His desire to put the shadowy basis of a constitution firmly on paper leapt up because it seemed necesary to keep Cuthbert in his place. Noble Anarchy was too easy: he needed the simmering violence of order. Most of the others were against a constitution being slipped edgeways into the system, so today he’d merely circulate the idea, hoping that next time it might not be looked on so unfavourably. ‘There’s one final thing,’ he said. ‘A fortnight from now we shall have Maricarmen Frontera-Mayol with us.’
Cuthbert marvelled at his quick change of topic:
‘Who’s she?’
‘A Spanish woman,’ said Dawley, ‘an anarchist not long out of prison.’
‘What’s she coming for?’
‘If you’d bothered to attend the last meeting you’d know,’ said Handley tartly. ‘We must have a constitution, otherwise the whole bloody ship’ll be on the rocks in another six months.’
Dawley broke in, before Handley got going on his son: ‘Maricarmen was Shelley Jones’ girlfriend. He was with me running guns into Algeria, and he died there. I promised him I’d contact her, so the community is inviting her to stay for a while.’
‘She’ll bring Shelley’s trunk,’ Richard said, ‘full of notebooks which he kept for the years. They should contain interesting revolutionary writings.’
‘A grim notion,’ said Cuthbert.
‘I’ve yet to see an idea that appeals to you,’ said his father. ‘Anyway, I want you to go to Dover and meet her. Look after her as if she’s a queen. Make sure the immigration police, who do their vile work in the name of every good citizen of this island, don’t treat her like the low-down weasels they are themselves.’
‘I can’t schlep all that way,’ said Cuthbert, not wanting to let his father know that he did in fact enjoy travelling. ‘It’ll take a whole day.’
‘You’ll go,’ said Handley, menacingly.
‘If you insist.’
‘Or you’ll be out on your bloody neck.’
‘It’s the easiest thing in the world to set you off,’ Enid said.
‘Contention is meat and drink to him,’ said Cuthbert. ‘He doesn’t care about anybody but himself.’
‘That’s not true,’ Handley said, his voice dispirited but calm. ‘There are some accusations I resent so much I can’t even get angry. I don’t like the way you go on about me. It’s not that I can’t take it, but I sometimes think you forget all the good things I’ve done, and the help I’ve given you out of the goodness of my heart. I don’t mind admitting: it makes me sad. You were like a miracle to me when you were born. I loved you more than you’ll ever know. You loved me, as well. We went everywhere together. You sat in my studio for hours, and painted to your heart’s content. I’ve always done the best for you, and I want you to know it, and I want everybody else to know it. I don’t have anything against you, and in spite of this bickering that goes on most of the time I have every regard for you both as a person and as my eldest son. I just want you to know that.’
Handley was sincere. Their judgements told them that no man could be more so, and they were not easy to deceive in that respect. Cuthbert, while listening to his reasoned voice, had turned white with apprehension. He was filled with a sense of dread, yet he too, somewhere, had been glad of his father’s words. But he didn’t trust any phrase of them, though he knew he would be the loser if he didn’t.
‘All right. I’ll go to Dover and fetch her.’
‘Good lad,’ Handley smiled. ‘I just wanted you to know I cared.’
Or do I? he wondered. I thought I’d got a community on my hands, and find it’s a monster. I feed it a bit of my flesh and blood every day, but it still threatens to eat us up.
The sky was brightening outside, and he felt like a walk. ‘Let’s get back to work,’ he said, ‘if there’s nothing more to say.’
And there wasn’t, for the moment.
CHAPTER TEN
The steamship trunk was a jig-saw of hotel and liner labels, some faded, others half torn off and in part scuffed through. Shelley had used the trunk, a log book of his meanderings over the world. The fat-faced surly man at the weighbase stuck on one more ticket — Port Bou and Paris Nord — and she opened her purse for the money. With its rusty lock it had been all winter in her mother’s damp house, a cloth spread over it like a table. Her brother’s record player blared out jazz on the frozen bulk of Shelley’s profoundest thoughts.
Back from prison she found that the music had not been hot enough to hold back rust and decay. Catalonian rain had tainted its corners — though an early spring had dried them and left mapstains as part of the fading labels.
Dawley’s letter held an open ticket to England. He seemed unwilling to give long explanations, only mentioning the community in which he lived, and asking her to bring the trunk which Shelley had talked about in Algeria.
To queue for and cajole a passport was a blight on her anarchist soul. Begging for the right to leave your country, and permission to enter another, was a bleak tyranny. She was twenty-eight, and during the last ten years had been twice out of Spain with false papers — once on foot over the snow into France. She was followed, and would be pulled back into prison at the first move. The Fascists treated you like a cripple. She filled in dozens of forms so as to take up domestic work in England, with the family of a famous painter whose triplicate letter in Spanish and English was shown at all the offices she waited in.
The passport was her book of servitude. On the train back from Barcelona to her home village, huddled in a corner of the shaking carriage like an animal that did not know which lair to flee to after the tight-lock of prison had been opened, she had been tempted to throw it into the heavily racing river below. The idea was overwhelming, but she pressed teeth and lips so hard that an elderly woman sitting opposite thought she was a mad person just out of the manicomio. The effort brought her close to fainting, in the smoke and steam heat, with rain-water sliding zigzag down the glass. Oak groves riding up the valley pinned her into herself.
The sky was churning with rain and more rain, the train shaking as if it would throw her into it. Two years of prison would take much time going from her spirit, and the passport was necessary if she were to survive and get to England. She gripped it tight, for fear it would fly of its own will on to the stony soil, and wear away under mouldering rain.
She loved Shelley as if he were alive and was to meet her next week in Sitges — as he’d done in former days. No love was ever lost. It buried itself into you, and could not disappear so that you didn’t feel it any more. He was that rare person who’d been able to love her as much as he was capable of loving himself, so she lived now with the smarting memory of his tenderness. They had regarded each other as equals, and the feeling that linked them was like that of brother and sister, but without the built-in destructiveness of sibling rivalry.
The simplicities and complexities had been there from the beginning. Perhaps belonging to different countries meant something after all. She did know why, but ease with him had become such a stable fact that she felt all people could learn to treat each other in the same way, so that the world might gradually save itself by creating its own utopia. Only the patience and the will were lacking. From childhood she had grown with the principles of mutual self-help, had been taught to work for universal sisterhood and brotherhood — equality, labour, abundance, and happiness. Her father had died in one of Franco’s prisons when she was six.