Trial by Fire hw-2

by Frances Fyfield

  She had not intended to use the paraffin at first. A spur-of-the-moment stroke of brilliance, the same ultimate solution she had played with yesterday, not really intending to use it until she had seen his cringing and knew despite his denials that he was slipping. She'd heard the lie in the shrillness of his voice and had realized in the same moment that the general discrediting of William by having him labelled a loopy arsonist as well as a thief was not going to save either of them; all it meant was that no one would believe a fire raiser.

  He had to be put away where no one could talk to him at all. Now, in the absence of any flames hitting the sky, the sight for which she had grown hungry, she doubted her own wisdom, wondered if she had underestimated him. Surely not, she decided. She contemplated going back, but no, let him face his family stinking of paraffin if he got out – family and policemen, if they had found her clues. What difference would it make? They would never listen to him now.

  The field below her inclined gently toward The Crown, the stubble of it shining like dull gold. Slinking down one side, barely visible, was the fox, a mere suspicion of movement, a flash on the eye like a ghost in motion. Its presence was a blow of surprise, a dark premonition of disaster, filling her mouth with vomit as she watched to see how close the thing would pass before detecting her presence. She loathed the sinuous progress of it, Mama's fox coming back, the one that had bitten off her hand, or so she had heard in some eavesdropped aside.

  No animal, no living thing, should have the teeth or temerity for that. Mother had been hers, the revenge all her own. Evelyn jumped to her feet, shouted wildly, `Go away, go away,' waved her arms, watched the fox freeze, flatten, turn, and double back into the undergrowth at the foot of The Crown's jungle of a garden. She was shaking with relief; she kicked her feet and wagged her hands, jogged on the spot, circled the tree against which she had sat, settled down again to rest, flexed her fingers, looked at her watch.

  Midnight.

  When she got home, she would write it all down, the way she wrote so many things, as Antony had taught her. It's all in your head, Evelyn: writing is only learning how to get it out, make sense of it. She remembered the alien familiarity of her room, the papers in it. They were safe, of course, the mildest of risks, because Papa could be bribed with the gold in the end, and no one had ever wanted entry to her sanctuary. No one ever had. Her only risk was what she had written; her only legacy from the teacher. Her eyes began to close.

  She would wait one more hour. Then she would go and see.

  Still no sign of fire.

  William was sinking into sullen inactivity, shuffling and speechless. `Cheer up.

  Nothing's ever as bad as it looks.' Helen's voice rang false in her own ears, repeating a cliche she hated.

  He grunted with short laughter. 'Nothing looks like anything in the dark. We can't see anything in the dark.'

  OK. Sorry I spoke.'

  `Not your fault.'

  `Couldn't we try again, pet? You lift me up, I push the door?' `No, I can't. I don't even want to.

  I'm tired.'

  So was she. Their several attempts to shift the trapdoor with a certain clumsy co-ordination but without the benefit of the shattered ladder, had resulted in nothing. The first shove had shifted the paraffin container, dousing them further, while the second had damaged their ankles and knees. They were filthy and stinking. Helen's hope for eventual rescue via Bernadette, whose punishment for her interference would surely not be as extreme as abandonment, had sunk to a dull glow of optimism.

  Her greatest fear was the return of Evelyn, but her fear was William's greatest wish and she tried to distract him from it. Even in the course of their efforts, in the flow of her own chatter, the odd joke which had succeeded in making him laugh, William's stone mill of a mind had been grinding out conclusions. She had begged him to think; now she wished he could stop.

  `She isn't coming back,' he said.

  `Well, she's obviously cross about something.'

  I don't mean now. Ever.'

  Oh, I expect she will. People don't stay cross for long.' `She tried to kill us. No, me.'

  Oh, no, William. This is just her idea of a joke.'

  `She knows I don't understand about fires. She tried to teach me, but I couldn't learn.'

  Helen paused, unwilling to stretch him further but desperately seeking clues as to how to deal with the dreadful possibility of Evelyn's return.

  `Why is she so cross, William? Is it about you and her being special friends, you know what I mean, going to bed together? Is she afraid her father might find out, or what? There's more than that isn't there?'

