‘Do it then,’ she screamed.
‘I can’t.’
‘Well, don’t blame me. You blame anybody but yourself.’
He wiped the paint off his hands with a turps rag, a gesture he knew would annoy her because it meant he didn’t expect to paint any more that day, and that it was her fault. ‘We’ve got seven kids,’ he said. ‘The eldest is twenty-five, yet we go on shouting like thirty year olds! Can’t we calm down a bit?’
‘You want old age? I’m still a young woman, as far as I’m concerned. You’ve got money but you hardly ever take me to London. Oh no, you go on your own, and God knows what you get up to.’
‘What the hell do you think?’
‘I’ve heard tales. There’s more than one poison-pen letter writer in this village. They go down to shop in the West End, and spot you up to your antics. They can’t wait to report back.’
‘I’ll kill the bastards!’ he said. ‘I’m absolutely innocent. You know how hard I work. I slave at it too much to take time off having affairs.’
‘You expect me to believe that? What would you do if I bloody well carried on?’
‘You want to know?’ he raved. ‘I’d kill him. And if he got away I’d search him out from the seven corners of the earth with a double-barrelled blunderbuss and blow his bollocks off one by one.’
‘If ever a man walked in the spitten-image of injustice, that man’s you.’
He relaxed, as if they’d reached the end of round one.
At night when they slept together they seemed to eat each other up in their dreams. The peaceful life of the community had failed to wean them from the attractions of a rough and tumble life. What they said they wanted was absolute order and calm, but they wouldn’t admit that what the consciousness craves is often what the subconscious doesn’t allow it to have. To get what they wanted meant settling the hash of their subconscious — and what self-respecting subconscious would ever allow that done to it?
‘Sit down,’ he said, approaching her. ‘I’ll make some more tea, just for the two of us, and put a good drop of Irish whiskey in.’
She sat. ‘Don’t touch me.’
‘I want you to be happy,’ he said tenderly.
‘You haven’t acted like it this last couple of years.’
He plugged in the hotplate, and reached for the bottle. ‘I thought you were happy here. I tried to create a paradise but it’s turned into a medieval slum. Apart from the house there’s two caravans, the garage, tool-sheds, coal-stores, three cars, a greenhouse, a wendy hut, two spare lavatories, and a leaking sauna-cabin. Talk about the back-to-backs of the affluent society. I sometimes think I’d be happier in a remote cottage with a bog outside and oil lamps hanging from the ceiling, with a plain wood stove that fills the kitchen with smoke every time you want a warm.’
‘It sounds marvellous,’ she said. ‘We’d have a garden though, and there’d be a wood where we’d go for kindling and bluebells and blackberries.’
‘You’re right,’ he said regretfully. ‘This community can’t work. Not for me, anyway. The trouble is I’ve got my family mixed up in it. If I was on my own I’d have more of a chance. But I’m too bound up with you and the kids to be on my own. And if I’ve got to choose between the family and the community I suppose I’d pick the family. You can’t beat it for the homely and profitable suffering it keeps you stuffed up with!’
While she reflected on this he washed two mugs at the sink, then poured a good flow of whiskey in each, and strong tea after it.
‘You’ve always wanted to be free of the family,’ she said. ‘You never stop hoping you’ll come back from Town one day and find we’ve been the victims of some madman with a machine-gun.’
‘I’m only human,’ he said calmly, putting the mugs down. ‘Of course I’ve often thought that. I’m honest: I admit it. But twice as many times I’ve told myself how much I love you. God knows, if anything happened to you or the kids I’d die of misery in a fortnight.’
‘You don’t know me,’ she jeered, ‘If you did you’d control yourself, and not say such things about wishing me and the kids dead. I’m not the hard woman you think I am. I may look it because you’ve made me that way, but I’m not. I can’t stand the way you’re always trying to kick me down.’
Of her many accusations, the one that he didn’t know her galled him most. It filled his brain with razor-blades. It brought out the worst in him, so that both of them were soon lost in the mists of spite — further from each other than ever.
‘When I want comfort,’ she said, walking around his table, a movement which made him nervous, ‘you don’t give it to me.’
‘How can I,’ he shouted, ‘while you’re ripping my guts out? You’re a shark. You want to bite people.’ He took a gulp of fortified tea and wallowed in false, lying counter-accusation, knowing it to be so but swinging out joyfully like an ape over the trees: ‘You want to eat people. So you’re worse than a shark because you’re a shark out of choice and not just because you’ve got to survive. You’re a killer shark, and I can’t live near it anymore.’
I must stop, he thought, at the sight of her face poised for retaliation. It seemed thinner in the midst of battle, but at the same time less lined and tired. I mustn’t give in to spite, he told himself, his heart suspended while the mechanics of self-preservation worked out a suitable reply in her breast. I must never give in to spite. I’ve got too much of it, like everything else. But leave spite out of it. I don’t want her to turn into a bitter cabbage with mad eyes and a slit mouth.
She spoke in a quiet voice. ‘You’d stand there forever, wouldn’t you? You’d leave me to rot and die before wondering how I was feeling.’
‘Drink your tea, love.’
‘You’re paralytic,’ she said, ‘paralysed by your own weakness.’
‘Old spirit-breaker.’ He laughed drily, sweating under his emptiness, picking up his brush and making a great letter X across the painting he’d so far done. ‘Does that make you happy? I’ll sacrifice that to you, because I know that’s what you want, old spirit-breaker!’
‘If that’s so,’ she smiled calmly, placated slightly by his Handley-like gesture of love, ‘your spirit isn’t up to much. But then, it never has been.’
‘Well,’ he went on, ‘you can break it there’s no denying. I’m human, even though I am an artist. But you can only do it as far as you are concerned. You can’t smash it so finally that no one can come up and pulverise it again in their particular way. That’s love, though. Your spirit can be knocked up a hundred times without it being forever. And if you do smash it, it would only mean I’d be shut of you. But maybe you’re only trying to get rid of me. Nobody can blame you for that. I’d be free of you as well, don’t forget!’
She listened to him going on. He was vile, and neglected her for his so-called art, but now and again if she prodded him hard enough in the right places she got him to talk, even if it was the worst sort of wordy flow that cut her in all the wrong places — though more truth came out than when they were sitting politely around the table with the others.
‘I’m a painter,’ he was saying, while she drank her tea. ‘How do you think I became a painter?’
‘To get away from me.’
‘To express all those pains I suffered and got no sympathy for. I hoped that the world would get the sympathy and understanding that I didn’t get.’
She laughed. ‘It’s these woolly epigrams I can’t stand. You look so pompous, like a parson who’s had to chop his pulpit up for firewood.’