He picked up her spectacles. ‘I spent the evening in Boston with friends. We had something to drink and forgot the time. I had a marvellous drive back.’
‘I thought you might have been with that Handley girl.’
‘I didn’t know you knew about her.’
‘I saw you together once, but you didn’t see me. Miss Bigwell told me a few things. She seems a common vicious little slut.’
Such terrible slander made it difficult for him to defend Mandy. ‘She’s all right,’ he said. Also it was the first time she’d mentioned any of his friends by name, and though angry, he was at the same time pleased to think she took some interest in him after all.
She shifted her weight across the bed. ‘So you have been with her tonight?’ Their few arguments had always taken place at night, now he came to think of it. ‘There are some good families around here, good Lincolnshire families, with nice young women among them, and I think it’s about time you settled yourself in a career so that you could see your way to marrying one of them.’
‘I don’t see why you should be so concerned about me,’ he said.
‘I want you to do some of the right things in your life before you ruin it,’ she rapped, ‘instead of ruining it before you do the right things.’ He remembered the story of a younger brother of her father’s, who went to Oxford and gassed himself at twenty-one. When his trunk came home they found it filled with gold sovereigns and pornographic books. He was immortalised eternally as a misguided young devil who should never have been born, but who nevertheless had broken his mother’s heart when he died. ‘According to Annie Bigwell that Handley girl is a disgrace, the things she’s been up to in her short lifetime, She wants horsewhipping. And her parents must be the lowest form of rubbish to let her carry on so.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. But it was useless to argue. Mandy had told him, indeed, that Annie Bigmouth Bigwell was a ferocious old dike who had once tried to lure her into bed, and whom she had bitten for her trouble — which explained the stories she would spread about her. There was no point in repeating this to his mother, for what she couldn’t understand simply did not exist.
‘It takes a long time to convince a fool,’ she said. ‘You’ll ruin yourself on her. This county’s full of nice people. I thought you liked Jennifer Snow? Don’t you?’
He knew there was no arguing with your own mother. You could only agree, and ignore her. ‘There are lots of creatures, all horse and no woman. I don’t want them.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’d stay away from Mandy Handley if I were you. Her family’s rotten. A pack of beggars.’
‘Her father’s a talented artist.’
‘Oh yes, I saw the papers. He should be quietly put into some asylum, doing such fraudulent pictures. I don’t suppose he’s ever painted a horse in his life. Not capable, I should think. If I had a painting of his in my house I’d burn it. It’s a disgrace that he should deceive people so.’
‘They’re very good by any standards,’ he said, leaning uncomfortably, wanting to leave, but not able to while she was in this distraught attacking state.
‘Anyway, it’s very distressing to receive a letter from a man like that. It came a few days ago, but I’ve not known whether or not to tell you about it.’
He pressed his hands onto her dressing-table to stop himself trembling or falling. ‘What did he want?’
She was agitated, and he could only feel sorry for anyone receiving a letter from a man who was, after all, the lowest form of brute in spite of his talent. ‘He wrote about you. Said you were to stop pestering his daughter, which I suppose means this Mandy creature.’
He smiled at hearing her name from his mother’s lips, even in disapproval, for it brought the softening aura of her beauty right against him. ‘It does.’
‘I don’t know why you smile. It was an ugly letter. He also called you a thief. Said you might try to break in and steal his paintings. He must be absolutely insane.’
‘I must go now, mother. I’m awfully tired.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I suppose you had better go and get some sleep,’ — the word ‘sleep’ contemptuously spoken, as if it were opium or marijuana that she’d never thought a child of hers would need. As he closed the door and went with a heavier step than usual to his room, she picked up her book hoping, in spite of everything set against it, that he might after all be changing his habits, and that his daily life would begin instead of end with the dawn.
He wasn’t conscious of total victory until closed in his room, with drawn curtains and light switched on. The largest and best room of the house, it was an act of spoliation after his return from Cambridge in order to make him feel more welcome. While on his world tour it stayed empty to lure him back, and this constant pampering by his parents (who when he was them didn’t seem to care whether he lived or died) drove him into a frantic melancholy. But at the moment he appreciated their kindness because, after moving table and chairs to the window enough space was left to flatten Handley’s canvas on the floor. He stood a chair-leg at each corner, holding it down like an unrolled map of some complex world with one layer of earth peeled off. It frightened him, the enormity of what he’d done. He flicked off the light and ran up a blind. His window looked eastwards over flat and saturated fields. The dawn was like pale lead, a long red knife-edged streak slit across it from end to end as if someone from a land of blood beyond were trying to prise the sky in two. The day would pour in like a bursting dam, and when you gave in to the dawn you were marked like a wounded animal, to be hunted down by the sundogs of the day.
Shirt, trousers, underwear went onto the floor. One had to sleep, and what was wrong with the day? Hide by the day in sleep, and those who slept at night could never get you. He had nothing against Handley when he was safe in his own room, and he stood naked, morosely conning the reasons why he had acquired the picture considering that in many ways he liked him. He was buoyant and bruto and had a crude sort of wit. There was no denying that. But at the same time he’d been a hard-bitten old-fashioned patriarchal beast when he’d wanted to marry Mandy, had forced her into the nastiness of an abortion, which accounted for her wild behaviour so that county baggages like old Miss Bigwell broadcast her exaggerated sins all over the place. He took his old Scout knife from a drawer.
The cowman sloshed across the yard in his waders, and the main gate squeaked as if it trapped a demon when pulled open. A tractor coughed out the cockcrow and cattle moans. Ralph stepped around the painting, slowly between the anchoring chairs, a widdershins at its disordered colourful soul, his naked faint shadow shimmering the desk and divan bed, the long thorn of knife hovering around the heart of Handley’s work. If I tear it, will it scream? Shall I cut it to shreds and drop it bit by bit down the lavatory during the next three months, or bury it under the barn floor at midnight with a storm-lamp glimmering on the rafters? Shall I wedge it in a trunk and send it by rail to a non-existent inhabitant of Thurso or Wick? I could burn it, but I don’t go by cremation — or by creation as Mrs Axeby, a farm labourer’s wife, put it: ‘When one of my relations died who had got on in Boston he asked to be created, not buried ordinary like the rest of us. What sort of a finish-off is that?’ No, I certainly shan’t ‘create’ it.