  `We weren't always special friends. She wouldn't let me…' He wavered away into uncertainty. Helen imagined Bailey as interrogator. How quickly he would persuade this boy to tell, shuddered at the thought, listened. 'I suppose she didn't like it very much. She only let me after… Oh, never mind.'

  After what?'

  After her mummy was dead. I cried. We buried her, Evie's mummy. She hated her mummy, but not as much as she hated the man she says killed her mummy.'

  Oh.' Helen cleared her throat. 'What about her mummy's coat and things? You know, the things women always seem to have, rings and bracelets and handbags. And clothes of course.'

  She could sense the puzzlement she could not see. William had lost his power to contrive, forgotten his small ability to keep secrets.

  `She didn't have any clothes and things,' he said finally. 'She was all bare. Like a big chicken.'

  He gave a giggle of embarrassment. `Goodness,' said Helen. 'And how did you dig the hole for her?'

  `With our hands, mostly, and Evelyn's knife. The ground was very soft.'

  Is that her knife you showed me?'

  `Yes. She told me to throw it away. I didn't, though. She never looks in the cupboard. I thought' – he struggled with the idea – 'I thought afterwards, long time afterwards, she might have wanted me to say I killed her mummy. I always said I would say that if she liked, I'd say that again and again if anyone ever said she'd done it -Evie, I mean.'

  `You go to prison for things like that, William. For a long time.'

  `So what? Doesn't matter for me,' said William stoutly. 'Why should it matter for me? But Evie's clever, going to be a doctor. Only Evie matters, not me. I love Evie better than anything. Only Evie ever cared about me.'

  `She didn't – ' Helen tried to make her questions as diffident as possible. 'She didn't see someone kill her mummy, did she?'

  I don't know,' said William hopelessly. 'I don't know, and I wouldn't care if she did. I don't know anything any more.' Sobs were rising again like a storm. 'I don't know. Her mummy was horrible. I only wanted to help. And now she wants to kill me.'

  Of course she doesn't. She'll come back.'

  `She wants to kill me,' he repeated. 'And I don't know why.'

  Helen put her arms around him, prayed for rescue, hugged him, and rocked him to and fro, a part of her wishing in fury a fate worse than death for Evelyn, the other part wondering how long it took for paraffin fumes to evaporate. The skin of her face felt flammable, her arms were weak, and the boy was growing ever more helpless. Wait for daylight. Another thought occurred to her with appalling clarity. 'William, will you give me the matches? I'd feel safer.' He handed them over. Her recognition, in this simple demand, of his despair and his longing to be dead made him cry more.

  `There, there, no crying, love. Think about something else. There'll be nice things to do in the morning. Shh, now. Listen, I'll tell you a story.'

  I'm frightened,' said William. 'Hug me. No one's ever going to hug me again.' It was said with utter and final conviction. She hesitated. Hugging William, even in this filthy pit, was a dangerous activity for a boy who could not distinguish between affection and desire.

  She hugged him all the same. They might neither of them see morning.

  `My mother never hugged me,' Bailey read. 'Never did anything like that, ever.

  Dressed up and all tha
t all the time, but never went in for hugging; it smudged her. Don't like her a lot and reckon she hates me. Jealous as sin. Hates me having friends. Always calls me darling child, like I haven't got a bloody name.' Bailey was examining one of a hundred fragments he had found in the desk in Evelyn's room, a mess of paper crammed into drawers, half-written letters and portions of school essays.

  This page was mildly corrected in Antony Sumner's hand: Evelyn, no need to swear in essays. It diminishes your considerable talent for description. Please remember to write in full sentences, not a series of fragments. Try this paragraph. "A Description of My Family" again.'

  She had tried again on the bottom of the same sheet: 'My mother is always staring into the distance and prefers I do not have a real name or identity. She has never loved me and always tries to prevent me having anything I want. The more I treasure something, the harder she will try to take it away.'

  `Much better, but give examples,' Sumner annotated in a bored hand. 'An essay should illustrate the points it makes.'

