‘I’m interested in how different painters work.’
Handley leant over and nudged him sharply with his elbow, an exaggerated wink and leer. ‘So you’re a bit of a voyeur, are you? Eh? Dirty old bastard! Still, don’t be ashamed of it. Do go on. Ask me something else.’
‘I’ll be quite happy,’ said Jones, ‘if you just talk.’
‘I’ll bet you will. But I’m not frightened of hanging myself. I was born in Wolverhampton. The old man had a builder’s yard. Left school at fourteen and worked for him, slaved, I should say. Nothing ragged-trousered about me: had no trousers at all most of the time. Never work for your father. The old bastard owned a row of slum houses, and we never knew it till he’d croaked. Six brothers, and we sold up the lot. Got forty pounds apiece after the lawyers had done. I’d left home by then, came up from London to collect it. Boozed it all up in three days, then joined the artillery. The war had just started, and I thought I’d get stuck into fascism. Knew all about it from fourteen because I read a lot and heard what was going on. Stuck on the Lincolnshire coast, bored to death so started painting, reading, demobbed, married, writing begging letters. A bad life with seven kids to keep, but there was no other way. Anything else?’
Jones found it difficult to believe that this lank man of forty had been able to paint such pictures. Rough and bordering on the primitive, they had yet a certain beauty almost belied by the rancorous striding bully in front of him. ‘What about politics?’ he asked mildly.
‘Politics?’ Handley sat in the other armchair. ‘I left off that sort of thing as soon as I felt they were necessary, as soon as I understood them and realised I had nothing left to learn. I’ll only take an interest in politics where there’s a civil war. In the meantime, let who will rule. If they want to indulge in that kind of self and mutual destruction it’s up to them. I’ve got too much work to do, and leave that sort of thing to people like Frank Dawley, who’s more fitted for it than me. He’s in Algeria somewhere, taking pot-shots at the French. At least I hope so: I wouldn’t like him to die on me, though I would feel better if he was taking pot-shots at some of the British I know.’ He poured some more brandy: ‘Let’s drink to good old Frank.’
‘Certainly. To Frank,’ — whoever he was, but it was good brandy, anyway. ‘Don’t you think the artist should take an interest in politics, Mr Handley?’
‘If you start mistering me I’ll shut up and sulk,’ he laughed. ‘Like the rest of the world I’m a split personality when it comes to art and politics: I can’t hear the glories of Mozart’s Coronation Mass without catching an echo of the Ça ira in the background, the sublime about to be pushed aside — temporarily, of course — by the clogs and sandals of the proletariat. So don’t ask me for an opinion, old rum-chum. Two of my lads are up to their necks in this Ban-the-Bomb stunt, so I’m involved to that extent.’
Like many people who drank a lot Jones got drunk too quickly. By the third large brandy his brain lost its usual middling sharpness, and the soporific warmth of the stove made his eyes heavy. ‘Aren’t there any political causes you help?’
Handley lit a cigar. ‘That depends. I do send money to certain organisations — if they look like causing enough trouble. That’s the only thing. So few of ’em do. It’s throwing away good money. Maybe something’ll turn up one day. You see, I have a system. I’ve invested five thousand pounds in industrial shares, and what dividends I get go into any trouble-making or revolutionary organisation aimed at disrupting the system we live under. You can’t be more apolitical than that, can you? Invest in the system in order to destroy it. Not that I think it’ll ever be destroyed, mind you, but if I thought it would last forever I’d not paint another thing. Maybe I’d be happy if I just lived on an ice-floe that never stopped drifting, painting until it melted under me and I took to the boat to find another ice-floe.’
Jones grinned. There were times when he seemed like one of us after all. ‘What if there were no boat?’
‘I’d sink.’
‘Would you mind?’
‘Not all that much. I’ve got a couple of heavy quick-firing ambush-guns defending this house, well-placed and concealed, a fine field of fire organised mainly, I must admit, by my son Richard, and my brother John, who’ve studied such matters. The cellars are stocked with food — self-perpetuating flour, expanding water — all that sort of thing.’
‘Don’t you find yourself a bit cut off from reality?’
‘Closer. How much closer to eternal reality can you get — an artist with a machine-gun waiting for the end of the world? I drink strong tea and walk through fields, fight with a cat-and-dog family, stand alone on the strand at Mablethorpe and watch the steamroller waves updrumming for me as I run back over the dunes dropping my notebook which they hobble-gobble, and cursing them as they spit defeated in my face. What do you mean, not normal? Do you think I should work in a factory? Hump shit around a farmyard? Paint fashionable nose-picking pictures that’ll reproduce nicely in the posh magazines? Get hooked. I’d rather listen to the wind and flirt with chaos.’
‘Do you often fall in love?’
Handley smiled. ‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t know. I’m asking you, really.’
‘No, I’m asking you.’
‘I might say “yes”,’ Russell said.
‘You might be wrong. If I said “often” you’d say I was sentimental. If I said “rarely” you’d say I was cold. It’s hard to answer with a simple yes or no. But I do fall in love from time to time.’ He reached to the table and opened a book so that a photograph of his daughter Mandy fell out. Jones picked it up. ‘I’m in love with her at the moment,’ said Handley, snapping it back between the covers before Jones could twig the similarity of feature. ‘But I don’t see what it has to do with me as a painter.’
‘I was just curious.’
‘Anything else?’ Handley wanted to know.
‘What about theories?’
He closed one eye, and farted. ‘Theories?’
‘Regarding art — painting.’
‘You can fart as well — if you want to. Liberty Hall. I know it’s catching. A theory is only a way of explaining how your art died. I never use ’em.’
Jones was exasperated, needed a break. ‘Do you mind if I go to your john?’
‘Down the stairs and second on the right.’ Handley wondered how someone like Russell Jones had already become acquainted with his brother John.
He was at the door: ‘It’s all right. I’ll find it.’ Handley shrugged, turned to his painting. The head-down fox was falling back to earth after its trip to the sky, a visit to the foxgods who forthwith sent him speeding to the nether world, his life one long and agonising vacillation between air and fire, space and boiling rock, vulpine trap into which he had by chance of birth been driven. The blazing circular limits of the sun surrounded his existence, and yet at the same time the eternal powerhouse of his drive showed him him as the lit-up centre of Handley’s wide-scope world immediately forgotten as he plunged back in.
The stairs were narrow, but Jones found his way to the wider landing of the lower floor. A girl was pushing a sweeping brush ineffectually around dark corners. He thought of trying to kiss her, but his nerve for it wasn’t in the right place this morning. Opening the second door without hesitation, he found it didn’t give into a lavatory at all, but a normal-sized blind-drawn room flooded by brilliant electric light. Much space was taken by racks of wireless receivers and transmitters, wavemeters and goniometers, speakers and microphones. At a table beside it sat a bald, middle-aged man wearing earphones and with hands busy at a morse key. On being suddenly disturbed he sprang up, careful to unplug the earphones, lifted a heavy service revolver and set its spout towards Jones. ‘Get out!’ he cried hoarsely, ‘Get out!’ — an unforgettable picture.