by Weldon, Fay
‘I suppose it is,’ said Alexandra. ‘Shall we not talk about it?’ Abbie asked Alexandra how she’d got on at the lawyer’s.
Alexandra said that for some reason Ned had left everything to Lucy Lint.
Abbie said no wonder Alexandra was in such a bad temper, and Ned was a fool. He must have done it when he was sulking about something or other Alexandra had done, or not done, like come home, and then forgotten to revoke it. Alexandra would just have to go to court and do it herself. Alexandra said there were circumstances which might make that difficult. Abbie said Ned had certainly not been best pleased to see Lucy Lint when she came into the room dressed in a black and scarlet suspender belt and white lace stockings and nothing else, and his ashes were around to prove it.
‘After he died she took his toothbrush,’ said Alexandra.
‘And the socks he’d been wearing that day,’ said Abbie. ‘Can you imagine?’
A wind had got up, presage of the storm, which still did not break. Great boughs tossed above their heads. The road finally took them out of the wood, and to the crossroads, and the left turn which took them to The Cottage.
As the car turned down the drive, the sun glinted out through a rent in the black clouds, and the day was suddenly bright again.
‘Creepy weather,’ said Abbie.
‘Very suitable,’ said Alexandra, pushing open the gate. It jangled gently as it always did when moved. Ned had attached some ancient animal bell to it, as an early-warning system against visitors. Loud enough to be heard at a distance, soft enough not to startle the animals. She wondered how often Lucy Lint had pushed it, heard it, contemplated the anticipatory excitement that would go with it. Worst Fears. She and Lucy were in some international war; Lucy winning: pushing forward, taking territory, defiling memory, altering history. Now she, Alexandra, must retreat. But she would adopt a scorched-earth policy. You had to be careful though; you had to do it on purpose, not by accident, and you could not allow yourself any possibility of return. Napoleon’s army had got it wrong in the autumn of 1812, stripping the countryside bare as it went, raping and looting, emptying the brimming barns, killing the fat livestock, advancing like locusts. But winter came and there was no one to declare the glory of victory or the martyrdom of defeat. Napoleon’s army had to crawl home through the starved landscape it had itself created, dying by the hundred thousand of hunger, cold and disgrace. If you scorched earth you must bar the way to your own retreat. Well, that was OK.
‘Blowing up a storm,’ said Abbie.
The leaves of the Virginia creeper were beginning to turn red around their finely formed, delicate edges. Four weeks from now the stone walls would seem to be on fire. The house always looked good this time of year.
‘Quite a wind,’ said Alexandra. It whipped her ears and shivered up her skirt. It was exhilarating. There was no such thing as a defeat, if you didn’t accept it.
The sun went beneath a serrated layer of black cloud; most of the light went with it. Inside the house Diamond lay back his ears and whimpered, very much preferring outside to in, and began to scrabble at the back door.
‘It’s OK, Diamond,’ Alexandra called to him. ‘It’s only a storm.’
Alexandra and Abbie pushed and pushed at the door, but it didn’t open. There was damp in the air: sometimes the door would stick after a long spell of hot weather. Alexandra had a vision of herself in a future which would be hers if she allowed it to be. It was as in the dream she had at Angliss Street. She was shut out, standing outside in the cold, beating against the locked back door. ‘Let me in, let me in!’ she was crying; Lucy’s little face peered at her through the window; she knew Ned was in there but he didn’t come to look. He was blind and deaf to her existence: he might as well be dead. The body in the morgue had been the metaphor: this dream, this vision, was the reality. Lucy was going about her business in her, Alexandra’s, home; at her table with her, Alexandra’s, erstwhile friends; preparing food, opening wine, pouring tea, victorious. Hamish would be a regular guest, she could foresee it. She was the ghost, they were living flesh and blood. She was the one who haunted her own home; the one Diamond saw, why Diamond crept under the table. Alexandra pushed and pushed on the door, in her vision; and then Ned pushed too. He wasn’t on the inside, he never had been, he was on the outside with her, Alexandra, with her and Diamond, and against Lucy. Ned recognised Alexandra again. He had made a dreadful mistake. She, Alexandra, must put it right. She had not been to the funeral; that ceremony was trivial. There must be a proper funeral pyre. He demanded it.