  `Well, she took away my camera, my new desk, my best clothes. She would never let me have friends or anything,' Evelyn had continued on an uncorrected sheet, apparently written for her own benefit, the standard of the English beginning to slip. 'Amazing she lets me have these English lessons. Because I asked Dad first, because it's pretty cheap and because she doesn't think it would be any fun. Didn't know, did she, how I love you. Thought she'd just be keeping me indoors while she's so bloody fat and I'm so thin. Ha ha.'

  Beneath these fragments, of which Evelyn had kept dozens of pages corrected in Sumner's handwriting, Bailey found a pile of poignantly incomplete letters on primrose paper:

  'My darling Antony, I love you so much it hurts. I want to kiss you all over, I'll do whatever you like. No one else listens to me except you and no one else notices me. Even if I had any friends, I couldn't bring them home, especially not Will. So I'm free to love you to pieces, and I do, I do. Hope you got my Valentine. Now that we have lessons with just us, I shall have you all to myself. She doesn't know. How can I write how much I love you?'

  Scattered among the sheets of compulsive writing were random diary jottings, as if Sumner's tuition had brought about an obsessive habit with the pen and a constant urge to record, albeit incompletely. On scraps torn from exercise books lay the evidence of a saga of bitter disappointment. 'August 5: Mummy losing weight like an Ethiopian. Ha ha. Buying new things. I wonder if she wants him. Oh, God, she can't, she's old. Why? Because he's mine, that's why. I watch them going out for drinks. Dad pretends he doesn't notice.'

  Next, a torn sheet, crumpled, straightened out again, kept against her better judgement: 'Watched them in the woods. Disgusting, yuck. He sucks her big tits, puts his thing in her, grunting like pigs. Why, why, why? I would have. I'm going to find William.

  Must stop crying. Can't stop crying. How can you do this to me? I hate her, hate her. Only thing I ever really wanted.'

  October 4: Dad buying things for her, only she never lets him buy anything for me.

  Gold stuff, lots of it. Suppose she thinks she looks bloody wonderful. Dad trying to buy her back. Silly wanker. Antony talks to me, nice, to me, but pathetic, head somewhere else. That gold stuff is mine by right. What about me, Daddy? What about me, then? I am beginning..

  `November 10: Where will they go in the cold? Not Bluebell Wood. In his car? Yuck.

  A whole winter in a car? That won't do. Ha ha. I wonder about telling Dad, but what difference would it make? I got William to rap on the car window and scare them.'

  `March 15: She's gone funny. He's gone off her; I knew he would. Now he'll come back to me. I want to, I want to, but he's making excuses not to come any more for my lessons. Why not? What have I done? How can he leave me? Surely he knows I don't mind about bitch face as long as he comes back.'

  Then a flat statement on May 10: 'Followed him again. He was with someone else, kissing. Watched them a long time. He doesn't come here any more and doesn't even say hello to me.'

  A gap of weeks and then more animation: 'Mummy phones him all the time, but he won't come back. She's done it, hasn't she? Driven him away. She doesn't know I can listen to her on the phone, doesn't even care if I do. Jangling gold and making phone calls. I can't say how much I hate her stinking face. She took him, she took him. Serves her right. Hate him, hate him, hate him.'

  `June 5: She gets him to meet her! I'm going, too. With my k… '

  Bailey paused in his reading, opened the next drawer. More paper, roughly torn sheets with crossings-out, sketched maps, a tube map of London, and a picture of a local craft shop, one of William's favourites, Bailey seemed to remember. There were lists, terse reminders on paper: 'Get washing liquid, v. useful. Hide bike, ask Dad for new one, don't tell.' Interspersed with the lists were strange descriptions, like brief catharses, literary attempts to distil an experience, full of slang in a deliberate and rebellious departure from the favoured style of the essays.

  A passage dated the day of Sumner's committal: 'You'd like this, Mr Antony fucking Sumner. Ain't this kind of neat? You were in the wood again with the old sow who wants to shag you like a bitch in heat – she never let me have a dog, so I don't know how I know.

