A Tree on Fire (30 page)

The
raita
fledged up its notes as if scattering feathers into the air, followed by drumbeats set on the impossible job of chasing them, and dragging them back to earth. The white-faced man held the snake, limp and pliable, not yet dead, gripped it with two hands near the neck.

A groan broke from everyone. With eyes closed, he was biting the snake at the neck, ripping into its flesh. The music stopped, the youth turned away, but the old man looked on, shaking as if ready to fall, but his face gentle and smiling at the victory helped by the exertions of his music. The snake-head was in his mouth, its body thrashing helplessly while his knife-teeth tore at it. As he bit on the snake the wound in Frank's arm burst into excruciating pain, the same ache as before only increased to such a pitch that he roared out. The wound burned, the air grew black, but he fought for consciousness. At his cry, other men shouted as if they too had old wounds that came back to life at the sight of the snake eaten in its final convulsions of life.

He forced himself to the horror, dying with the snake yet killing it himself, legs shaking, jaws locked. The man was swallowing pieces of the snake, eating it alive. Where had they come from, this sect from the bowels of the white and livid earth? His eyes were closed, stomach expanding under his rags, falling in, pushing out again, an unleashed madness devouring the earth's own snakes.

There was a movement behind, two newcomers approaching the outer fringe of the audience. They had been watching for some time, and one of them broke through with a revolver lifted, and Frank saw Mokhtar fire shot after shot into the body of the man who was eating the snake. He fell, writhing and spitting, flesh and blood pouring from his mouth and wounds. Mokhtar shouted at the others, a wild rational rage in his words, and they began to move. The dusk was blood red, colouring the wilderness all around as they attended to water and fires. The air before Frank went black. His eyes were pressed into his head, and he fell to the earth, raving in his fever that had returned with devastating fire.

Soil closed around him. The sun vanished, taking away consciousness, and all pictures out of his mind. He burned in the grey ash-bed of the night, he crawled towards water to escape the cares of the world, using the last remnants of mole-like strength after he fell. Mokhtar and Idris dragged him to a tent. Opening his eyes, he saw nothing. They closed, driven by fear into beneficient blackness.

He was moved with the caravan to the nearest village, the turbulent camelback journey distorting his black sleep. Lemon-rind was rubbed round his mouth, and he fought eyeless against water dripping over his teeth. He was tied on, a blanket over him, where he would drink his own sweat, rave and freeze. The village was by a spring in the mountains, with tree groves nearby, and a wall of cliff banking him off against the north.

Part Three

Chapter Twenty-one

His impulse was to get out of Lincolnshire, break camp and flee like some nomad chief who feels the approach of an almighty force that will sweep him away. To lose such a painting was a disaster, the thieving of his life's soul, a base robbery of his best work that barred a desperate groping to achieve something in life.

He walked up and down all night, in his studio and then around the house. A trip to London always brought bad luck, stirred the cauldron of fate, cut all guidelines and distorted his compass-bearings. And yet, he decided, it wasn't the time to flee, for he slowly realised with the coming of dawn that whenever he thought about abandoning everything he was on the point of solving whatever bothered him. A revelation was at hand. Standing far down under his studio window, by the old tree which leaned so close that it was continually lopped to give more light, he looked over the fence and across the field, towards the wood where, a fortnight ago, he had seen someone sniping him with field-glasses. It was such a facile explanation to all his troubles that it must be true. He lit another cigar. London hadn't been entirely unlucky, merely confusing. He'd been in love with her for longer than he'd imagined, but their lovemaking only emphasised the unholy fact that she felt nothing comparable for him and never could, because she still hankered after Frank Dawley who had vanished months ago into Algeria on a bout of misguided and cranky idealism. If I leave Lincolnshire where do I go, with a wife and seven children, a dog, two cars and two caravans, and a brace of
au pair
girls? You don't often hear of a flat to let in London with a car-park attached. He looked up at the stars for some time, before realising there weren't any, I'm too old for baling out. Forty-three is the pineapple age, sweet and upright. Yet maybe I'd get young again if I blew all this up. The bourgeois trap is a long one, a tunnel without end, a burrow. You went into it though, and forgot your dynamite-Nobody lured you. I'm not trying to get out. I'm leaving nobody. I'm not that sort. I'm not at the end of my tether. But I don't have ideals to help me off the hook and as an excuse to bolt.