The door opened suddenly; Alexandra and Abbie went in. There was no Lucy, just the familiar hall, and the dining room where Ned had not died, and the bright rugs on the polished floor, and an instant warmth, once out of the wet, cool wind: and a stillness, an emptiness. Everything was very quiet: the house waited for a decision from its keeper. Even the ghosts were still, acquiescent. What was going to be must happen.
‘So still, out of the wind!’ said Abbie, sensing something, but not sure what. Diamond went to lie beneath the kitchen table.
Lucy Lint had circled the borders and massed her forces, and pounced, and now cried ‘Mine!’ but it wasn’t so. Couldn’t be. Best wishes, Ned! I hope you had a happy time. I hope you made her glow. Life’s short.
‘You OK?’ asked Abbie.
She was making tea in the kitchen.
‘Fine,’ said Alexandra. ‘It’s so grim out there,’ she said. ‘I’ll just light a little fire to cheer ourselves up.’
‘Good idea,’ said Abbie.
The house insurance was in both their names: Ned’s and hers. The payments came out of Ned’s bank account, into which she, Alexandra, paid money. Ned paid the bills, looked after the paperwork of the household, in a desultory fashion. She supposed he had renewed the policy. It did not matter. Money was not the point.
Alexandra went out to fetch firelighters and logs from the barn. Twigs crackled beneath her feet. Everything was bone-dry. The storm might carry with it the first signs of moisture for weeks, but the rain had not begun in earnest. Just a heavy drop or so, wind carried, quickly evaporating. She stood on the path and watched the wind whip away the bean-polepyramids Ned had built: the bean plants writhed and stretched and reached into the air before falling. They seemed alive.
Alexandra went back into the house with her basket of logs, and lugged them not into the living room, but into the dining room. Hamish, in his search for documents, the better to incriminate her, Alexandra, the better to destroy her, had littered the grate in here with piles of old envelopes, papers, the recorded trash of the past. Alexandra saw an old school report of her own, despised and discarded by Hamish, and left it where it lay. Why bother? Who wanted anything of so sorry a past, so much of it based upon vanity and indecision? The shelf above the grate was all but hidden by cards – postcards from friends, invitations for Private Views, antique fairs, First Nights, PR junkets, Sascha’s drawings. More of Sascha’s drawings Blu-Tacked casually to the wall above, edges curling: just a little leap across for a flame, and on to the parched curtains; another leap and the flame would be over to bookcases: and the hundreds of art cards collected over years, propped up against books.
‘Where’s our book on early porcelain, Ned?’’Behind the Picasso, you know, the geometric lady.’ ‘Where’s the biographical encyclopaedia, Alexandra?’ ‘Behind the Monet, you know, those dozy water lilies, I think. Somewhere near Van Gogh’s boots.’
The crows – or was it jackdaws? – built their nests in the dining-room chimney. For some reason they scorned the chimney that led up from the living room. Sweep the chimney as you would, the new vacuum method of chimney-sweeping never quite got rid of the twigs. Masses of them. They stuck and clung in the crevices of the sooty bricks. You’d have to send children up, said Ned, if you wanted this chimney really swept. Sometimes a collection of tangled sticks would fall through into the grate, with a bang and a great puff of dust, soot and ancient bird shit. Each single twig i
n its time had been lovingly carried by some trusting bird to an entirely inappropriate nesting place. Dangerous for fledglings. Alexandra and Ned never lit the fire in the dining room, for the young birds’ sake. Who could tell what family dramas went on up there? But it was nearly autumn. The young ones should all have flown the nest by now. Dave Lint and Lucy would convert, modernise, remove fireplaces and chimneys altogether. Fireplaces mean dust, and fire.
Alexandra arranged paper, firelighter, twigs and logs in the grate, making a neat pyramid, decorous, but perhaps a little too large for its iron nest. She applied a match to the paper. ‘Sorry,’ she said, to anyone or anything which was listening, and felt the house prepare itself.
‘That’ll soon warm us up!’ she called out to Abbie, and went into the kitchen for tea. Abbie settled in to tell Alexandra more about the funeral. Abbie was conscious of the frozen peas she had bought thawing in the back of her car, but said nothing about them. She was doing her best for her friend, who smiled a lot but seemed distracted.
