by Dick Francis
And I did.
I DREAMED that I could smell toast. But someone had left it in my broken toaster for too long and it was beginning to burn. Burned toast. My father had always rather liked his toast burned black. He had joked that it wasn’t burned, it was just well-done.
I was awake and I could still smell the burned toast.
I got up and opened my bedroom door.
My cottage was on fire, with giant flames roaring up the stairway and great billowing black smoke filling the air.
14
O h shit! I thought. How am I going to get out of this? I closed my bedroom door. Perhaps it was all a dream. But I knew it wasn’t. I could smell the smoke coming through the cracks around the door, and I could feel the heat, even on the other side of the wood. It wouldn’t be long before the fire had eaten its way through.
I went to the window.
My cottage had been built more than two hundred years before, and the windows were the original leaded lights, small panes of glass held in place by a lattice of lead strips. The windows were themselves small, with only a tiny hinged opening for ventilation that definitely wasn’t large enough for me to get through.
I opened the ventilator and shouted at the top of my voice.
“Fire! Fire! Help! Help! Somebody help me!”
I couldn’t hear if there was a response. The noise of the fire below my feet was becoming louder with every second.
I shouted again: “Fire! Fire! Help! Help!”
There were no sirens, no hoses, no yellow-helmeted men on ladders.
The air in my bedroom was getting thicker with smoke and it made me cough. I stood up near the ventilator to get some fresh air from outside but, even here, smoke billowed up from the window below. And it was getting very hot.
I knew that people who died in fires usually did so from smoke inhalation rather than from the flames themselves. I wasn’t sure whether this was comforting or not. I didn’t want to die, and I especially didn’t want to die like this, trapped in my burning house. Instead, I got angry-bloody mad, in fact-and my anger gave me strength.
The air in the room had almost completely filled with smoke. I dropped to my knees and found that it was quite clear near the floor. But I could feel the heat from below, and I noticed that my carpet was beginning to smolder close to the wall near the door. If I was to get out of this alive, it had to be soon.
I took a deep breath of the clear air, stood up, picked up my bedside table and ran with it towards where I knew the window to be. I couldn’t see anything, as the smoke stung my eyes. At the last second, I caught a glimpse through the glass of the light from the fire beneath and made a slight adjustment to my path.
I crashed the bedside table into the window. The window bent and buckled but didn’t move. I repeated the process and the window bent more, and some of the small panes dropped out, but still the damn lead framework held.
I again dropped to my knees for a breath. The space beneath the smoke had diminished to just a few inches, and I knew this was it. Either I broke out now or I would die.
This time, the table went right through the window and fell out of sight into the smoke and flames below, taking the remains of the window with it. There was no time to think or worry about what I was jumping into. I clambered through the opening and leaped, trying to jump away from the building, away from the fire.
One of the advantages of having such an old property is that the ceilings were very low, and, consequently, the fall from my bedroom window to the lawn below was only about ten feet. Quite far enough, I thought. I landed with my feet together and my body moving forward, so I kept on rolling like a parachutist over the grass and into the road beyond. I got to my feet and moved to the far side of the road and looked back.
Flames were clearly visible through what was left of my bedroom window. I had literally jumped in the nick of time.
I gasped fresh air into my lungs, coughing wildly. I was cold. I stood shivering on the grass verge, and only then did I realize that I was completely naked.
My neighbor, roused perhaps by my shouts, was outside watching and now walked towards me. She was a small, elderly lady, and I could see by the light of the flames that she was wearing a fluffy pink dressing gown with matching pink slippers, and her white hair was held neatly in place with a hairnet.
I looked for something to cover my embarrassment and ended up just using my hands.
“That’s all right, dear,” she said. “I’ve seen it all before. Three husbands, and a nurse for forty years.” She smiled. “I’m glad you got out all right. I’ll fetch you a coat.” She turned to go. “I’ve called the fire brigade,” she said over her shoulder. She seemed totally unperturbed at finding a naked man on the side of the road in the middle of the night next to a raging inferno no more than fifteen feet from her own bedroom window.
The fire brigade arrived with flashing lights and sirens, but there was little they could do. My cottage was totally engulfed in flames, and the firemen spent most of their time and energy hosing down my neighbor’s house to ensure the searing heat didn’t set that alight as well.
I sat out the rest of the night at my neighbor’s kitchen table wearing one of her ex-husband’s coats and a pair of his slippers. I didn’t ask her if he was ex-by death or ex-by divorce. It didn’t matter. I was grateful anyhow, and also for the cups of tea that she produced for me and the fire brigade at regular intervals until dawn.
“Just like the Blitz,” she said with a broad smile. “I used to help my mother provide refreshments for the police and firemen. You know, WRVS.”
I nodded. I did know. Women’s Royal Volunteer Service.
THE MORNING brought an end to the flames but little other comfort. My home was a shell, with no floors, no windows, no doors and nothing left within, save for ash and the smoldering remains of my life.
“You were lucky to get out alive,” said the chief fireman. I knew. “These old buildings can be death traps. Timber stairs and thin wooden doors and floors. Even the interior walls are flammable, plaster over wooden slats. Death traps,” he repeated while shaking his head.
