Handley smiled. ‘You’d better watch it. Peddle hash and you’ll run faster than your old man ever did. I don’t suppose blue seas and olive groves will feel much better than the good old slums when you’ve got a dozen Turkish coppers on your tail.’
‘Life’s different now,’ Dean said confidently, ‘to what it was in the old days. Easier.’
‘I wouldn’t bank on that,’ said Handley.
‘It is. I skived all I could at the factory. Blokes tried to get me to join a union but I said my old man was in one and it never got him anywhere. Why should I join a union when I could skive? I had to join, though. Threatened to bash my nut.’
‘What does your old man do now?’ Dawley asked.
‘Poor bastard ain’t good for much,’ said Dean. ‘Had bronchial pneumonia last winter. Reckon he’ll croak one of these days. Works at the Raleigh sweeping up rammel. Poor old Dad. No future for him. He’s not above fifty. Had it too hard all his life.’
‘Don’t cry,’ said Enid, seeing he was about to. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘I know,’ he wept, ‘but I’m sorry for the poor lousy bastard.’
‘Maybe you should have stayed at home then,’ said Handley, ‘and looked after him. Give him some more stew, Myra. That’ll stop his blawting.’
Maricarmen looked on with absolute contempt.
‘Any road up,’ Dean said, reaching for the bread-platter, ‘it wain’t happen to me, you can bet.’
‘As long as your old man don’t feel sorry for himself,’ Dawley said.
‘I don’t think he does any more. He did at one time. Sees it’s no good. But he thinks a lot. That’s why I left. I couldn’t stand it. You’ve only got to look at Dad and you can tell he’s had a hard life. The misery on his clock makes you wonder what you’ve done to make him like that. And you can see he’s thinking the same. So I’m steering clear.’
It was impossible not to believe him, which was a good reason for changing the subject. Handley turned to Maricarmen: ‘I was wondering when we could have a look at Shelley’s notebooks. I don’t want to hurry you. I’m a master of patience when neccessary, but it might do us good to read some stirring revolutionary stuff. We need a new tone to inspire our decadent pedestrian souls.’
She looked at her plate while he spoke. ‘Maybe after the next meeting.’
‘That’s in a fortnight,’ Handley said.
‘I didn’t know I’d stumbled into a nest of Reds,’ Dean observed.
‘If you don’t like it,’ said Handley, ‘it’s bloody easy to stumble out again.’
‘I was only talking,’ Dean said in a wheedling tone. ‘Just talking, you know.’
‘There’s one thing,’ Maricarmen said. ‘I think Maria and Catalina should have a vote on the committee like the rest of us. They’re full-time working members of the community, even though they are au pair girls.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Cuthbert exclaimed. ‘They don’t know enough English to understand what’s being said.’
‘They do,’ Maricarmen told him. ‘I’ve been speaking to them.’
Handley didn’t like it either, but knew he’d have to agree if he expected her to hand over Shelley’s papers. ‘She has a point,’ Enid said. ‘They do more work than some people I could mention.’
‘Where are they today, then?’ asked Cuthbert.
‘In London,’ said Myra, collecting empty plates. ‘It’s their day off.’
‘The first for a fortnight,’ said Enid.
‘There’s a whiff of conspiracy here,’ Handley joked. ‘I’ll adjust the vote-meter so that it registers the proper number of ayes and noes.’
‘We’ll do it on a show of hands,’ Enid decided. ‘It’s simpler, as well as cheaper.’
‘That’s the end of the secret ballot, then,’ Handley grinned.
Two huge apple crumbles and a bowl of custard were placed on the table. Mandy came into the room wearing her padded and flowered dressing gown. ‘Am I too late for stew?’
Ralph smiled, and beckoned. She stood close to Dean: ‘What’s this?’
He looked up with a wide smile, his small teeth so even that Handley wondered if they were false. ‘Hey up, duck! My name’s Dean. You look nice!’
‘Another sponger,’ she said, walking over to Ralph, whose face had turned purple at Dean’s insolent remarks to his lady wife. She kissed Ralph, and went into the kitchen to get some food.
‘Everybody’ll have full voting rights,’ Handley said, ‘including Eric Bloodaxe. He can sit on the floor. One bark for yes, and two barks for no. We’ll soon train ’im.’
‘It’s no joke,’ Enid snapped.
Handley stood, leaving half his dessert. ‘Maria and Catalina can vote at the next meeting, then. And on the evening of the same day we read Shelley’s notebooks.’
Enid smiled significantly at Maricarmen, and Frank wondered what secret plans they had devised for the rest of them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
After each meal Handley went to his studio, and everyone thought he was working. They got on with their chores and duties, and grumbled while the days and hours passed, but thought it worthwhile because it allowed the great man to do his immortal painting.
These attitudes sifted through. He brooded too much on the forces that kept him going. It was good that he worked well for a time, but when it went on as if the peace would last forever he felt empty and irritable. If he laboured well, everyone concerned about him with such calm efficiency that he didn’t notice it, he felt that nobody cared whether he lived or died.
In his sketchbook he drew a clock, with hands over its eyes, and a huge mouth from which blood ran. The community worked by the clock: every piece of machinery was in place and doing its job, and the only result was that time passed and nothing happened. The peace was killing, but he realised that when he thought this, something violent and heart-wrenching was on its way. Yet even this couldn’t be guaranteed. You were in the hands of fate. What you expected was what you hoped for, a wish never to be granted except in such a back-handed fashion that it knocked you flat.
He paced up and down, from easel to door, from the bookcase to a small table in the corner with an electric kettle and cups on it, and paused at a shaving mirror nailed on the wall. His face looked more tormented than usual, and he could find no response except to fart and stroll across to the door and lift his cap from a hook, put it on, and resume walking up and down.
It was months since he’d seen Daphne Ritmeester, but feeling empty he had no desire to visit anybody. He wasn’t in love with her. He muttered that he didn’t even fall in love any more, and whatever he told himself, true or not, he believed at the time the words went uncontrollably through his head. I have a full life of work to get done, he hoped, plugging in the kettle for the sake of something to do. Love is a form of self-destruction, a kind of slow suicide, a full-time occupation that pulls you away from your central self — though I wouldn’t mind a bit of it right now, because it can be useful in hauling you clear when your middle starts to eat you up. Still, it’s a bitter sort of get-out, expensive and time-consuming.
He pondered how refreshing it would be to pack a tent and hide himself in some impenetrable wood or other. You can’t run away. Or can you? He felt in the grip of fluxes, fevers and frenzies, and to calm himself began composing a begging letter, maybe practising for when he was on his uppers again. The good thing about life was that nothing was certain, which was a thought to keep him going.
He threw his dip-pen at the door, then screwed up the paper and ate it. His heart wasn’t in it. Maybe he never would have to write such things again. The kettle boiled and he filled the pot, thinking to drink himself into a colander.