A Tree on Fire (52 page)

While he was speaking the lounge door opened, and a tall burly young man wearing a cap and overcoat stood a little inside the room. Handley noticed him but went on talking. The man slowly opened his overcoat at the food-heat, and took off his cap. He wore a black shirt, and the white reversed dog-collar of a priest. His face was sensitive though overfed. He had a long narrow nose and thin expressive lips, and curly fair hair that fell over his forehead and the depth of his brow. He could have been any age between twenty and forty. Listening at first with respect and attention in what may have been a habitual expression, his lips slowly took on the shape of contempt that finally was exactly duplicated on Handley's face when he stopped talking and looked at him for a moment. That, thought Frank, must be Cuthbert.

Handley was determined to finish: ‘But we can forgive Enid balking at some of our activities, because she is basically a noble and gentle soul who can't throw out her past because she's still living in it. And as for Ralph, he should be ashamed of himself. His family are rich Lincolnshire loam-farmers who plundered their tenants and workers for decades, and when he shows a bit of individuality his pain-in-the-heart of a mother pitches him out without even a strip of field to use as a necktie or arserag. And as for Mandy she's just got the same belly-yearnings as her mother, combined with my pitch of obstinacy, which she's perverted to her own sybaritic use.'

‘You're talking like a madman,' Enid cried. ‘In a few years you'll be in jail and we'll be destitute. You'll soon be as crazy and epileptic as John whom we sheltered and kept alive for so many years unless you get back to your painting and stop all this nonsense.'

Cuthbert broke in, shouting through his smile: ‘Well, well, I can see the old matrimonial death-grapple is still going on. Call it a community, call it what you like, but I can smell it a mile off for what it is. I come home and what do I find? The same old gluttons at the pig-trough. What you want around here is a bit of plain speaking!'

Enid's back had been to the door, and only now did she notice his presence. She turned and smiled at her favourite and eldest son. ‘We didn't expect you till next week, Cuthbert. How are you, my love?'

He ignored her. ‘Aren't you going to welcome your firstborn, Dad?'

‘Sit down and get some stew,' Handley said, grim-lipped. ‘Maybe it'll stop your mouth up.' Cuthbert was the perfect blend of his parents, in that you could not distinctly see either of them mirrored in his features, though at the same time you knew he could be none other than their son. Enid set him a place, and Maria brought a plate of stew. Richard, not too willingly, poured his wine. Frank sensed that the equilibrium of the house had been permanently displaced by his arrival.

‘I've got news for you, Dad,' Cuthbert said between food. ‘I've been thinking that with everybody's permission I'd like to stay here, because I've nowhere to go since leaving college. I hope nobody minds.'

‘You're welcome,' Handley said, ‘as long as you fit in like the rest of us. There's plenty of work to do. We all earn our own keep.'

‘Give him time,' Enid said indignantly. ‘He's only just stepped through that door.'

‘And he can step right out of it again if there's any trouble or disruption. He had the best bloody prospects in the world, of becoming an ordained priest in the Church-of-rotten-England, and he spoils it all through lust and greed, and I suspect a bit of simony and black mass thrown in. He could have infiltrated right into the middle of the enemy's juiciest pie. What a chance gone to dust and ashes. It gives me the knee-ache to think of it.'

Cuthbert stepped up by his chair, kicked a couple of bottles aside and blew a candle out with the flap of his trousers. He stood full height on the table, his head bending slightly under the smooth chalk of the ceiling. With a deliberate gesture he ripped off his priestly white collar, so that only his black shirt remained. ‘In coming here I chose freedom. Do you hear, father? FREEDOM! I've had enough of being your germ in a sealed train steering for the heart of the imperial poxetten church. I resented being used by you, and used by them, which is what it amounted to. By intermittent intelligence, continual fawning, and eternal hypocrisy I nearly got stuffed into that pit of frayed hymnbooks and incensed cassockrags that you intended me for. But I'd rather risk my life than my spirit. I was beginning to like it, and if I'd stayed another month I'd have been so genuinely deep in it that you'd have lost all control of me. That's what I call a crisis of conscience: getting out before you are too far in. I can't lead a double life. I had to come back here so as to stay loyal to you and the family. It's all right for you, Dad. You think it's easy to live six lives at once, because you're an artist, but me, I'm not an artist. I'm honest, and can't stand having my guts corroded by playing false-face to something as corrupt as the Church of England. Oh no, not me. I can be treacherous to a cause which has been genuinely set up to help a large section of hapless mankind get out of its awful sufferings, and all that stuff. Find me a
good
cause to rip open like a rat from the inside, that I can believe in from the bottom of my heart, and I'll enjoy no finer work destroying it. Then I'll show you what skill and patience I've got in me, so that even you would pat me on the back – father.'

Handley had, for reasons of family solidarity and to put on a show of love and understanding in front of Frank and Myra, been rehearsing a few lily-white phrases of a welcome-home speech, but now they flew back in his mouth and choked him purple. ‘Sit down,' he commanded, standing up. ‘You're the only one of all my brood who is worse than me. One day you'll steal my turps and cut my bollocks off. You're the sort who in the Middle Ages would have taken a quiverful of poisoned arrows to the top of a brand-new cathedral built to the glory of God and picked off his friends first and his enemies second. Still, welcome back, Cuthbert. I think no one will object to such a valuable sackbag of assets joining our community. There was never much of “hear all, see all, say nought” about our Cuthbert – was there, Cuthbert? So I'm sure his time with the trainee clergy has been an admirable exercise in self-restraint. And when he does open his mouth nobody can accuse him of having a concentrated epigrammatic idiosyncratic style either. So before we get down to a night of drinking, talking, knifing, remembering John, and cracking nuts, I'm going to have the last ceremonial word, as an artist always should. We'll found this community as a memorial to my brother John, and to his life, such as you all know it was. There should be enough money to keep this project going, but if there isn't then we'll have to find ways of getting it. England's a rich country still, so I don't see why it shouldn't support us while we're trying to bring it crashing down. And if ever it does crash we'll be able to fend for ourselves, because some of us will be running it. And if it's beyond a state when it can be run at all, by anybody, then we'll still keep alive, because chaos is very conducive when it comes to the likes of us living off the land.'

