A Tree on Fire (11 page)

‘As long as I can live with myself,' he said, ‘which is all a painter needs.'

She poured more coffee. ‘You have to live with the world, as well as yourself.'

‘Which world, though?'

‘There's only one world for you – the one that buys your paintings. What other can there be?'

‘That's the question,' he retorted. ‘An artist makes his own world, through himself. He doesn't go into one ready-made for him. He only started painting to get out of
that
one. If I was only half a man and half a painter I might not think so, but I have a bigger opinion of myself than anybody can imagine, and even had when I was unknown and struggling. Some people would like me to accept their world because they see themselves the highest common denominators of it, and the fact that I don't is a poke in the eye to them. My heart just won't let me take up with this big world you're talking about, as you and they would like me to do. It's got nothing for me, and maybe I've got nothing for it, but at least I have plenty of ideas and work to do and needn't concern myself with it.'

‘Why do you complain when they attack you?'

‘I don't. They attacked my wife. And there's nothing I can do about it, so I'm just letting off steam. Still, I'd like to punch that drunkard's nose. He wouldn't be able to get away with such a thing in my ideal, anarchistic, self-regulating society without getting beaten up for it.'

They gave up talking for kissing. Intellectual discussion, he said, always made him randy. There seemed nothing she could do with him in any case, which made her passion quick to return, though this time one point behind his.

Chapter Nine

Ralph steered his Land-Rover into the depths of a wood, tyres crushing over wet sawdust and wood-chippings of one clearing, and bumping towards another. Mud deepened so much beyond that he decided not to risk it, sat inside studying his large-scale map with the engine still running, memorising details of the terrain between this point and the Handley house so that he would not have to open it outside and see its beautifully decorated paper buckling and warping in the rain, a thought that tightened his lips with revulsion. Beyond the western edge of the wood were three fields to cross, the last rising twenty feet and crowned by a spinney of oak-trees. From such height and cover he could observe the house in all its detail, especially the side giving access to Handley's studio.

He put on his cap, fastened the pegs of his duffel-coat, and climbed out. Mud parted around his feet, but once off the track dead twigs and leaves made it seem more solid. Primroses had deepened in the rain, speckled a whole yellowing bank like flag-day badges on the lapels of a football crowd. Bluebells and arum lilies sagged and were flattened by water. Other flower heads littered, but he'd scorned to notice them after the age of sixteen. To do so was a stage of adolescence, to swoon and rapturise over wild flowers, and all the false crap of Lawrence and Powys and Williamson, the ‘I am a wild beast and proud of it but still very sensitive school because my father was a bastard to my mother' or ‘the cream of my generation was killed in Flanders or Libya' – as they sat in warm cottages or Hampstead flats. Thank God that sort of thing is dead, he thought, which meant to say he hoped it was and was convinced it ought to be but was by no means sure, England being England and all the things it was.

He kept well in to the hedge, clumps of soil that looked solid enough in the lee of it now collapsing muddily underfoot, till his boots were so heavily caked that it was impossible to move and he had to pull off the earth with his hands. After a few minutes the same coagulation had built up so high under his boots that he almost overbalanced and hoped for drier weather on the chosen night so that his retreat would be easy and quick.

From the edge of the spinney he looked across four hundred yards of field at Handley's residence, heard the misty depressing snap of a canine voice shifting towards him as if it had already picked up his scent. Through binoculars he saw it sniffing between caravans in the yard. After dark it was chained up, which was useful, but he'd carry a pound of best steak on the night just in case. Yet it barked continually at nothing, as his previous nocturnal scoutings had shown, so when he was actually climbing up no one would wonder what was disturbing it.

The village clock struck eleven. He ate a bar of chocolate. The house would be crawling with parents, six children, two
au pair
girls, a mad uncle, and a man-eating bulldog; though if he kept his nerve and moved like a bat he could shin his way up the tree, leap to the windowsill, and take the final floor by a nearby drainpipe. Once in Handley's studio he could lower a picture on a piece of cord, and collect it on the ground after his own descent. It was easy to spell it out like this, but he knew something was wrong, that more was needed than a ball of string and a full moon, a tight lip and a sure grip as he entered that rotten domain. Without a dry night, the painting would be ruined, and if that happened there'd be nothing left to live for, except Mandy, and she wasn't enough, otherwise he wouldn't be planning to steal it in the first place.