  Says she'll run off with you, doesn't give a fuck for her daughter, husband, etc. Tell me news. Ha ha. Ants in her pants, ripping off clothes. You hit her with the stick and leave her there with her bum in the air and your stick on the ground. Gives me the idea. So I tiptoe up with my knife and then I tiptoe away again. Get my gold later, also clothes. I want to… Go on, then, rot. Daddy's the same today. In I come in the evening, go downstairs. "All this time studying, darling child?" he says. "Of course," I say.'

  Bailey put down the page and found his hands were trembling. Sifted through the rest finding none of equal length or savagery, some of a similar degree of crudeness: 'At least I now know How to Fuck. William taught me. See what you missed, A.S.? Ha ha.' A few expressions of regret about something: 'Shouldn't ask Will to help, have to do something about Will.' Nothing else but reminders, dates, and scribbles, staccato scrawls like spittle on a page, a mind seized by itself, each day a new plan.

  On the desk itself, a notice to the occupant: 'Holidays, Dad. See to W. Buy: (1)…'

  The remainder of the white sheet a panic-stricken blank until the tiny scribble at the bottom:

  'People watching me now.'

  Oh, you are wrong, my dear. People have been entirely consistent in their failure to watch you. You might have known, thought Bailey, they would not change. We should all have watched you sooner, and where the hell are you now? He visualized her approach to the sobbing form of her mother, knife in hand, seeing in one wide-angled glance the evidence left to incriminate another, using the same neatness to litter the ground by one of the fires designed to discredit the hapless idiot who had assisted, perhaps, in the burial.

  What had one interfering policeman found here? No true confessions, but enough to release one Antony Sumner, that teacher of impossible stupidity, who had nevertheless taught her a powerful use of the written word. Not evidence enough to convict the darling child. And here she would sit in her room, keeping secret her books and her contempt, aware that someone must feed her.

  He froze at sounds from outside: car door, footsteps on gravel. With systematic speed, he began to search the remaining drawers in the desk, refusing to acknowledge the distraction.

  He registered an explosion of argument inside the front door of the house. Raised voices: Amanda Scott, John Blundell, and the patient, apologetic drone of Constable Bowles. At that same moment Bailey's hand closed around the semi-chill of metal. In his fist was the gleam of a gold necklace, heavy, elegant, dull-coloured. He might have known. Of course William Featherstone would never have craved this. And William Featherstone was never watched either.

  If you're so bloody worried, you go. Why should I be woken up? Let the little bastard get on with it.'

  `He's not little. That's the problem. And
he's not a bastard.' `Yes he is. You've only to look at him. He's not my flesh and blood, is he, Bernadette?'

  Oh, so that's your excuse for never watching him, is it? Can't stand the thought he might be your responsibility after all this time? Well you can't get away with that, however hard you try and God knows you've tried often enough. Fucking's the only thing we ever got right, and he's the result. Now go and find him, fuck you.'

  He recoiled from the explicit crudeness. Bernadette swore, cursed, and abused frequently, but rarely so personally. Harold was half awake, shaken from fully dressed sleep, dragged into his kitchen and his life disbelievingly, bereft of anything but slight shock and the merest semblance of cunning.

  In the summerhouse, is he? And that copper's woman went out there three hours ago?

  You've taken your time, haven't you, sweetheart? No worry like real worry. She'll have gone home hours ago, interfering bitch. What'd she be doing with a great dolt like William?'

  `God alone knows, but she never came back. We'll both go, if you're too frightened.' For once he was not defensive, but did not move.

  `Course I'm bloody frightened. Bloody summerhouse. Lights and ghosts, full of them.

  I've seen 'em. So've you. It's you who's frightened.'

  She was pulling on a coat, stubbing out her cigarette, simultaneous movements of fury.

  It's two in the morning. Leave it out, Bernie, for Christ's sake.'

  `Two in the morning, he says, as if it can wait. We've a violent son at large and a missing copper's wife. Does it never occur to you, Harold, that two in the morning means that by now someone, somewhere, might come looking for her if she hasn't gone home? Like now, for instance?' Bernadette's eyes were levelled over his head towards the kitchen doors leading to the bar.

  Slowly Harold turned, imagining the presence of a silent blue-uniformed cavalry.