‘You’re the only person I can stand in this house, Uncle John, but you see too much,’ she said, disgruntled at not being able to tell her own story.
Albert sat as if sand were being poured down his back. ‘Frank Dawley?’
‘I didn’t even know his name. He left me three pounds ten.’
‘You’re lying,’ he said, a weird smile, hands shaking.
She stood up, afraid of him. ‘I wasn’t pregnant then, but I was when he left. Poor Ralph got the blame.’
‘It couldn’t have been Frank,’ he said.
‘Albert!’ Enid shouted, the loaded frying-pan half towards the table. ‘Sit down. Don’t touch her.’ With her free hand she brought a heavy crash against Mandy’s cheek. ‘Get out, you.’
‘My best friend!’ Handley moaned. ‘My best bloody friend does such a thing!’
‘At that time,’ Enid said, ‘he was only a stray boozing companion you’d picked up.’
‘I saw him,’ Mandy sobbed, ‘and knew he was a man. I’ll never forget him. Why did he have to go off like that and never want to see me again?’ John ate his eggs and sausages in amiable silence with himself, as if in a transport cafe with a wild fight going on. But he absorbed each painful word stinging his heart, the tears bleeding into him.
Mandy sobbed in agony, and Handley stood up. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? If you don’t speak, how do we know. I wouldn’t have talked you into having an abortion if I’d known it was Frank’s. I’d have got hold of the bastard, made him get a divorce, and you’d have been married by now with another kid on the way.’ The idea almost cheered him up. Life wasn’t a series of ups and downs: with this family it was a roller-coaster that never stopped.
Richard came in, black hair uncombed, shirt and trousers thrown on. ‘If only it would rain. At least then there’d be some noise outside the house as well.’
‘Don’t you start,’ Handley said. ‘I’m beginning to feel ringed. Do you or Adam know anything about that picture that was stolen from my studio the night before last?’ No one did. Albert stood, his face pale and packed tight with ancestral rage: ‘There’ll be a bleeding holocaust in this family if you don’t all set to and find it. I keep you in luxury and bone idleness month after month — which is fair enough I suppose because you’re my family, the family, the sacred bloody Christian Western civilised family that rots the foundations of any free and human spirit — so the least you can do is rally round when somebody like me who is an artist and as it so happens the breadwinner is attacked, and do something about it. Get your curved pipe, Richard, put on your deerstalker and take out Eric Bloodaxe. John will lend you his magnifying glass. Comb the county till you find it.’
Richard chewed at a roll and butter. ‘Talk sense, father. Adam and I were up half the night printing leaflets about American intervention in Vietnam. Last month’s batch were handed out around Scunthorpe steelworks, and at the Raleigh in Nottingham. Next week we do Birmingham and Leicester. That’s more important than finding your painting.’
John had come to marmalade and toast: ‘I know who it was, Albert.’
‘So do I, John. Let’s see if we tally.’
‘I saw that young man Ralph in the house the night before last, at four-thirty in the morning. I was at the radio getting news from Algeria. The FLN attacked a French base in the south.’
‘How did they go on?’
‘It failed. A shambles. The French are pursuing the guerrillas, as well as mopping up at another place. Then I went across to the bathroom and saw him.’
‘So it failed,’ Handley said, sweating. ‘Poor old Frank. He must have been in on it. Why didn’t you call Richard and Adam and have the young bastard thrown out? He’s the one I suspected.’
John wiped his hands on the napkin. ‘I thought he was staying with Mandy. I didn’t want to break up something ineffably tender.’
‘You needn’t have bothered,’ Mandy said. ‘I sometimes think you’re just a dirty old man, Uncle John. I slept as pure as driven snow. You must believe me, father.’
‘I do,’ he said. ‘Richard, get the text together about French tortures in Algeria. Call it: The Rights of Man: This Wicked Oppression Must Stop Now. Have a French version done as well so that we can send some to Paris. They’re cracking up, so we can help them on a bit.’
‘What about a letter to the press, signed by you?’
‘You know I never do that. If I dabbled in politics, they’d say I was forgetting my place, and that would upset them. They’d never take me seriously again. Let’s be realistic, and anonymous — for the time being. John, keep on to Algeria for me, will you?’
He took out a cigarette, and Albert flashed a lighter under it. ‘I’ve broken their codes. They’re pounding the guerrillas, but they’re worried, because there’s still plenty of trouble in the north, which they want to give the appearance of holding in check because of the talks going on.’
‘Get me a report on it, then. Adam will find you the maps. There are quite a few of us interested in Frank Dawley’s fate, not to mention the lives of those brave Algerians fighting for their freedom. Things are getting too complex for me. Oh, for the simple days that never existed. Richard, tell Adam to sort out his burglar’s tools, because he’s going on a little job. Mandy can draw us a plan of the house, because I’m sure she’s been to Ralph’s bedroom often enough.’
Mandy fetched the morning paper, and locked herself behind it. ‘I’m finished with him,’ she said, ‘if he’s got that painting.’
‘I wish you’d all come down for breakfast together,’ Enid said, as Adam walked in.
‘Sorry, Mother. I only want a cup of tea.’
‘We made coffee.’
‘Coffee, then.’ He dropped a pile of letters: ‘Post, Father.’
Bills, printed matter, income-tax demands, begging letters, a copy of Elgar’s Enigma Variations from an admirer, and a letter with a Boston postmark, which he opened at once. He’d been hoping for one from Myra, to say she’d decided to come after all, or that she wanted to see him again in London, or that she was in trouble — any word and he would have abandoned everything and gone to her. What moral obligation had he now not to betray Frank when he had made his own daughter pregnant and caused so much trouble? And yet, and yet, one should go to Algeria and save him if he weren’t dead already and the sun hadn’t dried up his brain and blood. How tragic and exciting life becomes when it loses its blind simplicity at last!
He stood up and glared at the shivering paper. To be angry while seated was ignominious. On your feet it was more dignified, did not allow your raging twisted anger to lock itself like a piranha in your bent torso.
‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘“If you give me your daughter’s hand in marriage I will send it back safe and sound. But if you make one squeak about it to anyone beyond your family, I will cut it into little strips, and then into little squares, and mix it up with …”’ He couldn’t finish, threw it to Richard who read it to the end.
For the first time that morning, probably for years, there was awe and silence at the breakfast-table. ‘You see the sort of people I have to deal with?’
‘It’s all Frank Dawley’s fault,’ Mandy said, letting her newspaper fall. ‘I’d never have taken up with Ralph if …’
Albert turned on her. ‘Don’t be so bloody cracked. Let’s not try finding people to blame. It’s too late for that. What I want is to get the painting, and see that Ralph lying face down in a brook with the back of his head blown off. Not that I’m vindictive, but I just don’t think he should be allowed to live, the great big corpse-faced loon, frightening the life out of me with such a letter. He even signs it. I could get him put inside for ten years. I’ll teach him to steal art treasures. What are you blubbering about again?’