The Flame of Life (31 page)

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.'

‘But he must have taken them,' Richard said.

Handley stroked his moustache. ‘It's obvious. As plain as day. But anything plain in this gang's fit to baffle old Nick himself.'

‘But you'll still get back to the indisputable fact in the end.'

‘What's in the books?' Handley asked. ‘I'm sure you've had a good look already.'

‘Dirty stories,' Richard said. ‘They're so filthy they can't even deprave and corrupt. You could call 'em miscellaneous writings – to put a good face on it, but he must have had quite a sexual drive.'

‘Got it in the head, like everybody else,' Handley said scornfully. ‘There's no point in studying 'em, then?'

‘Not much. There's the odd page of revolutionary stuff, but nothing we don't know or couldn't have thought up ourselves. Pornographic trash mostly.'

‘Be a bit of a let down for Maricarmen. And Dawley.'

‘Maybe he didn't filch them,' Richard admitted. ‘There wouldn't be much point.'

‘Now you're talking,' Handley responded. ‘If you distrust the obvious you'll soon find out who did it, even if it leads you back to the obvious, as aforesaid. What we do now is this, and we do it quick …' Nobody was in much of a hurry for action, but they did it nevertheless, because there was nothing else to do.

Cuthbert walked through the yard. Noises were exaggerated in the sultry afternoon: he heard doors and cupboards banging, as if everybody for the first time in the life of the community were finding out what possessions everyone else had, almost as if the initial well-planned step towards common ownership of property within the compound down to the last razor blade and sanitary towel were finally taking place. It was amazing what devious means were needed to attain the simplest objective: you try to destroy the community, and unwittingly put it on the road to such a permanent foundation that it might never dissolve – if the others were but genuine enough to see it, which, being imperfect human beings and not fit for such an exalted form of society, they never would be.

He paused behind the lilac bush, water shaking on to the sleeve of his jacket. His father wasn't sneaking around, so he went along the lawn path to the other side of the house. Looking up the wall to Maricarmen's room, he noticed the window slightly open, and a convenient drainpipe located within a few feet of the ledge. The idea of searching for the gun in her room seemed insane, but his heart beat time to such insanity, and it was only the madness of the venture that gave him the strength to do it.

He gripped the pipe, rubber-soled shoes fastening on to the bricks as he levered himself up, hoping that by the time he got there his mother would have finished and gone elsewhere.

The climb went more quickly than expected, and soon he was level with the window. Nothing ventured, nothing lost, he smiled, breath pounding from stomach to head, legs trembling so that he wondered if they'd last the course. The broad pipe bent towards a bathroom, and it was little trouble to get himself along and reach the ledge. A spot of rain fell, but it was a false alarm, and he smelt the divine odours of damp grass and foliage coming from surrounding fields. It was as though he were about to enter the kingdom of heaven. A car roared along from the direction of the church, but trees hid him from the road.

Both feet lodged so tightly in the brackets of the drainpipe that he wondered if they'd ever snap out again. He heaved himself up till the ledge became his horizon and could see over it into the room. At first, looking keenly around its four walls, and wanting to believe it was empty, he was about to pull jubilantly in to look for the gun he had foolishly given up.

Two people were lying on the bed. Or, rather, it seemed at first as if it were one person, a single body, a demi-octopus with limbs still faintly writhing as if some noble intrepid warrior had nonchalantly delivered a death blow and gone on his merry unfeeling way.

It was clear that the short curly reddish head belonged to Dean. His bare arse would have been visible in all its narrow extent only if someone had been hanging from the ceiling – which they were not. He thought that the underneath part of the demi-octopus was Myra, or even Maricarmen who had nipped up after he had left her in the kitchen. But the hair was fair, and though the face in its ecstasy was turned away, he knew that it was his mother lying on the bed.

His head descended, an involuntary movement to stop crying out with surprise. He unlatched his feet, and went down at such speed that when he reached the earth he had scorched both hands. The pain was so intense that he wanted to go back into the kitchen for some Burnol, but his head was a junction-box of wild thoughts that spun in circles and lead him nowhere.