A long tartan dressing-gown was drawn tightly around him, each hand lost in large sleeve folds and resting on the kitchen table. He was perfectly still, and when Enid entered she thought he was sleeping in that position. But his light-brown eyes were open, gazing at empty air. Water rattled in the kettle. ‘Haven't you slept?'

He didn't look round. ‘Why do I only crave what I've lost? A man should want more out of his life than that.'

‘What else is there though, except to want what you haven't got?'

‘I want both,' he said, smiling faintly to reflect the ice-old bitterness. ‘What you haven't yet got is what you lost. They're the same thing, let's face it. God forgive me for getting all mystical, but when I look at those fields near the coast after a day of rain in the summer, and when it's beginning to clear up about seven, and they go all soft and distinct under the sun reddening through cloud – then I begin to want what I haven't yet got, and realise it's something that I lost in the days when I was half-conscious and didn't know I had anything to lose. In those days, I was king of myself and knew exactly what I wanted, which turned out to be this. I wish it weren't true that I had everything a person is supposed to want, that I wasn't in a position a left-handed person would give his left arm to be in. Even though I know I've got such a lot more work to do, I know that my life and all I'll damn well do is a failure. If I didn't have this lump of cold water always in my stomach maybe I'd never do these paintings that make me feel such a failure.'

Whenever he was in this rare mood of self-questioning and self-pity she felt full of love towards him. Yet at the same time she was afraid, knowing from experience that it was inevitably followed by a terrible frenetic bust-up. ‘You've always known your work is good, or you wouldn't have done it.'

He took the coffee-grinder from her, turned the handle slowly. ‘Good, bad, what difference does it make? It doesn't rip the despair out of my guts.'

‘You're a successful artist,' she said, knowing that he sometimes liked to hear her say this.

‘There's no such thing. You can be a successful shopkeeper or football player or film-maker or critic, but you can never be a successful artist. As soon as you succeed you fail.'

She made the coffee, ran a skin of butter over some bread. He wolfed it, famished after no sleep. ‘Something must have got under your skin in London,' she said.

‘I bumped into Russell Jones.'

‘So that was it. I wondered how you'd hurt your hand. You were stupid enough to hit him!'

‘Even my own wife doesn't know how noble I am, so I'm bound to cut my throat one day. I was going to hit him, it's true. But I resisted, hit the wall instead. There are some people you just can't crack open. He was terrified, the little worm, and that was enough for me. I just wanted to see whether he was human after all. There's a successful man for you. They get terrified at the wrong things.'

‘And you're so nervous you won't even call the police to find out who stole your picture.'

‘I'll get it back without that.'

She knew it was something worse than losing a picture, which would bring out his rage, but not this hopeless despair. ‘Did you see this Myra, in London?'

‘Frank Dawley's woman? I bumped into her at a party, had dinner with her and Greensleaves the night before last. I asked her to come back here and stay with us for a few days but she wouldn't.'

‘A pity. We could do with a bit of company. I get fed up, seeing nobody week after week. We don't even have to make ends meet any more. That at least took my mind off it.'

‘If we don't get that picture back we might have to struggle again soon enough. I have a pretty good idea who did the job, but I'm not saying yet.'

The
au pair
girls shuffled in, sluttish and dreamily beautiful, sat down and waited for Enid to serve them coffee. He leaned back and laughed. ‘I had a letter last week from somebody who asked me what was wrong with the world, so I wrote back and said what do you think I am, a writer? If I could tell them that I wouldn't be painting. And if I knew what was wrong with the world I'd know what was wrong with myself, and if I knew that I'd know how to put both right.' He had that look of a short-sighted man whenever he sat at the table trying to clarify his thoughts. At the moment they eluded him, not because he wasn't capable of clarity but because he was tired. Clarity only came as inspiration, unasked and unexpected, as a pleasure when it fitted into a scheme and enabled him to build some huge edifice beamed through with its light.

