The Flame of Life by Alan Sillitoe
The black slum-zones remained, factories and gasometers, crippled churches and decrepit schools. Handley had offered the Rambler, expecting him to bring Nancy and the kids back on the same day with their belongings tied to the roofrack, as if she would leave job, give up house, and snap ties like a nomad who’d been a few days there instead of all her twenty-eight years. Handley sounded as unrealistic as ever, yet the impossible happened. She severed her woven bounds and was on her way back with Dawley in a week. He was locked in the shock of speed, the flowering of unexpected decisiveness that stopped him knowing what he finally felt about it. He could only be mystified, until calmness of heart returned that would make things plain. In the meantime he preferred to think (in his male and blinkered way, he told himself later when the whole thing got smashed) that Nancy loved him, and did not want to live alone with the kids.
Having wife and girlfriend in the same house he could sleep with neither openly, but visited one or the other in secret – whenever the good mood took him, and if it coincided with the convenience and desire of the woman herself. He kept separate from Myra and Nancy by occupying the caravan. He thought he was in love with both, and this disorientated him, proving something he already knew: that there was no ideal way of existence. Such split love was like having his feet on two different lifeboats in the middle of a stormy sea and far from land. But he liked it, and thought that was how life should be.
It was good being in a community, as long as there were enough women to go round. With the coming of Cuthbert this was no longer the case. Not that Frank was jealous of his women – there was so much trust in the air that no one cared one way or the other. Neither was he aware of anyone being jealous: what harm would it do if he was robbed of either of them, even if he did love both? A fair proof of love was the ability to lose it like a man when it was taken from you, and the only way to enjoy it was to get all you could while you could.
Cuthbert did not seem to fit in, and Handley plainly thought the same, though spoilt his case by shouting it loud and clear, for it was fatal to let Cuthbert know that you hated his guts. It paid to say nothing, and lead him to believe you were the strong silent type who might quietly bash his face in if he ever stepped too far out of line.
The mellow notes of early nightingales sounded in the lilac trees of the upper terrace. He stood with rolled-up shirt sleeves, and a cool breeze played over his skin. He saw Handley by the kitchen door. ‘What’s going on? You look as if your liver’s on the blink.’
‘Mandy’s miscarrying. Enid and the doctor’s with her. She’s got moonbeams in her belly.’
Frank lit two fags and gave him one. ‘She’s been taking life easy.’
‘Her heart’s not in it, though, and who can blame her with that milk-brain of a husband? I should never have let them get married, but what can you do if they’re set on it?’ His sharp pallid features were screwed with anguish as Mandy’s screams burst from an overhead window.
‘Not much,’ Dawley admitted.
‘It’s that doctor,’ he went on. ‘She was bleeding a few days ago, and when she asked if she ought to go to bed, he laughed in his jolly old English avuncular fashion and said, “Oh no, just carry on as usual and get plenty of exercise, because you’re young and healthy and as strong as a horse.” What can you do with a murderer like that except take him out to sea and drop him from a helicopter? He’s up there now trying to stop her bleeding to death, but when this lot’s over I wouldn’t go to him again even if my arm was hanging off. He’s the sort that rants against abortion but goes on killing foetuses by the dozen whenever he gets the chance – not to mention people.’
‘She’s not lost it yet,’ said Frank. ‘Maybe she won’t.’ It was the wrong thing to say, but what was right at such a time?
Handley didn’t think much of it. At the moment he was a pessimist, though when all was going well he was the most optimistic person in the world. ‘It tears my guts. First John killed himself, and now Mandy’s losing her baby. There’s too much death. I hate death.’ He said it as if there were some connection between the two catastrophes, which made Dawley wonder if he were using it to work himself into a state where life became interesting as well as insupportable, so that he could get back into his painting.
They strolled towards the boundary wall, and Dawley looked at the façade of the house. ‘I didn’t know you’d put Mandy in Uncle John’s old room.’
