A long tartan dressing-gown was drawn tightly around him, each hand lost in large sleeve folds and resting on the kitchen table. He was perfectly still, and when Enid entered she thought he was sleeping in that position. But his light-brown eyes were open, gazing at empty air. Water rattled in the kettle. ‘Haven’t you slept?’
He didn’t look round. ‘Why do I only crave what I’ve lost? A man should want more out of his life than that.’
‘What else is there though, except to want what you haven’t got?’
‘I want both,’ he said, smiling faintly to reflect the ice-old bitterness. ‘What you haven’t yet got is what you lost. They’re the same thing, let’s face it. God forgive me for getting all mystical, but when I look at those fields near the coast after a day of rain in the summer, and when it’s beginning to clear up about seven, and they go all soft and distinct under the sun reddening through cloud — then I begin to want what I haven’t yet got, and realise it’s something that I lost in the days when I was half-conscious and didn’t know I had anything to lose. In those days, I was king of myself and knew exactly what I wanted, which turned out to be this. I wish it weren’t true that I had everything a person is supposed to want, that I wasn’t in a position a left-handed person would give his left arm to be in. Even though I know I’ve got such a lot more work to do, I know that my life and all I’ll damn well do is a failure. If I didn’t have this lump of cold water always in my stomach maybe I’d never do these paintings that make me feel such a failure.’
Whenever he was in this rare mood of self-questioning and self-pity she felt full of love towards him. Yet at the same time she was afraid, knowing from experience that it was inevitably followed by a terrible frenetic bust-up. ‘You’ve always known your work is good, or you wouldn’t have done it.’
He took the coffee-grinder from her, turned the handle slowly. ‘Good, bad, what difference does it make? It doesn’t rip the despair out of my guts.’
‘You’re a successful artist,’ she said, knowing that he sometimes liked to hear her say this.
‘There’s no such thing. You can be a successful shopkeeper or football player or film-maker or critic, but you can never be a successful artist. As soon as you succeed you fail.’
She made the coffee, ran a skin of butter over some bread. He wolfed it, famished after no sleep. ‘Something must have got under your skin in London,’ she said.
‘I bumped into Russell Jones.’
‘So that was it. I wondered how you’d hurt your hand. You were stupid enough to hit him!’
‘Even my own wife doesn’t know how noble I am, so I’m bound to cut my throat one day. I was going to hit him, it’s true. But I resisted, hit the wall instead. There are some people you just can’t crack open. He was terrified, the little worm, and that was enough for me. I just wanted to see whether he was human after all. There’s a successful man for you. They get terrified at the wrong things.’
‘And you’re so nervous you won’t even call the police to find out who stole your picture.’
‘I’ll get it back without that.’
She knew it was something worse than losing a picture, which would bring out his rage, but not this hopeless despair. ‘Did you see this Myra, in London?’
‘Frank Dawley’s woman? I bumped into her at a party, had dinner with her and Greensleaves the night before last. I asked her to come back here and stay with us for a few days but she wouldn’t.’
‘A pity. We could do with a bit of company. I get fed up, seeing nobody week after week. We don’t even have to make ends meet any more. That at least took my mind off it.’
‘If we don’t get that picture back we might have to struggle again soon enough. I have a pretty good idea who did the job, but I’m not saying yet.’
The au pair girls shuffled in, sluttish and dreamily beautiful, sat down and waited for Enid to serve them coffee. He leaned back and laughed. ‘I had a letter last week from somebody who asked me what was wrong with the world, so I wrote back and said what do you think I am, a writer? If I could tell them that I wouldn’t be painting. And if I knew what was wrong with the world I’d know what was wrong with myself, and if I knew that I’d know how to put both right.’ He had that look of a short-sighted man whenever he sat at the table trying to clarify his thoughts. At the moment they eluded him, not because he wasn’t capable of clarity but because he was tired. Clarity only came as inspiration, unasked and unexpected, as a pleasure when it fitted into a scheme and enabled him to build some huge edifice beamed through with its light.
The girls went upstairs and plugged in the vacuum-cleaners, motor-noise whirring and shaking through the house. Mandy came in wearing her dressing-gown, sleepy and petulant, which made her face chubbier and pale as wax. She sat at the table as if never intending to leave it. ‘It’s about time you were down,’ Handley said.
‘Do you expect me to stay in bed when those vacuum-cleaners are going like pneumatic drills outside my door? You only got that sort out of pure bloody spite.’
‘Your eyes will look like three-coloured chrysanthemums if you talk to me like that,’ he said, bending close. ‘There are only two things that will get you from that stinking bed of a morning. One’s noise, and the other’s hunger. You could live off your puppy-fat for a week, so noise is the only hope. You wouldn’t think so though to see the fat little chuff scoffing away.’
‘What can you expect?’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant.’
Handley looked horrified, while Enid stayed calmly at the sink. When crisis or bad news broke, his feeling and expression matched perfectly, which was the one time he could guarantee that it would. ‘Again?’ he said. ‘I hope you aren’t playing any more tricks.’
‘It’s only the second time,’ she said. ‘And I’m nineteen, anyway.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Nineteen. It’s not the modern generation that’s at fault. They can’t be that bad. It’s just my daughter. I suppose it was that picture-stealing vampire called Ralph again?’
‘It wasn’t his the first time.’
‘I’m reeling,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me any more. You said you wanted to marry that apostle of spineless determination, remember, last year?’ He looked into the impenetrability of her pretty face. ‘Who the hell was it, then, eh? Tell me that. Oh, what the hell do I want to know for? It doesn’t matter.’
She stood up and brushed her wide-flounced housecoat by him, head in the air, which in any case came to below his chin, and walked up to the sink to empty her coffee slops before refilling the cup. ‘I don’t suppose it does interest you. But if you want to know who it was the first time, it was that friend you brought here early last year, when there was deep snow everywhere.’
Uncle John walked in, shaved and fully dressed, wearing his best dark suit with small golden links showing below the cuffs. Handley greeted him: ‘I’m glad there’s one good soul in the house who isn’t hellbent on doing me evil.’
‘You exaggerate, Albert. But it’s a pity we have to wait for the millennium to arrive before we learn to live amicably together. Isn’t it, Mandy?’ Enid plugged open a tin of fruit-juice and set it before him with a dish of cornflakes and a jug of cream. She then turned to the stove to fry egg and sausages, because he was the only one in the house who wanted the full gamut of breakfast — after his prison camp experiences. ‘Why don’t you tell him Mandy?’ John said. ‘He burst into my room first — looking for the toilet. I scared him away at gun-point. Then I suspect he found it, and as I came out to see what was happening in the hall, you were talking to him — and pulled him into your room, where he stayed about ten minutes. That, I suppose, was enough.’ He spooned up his cornflakes. ‘Wasn’t it?’