His first impulse was to go and tell his father, but impulse with Cuthbert was never a straight road, even in this situation. Don't rely on instinct or intuition, he had often told himself. Never believe in anyone. Never trust those whom you trust absolutely – including yourself. It would be a terrible waste to blurt out his knowledge until it could be turned to some use or other.

He walked up the path and into his father's studio, his face burning almost as intensely as his hands. His heart felt suddenly battered, his veins jammed. The only thing to do when your mother's being humped by a kid of eighteen was give a good laugh and hope she enjoyed it, and that the old man would never know. At the same time he'd do his best to get rid of Dean before it went too far. It was all right trying to smash the community, but he had no wish to see his own family broken. Still, he had Dean to thank for the fact that he was at last able to see his mother as just another woman. The disadvantage, however, was that it made Cuthbert feel younger than his grown-up spirit could support. It made him feel sick.

Handley had set off the mechanism of this farcial search, though what had initiated things in the first place was too far lost in the backward swamp of timeless events even to bear thinking about. He sat on an upturned box. Handley's bits and pieces were scattered over the table, and in the middle was an ancient two-ounce tobacco tin, the sort Handley kept his gear for tailor-made fags in, which he rolled with one hand – as became an old gunner – when he was in a mellow and contemplative slant of mind. A piece of fossil stood on top, and Cuthbert idly opened the tin to sniff the tobacco, as he'd often done as a child, when Handley offered it to his nose even before he'd been able to prise off the lid himself. It was one of his earliest memories, and he wanted to see if the smell would bring it back.

The tin was jammed tight with thirty neatly folded ten pound notes, three hundred pounds which his father had left lying there for any pilferer to come across, though the tin was in such an obvious position that no one would think it worth looking into. He wondered why he kept so much cash available, enough to get him to Australia, which would hardly be far enough if he discovered what was going on under his stupid unknowing nose.

He was sorry he'd seen it: one more black secret to carry under his armpit like a plague boil. He wished he had never come home and into this lunatic community. Theological college had been a haven of peace, a past life comparable only to paradise. He felt pity for his father, who had created this hell. Yet everything was bound to be hellish outside an ordered monastic life, and so Handley couldn't be blamed for it. He only created this faction-house so as to escape whatever personal torment burned within him; and Handley often shouted in a light-hearted manner that for an artist any life was hell except during the short periods when he was painting – not knowing that a unique spate of it was brewing up for him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

He stood, but said nothing. Maricarmen gave a soft ironic smile, which suggested that maybe his own share of hell was also gathering. ‘I haven't wasted my time searching for those bloody notebooks,' he said, ‘if that's what you think.'

‘So even you won't help me?'

‘You got the gun, didn't you?' He lit a marijuana cigarette. ‘I hope they've gone for good.' When she came close he offered her a smoke. She refused it as if he were trying to insult her, but held his hand: ‘What are you thinking about?'

He had tried to irritate her by passing the cigarette, and now responded to her tenderness by asking: ‘Do you love me, then?'

She wouldn't speak, her face embroiled in some far-off world of her own. ‘You're the first person I've ever been in love with,' he went on. ‘I wasn't thinking, though. I never think. My mind unfreezes now and again from the Ice-Age emptiness it was born into, when something startling happens, but it soon silts up and gets back to its state of comfortable polar ice.'

Her distant mood broke into a normal smile. ‘You always say you're not thinking, and then show that you are.'

‘If I really began to think I'd tear the world apart! Anyway, if I had told you what I was thinking I'd only have lied.'

‘Do you always have to drive somebody mad to make them fall in love with you? I'm not very impressed with that sort of so-called love. You don't love anything or believe in anything. You like to be cruel, that's all.'

