Life with Handley had been a vivid dream that had suddenly lifted and revealed a state of painful chaos. Her hands trembled, yet the disarray brought fabulous compensations, and the confusion give her a base of euphoria not felt since the age of sixteen. It was as if seven children and Handley had never existed. Life in its changing cycles, its mysterious circles, was arbitrary in its miracles. She could have gone on getting older, taking the not unfruitful road to middle and old age, but she had changed because her ordinary heart was not so null as circumstances had continuously and relentlessly given out.
She pushed her hair back, and wiped a tear with one of the napkins. Love was the only thing that gave freedom. With love you didn’t care any more, and so felt ready for any kind of freedom that love might suggest. Dean came in and set loaves of bread along the table. He smiled at her, too considerate to speak what others might hear, but he laid the bread down and came to her where they couldn’t be seen. ‘I love you,’ he whispered, kissing her. ‘Don’t forget to think again about what I asked you.’
She gripped his hand. ‘Are you sure?’
His lips pursed, in pain and youthful anger. ‘It’s got to happen, you know it has. Don’t wait too long.’
Enid felt his strong young arms around her and, in spite of the rather hard grip, sensed infinite sweet tenderness in them. The sensation was strange for, instead of her seeming to embrace him like the youth he was, it felt as if she were a small girl being fondled by someone twice her size and age. This impression almost caused her to swoon, so that it was impossible to distrust it.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Rain descended, dark and heavy, as it often does in war at the end of the day, when the guns have stopped firing, and clouds relax after the awful tension of destruction. Handley stood at the window and relished his thought, a will-o’-the-wisp banality to which rainfall gave the piss of death — he grinned, turning to sit down when the others came in. Richard had unchained Eric Bloodaxe at dusk and the dog crouched gratefully in a new world of warmth and noise and plenty by Enid’s chair. The company was now fourteen, pleasing to whoever felt superstitious.
The meal of cold meat and smoked fish and black bread and salad and sundry wines had gone on for nearly an hour, very little said because the day had made them wolfishly hungry. A cold chicken leg kept Eric quiet. Maricarmen sat by Cuthbert, as if he were the only one in the community on whom she could depend for protection. He put a comforting hand on her shoulder. She didn’t look up, but he knew she needed his warmth, for the flesh was cold to the touch through her blouse. He felt her tremble, as if life were coming back in her, which might be necessary, judging by her pale and stony face.
Handley noticed that both she and Cuthbert ate with one hand each, the other two joined under the table. In fact most of the company seemed similarly afflicted, being split more into couples than usual — except for Handley and Enid, who occasionally looked emptily at each other down the whole length of the table. Dean sat at her left side, he noted, still with that sly and satisfied look on his gullish face, which stayed there even while he butchered a loaf of bread.
Enid had an aura of happiness about her, as if she wanted to smile but daren’t risk it in case it chased the happiness away. Or she was afraid someone might see it and wonder why? She wanted to hold Dean’s hand, and it was plain a mile off that Dean wanted to touch her, for a vacuous self-important grin gave him away. But they didn’t make contact, and this deliciously thwarted desire increased the air of glowing regard between them. Cuthbert felt sorry for them both — for the life sentence, he thought, that seemed in store for them.
Mandy and Ralph were together, and so were Catalina and Richard, and Maria and Adam. Myra was half-way along the table, and Dawley who was next to her had the blue envelope of John’s letter conspicuously by his plate. Cuthbert wondered if he had read it already, he looked so wise and smug, or whether his hunched preoccupied pose of a misplaced Chelsea pensioner was fast becoming his normal burnt-out state. You couldn’t tell with a man like that, who might be a vegetable one day, and a panther-like murderer the next. He gave an impression of great strength, an immense force that, if it suddenly lost its moral reasoning, could pull him so deeply under that he’d never surface again. Perhaps he didn’t have a thought in his head nine-tenths of the time, though Cuthbert readily admitted that the thoughts he did have might conceivably support the dead nine-tenths of him buoyantly enough.
The wind outside grew to such strength that Eric Blood-axe growled at phantoms thrown by it round the yard. You didn’t know how loose the windows were till the bang of the wind got up, Handley mused. The four young children of the community were in bed, and he hoped the racket wouldn’t stop them getting a good sound rest. When not on duty at the guns during the war he’d slept through such salvoes it was a wonder the people in his dreams had any eardrums left. Sleep was the source of all strength, he told himself, and children needed it like meat or calcium. He nodded to Dawley while standing to reach for the wine: ‘You’d better read that letter, and get it over with.’
Richard lifted a tape-machine from behind the chair, and set it on the table. ‘We chose a stormy night right enough.’
‘You’ll hear me just the same,’ Dawley said, taking a clean knife and opening the envelope. He spread the sheets of paper, and began:
‘Queen’s Hotel, Gibraltar. By the time Dawley reads this letter I’ll be speaking from the dead. I imagine your smiles when I say this. Is he mad? you’ll ask. Is he really off at last? No, you aren’t so ordinary that you will describe me with such words. They say there are no forests in Arabia Deserta, but why are there so many trees in me? I am not mad, but the trees are getting thicker and closer together, so I’ll have to die before they stifle me.
‘I can picture the scene, and feel I’m sitting at the same long table. Accept me back for a while so that I can tell you my thoughts. Maricarmen will be there, because Frank told me what Shelley had told him. It’s natural she should visit you, if only to confirm that Dawley is not to be blamed for Shelley’s death. The God of Revolution is an insatiable and jealous God, and drew them both equally into his savage mouth, and the mysterious ways that He moves in are not for anyone to question.
‘I’m speaking to you from the dead, so listen to what I say. Do you know where the land of the dead is? Nor do I, though I am there already. But I’ve had the final experience that you haven’t yet come to.
‘I am able to go back and forward in time and space, between life and death. I’m sitting in this austere hotel room in Gibraltar. Dark clouds have hung over the Rock all day, and no doubt still do, which makes it as dull and chill as England — in spite of the smell of Spain. I also am with you one English summer’s evening several months from now, having achieved the difficult state of being in two places at once, and at different times. I’m with you in life while this is being read. And I’m resting at a distance from you, in my own death. The light shines in both places. I am a man of faith. I love God, and He loves me in spite of everything. We respect each other.
‘I’ve been conscious of this twofold fundamental split all my life. When I was tormented in Singapore twenty years ago I encouraged and developed it so as not to go under from suffering and pain. I survived when others perished. God did not love them enough to send them mad. Even then this ability to create a grand canyon out of the psyche in order to survive wasn’t new to me. I used it early in life when my father bullied and beat me. You remember what a foul temper he had, Albert? I protected you from him once and he hit me on the head with an iron poker that drew blood. But we combined forces, and that was the last time he was ever violent.