She was pleased at hearing him call it a book for the first time. ‘I was reading George’s book this evening,’ she said, ‘and thought that perhaps his publisher would like to see yours when it’s finished. He’s got that sort of list. He likes revolutionary literature from young working-class men!’
‘Is that his name for it? And how many of us does he think there are? Anyway, it’s not a book yet. When I’ve finished you’ll have to tell me what you think. Make sure it’s all ship-shape and grammatical. I haven’t felt like a young working man for a long while, though I expect I could slot back into it if I had to.’
‘You won’t need to,’ she said. ‘All I want is for you to be happy.’
He craved a smoke, but knew she didn’t like it in the bedroom because of Mark. ‘If I stop living from day to day I might be able to see some distance ahead. Then I’ll know what I want to do, though finally I don’t know what happiness is. A necessary illusion, maybe.’
‘We’re unhappy so that we’ll know when we’re happy,’ she said, wondering whether he wasn’t too locked up in himself to ever give her anything at all.
He smiled, and kissed her. ‘We’ve got enough to eat, and we aren’t being bombed, so we ought to feel happy. But I can’t while such atrocities are going on in the world. I’m happy now and again though, in spite of myself. Life would be insupportable otherwise. I sometimes think: to hell with the world! Why should it make me miserable? But that’s weakness. I’m so weak I can’t stand my own bloody weakness.’
‘That might turn out to be your strength,’ she said, pushing the clothes back so that she could see his body. It seemed ridiculous that only their heads were visible, as if they were some form of transmuted life, not whole and to be seen even by each other when making love. He lay facing her, and she stroked his flattened stomach. ‘Why do you worry about everything?’
His gloomy preoccupations were an area in which she seemed powerless to help, and she wanted to cure him, bring his whole person back to herself and Mark. ‘It’s more than mere worry,’ he said. ‘I feel pity and fear and hope for Mark, and for you, and so can’t help extending it to everybody else. While they are threatened, you two are threatened, and I can’t stand that.’
She lay on her back, her head turned to him, kissing the wrist of the hand that touched her short dark hair where it met the pillow. ‘We have to look after ourselves, then do what we can for others. It’s all part of the human pattern.’
Was there any point in arguing? If he agreed they might make love sooner. Now that he was no longer in danger he was becoming civilised. Her hand roamed down his stomach until his penis became alive. When he kissed her the rest of the world vanished. ‘This is happiness,’ he said, thinking that when he loved he was most at rest.
Her breasts pressed into him: ‘I want another baby.’
They were both so ready that he was in her without guidance. There was no greater happiness, at the moment.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
It nagged at him all night long, invaded his dreams through the sort of sleep that gave no rest. Towards dawn Enid said that if he didn’t stop scraping around like a rat in a trap he could go off to his own bed in the studio. Finally, he slept a couple of hours, though the gnawing fact of getting John’s lethal pistol under lock and key woke him sharply at eight.
In his dressing gown, and without that vital first swig of coffee, he went on to the landing and up the stairs. The unreal den of his dead brother’s room made the world real again. Its creation was an act of lunacy that pulled him with a soiled almost sexual immediacy back down the years and on to the landscape of childhood. Not that life in the small Staffordshire town had been all sunshine and lollipops. He spat in the firegrate: far bloody from it. His mother was forty when he was born, his father fifty, and they’d died within a year of each other when he was twenty-five, having given him the benefit of their dry hearts if nothing else.
His father, a small-time builder, had gone bankrupt just in time to retire, a hard old man who’d forced him out to work as soon as it was legal. The word ‘legal’ had been his ever-loving word: it was legal to do that, or it wasn’t legal. He used it so often he’d stoop to any illegality he could get away with — a bald-headed man of middle height with grey eyes so piercing that people never took him seriously.
When Handley went to work at fourteen he had no time for his father. He didn’t hate him. He just wanted to get out of his way, remembering him as a miserable creature, though it was no good feeling sorry for him, because while you did he’d kick you so hard you wouldn’t get up for ten minutes. Handley slipped out one day and didn’t see him tell the lid was fastened on his coffin. His parents hadn’t even loved each other, so how could they have been expected to love their children?
He had been particularly unobservant of his parents because they were so hard on him, which might explain why he was able to jettison their influence so painlessly. Later, the emptiness he found in rooting around the distant corners of his anguished mind drove him to painting — not in an attempt to discover himself, but to create a world in which it wasn’t necessary to do so.
He sat on the swivel chair by the radio table, and suddenly felt afraid of this replica-room and the touchingly placed paraphernalia that had belonged to John who had never lived in it. John had burned down his real room in the Lincolnshire house, having meant it should no longer exist after he’d set off for Algeria. His suicide dated from that mad act — unable to live anywhere but in the room he could no longer go back to. So why perpetuate his memory with this homely shrine? Don’t we trust ourselves to remember him? By keeping the room intact he was celebrating death, not John, because he distrusted his loving memories of him.
He walked to the window. He opened the curtains. Across the road, between two houses, were emerald meadows, and a glinting sluggish stream. John wouldn’t have liked such scenery. He loved the wolds of Lincolnshire.
No one had loved him more than Handley. He was his one and only elder brother, that last real line that connected him to far-off Staffordshire. This mocked-up signals cabin, this faked hermit’s cave, this phoney remembrance centre, had nothing to do with it. When you created your own ghosts there was little you could do to get rid of them.
He shook his head. The cigarette tasted foul before coffee and bread-and-butter. By the radio he lifted trays of nails and screws, a spirit-level and calipers, plumb-line and a pedometer, though John hardly ever walked, depth-gauge and spanners — his brother’s beloved gear without which life would have been even emptier. Man must have his tools, his toys of reality, aids to tame the world yet keep it at a distance, and not get too enmeshed in its despondencies.
The cigar-box lid was held down by small tacks. From the radio-operator’s odds and ends on the desk he took a one-bladed pen-knife, and forced it upen. He swung the powerful lamp to it. There was nothing inside, and no amount of light could fill it. He felt a fool before turning angry. It was hard to move. He was rabid. The sweat came, as he let the lid fall. With a gun loose, the community was a death-trap.
He switched off the lamp, went over and closed the curtains. A shade of day still came in, light which didn’t seem safe any longer. He sat on the bed and wondered what to do. His nature was to exaggerate everything, scare himself with the possibilities of disaster. The others thought that his bark was worse than his bite, and that he could never hold back what was on his mind, so for the moment he would say nothing, and hope to get some advantage from not letting Cuthbert know he’d found out about the gun.