‘You can’t answer me because you’re tongue-tied by your own black guilt,’ she went on. ‘But I’m not asking you to be guilty. That’s not what I want at all.’
According to the ritual this was the moment for her voice to soften, and start to blame herself, and Handley felt it was time either to walk away or kiss her. The idea of the community had been fine, as he told her now, to try and extend the limits of the family with a few select friends, and not for the reason she imagined. He had no wish to turn it into a graveyard of crushed desires, neither for her nor for him nor for anybody. It was a good scheme that could still succeed, and he was determined to go on trying, if he could get the necessary co-operation. Even if he didn’t he would continue working for the commune, because he realised it was in their best interests, and that was the only thing that mattered as far as he was concerned.
‘You’re not at a meeting now,’ she said wryly, an impatient wave. ‘You’ll have me cheering in a bit. Or crying. I don’t know which.’
He laughed, all blackness gone, easy again, and no one knew the reason. He kissed her, and they went down the garden path to see if Myra had finished making lunch. They had gone up the garden path hand in hand many years ago, and had been walking up and down it continually since, and neither of them knew how to get off it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Richard waited in the front garden for the children to come from school.
His parents had been shouting at each other in the studio, but calm had now settled on the house. Handley needed such bust-ups to crumble the clogged energy that kept him from painting, and it was plain that his mother also thrived on arguments, for he noted how carefree she became afterwards. Such quarrels made his life a misery.
A warm humidity rose from the fields, almost as sweet in its smell as on the hillside in Lincolnshire. The road outside the gate was quiet, and the field behind the paddock lush and snug, safe and untouchable, eternally green, enticing alike for cattle and children — the land on the other side of the fence, beyond the realm of this incestuous bailiwick in which he was beginning to loose faith.
He wished Uncle John were alive, for he had radiated not only spiritual authority, but shown actual example on how you should accept it, as if he were living under some form of divine guidance. It was different now that he had gone, and committee meetings had taken the heart out of any satisfying life. The richness had left it, and he continually asked himself if it could ever be brought back.
Engrossed in revolutionary tactics and all manner of civil discord he compared the matrimonial antagonism of the family that had bred him to the social and political animosity of people in general; wondered, as he leaned on the gate, whether Handley would have been so obsessed with revolutionary strife if he hadn’t been an artist with a wife and seven kids. Children provided him with resentment — against society which made his life so hard because he wanted to live as an artist.
Richard didn’t think his father was eaten up by class conflict, at least not more than was healthy in such a country. He was too well off to justify such rancour, and too absorbed in his painting to be bothered. It channelled his spleen from the warping prison of the family in which he lived, yet he could not exist without his wife and children, and loved them so much he felt desperately fettered by their need of him and his of them. Combined with the occasional black frustrations of his art, this made it necessary for him to indulge to an infinite degree in the passionate pastime of revolution.
Richard had worked this out, and it worried him. Encouraged all his life to study revolution and rebellion it was natural that it should one day turn him against this indoctrination. Nothing stood still. You either learned, or you died. It was an ever-fascinating theme, and he had the sort of mind which led him to see the end of it. What better weapon had been put into his hands than the long training already received?
Paul, Rachel, Janet and Simon got off the bus. Simon Dawley was fuming and kicking. His short white bristle-hair seemed about to turn the same beetroot pink as his face because Janet had taken his marbles and would not give them back, held her lips tight as if the sky were about to fall down on her. A cool wind scattered them towards the gate.
Paul Handley put his arms round Simon. ‘Don’t cry. She’ll give ’em up.’
‘Finding’s keeping.’ Janet was rigid with possession.
‘It’s not, you know,’ said Paul, with his fifteen-year-old gravity.
‘They’re mine,’ she maintained.
‘No, they’re not,’ said Simon, who did not know how to right an injustice except by bursting into tears, or punching somebody. And when he saw that hitting out would not be tolerated it looked as if he were willing his head to burst. Paul turned to Racheclass="underline" ‘Get the marbles, and give ’em to him.’
Dark-haired Rachel walked up to cringing Janet, thumped her soundly on the back, and prised opened her hand. ‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘He’s my brother,’ Janet cried in her rage, as if that gave her a right to be mean to him.
‘They were his marbles,’ said Paul. ‘He got them with his spending money.’
‘He’s still my brother, you rotten Handleys,’ said Janet Dawley.
‘Well, you ought to treat him like a brother,’ said Paul quietly.
‘We’re not rotten,’ said Rachel Handley, ‘so don’t say it. It’s not right.’ They sorted out their differences in a reasonably short time, considering they were human beings. Paul opened the gate and they filed, with a ravening afternoon hunger, into the kitchen for bread-and-butter and milk.
Richard played his part in the system that Handley had created, and carried on working even when he no longer felt that satisfying ray of faith from Uncle John’s time. He had spent weeks with Adam listening out on VHF radios to the county police patrol frequencies, noting all call-signs, deducing the number of cars, and drawing a coloured map to show the operations area of each group. In this way he could tell at any hour where the various cars were, and get news even before it reached the newspapers or police courts.
He wondered whether Handley wasn’t trying to mould him into a new Uncle John, for any change of role in the household never came about by decree, but always by a slow unwitting half-conscious acceptance of something only fate could have turned you on to. Though feeling this strongly, he had enough moral fibre not to be put off by it, but what really made him uneasy was that Handley seemed to be welding them into one single generation, denying them the differences in age and outlook due to some need for safety and security in himself.
The idea alarmed him, not so much for his father, as for himself and the others. It was the most basic threat to the young community so far — and also a danger to the existence of the family, to which the normal troubles of the community discussed at meetings were nothing. These suspicions occurred to him while watching the children quarrelling their way from the bus. It came while the cool wind blew downhill from the opposite field, and brought the smell of damp herbage into his senses, making him momentarily a child, and lighting his brain as if he’d been smoking pot. He knew then what his father was up to, not by reason, but by an almost religious instinct that, five minutes later, he felt ashamed of.