A Tree on Fire by Alan Sillitoe Page A

them you’ll still have more than you can handle. You’re not sly enough. You let these people make mincemeat of you. They’ve only got to stick a pin in and you jump a mile. And they always get what they came for, whether it’s the posh papers or the gutter press. At your age you should know better.’
    He spread butter over black rye-bread. ‘At thirty I’d have been as cunning as hell, and was, but what’s the point any more? I’m getting old enough not to bother about disguising my feelings.’
    â€˜Too famous, you mean. It’s gone to your head.’
    The house was stonily quiet, children at school, others either asleep or set on various pastimes. A cow moaned from the neighbouring field. ‘Whose side are you on?’
    Whenever they argued it was as if a third and impartial person were present, taking down all that they said to each other – as if they would be ultimately judged on this. She stood up to change his plate. ‘See what I mean? Yours, but you’re too locked in your fame to know it.’
    â€˜Fame!’ He spat. ‘I don’t have any.’
    â€˜You do.’
    â€˜I ignore it.’
    â€˜You don’t. You can’t. I wish you did, but they’ve got you.’
    â€˜So what? Is my work any the worse for it?’ He hated the word ‘work’ and knew that she knew it, and had made him use it, by angering him on this touchy subject. Art was not work, since it was something you were not forced to do in order to earn a living.
    â€˜Not yet it isn’t,’ she said.
    â€˜It won’t be. When I’m working I’m completely myself.’
    â€˜And when you’re not working,’ she went on, eyes gleaming because a real quarrel was coming up, ‘we’ve all got to live with you.’
    â€˜You mean you have. Why don’t we keep personal relationships out of this?’
    â€˜You can’t live without them, that’s why.’
    He ate his bread and Stilton, cut up an apple. ‘Stalemate. Let’s pack it in. Divide the spoils and go our different ways.’
    She sat down and looked straight at him, a bad sign, portent of saying something unforgivable and bitter. ‘If you want to give in, you can. But I won’t surrender to all this muck you’ve dropped into. If you want to go, go. Kill yourself. If you left me you’d never paint another stroke, and if you don’t believe me, try it. We’ve suffered too much to fly apart just when the going gets difficult. It might have been possible before, but not now, not any more.’
    â€˜I don’t want to leave you, but what gives you the idea that you’re my strength and mainstay?’
    â€˜Because I am, though not any more than you are mine, I admit. You’ve got me, but you’ve also got your freedom. I don’t ask questions when you go to London for weeks at a time, so if you can’t manage in those limits you wouldn’t exist in any others.’
    She boiled his coffee, poured it out. ‘We’ve got such a bond, Albert. It would be a pity if you smashed it. We’ve burned in this love and torment since we were almost kids, grown up while our own kids were growing up. If I were sentimental I might call a lot of it suffering, but there was too much love for that. It’s made me hard as well, but in a way that makes me sure of myself, and the more sure I am of myself the more I know that being together is the only thing that matters. We’ve never killed each other in a rotten married way. We’ve been very big about it, right above the rest of the world, and it can’t be shown to anyone else, or passed on, but we own it far more than this piece of property we’ve bought. It’s valuable and unique. It used to be the suffering that ennobles, but now it’s the sort that degrades. So ruin it if you like with your black heart. You can destroy your part of it, but