‘I didn’t. Myra gave up hers. It’s more convenient. She certainly takes the weight of the world on her shoulders. I often wonder if we’re worth it, the ton of work she puts in. Still, I never was one to feel guilty when somebody does me a favour. That’s not my line, though I’d like her to know I appreciate it. But telling somebody isn’t enough. There has to be more to it than that.’
‘You slept with her last night,’ said Frank. ‘I hope that put the idea across to her.’
Handley jumped. In spite of the lax rules of community-living he didn’t like to make more turmoil than he himself would want to put up with. It was hard to drop your lifelong habits when everyone was watching. If he got rid of them at all he’d rather it were in secret, so as to give them most effect, but that would be going against the spirit of the community, so he was split two ways, which was better than the usual six. ‘You’re a right bastard. But you’re wrong.’ There was a pause. ‘Anyway, what makes you think I did?’
Frank didn’t know whether to believe him or not. ‘Same as tonight. Couldn’t get my head down. Copped you sneaking out of the house with your tail between your legs. Never saw anyone with such a hangdog look.’
Handley felt it was his turn to laugh. ‘Let me know if it gets too much for you.’
‘I don’t possess anyone.’
‘You will, when they possess you.’
‘I suppose it is a way of two people staying glued if they can’t bear to lose each other,’ Dawley said.
‘It’s inhuman not to be jealous,’ said Handley, ‘I would be – especially of somebody like Myra. You sound as if you enjoy her – as a woman, like.’
Dawley wouldn’t answer. He usually did, but why tell everyone? In his gloating, Handley was pushing it, taking the unwritten rules of freedom too much to heart. Dawley wondered what he’d say if he knew someone had been sleeping with Enid which, by the law of jungle-averages, might have happened.
‘The trouble is,’ Handley confessed, ‘I don’t really enjoy it unless the woman does. If I try too hard the woman often doesn’t. It’s love that makes ’em come, not effort – sparking both of you off at the right time. Then, again, if a woman don’t make it, it’s no good either of you feeling guilty over it. I knew a chap who used to apologise if he didn’t bring his girlfriend off. She had a nervous breakdown. Best thing is not to let them see you worry. Just care for them, as much as you do for yourself. I cottoned on to it when I got married, I suppose. The first act of civilisation is to get married. I’ve got seven kids, so what else can I say?’ He smoothed down his moustache, and grinned, as if he were a young man again.
Mandy was quieter. The house had settled to sleep under the veil of their subdued talk. ‘It’s also the most uncivilised act possible,’ Handley snapped, changing his mind. ‘The one social law that stops the progress of humanity dead in its tracks.’
‘Where does kicking against it get us,’ Frank said wryly, ‘except into this weird little set-up that we call a community?’
He was disappointed at not seeing Dawley’s face. Was he also full of nails about it? We’ve all got out reasons for being here. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Dawley, just that he didn’t know how conscious he was of the ramifications of his altered existence.
‘It would be nice to know what living like this is doing to us,’ Dawley wondered.
Handley saw that he might be in danger of underestimating him – another pitfall of community life: ‘We’ll find out when it begins to fall apart.’ Perhaps, in the obscurity beyond any immediate concern for Mandy’s suffering, they saw so
Handley had a vision of Cuthbert’s face at dinner, of his smile in fact at any time during the last month or so. The truth of what it had been trying to say, and at the same time to hide, came on him now, If there was anyone in the establishment (he preferred that word to ‘community’) who wanted to break things up, it was Cuthbert. One false move on his part, Handley decided, and he’d get booted out. ‘Did you say there was a light in John’s room?’
Dawley wandered what the long silence had been for. ‘There still is. I thought Mandy was in it.’
During the few moments of peace Dawley had an unrealistic and irrational wish for it to reign forever. But it was not possible, especially when Handley strode aggressively towards the house, his eyes burning and lips set tight, on his way to tackle Cuthbert who was malingering in the forbidden territory of John’s memorial room.
