The Flame of Life (15 page)

She felt a devastating loneliness, wondering why she was among these people. It was impossible to remember much of her journey, as if she'd been spirited here by magic. The lights were too bright, and she thought they'd arranged to have the greatest glare over where she sat.

‘We won't look at them if you think we've no right,' Handley said, delicately, ‘or if it would upset you in any way. Relax for a few weeks, and then see how you feel.'

Myra fetched in a huge joint on a platter, which she put before Handley to carve. ‘It's good of you to make it easy for me,' Maricarmen said.

Like hell it is, Cuthbert thought.

It was a floating world she lived in. The more she wandered the more settled she felt. Three months in one place and she began to feel rootless. Her head swam and she became dizzy, as if there were nothing to hang on to. Movement was stability. When she was on the move she didn't notice the spinning of the earth. She could be happy and confident on her own firm level.

But having to stay in one place made her cling to the world for fear of falling off. She'd once changed her address every week for a year, delivering street-fighting pamphlets to underground workers groups, and felt absolutely cool and normal. It was easy to merge with the crowd, and one man who took the inflammable tracts from her was so shocked at seeing this ordinary young woman handling such firing-squad material that he sweated about it three nights running, and even wondered why he had joined the revolutionary movement.

Surrounded by the strange people of this extended family who, through Dawley, had some remote connection to Shelley, she felt able to control and even enjoy the situation. With them, she could be herself, so was indeed at home. And her tiredness from the journey had diminished now that there was food inside her.

Her observations were not analytical, merely her customary musings out of which useful truths often came. Because of this born ability to be herself she didn't suspect that they in turn were wary of her, and that she might be at a disadvantage when set among people who, like the Handley's, found it even easier to be themselves. She noticed this, but only vaguely, because she was invariably ready to see good in people rather than anything else – and always condemned them more harshly afterwards if they didn't come up to her expectations.

To appear straightforward was a sure way of putting people on their guard once they thought you were doing so. Though not sensing this sudden alertness among them, especially in Cuthbert and his father, she did have the perspicacity to detect a slight change of attitude as she sat at the table.

Dawley was observing her in a cleverly unobtrusive way. This was as it should be, for he after all was her reason for travelling to England. Another aspect of being herself was that her set purpose would never falter – of finding out how he had tricked Shelley to a sure death in Algeria, and then pay him back in kind.

While the ways and means of it unrolled, she would be careful of him, knowing from experience in the organisation to which she had belonged in Spain, in the years before meeting Shelley, that when a man who happened to be her lover was taken to prison, or escaped to permanent exile in France or South America, the person to show love to her afterwards was often the man's best friend. And it was just as usual, in that sort of life, for her to be drawn strongly to him, for the casual reshuffle of love worked in as immutable a way as any social cohesion.

And Dawley was the last man in the world she would want as a lover, or even as a friend. To say that he was the sort of intelligent man who kept all power to himself only because he was selfish, and that he was therefore his own worst enemy, would be to underestimate his qualities, especially if he were an enemy of yours. She had seen this aspect in many men, for they usually ended, if they could, by making an enemy out of her, even if only to take the pressure off themselves. She had a firm belief in first impressions, and clung to them even when the initially accurate vision receded into a more general picture.

But outside her sense of mission regarding Dawley, was a feeling of well-being and happiness, and the certainty – as more food and wine was set before her and conversation spread in a friendly way – that she had reached a peaceful haven of sympathetic people whom she in turn liked and understood and, in some comforting way, was understood by, not in the style of old comrades but, weirder still, as if she were some distant cousin who had just come in from Gibraltar.

They were foreign and strange, yet because of these qualities, and not in spite of them, they were close to her. Was it only during this first meeting that she would feel such a thing?

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Day after day he bent close to the intricate colour and detail of the large-scale maps of the Algerian wilderness that covered the caravan table, trying to equate their contours and empty areas to the actual journey made on the ground.

Between reality and the pretty picture, memory posed its special problems when it came to fusing both into dull deadbeat words. What picture ever agreed with reality? Reality was one and indivisible, and the representative fraction of Dawley's split mind as he gazed at his maps – more detailed and expressive by far than those used on the trek itself – showed little sign of coming together and recreating the vanished though recent past.

He was in England, and safe, and the war was over, and his memories had no clarity though they still, somewhere, had meaning. Having more or less marked out the course of his footslog from the Moroccan frontier to the Khabylie Mountains near the northern coast, and re-knit a daily account of what happened, much of it was nevertheless inaccurate because he felt that his recollections were not to be trusted, and possibly never would be.

Knowing that reality and the past were so bound up that they could not be brought back, created a larger drier desert in himself than the scorching sand and stone he had walked over. It made him see that, returned to the safety of England's green and truly pleasant dead land, he did not know with any surety why he had gone to fight for the rebels in Algeria.

True, out of a sense of idealism, and to help the downtrodden of the world after a lifetime of believing that the international socialist brotherhood of man could cure the evils and inefficiencies of capitalist-imperialism, he had agreed to join Shelley Jones in driving a lorry of guns to the frontier beyond Tafilalet – a practical action that could never be confused with any dream.

After a successful ambush, he persuaded Shelley to go on to the war in Algeria. Shelley knew his limitations, and did not care to enter the battle-zone. But Dawley, drunk on the tactical superiority of the fighting, and the intoxicating though diminishing noise of their own gunfire, forced him to embark on the most stupid enterprise it was possible to concoct.

They struggled across desert and rocks and mountain ranges, hunted and hunting, half dead from sickness, hunger and thirst, yet somehow recuperating and surviving. Each day the sky altered, from darkness through scorching heat to darkness. Even now, it came back real enough when he descended down into the dream to think about it. During a night attack, Shelley was wounded in the foot, and died of gangrene a week later.

