The Flame of Life (3 page)

He stood alone, smoking a cigar and blessing such unexpected luck, his back to the empty fireplace. Or was it luck? There was no saying, though he couldn't think she'd shown him to her bedroom for a drink of beer. There were no pictures or ornaments on the walls, and only a faint sound of traffic through the double wondows.

She clicked the door to. ‘I hate cigars. Do put it out.'

Sitting at the dressing-table, she lifted off her wig. Its sudden absence diminished her face, made it slightly less thin, and dark hair underneath was so short she resembled Joan of Arc.

‘Don't kiss me,' she said, when he went to her. ‘And don't undress me. Just take your clothes off.'

He didn't trust her, though he had nothing to lose so could see no reason for it. But he got out of his jacket, shirt and trousers, watching her observing him through the dozen mirrors, and noting the slightly exaggerated curve of her lips, as if she too didn't know why he was there. If you couldn't kiss her, how else could you lead up to it?

Her short wispy hair made her look younger and more vulnerable, as if she ought to be glad of having him in her bedroom rather than trying to make him feel so privileged. Her face was also a little hard in its thinness, and the mix-up gave to her eyes a mocking air that he wanted to get rid of.

‘It's a fine bedroom. It suits you.'

She took off her pearls and bracelets. ‘I camp here. You should see the bedroom at Flaxton, my country place. It would make your mouth water, I'm sure.'

‘I like this one.'

‘It's mine,' she smiled, standing to let her skirt fall. ‘My husband is allowed to visit me in it now and again.'

The transformation from the elegant Lady Ritmeester with the elaborate and high-piled coiffure to the short-haired naked thin woman with a smile like a Hampstead housewife off for an afternoon with her boyfriend was so disconcerting that he found it erotic, and went towards her. The remains of her personality had retreated into her voice. She backed away and said in the normal Ritmeester timbre: ‘Don't. I'll come to you.'

Since they weren't more than a few feet apart he could afford to wait, though to pass the time he took off his pants and stood naked. She reached out and touched him in the only spot that seemed to matter, for under her delicate fingers it lifted, a very obedient horn. Her small breasts lured him because he had never seen any so perfectly white. Even the nipples were pale and merged into the flesh. The rest of her body was firm, and only slightly less pale, and he bent forward and kissed her slender neck, his hand on her stomach.

They stroked each other, and Handley was locked in the circle of her as if gripped by fatigue. His dream made him feel she was the most powerful woman he'd ever met, and he was disturbed at his liking for her, though his ready mechanism of self-preservation pushed it immediately away. ‘Don't let's burst,' he said, noticing her eyes were closed, and pressing her gently.

‘Don't touch me
there
,' she said, when his hand went between them. He wondered if they were to do it by extra-sensual perception, or some such mystical stuff, but he wasn't prepared to enter a brother and sister act either, so pushed her firmly towards the bed. She let herself on to the counterpane, eyes staying closed.

‘Not yet,' she said, opening her legs. He knelt beside her on the bed, able to stare because she still refused to look at him. Her fingers rippled at herself, and suddenly her whole body played with some sensation he wasn't allowed to share.

Unable to resist, and he assumed he was not meant to (you had to be careful with such a woman), and being at full height, he slid lusciously into her. Whenever he tried a kiss she moved her face, so he had to be satisfied with neck and shoulders, shifting gently as if afraid of breaking her, none of the usual forceful thrusting, but slowly and tenderly, one hand spread under her buttocks until another trembling broke deeply inside her, so that this time he got the force of it. Her dry breath jerked strongly out of her nostrils and against his cheek. A few moments later he also came, a weird flood that filled her narrow tunnel. It was an issue too soon for his taste, but he was never at his best on a fed stomach and a bottle of wine.

‘Get off me.'

He lifted himself. ‘Thank you.' There seemed nothing else to say, though he would rather have lain a bit longer.

‘Get dressed.'

‘Why do you keep your eyes closed?'

‘It's much better,' she said. ‘I get my enjoyment more quickly. I go into other worlds.'

