‘Did you have a good time?’ Enid said, arms around him for a kiss.
Mandy looked up from her Pan novel by the stove: ‘I wish you two wouldn’t slop so much.’ Handley gave Enid her headscarf and threw the necklace to Mandy, which was neatly caught. He noticed that she actually smiled. ‘I went to that party last night,’ he said, ‘and saw Teddy this morning. Made me have lunch with him, and I didn’t get away till four. What a life those ponces lead. The same routine day in and day out. Anyway, I’ll have a good show this autumn. We’ll be rolling in it, especially after that recent stuff.’
‘You can buy me a car, then,’ Mandy said.
‘That’s what you think, you fat little chuff. There’ll be no more cars here except mine, and I sometimes think that that’s one too many. Good God, I’m not in the house five minutes before I’m pestered for a car. It wouldn’t be a bad idea if I went back to begging letters.’
Enid put down a bowl of chicken soup and he ate hungrily. ‘There’s no going back to that,’ she said. ‘We can’t go back in this house.’
‘You say it like a threat.’
‘Don’t start,’ Mandy said. ‘I can’t stand it.’
He finished his meal in silence, and went up to take refuge in his studio, the place he needed to be, where he could sit and smoke in peace surrounded by his work. He knocked on John’s door and went in. He was in bed, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling, hands by his side as if someone had given the order to go to sleep. The radio was switched off, his desk in shadow, earphones on a hook and gun, presumably, in the drawer.
Albert set a tin by the bed. ‘I got your favourite cigarettes in town.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Albert.’
‘Feeling well?’
John’s eyes relaxed and he turned with a smile: ‘All right, but I’m afraid there was some bad news today from Algeria. Reception was good from French army stations, and I broke their codes. Some of it was even in plain language they were in such a hurry to get it out. The trees were on fire. They’re burning down the trees.’
Handley’s pale face leaned over. ‘What else?’
‘Not much. I expect you’re thinking of your friend, but he may not be in this particular part. It’s bad news, though.’
‘Are you sure?’
He turned to the wall, ready for sleep. ‘I set up the new aerial system, and it came clear as a bell. I’ll get back to it tomorrow. Geurrillas are attacking a base in the South. It’s not finished yet by any means. There are many trees on fire.’
‘I know,’ said Handley. ‘I bloody well know. Thank you, John. Sleep well.’
He took the stairs slowly, opened his studio door and lit it up. But he didn’t bloody well know. Nobody knew. In the middle of a long great storm the ability to know was replaced by the necessity to act. It was chaos that decided what you could and would do, so that all you had to do was prepare for it, unless you were an artist, in which case every form of storm was already in you — everything.
He looked for confirmation of this to his recent painting, slid his eyes from wall to wall, over door and ceiling, under the bed. There were sketches, the skin of a dead fox, a map of Lincolnshire falling into strips, windows of blackness through which nothing could be seen. He leaned on the table, and looked again in a calm and clockwise fashion. Sickness muffled his sight after the vast day he’d gone through, senses losing the edges of their definition. Yet even under his tiredness he knew that everything was in place, stones, paints, pencils, horseshoes, cigars, knives.
Bursting open the door he launched himself downstairs, entered the living-room with an insane look on his face, though not too far gone to notice the way everyone was frightened at what they saw.
‘The painting,’ he said. ‘Where is it?’
Enid poured him some black coffee. ‘What painting?’
‘Somebody took it out of my studio.’
‘Nobody’s been in there. It stayed locked all the time you were away. Only you had the key.’
He sat down. ‘It’s gone. No, it can’t be. I suppose it’s in the house, but who’d move it from my room?’
Back upstairs he saw that the window had been forced. ‘We’ll phone the police,’ Enid said. ‘They’ll soon get it back.’
‘No, I can’t do that. Let me think. I want to be alone.’
‘Who’d rob an artist of his work?’ she wondered.
‘Who would?’ he said. His hands trembled, he felt drained of all energy, as if he knew with horrifying accuracy and truth what it was like at last to be an old man. The heart was ripped from his autumn show, and if he didn’t get it back he’d never be able to repeat what he had done. Someone had poleaxed him, and he felt himself withering at the thought that there was a person in the world who wanted to do such a thing, a malevolence that for gain or spite would rip the living heart from you because they were unable to wait till you were dead. But since I’m an artist whatever bad happens must be turned into something good if I’m to survive and win. I’ll find who took it, and break whatever backbone is responsible before I’ll let anyone set fire to the tree I’ve grown into.
Part Two
Chapter Fourteen
A tree was burning on a hillside, a single tree in a waste of sand and ash. They knew it well, had used it as a landmark when counter-moving for the last three days to outwit a French motorised patrol from the west. The tree had been dead for a long time but clung to the red friable substance half-way between dry sand and bitter soil, scrubbed and bitten clean by passing camels, picked at by nomads for tea-fires after dusk. No one could say when it had last borne leaves.
Plane-jelly hit the ground nearby, jumped at the tree like a monster with bared teeth, spreading out to send a black-reddish pall of oil and eucalyptus into the air above. It was a lollipop in flames, expanding like an orange candy-floss fixed in the earth’s tight fist. It burned in a circle of fire, and the longer Frank watched, the more surprised he was that the tree should take so long to be consumed. From a plane it would be visible for dozens of miles, a stationary puff ball down on the grey brown earth. The peeled emaciated tree would not burn through, as if it were made of iron and waiting to melt, mocking the fire which clung to it for not being hot enough to do its job. Now and again, a tiff of wind thinned the smoke, and the white claws of its outer branches were seen, though many were missing because they had already dropped to the ground.
The bomb had struck earth like the bark of a dog. He’d heard the plane coming and lay dead in the cleft of sand. There’d been nothing for the pilot to see, and he hoped it was slung out to lighten his plane after being hit by gunfire further east, or that he was simply unloading from high spirits before going back to his aerodrome. The coppery flames of the tree cleared away much of the smoke, immolation so total that the reason why the plane dropped the bomb became unimportant, though it was necessary to know it in order to lay a guideline for the preservation of their group. Everything must be accurately deduced, so that they could rationalise and plan. Each day, half day, rest, thought, had to be set into the complexities of these shifting sands, clouds, winds. But the tree fixed his eyes, its scorching fire clearing out the caverns of his mind the short time he looked at it.