We watched from the road as his men sprayed more water over the ruin. The stonework of the exterior walls had survived pretty well, but it was no longer whitewashed as it had been yesterday. Great black scars extended upwards above every windowless void, and the remainder was browned by the intense heat and the smoke.
“Can you tell what caused it?” I asked him.
“Not yet,” he said. “Still far too hot to get in there. But electrical, I expect. Most fires are electrical, or else due to cigarettes not being properly put out. Do you smoke?”
“No,” I said.
“Did you leave anything switched on?” he asked.
“Not that I can think of,” I said. “I suppose the TV would have been on standby.”
“Could be that,” he said. “Could be anything. Have to get the investigation team to have a look later. Thankfully, no one was hurt. That’s what really matters.”
“I’ve lost everything,” I said, looking at the black and steaming mess.
“You haven’t lost your life,” he said.
But it had been close.
AT EIGHT O’CLOCK, I used my neighbor’s phone to call Carl.
“It has not been your week,” he said after I told him.
“I wouldn’t say that,” I said. In the past seven days, I had been informed of an intended prosecution, written off my car in a collision with a bus, spent a night in the hospital with a concussion, lost my house and all my personal possessions in a fire and now stood wearing nothing but my neighbor’s ex-husband’s coat and slippers. But look on the bright side, I thought. It was only seven days since I had taken Caroline out to dinner at the Restaurant Gordon Ramsay. I may have lost plenty, but I had gained more.
“Can you come and collect me?” I asked him.
“Where do you want to go?” he said.
“Do you have a shower I could use?�
�� I said. “I smell like a garden bonfire.”
“I’ll be there in five minutes,” he said.
“Oh, Carl,” I said. “Can you bring some clothes?”
“What for?” he asked.
“I escaped with my life,” I said. “But with absolutely nothing else.”
He laughed. “I’ll see what I can find.”
I STOOD for a good ten minutes in Carl’s shower and let the stream of hot water wash the smoke from my hair and the tiredness from my eyes.
The fire brigade had arrived on the scene at three thirty-two a.m. I knew that because the chief had asked me, as the property owner, to sign an agreement that the fire service investigation team had my permission to access the property later that day, when the building had cooled.
“What would you have done if I’d died in the fire?” I’d asked him.
“We wouldn’t need your permission, then,” he’d said. “We have automatic right of entry if there has been serious injury or a death.”
Convenient, I had thought.
“And we can always get a warrant to enter if you won’t sign and we believe that arson is involved.”
“Do you believe it was arson?” I’d asked him, somewhat alarmed.
“That’s for the investigation team to find out,” he’d said. “Looks just like a normal domestic to me, but then they all do.”
I had signed his paper.
After my shower, and dressed in Carl’s tracksuit, I sat at his kitchen table and took stock. I did, in fact, have some personal possessions left to my name, since my overnight bag had been sitting safely all night under my desk at the Hay Net. Carl had fetched it while I showered, and I was able to shave and brush my teeth with my own tools.
Carl lived in a modern, three-bedroom semidetached house in a development in Kentford, just down the road from where my mangled wreck of a car still waited for the insurance assessor to inspect it.
Carl and I had worked side by side in the same kitchen for five years, and, I realized with surprise, this was the first time I had ever been in his house. We were not actually friends, and while we might share a beer together often at the Hay Net bar, we had never socialized together elsewhere. I had felt uneasy about calling to ask for his help, but who else could I ask? My mother would have been useless and would have left me with the lady in the pink slippers for most of the day as she went through her normal morning rituals of bathing at leisure, applying her copious makeup and then dressing, a task that in itself could take a couple of hours as she continuously changed her mind over what went with what. Carl had been my only realistic choice. But I hadn’t really liked it.
“So what are you going to do now?” he asked.
“First, I need to hire a car,” I said. “Then I’m going to book myself into a hotel.”
“You can stay here, if you like,” he said. “I’ve plenty of room.”
“What about Jenny and the kids?” I said, noticing for the first time how quiet it was.
“Jenny went back to her mother nearly a year ago now,” he said. “Took the girls with her.”
“Carl,” I said, “I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you say something to me?”
“Didn’t seem to matter,” he said. “To tell the truth, I was relieved when she went. I couldn’t stand the rows. I’m much happier on my own. We’re not divorced or anything, and she and the girls come over for the weekends and it’s sometimes pretty good.”
What could I say? Restaurant work, with its odd hours, never was highly recommended for happy marriages.
“Could I stay for a couple of nights, then?” I asked. “I will be gone by the weekend.”
“Stay as long as you like,” he said. “I’ll tell Jenny that she and the girls can’t stay over this weekend.”
“No,” I said quickly. “Don’t do that. I’ll find myself a more permanent place by then. Much better all around.”
“You might be right,” he said. “Are you coming in to work today?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “I think so. But maybe not until later. I want to hire the car first.”
Carl dropped me at the car-rental offices on his way into work.
