A Tree on Fire (7 page)

‘We're done,' she said, in tears. ‘Finished.'

‘Finished,' he said. ‘That's it, then.'

‘I can't take this again.'

‘You won't have to. All your so-called love isn't worth it. Nobody's going to possess me in that way.'

‘Nobody wants to, if only you could understand. You'd better go then. Let's get it over with.'

‘I'm not leaving like a bloody lodger.'

‘Neither am I,' she said. ‘It's my house, remember. You got it in my name. You were too weak to get it for yourself. “I won't be a property-owner,” you said. So I'm not going.'

‘Neither am I, I won't be thrown out.'

‘It's my house,' she exulted.

‘Get the police then, you turncoat bourgeoise slut. You'd stoop to anything.'

From a sitting position his long thin body ricocheted across the room and caught her uplifted wrist. ‘Let go, or you'll break it.'

She put the plate in the sink. ‘I'll never give in,' she said. ‘Not even if you crawl.'

The idea of it made him laugh, brought a spark of humour into his black day. ‘That's what you've wanted all your life, but there's less chance of it now than there ever was, and there was none then.' He drew back, in danger being so close, though not of blows flying. He refused all temptation to inspect his aching cut, or touch the congealing blood.

‘I want nothing from you,' she said, holding a hand over one eye. ‘If I'd ever wanted anything we wouldn't have been together two minutes.'

‘But you've had plenty. I'm the sort of person who doesn't even know when he is giving.'

Her voice was quieter, more even in tone. ‘Not knowing when you give is the same as not giving.'

‘You can wrap those bloody semantic floorcloths around your aphoristic neck.' He couldn't hold back, in for the kill when he didn't want to kill, didn't need to, and when there was nothing to kill. She stayed quiet, knowing it had to stop, her own impetus gone. Choler sharpened his face, staring for a reply that never came.

The door opened, pushed the table a few inches into the room, and when he snapped around Mandy stood by the pot dresser – the only furniture still upright, apart from her parents. ‘You two been arguing again?'

He was angered by her buxom insolence, long auburn hair and wide sensual mouth ruined by lipstick. ‘What do you want?'

‘Nothing, except a couple of quid to go to the pictures. I'll go schizoid with boredom if I stay here.'

‘Get this room straight first,' he said.

‘Clear up your own mess. I'm not a skivvy.'

Enid's voice rang out. ‘Don't talk to your father like that.'

‘I'll clean it up when I come back,' she said. ‘What about Maria and Catalina?'

‘Probably hiding in the cellars,' Handley grinned.

‘All I want,' said Mandy, ‘is approximately three hundred quid for a secondhand Mini. That's not much to ask for, is it?'

‘I've told you approximately three hundred times the answer's no. You cost me fifty quid for an abortion last year, and that was enough pin-money for a while.' But even while talking he took pound notes from his pocket, as if held up at gunpoint. ‘Get going. Don't let me see you before tea-time.'

‘I wish you two would settle your differences in a civilised way,' she said, unable to move. ‘I hate it when you do this to each other. I suppose it's the only way you can show love, but it gets me down. I'll set the furniture on its legs, but don't expect me to clean the blood up.'

Handley's fist struck the dresser, seemed to break every bone, even those in his toes. ‘I'll murder you when you come back!' he roared, his grey face through the door she'd nipped out of.

‘You asked for that,' Enid said righteously, pulling the table upright. ‘You've never hit them yet, and you see what happens when you try?'

‘I bloody-well miss,' he said, numbed by the pain. ‘By God, the fat little trollop had better not come back too soon. My hand's finished. I'll never be able to paint again. What shall I tell Teddy? I'm ruined. And it's no laughing matter. I can't move it. Look.' The back of it was blue and swollen, a short, dark cut in one place. He leaned it against the cool wall and pressed hard.

‘Do a bit of work,' she said, ‘and forget it.' Bleak sunlight planted itself through the window. He swept smashed plates into a dustpan, rubble chuting musically into the plastic waste-bucket. Taking up the broken chair he opened the window and threw it out onto the quagmire garden. ‘That's that,' he said, as if after an hour's good work.