CHAPTER SIX
The house was like a hornets’ nest, and Cuthbert wanted to cut off. He turned the handle and went into the room that had been fitted as a shrine to Uncle John, arranged precisely like his den in the far-off scorched-down house of Lincolnshire.
There were the same shelves of books, and on a wall were pinned Algerian maps, while along another were colourful sheets of RAF topographical charts covering South Vietnam. Under these was a single bed, and then an altar of radio equipment that hadn’t been switched on since it was set up.
He wondered which knob to turn for sound, as another shattering cry of pain shot up from Mandy somewhere below, followed by a heartburst of guilt and sympathy from her husband Ralph. The padded earphones muffled a shout from Handley, and a lugubrious howl by Eric Bloodaxe. He heard no more – and knew how it was that insane and epileptic John had clung to life and sensibility in this zoo-den for so long.
The light held him in its circle, head and hands outlined against the complicated façade of transmitter-receiver. His slender fingers reached across the desk for a pencil pad, as if to switch on, tune-in, take down a message. But he covered the paper in rounds and squares: getting words by morse or voice was not meant for the sane and jittery like him. The animal world was blocked off under the twin clamps of padded earphones. He felt safe. No one could ever tell anything that he would see sense in. Neither God nor father nor friend nor teacher with knowledge or authority could impart useful advice. He who sought good counsel only advertised his weakness. He who took messages and signs as having any relevance to himself merely showed his helplessness before the ways of the cruel and fully designing world.
Handley thought that no one came into this room without his permission, for he alone had the key. But Cuthbert borrowed it for a day and got another made. He liked it here. Even though John hadn’t lived between these particular bricks his spirit nevertheless seemed to have spread peace within. John had never been placid, as his suicide on the boat at Dover proved, but maybe this congenial aura was a last gift to the family, in which Cuthbert was able to rest from a world that he couldn’t tolerate either.
In the old days Uncle John had shaken his head over adolescent Cuthbert, for John’s gentle eyes were hurt at his unnecessary obstinacy. He had wistfully pronounced him to be politically ineducable – not like the others, who drank in his anarchistic and humane socialism with a greedy suspect interest. Cuthbert had always despised rules and principles, and before leaving Oxford he had formulated it thus: never listen or learn; never take advice; never work; never fall in love. You would then live a full and satisfying life. Allow yourself no way out. Hold these precepts like a magazine of musket balls for a last-ditch defence of your true and basic integrity, and you will need neither loyalty nor friends. To be an everything-man you had to be an ever-man and a no-man, an impermeable, invulnerable, impenetrable nothing-man living solely on the meat of your own life and nobody else’s.
Spinning the tuning-dial of John’s lit-up radio, he smiled at the news broadcasts. Various Peoples’ Armies were struggling in swamp and jungle, trains crashed and aeroplanes dug holes in the earth, a newly-launched battleship ran against a sandbank, a factory had doubled its futile output of unnecessary goods, a horse had puffed its guts to rags and won some race for a chinless wonder, the Prime Minister had spoken about containing Communism as if it were a foetus you could fasten into a jar, and another copper had been murdered trying to prevent a smash and grab of somebody else’s money. He laughed between the earphones, fingers gripping the morse keys as if to prevent himself rolling on the floor at the inanity of the world.
All one heard from the radio, or read in newspapers, was a continual stream of hilarious jokes. If you did not laugh your mind was diseased. Your sense of humour had gone rusty. Books, bulletins, articles were the comics of mankind. Uncle John’s mistake had been to search for meaning in it, fit signs and symbols into a pattern and give them a significance they could never have – except to a madman. No wonder he did himself in.
Handley kept the power-leads connected, as if John might reappear and once more get stuck into an ethereal square-search for messages from God which were meant, of course, for him alone. So Cuthbert threw a few switches, waited for the valves to warm up their orange and purple filaments, and had a half-kilowatt transmitter at his wilful disposal. Instead of listening to what the bloody-minded world was broadcasting in all its prejudice and tyranny, he had only to connect the microphone to give it a piece of his own mind.
