A Tree on Fire (3 page)

‘Why do you?' Myra asked, drawn at last from the somnolence of his car and monologue.

‘You know why? Because it's a smoke-screen behind which I can carry on my real work – without being bothered by a lot of soapy-mouthed English stupidities. Mind if I roll the window up? I shan't smoke another cigar: since I've been rich I feel the cold more. You're right, though. It's no use getting excited about it. We're all a pack of grown-up half-educated neurasthenics. Camus came to the conclusion that, after all, the artist was a romantic. I began there. Where I am now I know exactly; but where I'm going I never shall know till I get there.'

Chapter Three

It was the sort of fine rain that would never soak you, rasping over the leaves, light enough in weight not to bend them, yet steady enough to turn the lawn soggy underfoot. Her only task in life was to resurrect the house, and look after the baby. The garden, which had been totally neglected, needed unearthing like the ruins of Troy, and she had hardly made a start on it. Vegetable proliferations feeding on rich soil had climbed and coiled from fence to fence. Paths had vanished under it. Flowerbeds with stone and tile borders could not be seen. Lush on top, it was rotten underneath after seven months' absence. Frogs like small vivid leaves had come up from the river and made it their private jungle. She cleared the paths, but the rest did not matter.

Myra had darkened after the baby, and a more ample figure made her appear taller. Hair grown long made her seem plainer. She looked in the full-length bedroom mirror, a corner of the double-bed reflected at her knees and thighs. The baby slept in a heavy, antique wooden rocking-cradle set between the bed and far wall, a cradle that had been in the family for generations, passed on to her by Pam. Their grandmother, one of twelve who had slept their first months in it, had tugged and handled it from the far marches of eastern Europe – hardly any luggage, and pulling that huge heavy mahogany cradle across tracks and platforms and guarding it on the deck of a crowded rat-eaten rusting steamer from Hamburg. Mark looked safe in it, eternal, never wanting to grow up, grateful to that misty forgotten grandmother for taking so much trouble. It rocked him gently, high sides dwarfing the Dawley blood in him.

The house was a corpse, and she gave it the kiss of life – phone, gas, electricity, water. Everything shone again except the garden. The house glowed from within, warm from the baby out. Having a child alone with her, she was sometimes terrified of a disaster happening while asleep upstairs, that she would faint or die and, nobody aware of anything, and thinking she had gone to her parents in London, the baby would starve to death. The vision haunted her on deep and windy nights of spring, a penalty of winter's end, and punishment for living alone.

Her body in the mirror shone back, had reshaped well from the birth, firm and immobile as she looked at it, different now that her breasts were full, aching slightly from the weight of the next feed, marked by blue veins where they rounded towards her arms. She drew back at the touch of her own thighs and slipped the nightdress over. Down in the darkness the garden was three sides around the house. She sat on the edge of the bed.

Outside it was mist and mud, primroses beyond the leaded windows, the elaborate cave of the house. Cat, paraffin, coal-smoke from the stove while the central heating was re-engineered. Wet grass, night birds continually, a cow in labour bellowing, dunghills steaming in the nearby farm. Buds, confetti stuck on thorns for the marriage of mist and mud under the hill of Thieving Grove. An aeroplane prowled on old-fashioned engines through low cloud. She'd read
Wuthering Heights
and
Pilgrim's Progress.
Her house was under the cat-back of the hills. She'd bought mimosa in Aylesbury, but the house odours soon killed it. The toothless cat, old marmalade, sat on the outside windowsill downstairs, senile and independent. There had been no sun till four in the afternoon. Where was he? Lost in the vast freezing acreage of the
bled
? Her body shuddered for him, shook as she gripped herself.

The baby was fed, changed, back to sleep by the time Mrs Harrod unlatched the gate next morning. Mark was put to bed, and she was putting herself back to a lonelinesss similar to when George was with her, now that he wasn't here any more. The day was cold, so she built a wood fire in the living room, heaped up logs and drew back furniture that might get scorched, smiling to realise there could be no danger of it. It was a waste of wood, for she still had work to do and could not be near it, but it was like another inhabitant of the house in which everything nevertheless was so strange. She wanted to fill the house with noise and fires and people, drench it in light and vigour. But at the moment that seemed a dream. So in her quiet way she worked to restore it to a common translucent state of ordinary comfort, oblivious to anything beyond the foundations of what had been built years before by George and herself. When perfection reigned and ruled you could venture elsewhere.