‘That's that,' she said, enraged. ‘But it isn't.'

‘I wouldn't want it to be, either,' he said, lighting two cigarettes and passing her one. ‘I wouldn't want all this to be for nothing. As forty-year-old Romeo said to his dear Juliet across the Sunday dinner-table. “What did you expect?” – before dodging the loaded teapot. They were in love though, I suppose, bless 'em.' He dropped his cigarette into the sink, and slid an arm around her. ‘Every word we say is true,' he said, ‘between us. But it doesn't matter. It can't touch my love, nor yours.' She said nothing, no bitterness left, words crushed as they kissed, unable to withdraw from the black infesting lust.

Chapter Six

Mandy fastened her leather coat and ran down the muddy lane. When far enough from the house she walked, and took out the four notes her father had pushed at her, enough to get to Boston and back, and buy a meal for herself and Ralph. It was just after two by her watch, solid gold that Handley had bought in London and swore cost forty quid – though she knew he'd doubled the price on his way back just to impress her.

Since his success she'd wondered which was worse, being the daughter of a famous artist, or of a bone-idle penniless no-good. Certainly his fame hadn't got her the Mini she craved and thought it should have. Before, men used to give her money buy her drinks and meals, now they expected her to pay for them, because her father was supposed to be rich and lavish. Nobody had done a thing for her this last year. It was as if she'd lost her purpose in life. All the force and wiles seriously expended piecemeal on other men now became one long ploy against her father, though, of course, in this relationship she could never play that final card of sexual attraction that she often had with others.

It rained in the village, and still needed forty minutes for a bus to the station. With a souped-up Mini she could reach Boston in thirty, while this way it was a day trip. Who would imagine that when your own father had seven thousand pounds in his current account (she'd been through his papers and seen his bank statements) he'd be so mean as to refuse you a secondhand Mini for a measly three hundred? What was he expecting to do with such a fortune? Shoot himself and leave it to a dog's home? He was harder than nails. When she'd got pregnant last year, hoping he'd set her and Ralph up in a new house, since they would have to get married, he'd thrown a fit and made her have an abortion, and on top of it all met Ralph and punched him in the face for what he was supposed to have done, but actually hadn't because another man had done it. So Ralph was chary of venturing up that neck of the county now, and she had to traipse all the way down to dismal Boston for a glimpse of him. What could you do with such a father? He was too knowing to do you any good at all. He'd never considered what damage an abortion did to you psychologically, especially at a time when all she'd wanted was to settle down with Ralph in a nice house and really have a kid if that was the price she had to pay for it. I can't stay in a house like The Gallery all my life, she thought, with such terrible black upchucks going on all the time. Not that I really wanted to get married, for Jack Christ's sake. Trust Dad to see through that one and get me off the hook. A trick that came today and went tomorrow. But what do I want to do with my life? I'm eighteen already and might be dead before I'm twenty-two. It's all right reading Huxley and Lawrence (and those dirty books Dad brought back from Paris – he'd cut my throat if he knew I'd got at them as well) and brooding in my room over their slow-winded lies, but I suppose one day I'd better make up my mind and do something. Dad's always on at me to get a job, and so I'd like to if one had any interest in it, but not like I did for six months in that estate-agent's office, typing cards all day with particulars of houses on them to stick in the window, with Mr Awful-Fearnshaw trying to get his hands up my thighs.

Thank God for bus-shelters, anyway. He isn't good for much else. I suppose the highest I can hope for is to be either a nurse, or a teacher, but I don't want to be anything yet, except something good and worthwhile when I do, so that I can be of use to somebody in the world. I've got my School Cert, so I can get my A levels and go to University, because I know that's what Dad would really like.

Miss Bigwell stopped in her new A40: ‘Want a lift?'