For weeks he’d speculated on the kind of radio programme he’d run, between going on the air and getting tracked down by slow-moving post-office direction-finding vans. Instead of a sustained obscene assault on one particular channel of misinformation, perhaps he’d play the hit-and-run pirate on several frequencies, popping up here and there saying ‘God is dead, love live God’, while the announcer paused between lies to get breath.
Or maybe in a parched voice of the soul he’d put on the hellfire ravings of a priest – developed at college with the help of a tape-recorder – whose prophecies would tremble their way to the marrow of any listener ready for his master’s voice.
Perhaps, finally, he’d do nothing except dwell on what he’d do, and Radio Cuthbert from Unholy Island would stay a joke in the far-off corners of his megalomaniac veins. Ideas were more potent, and amusing, when you never put them into action. Action ruined them, took all spirit from a noble idea, brought it into the gutter of reality. To act was to share, and to share was to damage your integrity.
With the transmitter fully warm he kept his hand on the morse key, so that a long continuous squeak cut through both ears and was, he supposed, shooting across the sky, close enough to the BBC medium wave to make people reach for their knobs to shake off the interference.
There was a smell of camphor from John’s last suit hung behind the door, lovingly pressed by Myra because she thought him the saintliest of creatures after he had gone to Algeria and pulled her lover like a hot chestnut from the fires of revolution and civil war. This demented act of rescue did her little good because Frank Dawley was sleeping with his true and proper wife whom he’d cajoled out of the security of her Nottingham council house to come and live with him.
It was the world’s most experimental mix-up, the Achilles heel of benighted Handleyville. Now and again Dawley slept with Myra, but his wife didn’t know. She seemed a bit hazy about what went on, though perhaps she knew everything and was nursing her time for the jump. Dawley was too dim to notice, and that was a fact.
What Dawley didn’t know, and never would unless Cuthbert blurted it forth in order to shatter him, was that Cuthbert had passed a few nights with his wife. She wasn’t that good, but he’d serviced her – and himself – nevertheless. Maybe Dawley wouldn’t care, but if he did, it was one more thumb-tack in the coffin of the community.
The family house in Lincolnshire had killed Uncle John, and this community was emasculating his father. There was nothing to choose between them as far as Cuthbert could see. Only prisoners are obliged to make choices, and
A box of John’s cigarettes lay by the morse key, in case he came back craving a smoke with the same intensity as he’d done during his four years as a prisoner of the Japanese. Cuthbert puffed one slowly, trying not to inhale or cough. A score had already been purloined on other nights, but Handley had not lifted the lid to check – during his daily visits to change the calendar and see that the clock above the transmitter was fully wound.
The silence saddened him, but he stuck to it like hunger. If you want something out of life be careful what you hope it is in case you ever get it. He opened the window and leaned out, pressing his fingers on the sill as if to support himself against the rabid noises of life from below. He felt such pity and love for Mandy that tears wetted the flesh of his cheeks, and he ached for daylight so that she might be better.
He’d believe in God if only she could stop screaming. He couldn’t bear it when she cried again, because her agony was his, just as, at certain times during his stay at college, she had shared her wealth with him. Living in such a hardup or tight-fisted family he could never decide where she got such money, but neither did he think to ask in his picture postcards of thanks. And now as he winced at her cries he only wondered about the impulse that caused her to send those occasional few pounds to her elder, no-good, cloistered brother. The rest of the family forgot him for months at a time, and he never blamed anybody for that, but loved Mandy for her sweet sacrifices that allowed him to buy unpriestly comforts in the town, so that on his penniless return to the dark towers of college he fervently hoped she had stolen the money from their father – otherwise he would feel too guilty to enjoy the next lot that came.