A Tree on Fire Read Free

and wife, Handley lean, sardonic and domineering; Myra cool, dark-haired, attentive to her baby – a couple who, being so hard to place and travelling in such a car, were thought by those who served them to have inherited vast amounts of money they could never have deserved. ‘Do not define yourself. Other people can do that,’ she thought, holding Mark high on her shoulder for his glass-eyed paradisal belch.
    On the road again, gliding between frosty March fields to the almost silent sewing-machine engine, Myra thanked him for coming all the way down from Lincolnshire to meet her.
    â€˜Let’s say it’s in memory of Frank, and at the same time to show hope that he’ll come back from Algeria. I only feel really generous when I’m walking in the rain to tell you the truth, not on a frosty day like this. I’d give all I’ve got, then, including the coat off my back. The rain makes me feel good, even when I start sneezing. It’s only when the sun comes out and I’ve got pneumonia that I feel foul. I haven’t done much in the last fortnight, so I came down to London for a break. I don’t paint so easily as I used to. Success is a funny thing: can eat your guts out. But the secret of beating such an enemy is not to regard it as success, to keep on thinking of yourself as an exiled, unemployed nobody – which doesn’t need much effort from me – though I suppose I was a bit brash and unnerved by it at first, as Frank no doubt told you. I’ve been so broody lately, that Enid was glad to get rid of me. It’s rough on her these days, though. In the autumn I’m hoping to go to Russia for a month if nothing goes wrong with my house and brood. Teddy Greensleaves, the man who owns the gallery, doesn’t want me to. Not that I’m finally decided about it. Says they’ll turn me into the tool of international communism – or some such thing – but I said it would take more than Russia to do that. I’m nobody’s tool, anyway, and certainly not his. I’m an artist, which means that nobody can tell me what to do. If they advise me to do the opposite of what they want me to do in the hope that I’ll go against them and so do the right thing they’ll still be disappointed because they can’t dream just how subtle and independent I can be.’
    He roared his car along an empty hundred-yard stretch of dual carriageway, heading for the next narrow bottleneck of the woods. ‘I’ll drive to Russia if I go, through Berlin and Warsaw, strap my canvases to the roof, get a bit of work done while I’m there. Might paint a couple of tractors if they stuff me with caviare.’
    Myra listened: the subtleties of a rogue-elephant flattering himself that he had enemies. He had. They’ll get him, she thought, by making him continue to the blind end the role they had forced him into. Or maybe they wouldn’t. Frank hadn’t been able to make him out – though that needn’t mean much, since they’d been friends for such a short time.
    â€˜What are you going to do with a baby and without Frank?’ he asked.
    â€˜Get home,’ she smiled. ‘And ponder things for a while.’
    An AA man acknowledged his car, and he gave the clenched fist salute. ‘I was going to say and I talked it over with Enid, that if you’d like to come up to Lincolnshire and muck in with my mob, you’re welcome. I’m having an extension built on, and I’ve got two big caravans in the garden. You’ll find it friendly. Maybe Frank told you: we’re a bit rough, but don’t let that put you off. There are seven kids, a bulldog, six tom-cats and two au pair girls (one of them pregnant already) so you and the baby will be well looked after, fixed up in a room like the Ritz. The air’s good, walks lovely, and people say good-morning again now that I’ve stopped tapping them and stealing their