“Certainly, sir,” they said. “What sort of car would you like?”
“What have you got?” I asked.
I decided on a Ford Mondeo. I wanted a fairly nondescript vehicle that wouldn’t attract attention if, for example, I went again to the members’ parking lot at Smith’s Lawn and the Guards Polo Club.
One of the car-rental company staff insisted on coming with me to my bank to make the payment arrangements before he would give me the keys of the Mondeo. It often seemed to me that the restaurant business was one of the few that allowed its customers to consume the goods before asking for any payment, or even a guarantee of payment. The old joke about washing dishes had worn a bit thin over the years, and I had never known anyone who actually did it, although I had come across many a customer who didn’t have the wherewithal to pay for his dinner after he had eaten it. What could I do? Reach down his throat and pull it out again? In truth, there wasn’t anything one could do except send him on his way, accepting his promise to return with the money in the morning. In most cases, a check quickly appeared, with profuse apologies. Only twice in the six years that I had been open had I simply not heard anything afterwards, and one of those times was because the person in question had died the day after, but, thankfully, not from eating my food. On the other occasion, two couples that I didn’t know, and who had enjoyed the full dining experience we offered, including three courses with coffee and two bottles of my best wine, had both then claimed that they thought the other couple was paying. They had given me just their assurances and their addresses, both of which turned out to be false, and I had carelessly failed to record the license plate number of their car. I bet they had thought it was funny. I hadn’t. I would recognize any one of them instantly, if they ever tried it again.
While I was at the bank, I drew out a large wad of cash and also arranged for a replacement credit card to be sent to me at the Hay Net at the earliest opportunity. Tomorrow, they said. How about this afternoon? I asked. We would try, they said, but I would have to pay for the messenger. Fine, I said, get on with it. Without my credit card, I felt as naked as I had been in the road last night.
I sat in my new wheels and took stock of my situation. I was alive, I had a change of clothes in my overnight bag, my passport in my pocket, somewhere to sleep for the next two nights, and I could always put up a bed in the office of the restaurant if I had to. But I had no watch, and my cell phone was, I was sure, totally beyond repair, having been alongside my wallet in the pocket of my blazer, which had been hanging over the back of the sofa when I went to bed last night.
I parked the car and went into the cell phone shop in the High Street. I explained to the young woman behind the counter that my house had burned down with my phone still in it and I needed a replacement, preferably with the same number as before. Now, this didn’t seem like an unreasonable request to me, but it took me more than an hour to achieve it and involved me having to raise my voice on several occasions, something I was not used to doing.
For a start, she kept asking if I had the SIM card from the phone, and I tried to explain to her that my phone, along with the damn SIM card, was no more. I told her that it had been melted away into a puddle of silicon, solder and plastic. “You shouldn’t have put the phone battery in a fire,” she said. “It’s not good for the environment.” Only a semblance of remaining decency prevented me from strangling her at this point. Finally, we neared the end of our tortuous affair. I had the phone in my hand, as yet uncharged, and I had my stack of money ready and available for payment. “Do you have any form of identification?” she asked, somewhat belatedly to my mind. I proudly flourished my passport. “That won’t do,” she said. “I need something with your address on it. Do you have a utility bill?”
I stared at her. “Have you listened to anything I have told you?”<
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“Yes,” she replied.
“Then how would I have a utility bill if my house has been completely burned to a crisp?” I said. “At the time, I hadn’t exactly thought that a utility bill was something I needed to save from the inferno along with my life.” My voice rose to a crescendo. But I somehow managed not to boil over completely. “Sorry,” I said more calmly. “No, I don’t have a utility bill.”
“Then I’m sorry, sir, I must have something to confirm your address.”
We were getting nowhere.
“Can you please produce a duplicate of my last month’s phone bill?” I asked her, now back to my usual calm tone.
“Certainly, sir,” she said. I gave her my cell phone number, and, unbelievably, she also wanted the first line of my address, for security reasons. I told her. A printer under the counter whirred, and she handed over a copy of my bill, complete with my full address printed in the top right-hand corner.
“There,” I said, handing it back to her. “One utility bill.”
She didn’t bat her thickly mascaraed eyelashes.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, and processed my order. Hallelujah!
“Can I leave the phone here to charge for an hour?” I asked her.
“Sorry,” she said. “You will have to do that at home.”
I sighed. Never mind, I thought, I’ll try elsewhere.
In the end, I bought an in-car charger from her and again sat in the Mondeo with my new phone connected to the cigarette lighter socket. Progress had been slow. I looked at my wrist. No watch. It had been on my bedside table. The car clock told me it was half past eleven. Half past five in the morning in Chicago. Still too early to call Caroline, even if I knew the number. I was sure she would call me when she woke. I hoped my phone would be sufficiently charged by then.
I left it charging while I went for a coffee. I sat in the window of a café with the car parked right outside. I had needed to leave the car unlocked with the keys in the ignition in order for the charger to work, so I kept a close eye on it. I didn’t fancy the prospect of having to go back to the young woman to explain that my new phone had been stolen before I had even had a chance to use it.