He crossed the street and nearly got knocked over by a taxi. The driver cursed. Handley thought of shouting back, but why bother? He made his way to the car in Hanover Square. With Teddy’s cheque in his pocket he could go back to the bosom of his community without a soul being any the wiser.
Two more parking fines had been attached to the windscreen by a rotten little Hitlerite traffic warden, and it was more in sorrow than in anger that he set the car moving up the street, and once again flipped on the wipers so that they went off like a pair of birds in freedom, narrowly missing a Rolls-Royce behind.
It was the last real carefree day he could remember.
CHAPTER THREE
Cuthbert came downstairs in his green-and-white striped pyjamas, switching on lights at every turn. If there was one thing the Handleys loved it was light, and in this at any rate he was no exception to his father.
Formerly, in the Lincolnshire house — called The Burrow when they were destitute, and The Gallery after the old man had struck it rich — bulbs had burned all the time, as if they lived close to an immense inexhaustible powerhouse of a dam. But the family hadn’t made much of an impression on Myra’s place in the south Midlands, where they had come to live after the Gallery had been burned to the ground by mad Uncle John. They seemed subdued by a subtle combination of middle-class economy and bourgeois abundance.
The décor, the pictures, the smell, even the creak of stairs underfoot made Cuthbert see how much of a trap the freedom-loving Handley family had fallen into by accepting the bonds of this puerile community of twenty souls. Roundabout the house Myra had kept the lawns smooth, the trees pruned and bushes trimmed, and therefore safe against free-booting Handleys who had been so free they had finally imprisoned themselves in the middle of it. The shining motor-mower ready for instant action, primed and fuelled in its centrally-heated garage, was a threat to everyone, and from his stance by the kitchen door Cuthbert pictured rose bushes and fruit trees surrounding and enlacing the house, with their aroma of damp tea leaves and delicately rotting bark, clad with ivy and wistaria gently crushing bricks and mortar to death.
He felt hunger, but no appetite. If voracity is the spice of life, eat on. He tried to smile, but failed, so cut bread and cheese, and came back into the living room. Drummed out of theological college, he’d been glad of this refuge which he now despised. The spine and purpose had gone from his life, and he’d been near to doing away with himself, not because the dismissal had made him particularly unhappy (that was all over and put behind) but because it was a situation he’d been unable to control.
Thoughts of suicide had been tempered by curiosity at the mechanism of this community to which the others imagined he loyally belonged. He was amused at the intensity with which they worried about the world. Such concern seemed merely the premature onset of middle age. People only form this kind of togetherness out of fear, as if they never had father or mother to kick all that crap out of them.
He would appear as a devoted member of the community, though to cultivate the necessary subterfuge — which shouldn’t be hard after three years of trying to become a priest — would mean speaking as little as possible, because while you talk you cannot think, and he preferred to indulge in the fruitlessness of his secret thoughts. There was wisdom in silence, acquiescence to one’s innermost desires. If you smiled, everyone trusted you. Open your mouth, and you betray yourself. Speech is thought that kills itself as soon as it races aloud from between the lips.
He looked in the mirror, swilling down Nescafé between bread and cheese. The framed prints of early nineteenth-century huntsmen floundering in ditches seemed to have enticed Handley the Lincolnshire poacher to an early spiritual death. An artist did not need a settled base in which to work, so his father should have loaded tools and easels into the Rambler and taken to the road (after installing his family, as was only right, in some opulent bungalow), rather than accept this frigid nullity of communal life.
Looking round the white-walled room, it was hard to imagine a naked man with a penis in full bloom chasing a bare woman between plush chairs, and then going upstairs to rampage in one of the cool, impeccable bedrooms. You fucked quietly in this house, or not at all, didn’t even grunt between the sheets, which was why he supposed Dawley had installed himself like General Montgomery in one of the caravans to write his memoirs.
Two months ago he had no notion of staying long in his father’s establishment. The prodigal son had never been part of his make-up, and certainly no fatted bullock had been roasted on his tentative return. His life had cost little in the way of straight cash, for like all Handley’s children, he was a child of charity, the eternally promising youth of scholarship and patronage.
The nearest he came to a rebellion at school was one winter afternoon when he decided that if he heard another word about King Arthur and his screwy knights he’d go off his head. This state had been lately repeated at theological college when he had found himself beginning to accept the principles of Christianity that had been panned at him during the last three years. He dreaded losing his sacred assets of cunning and hypocrisy.
Over the affair of King Arthur he had throttled his indignation because it only increased his interior scepticism, but the more recent threat to his lack of faith he took so seriously that he entered into months of lying, cheating, perjury and screwing. He hadn’t gone into precise details of his expulsion with Handley, yet saw them chuffing into their beers over it one jovial night, in which case the simile of the return of the prodigal might have some relevance after all, and he knew Handley in his heart wanted nothing more deeply than this.
Under the livid strip-lighting he sliced more black rye and Camembert. During the day he could eat nothing, so throughout the night he was unable to overcome his insomnia while the wolf-rat of hunger pranced around in his stomach. At college he slung a loose cloth bag over the toprail of his bed so that when the famishings began he could dip in for biscuits and corned beef, slab cake and fruit — all the goodies he remembered wanting in childhood but hardly ever getting. In his hasty departure this precious piece of equipment had been left behind, so by night he turned into a shoeless marauder and made a sardonic trek for the icebox.
Any change made him bitter, especially one over which he’d had no control. Yet the more he thought of it the less could he remember any over which he had been in charge. This made him realise that his bitterness was misplaced, a spectacle which awed him slightly.
Even the acts which led to these alterations, carried out with much forethought, had somehow happened against his will — a will that was the most threatening part of him because he had never been united with it. Whenever he did something, he wondered why he had done it, and knew that this was not the best way to order your existence. His will was irresolute, disobedient and pernicious, and whatever happened in his life had never been connected to it.
Being without will, almost without desire, momentous events happened to you, but he was too busy eating at the overlit kitchen table to consider them now. It was as if matters of volition and decision were a thing of the past. Having no will created self-regard, led him to suppose that if it had perished in him then it must also be on its way out for the rest of the world. Whether it were or not didn’t concern him, for he felt in no way influenced by it.
The fact that he was without will did not mean that he could be manipulated by those who possessed it. Quite the opposite. He felt safe from the world, more his own master than if he were clutched by a rabid will-to-power. And under cover of your own pale lack of will what could not be perpetrated against friends and enemies alike?