Chapter Four

Albert Handley's house had been named The Gallery, and often he didn't know whether one might call it an art gallery, a rogues' gallery, or a shooting gallery, though mostly it was a bit of all three rolled into one mad house. It stood on a hill beyond the village, at the end of a lane that wound up from the paved road between two thick closed-off copses – a large simple house with two floors and a spacious attic, late Victorian country-nondescript that had at one time served the manager of an estate long since hammered up. The slate roof glistened in weak morning sunshine, its brick façade glowed. Two caravans stood in the large front garden, forming a sharp angle pointing away from the house like a scarp designed on Vauban's defence system. Across the path, amid a marshalling-yard of tracks and rut-marks, stood a Land-Rover and a well polished Ford Rambler. A newly built kennel beside the front door stored a bulldog that, when standing belligerently out, looked like a miniature iron bedstead about to leap. Behind the house was a long newly-erected wooden hut used as a children's playroom, and a solarium had been built nearby, as well as a new fuel store. This was the house that Handley had lived in while poor, and that he preferred to stay in now that he was better off.

After his unaccustomed toil up the hill Russell Jones noted these details of the Handley locale for when he sat in his London flat to write a monthly middle-piece on Albert Handley the painter. If his rise hadn't been so sudden and from such obscurity Jones might have thought of him as an artist instead of a painter – but there, a man of his sort couldn't have everything, though it looked as if he had much of it already to judge from the various mounds of obsolescent gear scattered around the house: ‘like the camp of some gypsy king who had struck it rich in middle age.' Or should he say ‘Middle Ages'? He'd decide on the train going back. ‘Someone who had been through the biggest supermarket in the world and collected with a free pass more than he could ever need.' If phrases came so quickly the article should be good. He'd been feeling rather stale of late, too many parties, too much drink, proved by the ache in his legs and the constriction in his lungs on his walk up from the village pub. His well-planted hair was too warm under his Moscow fur hat – he'd imagined frost and flecks of snow persisting on these northern wolds, but the worst of it had gone, and his London ears proved tougher than he'd even given them credit for.

He stood to light a cigarette. Handley should be expecting him, but the house seemed deserted. At nine in the morning where were the children on their way to school? He sensed that all was not right in the kennel. By the threshold lay a gnawed unheeded bone, and for a moment he thought of swinging his camera onto it, for a possibly symbolic shot in another illustrated article which he might publish under his mother's maiden name. A piece of sacking hung over the kennel exit, and suddenly framed in its place was a wide-headed vile-toothed British bulldog. Jones didn't know whether his fur hat flew off at the sight of it or whether it wasn't released a second later as the dog sped through the air for his collar and tie.

In the far-off top-floor studio Albert stirred in his sleep. He'd worked till two, then undressed and slid into the camp-bed so as not to disturb Enid's ever-fragile slumber. It was just about warm all through, though the cold was ever poised outside to heave against and overwhelm him. Pushing his legs straight, he tried to ignore it. It sounded as if somebody had left the wireless on, and a wild drama to which no one listened played in a dark room. He couldn't believe it was morning. The noise ate into the old army blankets covering his long body. It seemed as if his great fear had at last come about, that the family had united against Eric Bloodaxe, the pride and prime of the bulldog breed to do him that final and fatal injury together that no one had the courage to attempt single-handed. Enid kept a crowbar in the hall should he ever get out of control, but that was only for reassurance since he had so far been the gentlest of pets where the family was concerned, kept when they were poor to hold creditors at bay, maintained now that Handley was rich to ward off gutter-press journalists, professional beggars, and ill-wishers from the village. There were shouts, doors banging, vague blows, and a rending series of howls from Eric Bloodaxe. Was the ship going under at last, and water about to pour through the portholes that fate had left maliciously open? His long thin body was naked, his face irascible and swarthy as he drew on trousers and shirt, not even a mug of black coffee to sustain him on a flying rush down the stairs.