Soon Alexandra heard a roaring noise coming from the dining room. A whoosh, an echo, and a steady, windy, throaty noise continuing after.
‘Listen to the wind,’ she said. ‘How it’s getting up.’
‘So it is,’ said Abbie. ‘Howling round the chimneys.’
‘Abbie,’ said Alexandra, ‘could we leave the house right now? Drive over to your place? Hamish might come back and I really don’t want to see him. I couldn’t face it! Or even Lucy Lint, to say how we can all be friends, or her husband Dave to marvel at how I ever got by in this kitchen.’
‘OK,’ said Abbie, ‘if you’re sure you don’t want to finish your tea. It seems a waste to me.’
‘I want to go now,’ said Alexandra. ‘And it’s got so peculiar in here. Look how Diamond’s trembling.’
‘Old houses always move and shift,’ said Abbie, ‘and make strange noises. You’ve got so much imagination, when it comes to things that don’t matter.’
But Abbie got up from her chair and they left the kitchen together, and Alexandra went into the dining room for a moment as they left, careful to stay between Abbie and any sight of what was happening to the far wall.
‘Fire OK?’ asked Abbie as they went out of the back door. Diamond shot out ahead of them.
‘Fire’s fine,’ said Alexandra. ‘I threw an extra log on.’ And so she had.
Sparks hurled themselves into the blue-black sky from the dining-room chimney. Spitter-spat of raindrops. Fire and rain must fight it out. Abbie didn’t look up to see them. The wind howled. Abbie and Alexandra had to lean into it to get to the car. The rain was fitful. They hardly got wet.
Diamond chased them up to the top of the drive, barking. ‘Hang on a minute,’ said Alexandra, and Abbie stopped the car. Alexandra opened the door and Diamond trod her into the seat with desperate paws, clambering through to the back.
At the top of the drive they came nose to nose with Lucy Lint’s little car. Abbie had to break suddenly to manoeuvre by, and managed to stall her engine. Hamish was driving. Lucy Lints at next to him. Dave and Sheldon Smythe sat in the back. They gawped out of the windows at Alexandra. She waved cheerily.
‘All yours!’ she mouthed, but she didn’t think they understood. She could see The Cottage in the side mirror. There was most certainly a chimney fire, and flickers of light running up and down the east side of the house, which might well be flames. It was a pity the others had arrived so soon. She could have done with an extra ten minutes. All it would have needed.
There was a sudden hammer-blow of thunder and a brilliant flash of lightning, zig-zagging down from above. For a second it turned all their faces blue as corpses. It seemed there’d been a direct hit on The Cottage. Now the roof too was aflame: fire raced over the tiles, burning what? Old leaves, wooden beams, who was to say? Flames were now coming out of the side window downstairs, too: marvellous, melodramatic red light reflected back from the clouds.
‘Divine intervention sometimes comes when it isn’t needed,’ said Alexandra. ‘Shall we get going?’
The occupants of the other car mouthed and shouted. Abbie, distracted, put the car into reverse gear and drove sharply backwards into the other vehicle, blocking the entrance to the drive. No one was hurt: all were shaken; everyone got out and stood staring down at The Cottage. The wind whipped through the building from east to west, as windows cracked and broke; it carried flame upstairs to the bedrooms while the flame from upstairs travelled down. What a fire that was, devouring Ned’s papers, Ned’s clothes, twisting and blackening the frame of the brass bed; gnawing through the linen cupboard, charring the split ammonite so no one now would ever recognise it for what it was; shattering the crystal, making a nonsense of the settle, the Picasso, the refectory table; what price now all the polishing, the dusting? All gone. Only the fireback (1705), would survive this, rather more blackened than usual, but with its golden lads and lasses still surviving, still dancing through the disasters of the centuries. Everything else gone. All Sascha’s toys; everyone’s school reports, photographs of ancient relatives, grandmother’s love letters, books, books, books, more books. CDs would melt. Tears went up in steam. Ghosts fled. Ned’s house, never hers, like Ned, gone to embers, gone to ashes. The house wanted it. The rain held off.