Sweet-papers and beer-cans were scattered from previous hours of observation. His theory for committing the perfect crime was that you must carry it out with all possible speed, which meant scrupulous attention to the actual details of break in, though beyond that sphere of action one could be as careless as one's temperament demanded, in which case a few sweet-papers were neither here nor there. An amateur could get away with murder – as it were – whereas the adept was always liable to betray himself over some clue he'd been too careful to eradicate. A motiveless job was the safest. If even he did not know why he wanted to steal the best painting in Handley's studio, how then were the police to find out his motive? And if they couldn't deduce a motive for the so-called crime then there was no reason why he should ever be tracked down. If he got clear of the house, he was away for good. Whoever could rationalise the various stages of a crime had a fair chance of never being detected. So it sometimes worried him that he hadn't yet concretely pinned down his reasons for wanting to acquire the picture. Those he had outlined to Mandy had been little more than a legpull. If he simply needed to get his hands on a great picture in order to indulge in a lifetime of private viewing then why didn't he go to Amsterdam and steal Rembrandt's
Night Watch
from the Rijksmuseum? He daydreamed through the mechanics of such an operation, which would involve getting it in a taxi to the docks or on a porter's barrow, then sweating with apprehension as clumsy workers levered it onto the boat. All limbs shook when he saw it slipping in a nightmarish vision from their hands into the slimy bed-green water. I'd better roll it up while in the museum, even if it cracks slightly here and there. But he relinquished the idea, and immediately felt better. A latest Handley would suffice, an easier job because he didn't live far away and had the use of a Land-Rover. Such a chance came rarely, and the more he dwelt on it the more did his fear of actually stealing it increase. Such marvellous bouts of fear continually sweeping through him must mean there was little chance of his resisting what he had first broached with Mandy as a joke, and that when he came to cross the field and climb that tree all fear would go, and leave him free, cool and swift as he soundlessly scaled that wall to a dangerous height before forcing the window.

It was hopeless, but he would do it, and succeed because he knew it was hopeless and because he had absolutely no control over whether he did it or not. He sat for hours in the tree-fork trying every optic combination of the binoculars to bring that house a foot closer across the field, the house which contained two things he wanted most in his life. He'd been there once with Mandy and, having those dull louche-brown eyes of a born reconnoitrer, remembered everything. Framed by field, sky, fences and trees, he saw again into the rooms and stairways as if the walls were glass, recollecting the positions of doors, locks and windows. He knew the direction of Uncle John's radio room, and where everyone slept, each secret nook of the worn-out worm-eaten labyrinth.

He reached into his pocket and took a long drink of brandy, careless of precarious balance, hoping to stave off an ulcerous hunger. An unfurled hedgehog came from a grassy bank and walked at leisure across the path, eyes calm under spiny impregnable defences. Ralph considered it put on a fine front against those it had no wish to be bothered with, an anti-social bore in the hedgehog world, when no one in his right mind could wish to be otherwise in any sort of world.

A single block of enlarged vision beyond the twin funnels of his binoculars scanned the multitudinous bricks of the great wall, broken only by the high elm leading to the side window of Handley's studio. His will centred on it as he examined all possible angles and limits of that huge flank, always drawn back to the window until it seemed that if he spread his arms and gave one great foot-thrust from the fork of the tree he would fly across the deceptively narrow expanse of field and land in a few seconds by the window he so much wanted to go in by.

Lowering the glasses, it was as impossibly far off as ever. It didn't worry him. Subtlety and solitude ruled out any shocks from life, and he smiled at the pleasures of continual observation, that nevertheless gave no results and got him no closer to what in such a desperate key he wanted to get his hands on. It was a game, and the course was an unstoppable zombie-like action leading to a double and satisfying jackpot. He smoked a pipe to comfort himself under the drizzle and raindrops from higher branches, which might have been torture to anyone less fundamentally preoccupied.

