A Tree on Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’m painting I want to sleep. I want to sleep more than I want to paint whenever I pick up that brush, but somehow I paint, I work at it. I don’t go mad like any old Jack Spatula puttying away, mind you, but I think I’m right in saying it’s sleep that drives me along.’
    In the painting he had used the shape of the fox pinned on the door, a fox motif, the spreadeagled vulpine set in an aureole of colours, a fox in the rising sun flaring over the sea. From subtlety and delicate feeling at the centre, the form and colours had been made to expand, reaching a brilliance and panache Jones had never seen before – a great spending of the daywake above the grey blue line of the Lincolnshire sea, and in the bottom left corner a man humping home from an all-night fish or poach with a moon in his net. Observing Handley’s face as he knelt by the stone brought the word ‘Byzantine’ to mind.
    Handley took off his jacket and cap, poured two glasses of brandy. ‘A man from the Daily Retch came up a month ago, and needled me about being rich. He got ratty on the way out so I gave him what for. You should have seen the article: they really set the dogs on me. I don’t care about being rich. We’re rich, it’s true, compared to a year ago. But the stuff we lose or get nicked. If only I was rich enough to look after my things and lose nothing. Still, I wouldn’t be an artist then. Cheers!’
    â€˜Cheers!’ Brandy after coffee brought his tone of confidence to exactly the right pitch. Handley stood before the picture, eyes glowing: ‘I’ll have to do it again. Nothing’s ever quite right. Never was.’
    â€˜Do you manage to work all day and every day?’ Jones asked.
    â€˜There are certain questions I can’t answer.’ Handley said, wrenching open a bottle of turps. ‘If I was a journalist I’d ask people the sort of question they only put to themselves in the pitch-black at four in the morning.’
    â€˜I’m interested in how different painters work.’
    Handley leant over and nudged him sharply with his elbow, an exaggerated wink and leer. ‘So you’re a bit of a voyeur , are you? Eh? Dirty old bastard! Still, don’t be ashamed of it. Do go on. Ask me something else.’
    â€˜I’ll be quite happy,’ said Jones, ‘if you just talk.’
    â€˜I’ll bet you will. But I’m not frightened of hanging myself. I was born in Wolverhampton. The old man had a builder’s yard. Left school at fourteen and worked for him, slaved, I should say. Nothing ragged-trousered about me: had no trousers at all most of the time. Never work for your father. The old bastard owned a row of slum houses, and we never knew it till he’d croaked. Six brothers, and we sold up the lot. Got forty pounds apiece after the lawyers had done. I’d left home by then, came up from London to collect it. Boozed it all up in three days, then joined the artillery. The war had just started, and I thought I’d get stuck into fascism. Knew all about it from fourteen because I read a lot and heard what was going on. Stuck on the Lincolnshire coast, bored to death so started painting, reading, demobbed, married, writing begging letters. A bad life with seven kids to keep, but there was no other way. Anything else?’
    Jones found it difficult to believe that this lank man of forty had been able to paint such pictures. Rough and bordering on the primitive, they had yet a certain beauty almost belied by the rancorous striding bully in front of him. ‘What about politics?’ he asked mildly.
    â€˜Politics?’ Handley sat in the other armchair. ‘I left off that sort of thing as soon as I felt they were necessary, as soon as I understood them and realised I had nothing left to learn. I’ll only take an interest in politics where there’s a civil war. In the meantime, let who will rule. If they want to