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Jones thought, who’d even allowed Handley to give her seven children? She spoke to Jones as if using language and enunciation she might once have had command of, but had lost after her marriage to Handley: ‘There are some people to whom being an out-and-out bastard gives strength. Oh, I don’t mean the weedy or puffy sort who never have the strength to be real bastards anyway, like you. But I mean the man who, not strong in the beginning, like Albert, soon finds himself becoming so when he gets money, and the urge to be a swine gets into his blood .’
    Jones felt as if he had been struck in the face. He was ready to leave. Albert had also gone white at this whipcrack from Enid so early in the morning, a time when he found it extremely difficult to take such insults. He grasped Jones by the arm: ‘Let’s go to my studio. I’ll raise the drawbridge and drop the portcullis, boil oil and sharpen spears. There’s brandy up there.’
    â€˜I think I’ll leave,’ Jones stammered, hurt to the core. What kind of family was this, that took a total stranger to its quarrelling heart and clawed him to death?
    â€˜Don’t go,’ Handley said, concerned for him. ‘I can’t let you come all this way for nothing. Enid’s got a bomb on her shoulders this morning though, and I don’t like shrapnel.’ They walked across the hall and towards the stair-foot. ‘I’ll buy a new overcoat if you aren’t insured, or don’t get danger-money. I’m sure editors are as mean as any other gaffer.’
    They went in silence to the first floor, Russell Jones taking note of what regions of the house he was privileged to go through, trying to fix the many noises muffling from behind various closed doors. Handley’s studio was an enlarged attic, skylight windows showing grey clouds drifting overhead. It was bitterly cold, though Handley took off shirt and trousers, standing naked to put on underwear and dress properly. ‘You’ll excuse me,’ he said to embarrassed Jones, ‘but I’d die otherwise.’ Shirt, trousers and two pullovers went on, then a waistcoat and jacket, followed by a heavy woollen scarf, a cap and pair of mittens. ‘Sit down while I light this pot-bellied stove. It’s a cold as Stalingrad up here.’
    Jones thought how strange it was that rough language from Handley had frightening barbaric undertones about it, while the same words from his London friends seemed neither uncivilised nor out of place. He watched him break an orange-box in pieces, rake out cold ash, and pull a lump of coal into cobbles with his bare hands. With such habits where did the subtlety come from to be found in many of his paintings? He looked around the room: apart from the bed were two large old-fashioned kitchen tables covered with the usual painter’s bric-a-brac – queer-shaped stones and pieces of wood Handley had picked up on his walks, odd drawing-pads, pictures from magazines, heaps of books, horseshoe, magnifying-glass, cigarette-lighter. Along one wall was a record-player, heart of a stereophonic system. The record on the turntable was Mozart’s Coronation Mass.
    Under the skylight a large half-finished picture stood on an easel. Shelves were filled mostly with modern novels, books on country life and natural history. On a low table were bottles of brandy and beer, a packet of cigarettes and a box of Havana cigars. In an opposite corner was a small sink heaped with glasses and cups. What struck Jones with great force, and what he held his eyes from until the last, was the newly cured skin of an outsize fox pegged neatly on the frame of an old door – leaning beside the now closed door they had entered by. He only took his eyes from it to look at the presumably new painting from Handley’s brush.
    Handley was making feverish work at the fire, which was now on the point of springing into strong life. ‘Whenever