‘I'm going to Louth,' Mandy said, ready to take anything to get out of the rain and sit between four wheels. Always prone to dislike someone before she could possibly grow to like them, Mandy made an exception for Miss Bigwell, for whom she had a vague admiration. In the old days, that is to say two or three years ago, half-frozen in her winter mittens, she sometimes made her way to Miss Bigwell's cottage at the end of the village with a book of raffle-tickets hoping to sell a few at a shilling each for a painting of her father's. Because Miss Bigwell usually bought half-a-dozen and at the same time never won a picture (no one did) she was careful not to go there too often.

Pulling into second gear, her car shot from the bus-stop. ‘Why on a day like this? It's pouring mackerel. Boyfriend, I suppose. I'm off to see my brother Joe – not well again.'

Miss Bigwell was said to have a private income, in order to explain how she lived well and did no work. The reason people called it private was that few of them knew where it came from, though Handley said she was the only daughter of the Coningsby Bigwells. There was little he didn't know about the rich families of the county, for he had tapped them all at one time or another. She and her brother Joe had sold all the land when the old man finally croaked and invested the money in the holiday-making industry of Skegness. She was a big shrewd woman of about sixty, with a moon-face and glasses, whom you might have thought rather common if she didn't have money and a few of the ways that go with it. Like every local person she couldn't resist pumping Mandy about how her father felt now that he was famous. It never ceased to amaze Mandy that local people almost respected him, while to her he was the same old stingy bastard he'd always been. Her aim in getting away from the family was simply to reach some state in life where there was so much money that it ceased to have either meaning or importance. Lack of it had always cramped her natural zest for living – and so it was more vital in her life than it ought to have been. When she was a child in school the headmistress had said hands high those who want to pay two shillings for a Christmas party. Mandy shot hers up because it was all her father could afford anyway. But no one else moved because they knew what was coming: hands high those who want to spend five shillings for a
real
party – as if this price included champagne, the sheep! A wheatfield fluttered, naturally. When they subsided she said let's see again, (laughter already) those who even now want the cheap rate of two shillings. I still said yes, to everybody's surprise. Imagine thinking I'd change my mind just because I was all on my own! The headmistress went, then came back with a beautifully bound hymn-book inscribed from her, which she was giving me for my ‘independent spirit'. I said thank you. What else could I say? She must have made about five pounds profit on that party, so what was a miserly hymn-book to her? Yet if she gave me something it ought to have been more than a book I never opened and couldn't even sell to the girls. So I went through all that for him, and he won't even buy me a car now that he's rolling in it.

Once in the car and it stopped raining she wished she'd waited for a bus instead of putting up with Alice Bigwell's endless ramblings about the best way of making compost-heaps. She pumped on concerning slops and vegetation and manure and proportions of water, (nothing after all except complex euphemisms for common shit) building it up and putting it to bed, taking temperatures and saying how long it took to become soil. Mandy wondered whether she hadn't an incurable and repulsive obsession with birth and cannibalism, and whether she didn't serve the stuff up as a first course to any starving and unsuspecting traveller who knocked at her door for a bite of bread and cheese. Nothing would surprise her from the people around here. Though born in the place, she didn't really
belong
, for her father had come from Leicester (where they still went occasionally to visit hordes of the family) and didn't have an occupation like everyone else round about. He'd always been either a malingering no-good on the scrounge or, as lately, a celebrity with a murky past they were so ready to forget that it would surely be thrown up in his face with real fury if ever he went back to scrounging. And with the confidence of people who had lived for generations in one place, they realised how possible this was.

Because there was no saying when his suddenly acquired fortune would vanish, Mandy wanted to get out before it did. She couldn't believe that from now on he'd be able to earn good money doing something or other in the world of art. He could turn his hand to many things, but being pigheaded, would never do anything his integrity told him was wrong. Otherwise why had they lived a desperate existence for so many years? To deviate from such principles would turn it into an awful waste, and though she realised how much of a pity this would be, at the same time she didn't want to go on living in the greater uncertainty that unexpected affluence had created. She was the daughter of a true aritst in that she wanted the sort of settled life her upbringing had denied her the means of acquring. And having the same determination as her father she would go to great lengths to get it, in the course of it justifying the inversion of the common maxim to say that the sins of the children are visited on the parents.