‘What worlds?'

‘Wouldn't you like to know?'

‘Of course I bloody well would.' He put on his underwear and shirt, grateful for some explanation at least. While his back was turned for his trousers she leapt silently off the bed towards a grey silk dressing gown.

‘Does your husband know you carry on like this?'

She sat by the dressing-table and lit a cigarette. ‘He thinks I have lesbian relationships, and that's all right.'

‘Do you?'

‘Sometimes. Just to allay his suspicions – or to head them off.'

The encounter had left him feeling deprived, as if it had been too civilised. ‘I expect he likes to watch.'

She frowned. ‘He's not perverted. As long as I tell him about them.'

He was half-way to lighting a cigar, but remembered she didn't like her bedroom stunk up – which made him want to get on the street where he could be free and in peace.

‘One has to live,' she said. ‘And there are many ways of doing it.' Her wig was back. ‘Perhaps you'd better go.'

He put his coat on. ‘How do I get to kiss you?'

‘You'll have to marry me.'

‘You already are,' he grinned.

‘Exactly.'

‘Well, so am I, come to that.'

He had lost his patter, which was another gauge of her success. ‘What does your wife do while you're out with other women?'

‘She doesn't know.'

Lady Ritmeester laughed. ‘Have you asked her?'

‘No.'

‘Then how do
you
know?' She had found his weak spot. He trusted too much in his own strength. And what a big weak spot it was – such non-existent strength! ‘Still,' she said, not wanting to warn him of the disaster she saw in store, ‘you can hardly complain if she does the same as you.'

‘I won't. But how do we keep in touch?'

She smiled. ‘We don't.'

‘You serious?'

‘Don't ever telephone me.'

‘I'll walk up and down outside with a sandwich board over me, saying DAPHNE I, LOVE YOU on one side, and KISS ME, DAPHNE on the other.'

He was almost back on form, so she could be more indulgent. She hated men who became serious afterwards.

‘Perhaps we'll meet at the gallery.'

That was enough. Why push too far? He blew a kiss, and she sent one back. Sweethearts at least. ‘Do let yourself out,' she said. ‘I feel a headache coming on.'

He crossed the street and nearly got knocked over by a taxi. The driver cursed. Handley thought of shouting back, but why bother? He made his way to the car in Hanover Square. With Teddy's cheque in his pocket he could go back to the bosom of his community without a soul being any the wiser.

Two more parking fines had been attached to the windscreen by a rotten little Hitlerite traffic warden, and it was more in sorrow than in anger that he set the car moving up the street, and once again flipped on the wipers so that they went off like a pair of birds in freedom, narrowly missing a Rolls-Royce behind.

It was the last real carefree day he could remember.

CHAPTER THREE

Cuthbert came downstairs in his green-and-white striped pyjamas, switching on lights at every turn. If there was one thing the Handleys loved it was light, and in this at any rate he was no exception to his father.

Formerly, in the Lincolnshire house – called The Burrow when they were destitute, and The Gallery after the old man had struck it rich – bulbs had burned all the time, as if they lived close to an immense inexhaustible powerhouse of a dam. But the family hadn't made much of an impression on Myra's place in the south Midlands, where they had come to live after the Gallery had been burned to the ground by mad Uncle John. They seemed subdued by a subtle combination of middle-class economy and bourgeois abundance.

The décor, the pictures, the smell, even the creak of stairs underfoot made Cuthbert see how much of a trap the freedom-loving Handley family had fallen into by accepting the bonds of this puerile community of twenty souls. Roundabout the house Myra had kept the lawns smooth, the trees pruned and bushes trimmed, and therefore safe against free-booting Handleys who had been so free they had finally imprisoned themselves in the middle of it. The shining motor-mower ready for instant action, primed and fuelled in its centrally-heated garage, was a threat to everyone, and from his stance by the kitchen door Cuthbert pictured rose bushes and fruit trees surrounding and enlacing the house, with their aroma of damp tea leaves and delicately rotting bark, clad with ivy and wistaria gently crushing bricks and mortar to death.