Sparks got to the barn. If the house went, how could the barn remain? Its thatched roof burst into a thousand flames. The wind roared. Everything in there went: from the wooden handles of the antique tools that should have gone to the Folk Museum but never did, to the bits and pieces of old furniture waiting for ever for restoration. What price now, all that weight of conscience, the burden of things undone that should have been done: better everyone had just partied while they could. The fire brigade bulldozed Abbie and Lucy’s cars to one side, to allow them access. They made short work of them. Water from the hoses made the whole hillside smell like damp flesh and burnt dinner for days. There were no hydrants so far from civilisation. Ingeniously, the firemen drained the pond so the ducks were homeless, but the wind was too strong for them to do much about anything; they let the fire burn itself out, then simply damped everything down.
Arthur, on Abbie’s hysterical return in a police car, was glad there was no loss of life.
Vilna cried for the newts, sucked up from the pond by the firemen’s hoses.
Mr Quatrop rejoiced. Where there was a fire, there would later be development. The firemen said they suspected first a chimney fire – old crows’ nests were always a hazard – compounded by a lightning strike. Alexandra shared her guilt with God, which meant she felt none. The insurance company declined to pay up. Ned had not paid the last instalment due. A final reminder had come with the condolence letters, and been overlooked. Insurance companies are not moved by personal tragedy: they have seen too many.
Gone. Worst fears. Along with them, Alexandra’s clothes, books, papers, past. Alexandra’s family photos, documentations, school reports, love letters from Ned. And others, kept hidden. Alexandra’s pots, pans, plates, cups, saucers, sheets: things used and abused by Lucy Lint. ‘She walked in when you walked out.’ So who wanted them?
Alexandra’s cosmetics, favourite eye shadows, mementoes from past shows. Gifts from friends. A suspender belt in black and crimson that didn’t fit. Alexandra’s address book and diary, and Lucy Lint’s too. Except Lucy Lint had her own copy. Pity. Like losing your handbag but a hundred times worse. Alexandra had taken her purse up when she left with Abbie just before the fire.
‘Strange,’ Abbie had thought at the time, but didn’t care to pursue the thought thereafter. Too dangerous. A chimney fire compounded by a lightning strike. An act of God.
Gone, Ned, with Alexandra’s blessing.
Hamish took the ashes back to Scotland.
A neat navy-blue cardboard box, rather heavy.
35
Alexandra called her mother and said now she, Alexandra, was homeless, could she leave Sascha there by the golf course, with the kittens, where he was happ
y? She knew her mother to be a careful driver. She called Eric Stenstrom and said could he look in on Sascha every now and then, and gave him the address. Every good child deserves a father. She called the man from Amblin and said she would take the part. Yes, she would play opposite Michael Douglas. You bet.
She called the theatre. She wasn’t going to argue about not going back to A Doll’s House, she wasn’t going to sue: let Daisy Longriff bare her breasts every night. Best wishes, Daisy! Since apparently management had expected her, Alexandra, to do that very thing, should they be obliged to accept her return to the part, they on their side had broken the terms of her contract, so goodbye. She was on her way to Hollywood.
Alexandra stayed with Vilna in the meantime. But declined to share Vilna’s bed. She gave Diamond to Kevin Crump: Diamond would be happy with a proper occupation, herding cows to the milking sheds. Kevin Crump had a broken arm following a hit-and-run accident with the tractor, but was now engaged to Sheldon Smythe’s secretary, and was happy.
Alexandra best-wished everyone on her departure. Ned, again, and Abbie, and even Leah, and Vilna, and Arthur, and Dave Lint; Dr Moebius, and Mr Quatrop, and even Hamish, who kept calling and writing with remorse and apologies and whom she could not be bothered to despise or dislike, and Theresa, who, on hearing about the fire, instantly returned such of Alexandra’s treasures as she had taken – offering them as gifts, of course: the Belgian lace tablecloth, the Arts and Crafts fire-tongs, the birdcage and the glass bowl. She best-wished Mr Lightfoot, and Mrs Paddle and even Chrissie, and her mother, and her mother’s husband, whose name she had forgotten, and Sascha, and Sascha with all her heart, weeping but doing it, leaving her child because everyone was right on that subject. Sometimes grandmothers are better than mothers, with children. Best-wishing.
She could not best-wish Sheldon Smythe, he was not worth it, and she could, but would not, best-wish Lucy Lint. She must be allowed some indulgence, some caprice. And she best-wished Ned again, because what was the point of not? Ned was dead. And she was off.