Dawley lived in the same village with Pat Shipley the district nurse, whose door he’d knocked at for a drink of water during his zigzag hitchhike after leaving autumnal Nottingham. Instead of searching John’s room he seemed to be searching himself, remembering that the only thing he didn’t do on that far-off Saturday afternoon was tip the table up before saying good-bye. Being the traditional thing, was it a mark of progress that he hadn’t done it, or merely a slip of his shattered mind?
He had wandered upstairs at Handley’s place looking for the toilet, and by chance opened the door of John’s room, seeing a bald-headed thin-lipped man of about forty, illuminated by a desk lamp because the blinds were drawn, sitting with earphones on and fingers tapping at a morse key. John wore a good suit, he noticed, and was shivering as if in a hard stage of malaria. He turned a panicky glare on Frank’s intrusion, and swivelled from the radio with a gun in his hand.
He saw him next when he came to get him out of Algeria. Only an insane-idealistic-socialistic-epileptic-Englishman, who weighed the problems of the world as clear and simple, could have done it, who imagined the earth as a battleground of good and evil — one of which would eventually reign forever. The good of the world was lost when John lifted the gun to his mouth as the cross-Channel steamer entered the welcoming arms of the breakwater at Dover.
In Algeria John had seen that the pursuit of equality brought nothing but death and suffering. He realised that almost anything was preferable to the annihilation or crippling of people.
No one doubted that he had been the unfortunate and tormented possessor of a finer organism than themselves. He was the person who could bear his calamities least, that rare being whose sensibility was in fact increased by them. Unable to put up with it any longer, he realised that the onset of further agony might make him callous, and therefore alter him to himself and those among whom he lived. He did not allow it to happen.
Dawley had gathered all this from long talks with him in Gibraltar. He thought John’s last letter must deal with it, a letter that he was soon to open before the assembled family, part of John’s final instructions to him. In the last few weeks he had often felt a need to read it, but would put it off for as long as possible, as John had said he should.
But whatever John proclaimed about the futility of violence, whether they were his dying words or not, Dawley was unable to wipe away the last few years of his existence in order to suddenly believe in them. Such sentiments had no connection with the realities of the earth — though they made him uneasy nevertheless, as if one day they might have some influence on the raw wound of his soul.
He’d tried to make things good with Nancy and their children, but when he’d walked out on her three years ago he hadn’t realised how final a move it had been. Maybe we never do, he thought, until the irrevocable steps of time cement the issue into something dead and gone forever. Nancy had tried to live in the community, but it hadn’t been possible. What he’d so thoughtlessly destroyed was not easily rebuilt. He couldn’t blame her for it, nor himself, either. If things turned out to be so irredeemable it only proved that he’d had good cause to make the decision in the first place.
Nancy was working as a conductress on the Nottingham buses, and he’d got a letter saying that she’d taken up with her old boyfriend, who was still single and now wanted to marry her. In effect, she asked if she could divorce him for his desertion of her. He should have been happy at her civilised proposal, but it depressed him, made him feel that the world was not as secure as it had been when his options were open. Yet he was strengthened by his closeness to Myra and Mark, an attachment which was now as firm as all the others he had made in his life.
Fatigued, he stretched his arms, and looked along John’s books. Among them was a Bible from which the New Testament had been ripped. A verse had been ringed by a dark soft-lead penciclass="underline" ‘And Solomon said, If he will shew himself a worthy man, there shall not be an hair of him fall to the earth: but if wickedness shall be found in him, he shall die.’
The impression was vivid and profound, and he stood unmoving, his soul blacked out painfully with peace. When his senses reopened he thought of death, and there was less agony in it than in the emptiness. Such ideas were not easy to resist, sitting in John’s studio. He recollected that John, in Algeria, at the point of embarkation on a black and turbulent night, had wanted to stay behind, perhaps because he wasn’t sure what his future would be. But Dawley fought with his remaining strength to get him down the hill and on to the boat, a struggle which put off only by a week John’s final bleak victory.
He sat in a vegetable state, mulling along the lines of circular thought, knowing it was no use searching John’s room and hoping to find anything unless he first searched his own heart.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Adam read to make certain there’d been no mistake. Having pulled a notebook from under Dawley’s bed, and made three ricketty piles on the floor, it was hard to see what all the fuss was for, because there was nothing subversive about these unhallowed slabs of prose.
Skimming the spidery open handwriting, he saw it might have been better if they’d been burned instead of stolen. Each story, sketch, paragraph and page of notes was signed by Shelley Jones, otherwise he’d have thought the books belonged to someone else. There were a few heavily marked quotations from some authority on guerrilla warfare, a clumsy sketch on how to lay explosives under railway sleepers, and one describing a silencer for a pistol, but mostly the writings were lewd, vivid, and humourless pornography that could never have been looked into by Maricarmen — or read by whoever had taken them from the trunk. He felt such awe at being the first to broach their covers that he broke into a goggle.
Richard stood on the step. He was tall and swart, with black curly hair, a year younger than his brother. ‘I’ve had no luck.’
Adam was red at the face. ‘I found the golden hoard, that’s why — the sacred mysteries, Shelley’s notebooks as I live and breathe! I don’t think we’ll get much out of them.’
‘So Dawley did it?’
‘Seems so. Can you see Dad anywhere?’
Richard bent his head to look. ‘Leaning on the front gate having a pleasant smoke. Shall I get him? I always feel guilty if I disturb an artist in his meditations!’
‘We’ll need somebody’s wisdom to sort this one out.’
‘His experience, anyway,’ Richard said, going down the steps. Adam opened another notebook. Four men were having a go at each other. On the next page, a group of women. It was abominable. How could a dedicated revolutionary indulge in such horny nonsense? Judging by the names they even belonged to the same family. Maybe Shelley had been preparing a long plain tome on the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity, believing so much in the harmony of people living together in peace and love that it was necessary to work out every possible permutation of sexual congress in order to see if any snags cropped up. What right had he, Adam, to judge his motives? Either he’d been amusing himself, or his mastabatory musings were simply another twist to his idealism.
The caravan boards creaked under Handley’s walk. ‘In Dawley’s bloody quarters, too. That’s awkward.’
‘I suppose he needed them to help with the writing of his book.’
‘He’d ask for ’em,’ said Handley, ‘not nick ’em’ — taking a ball of string from his pocket and giving it to Richard. ‘Tie ’em up and let’s get ’em out of here. Neatly though, or they’ll slop all over the place.’