Maricarmen hadn't come to England so that the Handleys could comb Shelley's notebooks for aphorisms on revolution. They, after all, were ten-a-penny compared to the rarity of action. Who could say what the notebooks contained, anyway? Shelley had never been one for writing his great notions down, but usually spouted them to whoever was near by. His friendship with Shelley had been deep enough for him to laugh at the more impractical ideas. Maricarmen had another sort of friendship with him, and he saw that she had come to find out exactly how it was that Shelley had decided against his usual and better judgment to go into a country that was at war. Frank felt that the revolution had really come home to roost, and he was uneasy.

Later that night, when they went back to the caravan, Nancy sat opposite with her knitting, while he tried to scribble a few notes out of himself. The kids were tucked into their sleeping places, dead to the world after a day roaming the woods for cowslips and birds' eggs.

His thoughts floated, idle and infertile, and because he was tired, and in a way content, he waited for them to tell him something new.

‘I can't stand this life any longer,' Nancy said, pausing in her needlework.

He looked up.

‘What's wrong with it?'

‘I want a home of my own, that's what's wrong with it. I don't like living on top of other people.' She was knitting a jumper for Simon, having bought a Fair Isle pattern from the store in the village, one of those fly-blown pamphlets paled by the sun that you see all over the country, with an illustration of a kid-on the envelope already wearing it, the sort of smiling nipper that never was except in Nancy's mind.

‘I want to live in private, not public,' she said. ‘Nor in a caravan, either. It's like when I was a girl and lived in a slummy street, everybody sitting on their door-steps and shouting across to everybody else. I was glad when we went to the housing estate.'

‘You can't compare this to a slum.'

The clicking needles showed off her mood. As if he needed them! She had a lot to say, and didn't relish the fact that he was making her say it. He was sly as well as idle these days, and such people can't love. ‘Perhaps not. But I'd like us to be more on our own.'

‘I wouldn't want to,' he said. ‘This is a good way to live.'

‘Where does that bleddy leave
me
, then?' she demanded.

‘If we can't agree, there's not much point in things.'

‘If you'd agree with me,' she answered, ‘we'd be all right. Depends which way you look at it, don't it?'

‘I expect it does.'

She was not prepared for it to stay like that, though she didn't doubt he would have been. ‘I'm going back to Nottingham, then.'

‘Oh ye'? Gonna get rooms?'

‘Not bleddy likely. I kept the house on.'

He hadn't known about that. ‘You just came down for a holiday, like?'

They sat at the table, with a pot of tea between them – which he had made. ‘I've got two kids to think about, and I know I can't rely on you to do anything. You've been back months and you haven't even got a job yet.'

‘It's not so important.'

‘It is for me,' she said.

‘There's plenty of others to sweat in factories. I've done my share.'

‘Twelve years isn't a fair share. And where's the money going to come from?'

He saw the lines already at her mouth, the hard-bitch determination to do nothing that wasn't approved of in TV adverts and the
Daily Retch
. To her there was nought else to do but the done thing, to knuckle under and get back to it and pull your weight and feed the hungry mouths in the handpainted nest – mostly for the benefit of bastards who'd faint at the smell of an oil-rag, or who couldn't even mend a fuse. He felt an ugly mood in him, and held it back. ‘Are you short of money? I'll solve that problem if you are.'

‘You wouldn't have talked like that in the old days,' she shrugged. He'd be an old man if he stayed here much longer, doing something he was never cut out for. But he was shifting and unreliable. He'd left her once, and would do it again, so she might as well get it in first.

‘Times change,' he said.

‘I don't think so.'

‘Well I change, then.'

He'd done the wrong thing going to see her in Nottingham after coming back. He couldn't think why he'd done it now, except out of curiosity, and a wish to look at the children. But it was a useless waste, because even if they'd missed him they were used to him having vanished by then. Such a thoughtless return had ruined everything, and now it was being done again – by Nancy this time – so he had to do his bit and not make it look too easy: ‘Can't you stick with things for a while? What about all the love you told me you had?'

He wouldn't have said that a year ago, either. He felt a wave of self-dislike, yet at the same time knew he hadn't come back from Algeria to get caught in this.

‘Maybe it's gone so deep I can't get to it,' she said. ‘But I know what would be best for the kids.'

‘They're happy here.'

They were, too.

‘They'll be happier in Nottingham, even though I'll have to go to work. It'll be more real for them up there.'

More real! Good God! Wasn't it real everywhere? But there was no moving her. Nor did he want to, finally. He was aware of being unjust in his indifference, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd known for weeks it wasn't working out.

‘I'll pack tomorrow,' she said. ‘And if you want to follow on, you can. But don't leave it too late. Things have a way of altering for good. I'm only thirty, don't forget.'

‘I won't go back to work in a factory,' he said quietly. ‘Not till I've tried something else.'

‘What, though?'

‘I'm not sure yet.'

‘Well, you ought to be. You liked the factory at one time. That's all you know how to do, anyway.'

‘Do you think that's a good life?'

‘I don't know. But I've worked as a bus conductress, and that wasn't exactly fun. And I sweated in a stocking factory from fifteen, till I married you. I've done my share, and I know I'll have to go on doing it – all my bloody life.'

So Nancy left. Nobody could persuade her not to, and they all missed her when she went, which made him feel quite bad about it. In fact he didn't realise how much she and the children meant to him till afterwards.

A final set-to at the station showed that she knew Myra's son Mark was his child, and that her pride would not let her live so close to them. He couldn't blame her for it, and it was as clean a way of parting as he could think of. He did wonder though what vile gett had thought fit to tell her. It was strange, he brooded on his way back from the station, how she'd made up his mind for him, instead of it being the other way round.