He felt hunger, but no appetite. If voracity is the spice of life, eat on. He tried to smile, but failed, so cut bread and cheese, and came back into the living room. Drummed out of theological college, he'd been glad of this refuge which he now despised. The spine and purpose had gone from his life, and he'd been near to doing away with himself, not because the dismissal had made him particularly unhappy (that was all over and put behind) but because it was a situation he'd been unable to control.

Thoughts of suicide had been tempered by curiosity at the mechanism of this community to which the others imagined he loyally belonged. He was amused at the intensity with which they worried about the world. Such concern seemed merely the premature onset of middle age. People only form this kind of togetherness out of fear, as if they never had father or mother to kick all that crap out of them.

He would appear as a devoted member of the community, though to cultivate the necessary subterfuge – which shouldn't be hard after three years of trying to become a priest – would mean speaking as little as possible, because while you talk you cannot think, and he preferred to indulge in the fruitlessness of his secret thoughts. There was wisdom in silence, acquiescence to one's innermost desires. If you smiled, everyone trusted you. Open your mouth, and you betray yourself. Speech is thought that kills itself as soon as it races aloud from between the lips.

He looked in the mirror, swilling down Nescafé between bread and cheese. The framed prints of early nineteenth-century huntsmen floundering in ditches seemed to have enticed Handley the Lincolnshire poacher to an early spiritual death. An artist did not need a settled base in which to work, so his father should have loaded tools and easels into the Rambler and taken to the road (after installing his family, as was only right, in some opulent bungalow), rather than accept this frigid nullity of communal life.

Looking round the white-walled room, it was hard to imagine a naked man with a penis in full bloom chasing a bare woman between plush chairs, and then going upstairs to rampage in one of the cool, impeccable bedrooms. You fucked quietly in this house, or not at all, didn't even grunt between the sheets, which was why he supposed Dawley had installed himself like General Montgomery in one of the caravans to write his memoirs.

Two months ago he had no notion of staying long in his father's establishment. The prodigal son had never been part of his make-up, and certainly no fatted bullock had been roasted on his tentative return. His life had cost little in the way of straight cash, for like all Handley's children, he was a child of charity, the eternally promising youth of scholarship and patronage.

The nearest he came to a rebellion at school was one winter afternoon when he decided that if he heard another word about King Arthur and his screwy knights he'd go off his head. This state had been lately repeated at theological college when he had found himself beginning to accept the principles of Christianity that had been panned at him during the last three years. He dreaded losing his sacred assets of cunning and hypocrisy.

Over the affair of King Arthur he had throttled his indignation because it only increased his interior scepticism, but the more recent threat to his lack of faith he took so seriously that he entered into months of lying, cheating, perjury and screwing. He hadn't gone into precise details of his expulsion with Handley, yet saw them chuffing into their beers over it one jovial night, in which case the simile of the return of the prodigal might have some relevance after all, and he knew Handley in his heart wanted nothing more deeply than this.

Under the livid strip-lighting he sliced more black rye and Camembert. During the day he could eat nothing, so throughout the night he was unable to overcome his insomnia while the wolf-rat of hunger pranced around in his stomach. At college he slung a loose cloth bag over the toprail of his bed so that when the famishings began he could dip in for biscuits and corned beef, slab cake and fruit – all the goodies he remembered wanting in childhood but hardly ever getting. In his hasty departure this precious piece of equipment had been left behind, so by night he turned into a shoeless marauder and made a sardonic trek for the icebox.

Any change made him bitter, especially one over which he'd had no control. Yet the more he thought of it the less could he remember any over which he had been in charge. This made him realise that his bitterness was misplaced, a spectacle which awed him slightly.

Even the acts which led to these alterations, carried out with much forethought, had somehow happened against his will – a will that was the most threatening part of him because he had never been united with it. Whenever he did something, he wondered why he had done it, and knew that this was not the best way to order your existence. His will was irresolute, disobedient and pernicious, and whatever happened in his life had never been connected to it.