When he next allowed his focus to drift up to Handley's window he saw that it was slightly open, a pleasant surprise, because he felt as if it had suddenly become more human. It had. A head fixed there had a sort of machine where the eyes should have been, and with a shock he realised that they were more powerful binoculars than the infantry glasses of his father's slung round his neck. By some invidious mechanism of auto-attraction both sets of glasses seemed unable to cease observing the other, and this situation was painful to Ralph, because he'd been at it longer and could only be the cause of this unexpected retaliation. He wanted to smile, wave, and nonchalantly slip his glasses back in their case, but they seemed glued to his eyes, his arms frozen at the joints, and he would have been set in that pose all day if Handley's window had not slammed shut. He imagined he'd heard the noise of it, though he couldn't remember having actually seen the face rip aside even though he'd been fixed on it to the end.

Half in and half out of an overcoat, Handley ran at great speed across the yard, disappeared for a moment between the caravans, then seemed to go head first through the window of his Rambler. A few seconds later it dropped out of sight like a submarine.

Embarrassing questions stung his face like ants, and all the answers pointed to the fact that he'd better get out of the wood. He threw the empty bottle into a bush, and the ten-foot jump folded him like a joiner's ruler, but he straightened and looked for a hollow tree-bole in which to hide his binoculars, where they would stay dry and safe till he returned for them in a few days.

When they were stowed, and the tree noted by pointing the bottleneck towards it from the far side of the path, he walked leisurely back to his car. Studying the map in its dry cabin, it was obvious which way Handley would go to bar his exit to the metalled road. And yet, perhaps when he dashed out so wildly to his car just now he'd only gone down to the village for a drink, and not because he'd seen him perched in the tree. But his paranoid senses told him that such an assumption was the dangerous road to normality, and that evasive tactics were necessary. To avoid Handley's obvious manoeuvre, his best plan was not to turn back but to continue through the wood, in spite of the quagmire, and take the bridle track running through Waller's farm, which would eventually bring him to a road miles out of harm's way, so that while Handley was waiting in useless fury at the southern exit he would be through Catham and half-way to Boston.

After appalling difficulties in the mud, tackled with such noble restraint that he actually enjoyed them, he drove along the last stretch of hedgebound track before the paved road. Turning a bend on the last hundred yards his way was completely blocked by the longside view of a black twenty-foot station-waggon. Handley himself stood by it, smoking a long thin cigar to calm his impatience, and on first seeing the Land-Rover – which he thought for a moment might be Waller's who also had one and who wore a cap the same style as Ralph's – he felt a pang of disappointment, which then turned to joy at having an intensely complex plan worked out in a few seconds triumphantly succeed.

Being so neatly trapped made Ralph reflect that maybe older people were more devious after all, and had developed greater reserves of cunning in the extra time that one still had to suffer through. This reflection showed on his face in a cold look of neutrality, an unexpected meeting with someone he tried not to know.

Handley walked up to his cab. ‘Where are your binoculars?'

‘What binoculars?'

‘Eyes. Glass eyes. Spy rings.' He looked inside but they weren't to be seen.

‘I haven't any,' said Ralph.

‘You've been spying on my house for the last two hours. My sons were watching you, and I saw you as well. Get down.'

The sudden closing of the trap in a ten-to-one chance had unnerved Ralph. He wanted to stay in the protection of his car, but Handley came back from his own with a long heavy monkey-wrench. ‘If you don't get down, I'll smash your headlights.'

He lifted the spanner, and only a quick strangled cry from Ralph stopped it splintering the glass.

‘All right,' Handley said, when he stood before him on the path. ‘If you don't stop chasing Mandy I'll break every bone in your body. You've no right or reason to sit like a batman in that wood for days with your binoculars trained on us. I'd think you were casing the joint if I thought there was anything worth nicking. But next time I see you spying you'll be for it. I've got enough witnesses to peg you down. It's called loitering with intent to commit a felony, and don't think that because I'm an artist and an anarchist I wouldn't call the police and have you put away. I could have done it any time this morning, and they'd have been on to you while you were still stuck up that tree hoping for a sight of Mandy, and you'd have been in the loony-bin already. All that stopped me was the thought that it might upset her, and no man in his right senses would want to do that, which makes me wonder how straight in the head you are if you're supposed to have any regard for her at all.'