Cuthbert turned his eyes from one member of the family to another, and to those who were strangers to him. Frank saw him, and burned his look away. Introductions would come later, but there were no smiles between them.

‘We all have our pledges,' Handley went on. ‘Mine is to keep painting, to open the furnace-ovens and pull out the steel, work till I go mad or drop dead, to keep my patience and courage even when I can't do a stroke for weeks, to work cheap and sell to the highest bidder. My labour and long hours cost nothing, is so dirt-cheap that it's free where art is concerned, and in the end I place no money-value on what I turn out. But I know what it is worth to others, and I also know that my heart is never willing to sell it. But it's no use creeping into a corner to have a quiet cry when Teddy Greensleaves takes half a dozen canvases away on a tumbril cart to their doom in his gallery, though I know that when they go a few more gobbets of irreplaceable flesh have been snapped off my backbone. And so all I can do is have bad dreams, and carry on painting – as long as the rest of you work with me.'

Cuthbert stood up with tears on his cheeks, and a glass in his hand. ‘We'll drink to that, Dad. We'll drink to that. And to Uncle John. And to Mother, and all of you.'

Everyone gathered around, including Ralph. Handley looked at them all with obvious distrust, but concealed love, then smiled sardonically and put an arm around Cuthbert. Frank was bemused, saw many weeks, even years of invigorating chaos ahead, of great ideas, and great work, and to this only he lifted his glass.

This is the second part of a trilogy, of which
The Death of William Posters
is the first.

Turn the page to continue reading from the William Posters Trilogy

CHAPTER ONE

Albert Handley left his car in a meter-bay behind Oxford Street, and went into a shop to buy a transistor radio.

‘How much is that?' he asked.

‘Costs twenty-seven guineas,' said the young salesman.

Ash dropped from his thin cigar. He'd smoked all the way down that morning. His daughter Mandy had asked him not to, otherwise he might die of cancer. ‘Who'll make the money to keep us in the sort of idleness we've got used to if
you
get carried off? The trouble is, you think of nobody but yourself.'

‘Looks good.'

He twiddled a knob though it was not switched on. There were no batteries in any, and they were chained by their handles to the wall. He was eating himself so hard that cancer wouldn't get a look in.

‘It's very fine,' the salesman told him, as if he weren't a serious customer, but was passing the time before going to a pornographic picturedrome down the street.

Handley unbuttoned his short fawn overcoat. He was tall and spruce-looking, with brown eyes, and a face more reddish than the ruddy glow it had when he'd been poor and walked everywhere. Yet he was still thin. No matter what food he shovelled down, and in truth it was never much, he did not put on weight. There was something intelligent and ruthless about his face, until he smiled and spoke, when whoever he was addressing might make the mistake of thinking him an easy person to get on with.

‘I want something powerful,' he said. ‘A good radio with lots of short-wave. I live in the country, and like to feel cut off from the one I'm in!'

His brother John had been a wireless enthusiast, and so Handley wasn't as unfamiliar with radios as the salesman thought. But John's dead, you fool, he snapped at himself in his momentary abstraction. What do you mean dead? Of course he's not. Why do you say that? He never was dead nor will be dead. He can't be. If he died I wouldn't paint another picture. I'd die myself, in fact. But he
was
dead, all the same. Killed his bloody self.

He saw a black, complex, heavy model with a multiplicity of wavebands, switches and aerials. ‘What do you rush for that one?'

‘A hundred and ten guineas. It's a Philips, from Holland.'

‘You look as if you could really communicate with it. Turn it on, will you?'

He unlocked the chain, and fixed in batteries.

‘It's a good smart model.'

‘Can you get police-bands?'

‘Everything. Fire-brigade, aircraft, radio-taxis, ship-to-shore in morse and telephone. Anywhere in the world, providing you adjust the aerials.'

The tone was good, trilled with spikey clearness when he spun the wheel over short-wave. ‘Pack it up, then, I'll take it with me.'

He got back to his car and found a ticket fixed on the windscreen. He supposed it must be a two-pound fine because – as he now realised, looking at the meter – he'd forgotten to put money in. He drove off without touching it and, going smoothly along Oxford Street, flicked on the wipers till the little cellophane envelope flew out of his sight forever.

He cursed his carelessness – as well as the vindictive warden so assiduous in his packdrill duty – and picked his way through the traffic. His sleek black Rambler Estate made easy progress, but it still took some time getting to the Arlington Gallery after finding a vacant bay in Hanover Square.

String-wire-and-tinfoil sculpture that formed the basis of the current exhibition looked flimsy but interesting, something between Futurist muck, Surrealist crap, and a heap of socialist-realist junk thrown out of a builder's yard. In other words, it didn't lack imagination but had no talent whatsoever, only a demonic persistence on the part of the artist to create something or die. The man's name was famous in the art world, and though Handley couldn't begrudge him that, he was annoyed at the fact that he didn't know what it was about, feeling insulted because the sculptor hadn't done something that his by no means simple intelligence could understand.

Still, maybe it was only a bit of obstinacy on Handley's part, because many people were paying high prices for it, and countless critics were vomiting words in order to explain it to each other. It kept them out of mischief, though he felt that the more words a picture needed the worse it was.