Russell Jones crouched, back to the gate, a round and raddled face inadequately protected by his uplifted arm, an angular tear hanging from the sleeve of his expensive tweed overcoat.

‘Haven't you heard of the bloody telephone?' Handley shouted from the door. Eric, foam on his mouth, pulled on the extended radius of his chain, clawing the ground a few inches from Jones's camera.

Enid stood with a bar suspended over the dog's head should his chain snap. Three school-aged children grinned from the door of the nearest caravan. ‘It's out of order,' she said. ‘I tried to get the off-licence for more wine last night but couldn't.'

‘Back!' Handley commanded, and Eric shuffled inside. ‘He might have had the arse off you,' he said to Jones. ‘I don't want to be responsible for that. Who are you anyway?'

Jones stood up, pale as a bottle of milk that had been left all night in the snow: ‘I came to interview you. Did you receive our letter?'

‘
Sunday Pulp
was it? Or
Old Nation
? I didn't think you were serious. Come in and have some breakfast. Don't mind the dog: he does his best.'

Jones swore under his breath. Like hell he was serious. He'd passed much of last night at the pub buying drinks for the customers and finding out how much was known about the Handley Kraal up on the hill. As hearsay was so much more picturesque than the truth, and rang so convincingly as to sound like the truth, he'd discovered more than ever he hoped would be possible, facts still spinning in his head because that predatory dog had all but emptied it. Fortunately, working for respectable papers in England had advantages in that whatever you wrote was accepted as the truth. Articles weren't his regular occupation, and he looked on such assignments as a holiday from the regular chore of reviewing. Not that Lincolnshire could be classed as vacation land at this or any other time of the year. What else could one do but become famous if one had been stuck in it for twenty years? Either that, or go mad, if you had anything about you, as Handley presumably had – though we'll see about that.

They went into the hall. Where a portrait of the Queen had stood when he was poor, a framed photo of Mao Tse Tung hung now that he was, by comparison, rich. Handley, though tall, had a slight stoop at the shoulder, as if he had walked great distances at some time in his life. He also, Jones noted, had the faintest beginnings of a paunch, not uncommon in a man past forty, a painter who had had half a year of fame with which to glut himself. But Jones found the atmosphere bleak, and was glad when they descended into the large warm kitchen, where Enid passed them black coffee in Denbigh-ware bowls, and thick slices of white bread and butter on wooden plates. Jones thought there was a certain austerity about the house, though nothing that an extended visit to Heal's wouldn't fix.

‘What's to be the tone of your article?' Handley said, fastening the neck of his collarless shirt. ‘I'm perished. Still, we'll have the central heating man in next week, then we can start to live.'

‘Don't you think central heating makes people soft?'Jones said.

‘You mean like the Russians?' Handley snapped. ‘I've nothing against it.'

Jones was glad of the coffee. The uptilted bowl almost hid his small mouth, and wide all-knowing eyes, brown curly hair coiled aggressively above. ‘Much to do with painting?' Handley went on.

‘It's more of a profile – painting, of course, but a general sort of article, something very respectable on you as a man, to explain your painting.'

‘High in tone, low in intent. That sort of thing?'

‘You're mixing us up with another paper,' Jones laughed.

‘I'll tell you when I've seen it.'

‘What newspapers do you take?'

‘I don't. I pick one up once a month, just to make sure I didn't need to.'

‘Don't you find yourself awfully cut off?'

‘From my painting?'

Enid filled his coffee-bowl without asking, and he absentmindedly helped himself to another slab of bread and butter. ‘London, for example?'

Handley reached for toothpicks. ‘Is this the interview already, or are we just chatting?'

‘Whatever you like,' Jones said, managing a smile. An
au pair
girl came into the room, all black ringlets and bosom, a sallow Florentine face at the stove putting on hot water for more coffee. She must be dying in this dead-end, Jones thought, though from what people in the pub said she mightn't be as bored as she looked. Probably just tired.