Tea finished, he lit a cigarette and sat back with the restfulness of sanity and good health, laying aside the turned-up papers of his notes. Flies landed and took off from the vertical landing-grounds of the window-panes above rows of books, but he saw no reason to kill them and still their engines. They flew where warm sun heated the glass, summer bluebottles at liberty to annoy him with their touch and noise, thoughtless and helpless innocents feeding from the effluvia of the rotten earth or refuelling on his jam-stained spoon. Flame crawled up the matchstick, and he let it fall into his waste-paper-basket. Worn-out carbon-paper soaked in thousands of words twisted under invisible heat. He should douse the fire out, but wondered how much the flame would eat before he grew afraid and leapt on it. Every man who owned a pen, shoes, a slice of bread, was an enemy of the Revolution he envisaged, if he did not consider that it also belonged to someone else. Everything on your back, feet, in your mouth was common property. There was to be no ownership whatsoever, and no state to distribute it, either. Your house was everyone’s house, provided everyone’s house was your house. Abolish private property, and you abolished privacy, for who would want privacy if they had no property. Privacy is piracy. The prime sin of the world was the ability and opportunity to possess, to have and to hold till the heart grew cold and became an object from which all evil sprang. Privacy was the root of compounded malice and evil. The only time privacy was essential was in order to preach all this, but even then you had no right to such privacy for long, even to the extent of owning a wastepaper-basket that was about to catch fire.
He opened the window, and bluebottles flew out, then picked up two dusters and lifted the basket at arm’s length before sending it down the side of the house like a missile to repel invisible invaders. It landed by a blackcurrant-bush, that did not take fire, though the noise brought forth frenzied growls from Eric Bloodaxe around the corner.
His hands shook, unable to plug in the earphones, so he listened from the loudspeaker instead. Signals fell over themselves to get at him, each with a different pitch and music. Fifteen years had gone by since he came to this house, and though he was wiser and steadier in the heart, he seemed no older, felt in fact more full of vigour and youth than he ever had.
He stood by the open window looking down at the charred basket and flakes of paper leaping in the wind. Sweat glistened below brown calm eyes that gazed beyond the garden at fields rising and falling towards knots of wood and coppice. At first it had repelled him, that vegetable charnel-house of the earth. Distance chilled him, space horrified. All he had wanted was four walls, the self-imposed limits of his own world. Yet without reason he thought of getting out, going on some journey to a place where he could put his so far wasted life to some ultimate use. Perhaps the impulse now set on him was what he had waited for all along, began as a vague but irresistible restlessness that unconsciously clarified itself while he continued his normal life and only occasionally brooded on it. The calamity of his existence came upon him as he stood by the window, the enormous gap of full consciousness that now gave back a promise of his native strength.
Hands under control, he switched off the radio, disconnected himself from the exterior telegraphic signals of common affairs and business scything and chipping and pulsing through the air, and pondered on the various world situations to decide in which direction he must go.
Chapter Twenty-five
Half-way across England they stood in a lay-by hoping for some fresh air, but all they got was a petrol reek whose rainbow stains beautifully coloured the road. ‘It’s foul,’ said Myra. ‘How long can one go on living in it?’
‘Get a mile up one of these side-lanes and it’s sweet enough,’ said Richard. ‘I’ll take a detour in Lincolnshire, and the air will be so clear you’ll faint. It’ll cut you in two. I like living in cities, though. I’m kinky for factory-smoke and petrol-fumes and plenty of machine-noise. I love it. It’s blood and gold-dust to me. Two years I spent in Leicester working in a factory were the best of my life. Factories, power stations, machines — that’s all that matters. When I look up and see a four-engined jet sliding across the sky I want to go and see my best girl-friend. I think of love.’
They drove on, and he continued talking. ‘I hitch-hiked to Cornwall last November to have a look around. Father thought of moving there, heard of a house, and wanted me to look at it. On the way back I got a lift and reached Oxford late at night, and I went into a place for some coffee. A group of students were standing at the counter, and when I went up they made sneering remarks about scholarship boys. I was amused. It was rather a nice experience to be taken for an undergraduate. The more roles I have in life the better.’
His head was held back slightly, as if to see more of the road. He had dark curly hair, and a long rather sharp nose that gave a piercing distant gaze to his eyes. ‘I drank my coffee, and singled out the ringleader. When he left I followed him, and caught him up as he turned off the main street. I became all the working-class scholarship boys rolled into one, and had an idea that this young blood or whatever they call themselves shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. I’m a man of ideas, and sometimes they’re so strong that I’m forced into action.’ He laughed, reached a straight piece of road and overtook a lorry that had slowed him down for the last half-hour. ‘If I act from bravado or boredom and not out of an idea it’s usually a fiasco. So I have to be careful.’
‘What kind of an idea?’
‘Well, while talking to you just now I was wondering whether man can benefit from having his soul laid bare. It makes him hate himself so much that he’s going to destroy himself because he can’t stand it. He’ll lose all confidence, and that’s bad. Nevertheless, he’s got to learn to live with his own soul, with the depths of his own real and far-out soul, though sometimes I think he’d rather die than do it. That person who made the stupid remarks about scholarship boys didn’t have the human vision to have a soul. I tried to talk to him and make him listen to me, but he didn’t like it, so to defend myself I sunk my boots into him. His social hatred wasn’t enough for him to do much about it when it came to the crunch. It was all very silly, really. I don’t suppose for one minute it helped him to think next time before opening his trap. From then on, when I got a lift in a car or lorry I told them I was a student from Oxford. You’ve no idea how easy it made things. I did it as an experiment, and it worked so well I kept it up. I got so good at it I nearly vomited one day, and that ended it.’
‘You’re almost as bad as your father.’
‘That would really worry me. Father has great talent, but he’s ruthless, unscrupulous, over-generous when he feels like it, and being an artist his thoughts are totally disorganised. There are times when I actually have a great liking for him, even though he is my father. I nearly flattened him two years ago when he lifted his fist to my mother, but there were no ill-feelings about it. He wouldn’t have forgiven me if I hadn’t stopped him. Some silly quarrel or other.’
‘About money, I suppose,’ she said, ‘in those days. You were all terribly poor, weren’t you?’
‘That’s true. But they never argued about money, never. It was always about the children, or about his ideas as an artist, or — well, anything. They loved each other so much that everything was important enough to quarrel about, bitterly and violently at times. They had their hell, we had ours, so there was nothing to reproach them with. It was all out of love, you see — and still is. Father was determined never to go out to work, and Mother was determined never to let him. That was the whole basis of their happiness, so how could they quarrel about money? Their mutual agreement about what they would never disagree about saw them through. I often marvelled at it, as soon as I began to understand. I suppose we had a perfect childhood, really, having Father at home all the time, like any sons of the idle rich, and we never actually went hungry, thanks to all his tricks. He used to write begging letters, and say that when he was famous he’d get them published, and call the book: The Collected Begging Letters of Albert Handley, R.A. But he won’t, of course. Now he says he’ll save them in case we ever get poor again.’