‘I thought he was a Communist?’
‘He was many things. No real Communist is a simple man.’
He was irrevocably naïve. She didn’t show the respect for his priest’s collar that he was used to. That old subconscious was getting too big for its boots. He’d been relying on a falsehood to give him confidence. ‘How old are you?’ she asked.
‘Twenty-five.’
Her wry expression put him back into the world of non-talk. The complexities in her were as deep and varied as those within himself, and he would have to learn how to handle them. Honest and forthright in her opinions, he didn’t know how to counter her scorn, which may still be the main part of her. His active suspicion created lurid pictures. She was honest only in the way lively and attractive people could afford to be. In the lit-up dusk of Charing Cross Road she lost some of her classical Iberian beauty. What was it made her seem so reliable except his own dishonesty of soul? — which meant she was not.
The one thing in life, he mused, but with a shade of regret and sadness because Maricarmen sat warmly beside him, is to be dishonourable, ungrateful and plain wicked. Not in order to benefit oneself — that would be merely selfish — or to do harm to others — that would be simply vicious — but as a clean way of living, in other words to live by the naked law having the rest of the world exist for your especial benefit. Only in this way could one be anti-bourgeois and anti-life, and eventually move in all humility towards God.
The main thing is to give every rotten action a false label, to call it either bourgeois reactionary wickedness (in the name of the Revolution which you didn’t believe in) or Red Communist Bolshevik wickedness (in the name of the Good Christian Capitalist Western Freedom-loving way of life which you could never believe in, either). Pretend to the way of life that you act vilely in the name of. Be a man of no principles — that change every day. Only in this way will you extend the limits of your horizon and retain your integrity in the pitted face of all systems. Teach yourself not to care, and do it quickly. He’d tell this to anyone foolish enough to ask for advice while his white collar was on. It is essential for survival to retain the complexity of your nature. And to a man of principle integrity and survival were the same thing.
‘People are often broader in spirit than you think.’
‘I know,’ he answered, vulnerable in spite of what he thought, and unable to dislike her for making him feel so, in case his vulnerability one day turned into love. ‘I’m glad you came to England.’
‘Why is that?’
‘I don’t know yet. It’s good you’re here, that’s all.’
At the station he saw to the unloading of Shelley’s trunk. The fact that he felt elated could mean nothing to her who made him feel so — not yet, anyway. He imagined every man experienced something like love in her presence, but that she didn’t know much about such things herself. The trunk should be draped with a hammer-and-sickle flag, and flanked by a Red Guard of Honour as it went into the station. She looked at it too, studiously and sad, as if the same thought occurred to her. It’s going home, he smiled, to its final resting-place: the spiritual incinerator of a half-baked museum.
Sitting opposite her in the train, he knew where he had seen her before. He remembered the cigar box in Uncle John’s room, and through the orange and white lights of London’s outskirts saw again the impressive labels on its lid, with the picture of a multi-chimneyed tobacco factory, and the crude engraved portrait of the olive-skinned, green-eyed, smooth-haired woman wearing a plain collarless common shirt with a low neck. Her lips were smooth and thin, and the meticulous details fitted perfectly the real features of Maricarmen, whose face softened when her eyes closed from exhaustion.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Handley thought that to paint the soul of England you had first to paint the soul of Europe.
What shape the soul should take he wasn’t sure about. What colour the heart, what composition the mind, had yet to be transmuted into real paint and colour, pain and choler. It was no use relying on inspiration. You mixed the paint with your sweat of fear, perspiration of labour, blood of vision, and let the energy take the hindmost or the rindpest as your heart expanded, chose for you, and finally took over.
Stop and start, trial and error, he painted them all from the very beginning: emanations from the swamps of the dead in France and Belgium, poppy dung, Brecht music, German swamp songs, Elgar’s sewer-tunes, sadistic misery, cock-eyed teutonic intelligence, Ophelia in the mud of Passchendaele, Lady Morphine of Vimy Ridge, the Howling Crone of Hill 60, the Angel of Mons. Roses, the Lions and the Donkeys of the Somme: those flowers of the bowels still blooming in Picardy, hectares harrowed and sown and perpetuated in the bone and blood of all countries, the final international fraternisation of the battlefield where the corpses of the world unite because they had nothing to lose but their lives.
Handley’s large hut in the back of the garden served well as a studio, as far from the dog and bird noises of England as he could get. He slammed up a window to breathe fresh air, yet despite its advantages wished he still had the attic of his Lincolnshire house, where he could stand at an open window and contemplate throwing himself to his death if the painting didn’t go well. Thinking about suicide cleared the head.
Large sketch-books were full, drawings of landscapes in pencil and charcoal blocked by statistics and notes. Cartoons abounded, geopolitic maps and scrawls and crossings out, Piccasso and Haushoffer, enormous motorways traversing saps and wire and dugouts and a thousand interdenominational faces fixed in the pavé of the road leading to the front — those sacred spokes leading to the axel-hub of death.
He threw the book across the room. Inspiration drove him to work, to keep out the cut of its fangs — or it left him a while to belly-crawl off to pastures new. He walked up and down.
The unsettled wetness of summer weather, with its air of fecundity that had often inspired him in Lincolnshire, made for restlessness here, and gave a leg-ache that wouldn’t let him stand in one place. He burned to go, but didn’t know where. He longed to settle down into tranquil happiness, but didn’t know how. He wanted to work, but couldn’t.
Birds of summer sang in the trees. The house was busy. The grocer’s van was unloading by the back door. Bourgeois placid life was running its accustomed course. Life had to be lived, one way or another. You called it ‘bourgeois’ if it went on too long and started to rot your soul. They’d lived in Lincolnshire twenty years, and here in this place less than one, but already the gangrene was eating him in vital places. The only thing left was a career of crime, or to sleep till better feelings came.
He regretted not having gone to fetch Maricarmen from Dover, but he’d wanted Cuthbert out of the house so that they could bring in a constitution. Cuthbert’s voice would have gone against him, so he’d sacrificed a pleasant trip through London, and a possible visit to Lady Ritmeester. After an hour’s speech a near unanimous vote at the meeting had brought in a constitution, declaring Albert Handley to be president of the community, with the power of veto on any decision. Let Cuthbert unravel himself from that one. There was no point in not being clear about it. Any room for doubt and you’re being unfair to the rest of them. One must never shirk responsibility. At least there was that much satisfaction in life.
If one doesn’t face problems one might just as well go out and get a job as a milkman — which didn’t sound a bad scheme to him, though not at the moment. In the old days, when he’d got no money, such an idea would never have entered his mind, but he was so bored he’d consider anything. Even manipulating the community held no further fascination now that he’d won control of it, though he’d yet to see Cuthbert’s face when he got to know, and sit back to watch his futile machinations as he tried to alter the course of history. He couldn’t, and that was the joy of it. As long as you lived from day to day the filthy claws of time couldn’t get at you. Courage was all you needed.