‘So that you'll love me!' he laughed. ‘You guessed right. I feel calm in here. God knows what's going on outside. It's nice to talk before the flood comes in. My father created this place. It's got great peace. He rants against God, and does the most marvellous Old Testament paintings. I don't know who else you've destroyed in your life, my sweet and heavy-breasted Maricarmen with the Iberian eyes and Cantabrian cheekbones – but don't get too bloody close to me!'

‘You're the only real person in this community.'

‘Thanks. But you'd like to see me at the knackers' yard. I'll walk there on my own one day. You've got to put up with me. Here I am. Something's latched us together that's more than love. Having to tolerate myself is the worst thing.'

He caught the same tone of trapped domestic fury in his voice that he noticed in his father's, and wondered how it could have come so quickly unless he had wanted it to. Maybe it had nothing to do with domesticity at all. He waited for her to speak. It wasn't rare for him to intimidate someone into silence, though he didn't like it when he did. When in doubt, talk. ‘If I sit quietly for a minute' – he took a long pull at his cigarette – ‘I see faint grey smoke drifting between my eyes. I get frightened sometimes, but I don't know what of. A cigarette drives it away. It stops me thinking, and that's what I like.'

She noted his precise movements, the sharpness of his eyes, and the self-satisfied smile when he'd forced her to speak at last. ‘All you have to do is to forgive yourself,' she said. ‘The mind becomes clearer then.'

‘How did you learn to forgive yourself?'

‘It came to me in prison. As soon as you have stopped blaming yourself for all your sins, and for what crimes you've still to commit during the rest of your life, then everything becomes easier to bear. An anarchist friend told me that the only gaoler in the world is God, and guilt is the prison he locks us up in. But once you've talked somebody into killing Him for you, you're free. Don't try to kill him yourself, though. It does too much damage. Kill God for somebody else, and let them do the same for you. Isn't that what we're in this community for?'

He was pale. His hand trembled that held the cigarette, so he threw it down and put his foot on it. ‘I'd rather believe in God, because finally I belong to the world, and not to myself alone. Maybe I love you because I've always wanted to find someone worse than myself.'

She flinched when she had no intention of it. ‘Shelley used to say that belief in God is a cosmic form of self-pity.'

‘I believe,' he said, ‘because in the end I have to.'

‘You're not capable of suffering, that's why.'

‘If I suffered it'd be even harder for you to tear me from what I believe: you don't get wisdom from suffering. You only get more faith.' He spat. Such phrases wore him down. They left him foul and dissatisfied. Maybe he had learned a lot by coming to this place, for it was the other side of the coin to his three years at college. It wasn't too late to go back, get readmitted, and stay till he became a priest.

He said something so abruptly that it confirmed his love of God. He didn't know why the command came into his mind, though it seemed absolutely right that it did:

‘Give me the gun.'

She took it from her handbag, and pointed it at his face.

Having burned the offending matter it was obvious he'd find nothing while searching the flat over the garage. Every member of the community was scurrying about the property looking for non-existent notebooks, as if an electric shock had gone through them, and it played on his sense of humour. He hadn't felt so positive and well since before the hedgehog died, he thought, with a faint cut of sadness on reminding himself of it.

Now that his kleptomaniac
coup
had been discovered, he wondered how he could let them know – with suitable dramatics, and without bringing any shame on to himself that the notebooks had been fed to the Devil. That could come later, he smiled, as he leaned against the damp whitewash of the wall, though not as blame, for he felt no guilt from it, but as a victory for himself when he gloatingly told them that he'd taken the irreversible step of sending Shelley's revolutionary paraphernalia up in smoke.

Yet there was always something to spoil it. Because nothing was ever perfect for him, nothing short of perfection could cure the corrosion in his heart. The fact was that his own crime was diminished by the theft of the gun. He'd give much to know who'd taken it, and where it was, for then he could fulfil his promise to Handley, who had begged him to look for it, and it would enhance still further his own act of burning the notebooks. Having done something, he wanted to do everything. Who could be satisfied with less when you lived in a community?