this checked by a Boston lawyer before finally acting.

  He was rich enough, albeit within the dreams of avarice, to satisfy himself in all he modestly wanted. His house, Skeat Court, was bigger than he’d imagined in his fantasies while locked in the Handley Community, but it was comfortable enough not to give him any more ambitions, which meant that his madness was cured.

  At thirty he was the father of three sons, and it was having children, as much as his good fortune, which helped to draw him closer to the elder Spilsbys. Mandy loathed them as much as ever, and did not hide it – at first. But Mabel Spilsby, her mother-in-law, grew gentler as the children came, and Mandy put up with her because whenever the mood took her she could dump the kids there and take off in Ralph’s large Royce to the motorway, in an effort to chase out the smouldering discontent till such time as she would know what to do with it.

  Handley’s sons went to Oxford, but their revolutionary kndwledge did them little good. They discovered that those students, who were supposed to hate the medieval authority and deformed human ritual of the university, were appalled when they produced a foolproof blueprint for burning much of it down. So Adam and Richard studied all they could, got honours degrees, and departed for the United States to do more research.

  Adam stayed there, but Richard came back for a while, then went to Israel where he spent many years in labour and study on a kibbutz. It was the closest in life he could get to a perfect form of democracy as far as he was concerned, as well as being an everyday existence which also had its dangers because it was close to the Syrian border. It was this peril in which the people lived that eventually enticed him into it for good. He married a girl there, learned Hebrew, and stayed.

  Albert Handley’s sole purpose in life was to get letters and paint pictures. But he left Myra’s compound to have a house built on the site where he had once lived in Lincolnshire – which still belonged to him. Paul, Rachel and Toby stayed with Myra, a neat arrangement that did not disturb their schooling, and left Handley free to plan and build.

  Scorched bricks under the tangled mound of bushes and thistles were finally cleared away. Rotting and burnt timbers were pulled clear, and the foundations of a bungalow laid. An adjacent studio with enormous glass windows was added later.

  His wooden studio was dismantled and transported to his old garden, and he lived in it, with Eric Bloodaxe for company, the Rambler Estate car standing outside. He painted pictures and sent them to Greensleaves’ gallery, but many hours of each week were taken up with builders constructing his new house, moving among heaps of bricks and timber, dodging dumper trucks and concrete mixers, peering over drawings, and arguing about the finish of the work.

  Ralph and Mandy came to the housewarming party, as well as Dawley and Myra and his three young children. Greensleaves travelled from town with Daphne Ritmeester.

  The house was placed near the brow of a hill, its lights glowing for miles around. Local people who’d known him for over twenty years saw that the Handleys were back after an absence which now seemed like no time at all. The local tradesmen sent vans up the muddy green-arched track laden with food and drink. Except for absent faces it was like old times, and Handley, upright as ever, smoking his long Schimmelpenninck, led his guests from room to room showing off his house as if it were a new car. Finished canvasses, awaiting transport to London, decorated every wall.

  ‘It amazes me where you get your energy,’ Teddy said, sipping his champagne – and then putting it down on a box. It was so dry it scorched his tonsils.

  Handley tapped himself on the groin. ‘I store it here!’

  ‘Oh you don’t,’ said Daphne Ritmeester. ‘I can’t believe it!’

  ‘A dynamo,’ Handley said. ‘I haven’t had a woman for three months. The last was a girl of eighteen from some art college. Got the shock of her life to find me living on a construction site. She thought I was the foreman and asked where Albert Handley was. I didn’t let on straight away. Said I thought he’d gone to Boston and would come back tomorrow – from his hotel to see how the house was progressing. I got on with her all right, even though she did think I was the foreman. After she’d slept two nights with me in my hut I sprang it on her gently. Then she stayed another two nights and left. A lovely young girl. We managed fine with my old dynamo.’

  ‘You don’t change,’ Daphne said. ‘That’s why I never lose faith in you.’

  ‘I’ll be sleeping in the hut tonight,’ he said, ‘because friends and family have taken over the bedrooms.’

  ‘I shall love to see it,’ Daphne said, holding his hand. ‘Does it smell of creosote?’

  ‘I gave it a new coat,’ he told her softly, ‘specially for you.’

  He led a hermit-like existence – except for the dog, and occasional visitors – though Daphne came now and again to see him. He thought of Enid, and remembered the coffee she made in the early Lincolnshire mornings. He hadn’t had such a cup since she’d gone. He hadn’t noticed it was so spectacularly good at the time. Yet it
was, and he knew it now that she was no longer here to make it and share it with him.

  It wasn’t much to remember her by, yet everything else came with it. He had only to breathe the pure Lincolnshire air in the early morning to be reminded of her – and smell his own rotten coffee-brew coming through the window. We never value what we’ve got, he thought. If only man didn’t always want something better – which turned out to be no good when he got it.

  He heard from Cuthbert and Maricarmen, that they had set themselves up as sculptors in a village in the Pyrenees, but used their house as a sort of transit camp for Spaniards who had to cross the border illegally out of Spain. Those who came through in the perilous snows of winter were glad to find some haven that would help them on their way. Handley sent money, to finance the work of which his brother John would have approved. He knew also that Cuthbert would help people to get into England if ever it were necessary.

  Cuthbert told how he had gone with Maricarmen to Algeria and, after a ten-day search, found Shelley’s grave in a desert village between Aflou and Laghouat, guided there by directions which Dawley had written down for them. The people remembered when the group of guerrillas came, and how one of them who was sick had died that same afternoon. They led Maricarmen to his grave by the wall of their own small cemetery, still marked by the pyramid of stones that Dawley had built. Cuthbert observed her. She smiled, as if it were one desolation over and done with. Whatever was left in her would be for him, and it was more than enough. It had to be, though he felt it was more than he deserved. Life grew out of death. He saw it happening already. They paid a mason to build a permanent stone for Shelley. After photographing it, they got into their car and drove back to Oran.

  Eric Bloodaxe, in the ripe fullness of age, its dream-world forever intact, guarded him day and night. The torment of losing Enid, which he put down more and more to callous neglect of her, stayed a while, and then the hardest bit of it eased after the new house was built on the ruins of the old. He worked hard at his painting, and though his reputation in the art world waned for a while, it then revived. He enjoyed his freedom for the first year in Lincolnshire, but was glad to send for his three children who, back in their old territory, made him feel more like himself again. It turned his agony on to remembering Enid, yet even that did not last. Unnecessary pain soon wears away.