A Tree on Fire Read Free Page A

rabbits and cabbages. You won’t even see me from one weekend to another, because though I complain, I’m working all the time for my next show. I’ll send one of the lads to fetch you if you like.’
    â€˜After a fortnight at home,’ she said, ‘I might feel like a change.’ She couldn’t force herself to say much, though her mind was full. A bomb had fallen on her life, and the pieces hadn’t yet come together. Handley, for all his affluence, was rooted in the earth, a tree that died and flowered frequently but never changed colour or character, and she thought he wouldn’t understand the recent fragmentation she had undergone. Yet being an artist perhaps he would, though she still couldn’t begin to tell him until she could with absolute clarity begin to tell herself. Maybe the baby had completed the powerful outspreading flower of the explosion. Life before he was born seemed purifyingly simple, but now she was not only geared to her own unanswerable complexities, but also to Mark’s creature-like timetable wants that occupied her till midnight and claimed her again at six in the morning. His darkening hair and Dawley-blue eyes kept her body and soul separate from each other because they dominated both. He was her life and suicide, the great divider and conqueror that would not allow her to use the fragments of her past life in order to construct a future. With husband dead and lover missing he warmed her, an organism fully alive but not yet conscious, eyes to see and lungs to shout with, the facility to eat, excrete, inexorably grow yet everyday seem exactly the same. She was stunned by this ruthless parcel of give-and-take that nature had put into her arms. She could now understand how certain natives of the South Seas had never thought to connect childbirth with sexual intercourse, whereas before such an idea had seemed hilarious.
    The integuments of passing landscape drifted by: layers of brown field and lead-green wood, cottages smoking like old men, a countryside at rest as if it had never worked to deserve it, peaceful, apathetic and full of beauty. The sky was clouding, as if they were driving towards rain, a softening watery grey that made the green grass picturesquely livid by the roadside, a piebald emerald covering the pre-Raphaelite soul of England. She existed in it, felt the cool grass-air on her cheek, merely by looking at it, still familiar after her years in the country with George.
    â€˜I expect you’re glad to get back,’ Handley said, ‘orange-juice and cheap milk.’
    â€˜There’s always some reason to come back,’ she answered, ‘usually unimportant. I need to put my house in order – literally.’
    â€˜Then what?’
    â€˜I don’t know. But I shall.’
    â€˜Come up to us for a while. There’s nothing like violent change to shake perspective into place. Not that I’m suggesting our place is violent. I hate violence because there’s so much in me. I love an ordered life – never having had one. I used to think that once I got money I’d achieve this peace that pisseth out understanding, but no such luck. My daughter Mandy banged at my studio door the other day. She’s seventeen: “Dad, can I have a car?” When I looked at her as if my eyes were hand-grenades she pouted and said: “Only a Mini.” I tried to throw her out, but she threw a fit and tipped paint on a big job I’d been working on for weeks and that I might have bought two Minis with. Then she shouted: “Do I have to go on the streets before I can get what I want, you tight-fisted rat?” That’s only one thing. I could go on, but why bother? Richard – one of my sons – he’s more devious. Wants to set up a magazine, devoted to pacifism and the arts – poems and things. Promised a whole issue to an intellectual assessment of my own work! My own son! I could have battered