The girls went upstairs and plugged in the vacuum-cleaners, motor-noise whirring and shaking through the house. Mandy came in wearing her dressing-gown, sleepy and petulant, which made her face chubbier and pale as wax. She sat at the table as if never intending to leave it. ‘It's about time you were down,' Handley said.

‘Do you expect me to stay in bed when those vacuum-cleaners are going like pneumatic drills outside my door? You only got that sort out of pure bloody spite.'

‘Your eyes will look like three-coloured chrysanthemums if you talk to me like that,' he said, bending close. ‘There are only two things that will get you from that stinking bed of a morning. One's noise, and the other's hunger. You could live off your puppy-fat for a week, so noise is the only hope. You wouldn't think so though to see the fat little chuff scoffing away.'

‘What can you expect?' she said. ‘I'm pregnant.'

Handley looked horrified, while Enid stayed calmly at the sink. When crisis or bad news broke, his feeling and expression matched perfectly, which was the one time he could guarantee that it would. ‘Again?' he said. ‘I hope you aren't playing any more tricks.'

‘It's only the second time,' she said. ‘And I'm nineteen, anyway.'

‘Oh,' he said. ‘Nineteen. It's not the modern generation that's at fault. They can't be that bad. It's just my daughter. I suppose it was that picture-stealing vampire called Ralph again?'

‘It wasn't his the first time.'

‘I'm reeling,' he said. ‘Don't tell me any more. You said you wanted to marry that apostle of spineless determination, remember, last year?' He looked into the impenetrability of her pretty face. ‘Who the hell was it, then, eh? Tell me that. Oh, what the hell do I want to know for? It doesn't matter.'

She stood up and brushed her wide-flounced housecoat by him, head in the air, which in any case came to below his chin, and walked up to the sink to empty her coffee slops before refilling the cup. ‘I don't suppose it does interest you. But if you want to know who it was the first time, it was that friend you brought here early last year, when there was deep snow everywhere.'

Uncle John walked in, shaved and fully dressed, wearing his best dark suit with small golden links showing below the cuffs. Handley greeted him: ‘I'm glad there's one good soul in the house who isn't hellbent on doing me evil.'

‘You exaggerate, Albert. But it's a pity we have to wait for the millennium to arrive before we learn to live amicably together. Isn't it, Mandy?' Enid plugged open a tin of fruit-juice and set it before him with a dish of cornflakes and a jug of cream. She then turned to the stove to fry egg and sausages, because he was the only one in the house who wanted the full gamut of breakfast – after his prison camp experiences. ‘Why don't you tell him Mandy?' John said. ‘He burst into my room first – looking for the toilet. I scared him away at gun-point. Then I suspect he found it, and as I came out to see what was happening in the hall, you were talking to him – and pulled him into your room, where he stayed about ten minutes. That, I suppose, was enough.' He spooned up his cornflakes. ‘Wasn't it?'

‘You're the only person I can stand in this house, Uncle John, but you see too much,' she said, disgruntled at not being able to tell her own story.

Albert sat as if sand were being poured down his back. ‘Frank Dawley?'

‘I didn't even know his name. He left me three pounds ten.'

‘You're lying,' he said, a weird smile, hands shaking.

She stood up, afraid of him. ‘I wasn't pregnant then, but I was when he left. Poor Ralph got the blame.'

‘It couldn't have been Frank,' he said.

‘Albert!' Enid shouted, the loaded frying-pan half towards the table. ‘Sit down. Don't touch her.' With her free hand she brought a heavy crash against Mandy's cheek. ‘Get out, you.'

‘My best friend!' Handley moaned. ‘My best bloody friend does such a thing!'

‘At that time,' Enid said, ‘he was only a stray boozing companion you'd picked up.'

‘I saw him,' Mandy sobbed, ‘and knew he was a man. I'll never forget him. Why did he have to go off like that and never want to see me again?' John ate his eggs and sausages in amiable silence with himself, as if in a transport cafe with a wild fight going on. But he absorbed each painful word stinging his heart, the tears bleeding into him.