Daughter of the House

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated.

  Celia shook her head. ‘I’m grateful to you, really. You kept Gil married to me for ten years. And you brought me Richard. I can never thank you enough for doing that.’

  ‘I didn’t. Really, I …’

  The other woman’s hand shot out. Her fingers gripped so fiercely it made Nancy wince.

  ‘Yes, you did. Don’t tell me otherwise.’

  After so many years of doing it, Nancy wearily speculated, was letting Celia Maitland believe what she wanted any worse than doing the same thing for dozens of other people? It would never happen again. All that, and the Uncanny, was over.

  She heard a murmur of voices and her senses instantly sharpened. The view through the window of the Bentley briefly shimmered, and then every last vestige of the Uncanny was gone.

  Stepping down on to solid ground made her feel much better. Celia’s ravaged face was framed by the open win-dow.

  ‘What’s wrong with your eye?’ she asked, as if she had just noticed that Nancy wore a patch.

  ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The hand rapped on the glass partition once more and the car slid away. Celia didn’t look back.

  ‘Aunt Faith and Lizzie said goodnight,’ Cornelius told her as soon as she came in. ‘We weren’t sure how long you were likely to be.’

  Jinny sat at the table, stringing runner beans. Cornelius chopped them and tossed them into a saucepan.

  ‘Where’s Devil?’

  Cornelius said, ‘He was agitated. He went back to shouting about never selling and over his dead body, so I gave him a tot of brandy and some of my old sleeping draught. When I looked in a moment ago he was snoring.’

  Nancy went into the scullery for the hoarded brandy bottle she and Cornelius kept hidden in a box of oatmeal. Alcohol was best out of Devil’s way these days. She poured herself a scant finger of the spirit and placed the bottle on the table. Jinny helped herself and went on deftly stripping green spirals from the beans.

  They wouldn’t ask, but she could tell them.

  ‘The woman in the Bentley was Lady Celia Maitland, Gil’s wife. He brought her to one of my early Palmyra performances because she wanted to reach her dead brother. Gil and I became lovers not long after that.’

  She had never told them how it happened. Nobody spoke for a moment.

  ‘And did she reach her brother?’ Cornelius asked in his flat tone.

  ‘In a way, yes.’

  Jinny’s head was bent over the old enamel colander. She never judged, even when they had confided their early secrets amidst the oily clatter at Lennox & Ringland after big ambulance nights.

  Nancy said, ‘Anyway, I have just realised that Gil and I are finished. I have discovered how much I hate secrets.’

  Cornelius carried the pan across to the range. He searched for the box of matches that usually stood on a shelf next to the gas ring.

  Jinny said, ‘I would like to see you happy.’

  Nancy considered. Out of the mass of new shocking perspectives that confronted her it was difficult to pick a consistent angle.

  ‘I am not unhappy,’ she confessed, surprising herself. There would be pain to come, without the man she had counted as her dearest friend as well as her love, yet an unacknowledged green shoot gave her hope.

  The air was spiky with a strange tension. Jinny raised her head.

  ‘I hate secrets too. I want to tell her,’ she said to Cornelius.

  Nancy turned to her brother. His cheeks turned a mottled dark red but he went on mechanically searching shelves for the matches. Jinny put down the paring knife.

  ‘Cornelius has asked me to marry him. I said yes.’

  ‘Neelie?’ Nancy breathed.

  He pushed his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose.

  ‘That’s right.’

  She was shocked almost to silence, where she had no right to be. She might have guessed, she realised, except that she would have dismissed the idea as impossible.

  ‘I … That’s wonderful news.’

  ‘Do you mean it?’ Jinny seemed hardly able to believe her.

  ‘Of course I bloody mean it. Come here, both of you.’

  She spread her arms wide. She kissed Jinny’s cheek and rubbed Cornelius’s heavy head as he laid it against her shoulder.

  ‘I am so pleased for you.’

  Jinny babbled, ‘I love you both. And Devil, of course. I’ll take the greatest care of him, Nancy, and of Cornelius, and nothing else will change, will it? Omadood barm, darling.’

  ‘Besarves amather,’ Nancy dazedly completed.

  It was wonderful. Cornelius would have a wife and there could be no better woman for him. There might even be a child, she realised. Jinny was not yet forty.

  A new family in Waterloo Street.

  She pressed her hand against her belly. The tectonic plates of her world shifted. Where would her future place be? No longer in this house, surely? The immensity of change, the splintered perspectives of the new order swung at her and made her giddy all over again.

  ‘Nancy?’ Jinny was still holding her.

  ‘Phew. It’s a lot to take in. Pass me that glass, will you? I hope you will be very happy.’

  They toasted each other in cheap brandy.

  ‘My future wife,’ Cornelius said, trying out the words. He put his hands on Jinny’s shoulders and withdrew them again, awkward and affectionate as always. Nancy couldn’t quite suppress a shameful quiver of jealousy. Jinny didn’t see it and she was glad of that.

  Cornelius muttered about this all being very fine but it was getting late and if there were no matches there would be no dinner. He went off in search of a box and Nancy and Jinny were alone.

  Nancy said, ‘I didn’t know, girl. I really am blind. I thought you and Ann were for ever.’

  ‘Had she lived, we would have been. But there’s more than one kind of love in this world, Nancy.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘There is.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  She didn’t know what woke her, but in the tick of a second she was fully conscious and staring into the darkness. She lay listening to the tiny noises of the old house before she pushed back the covers and swung her feet to the floor. Devil’s bedroom door stood slightly ajar and she padded in her pyjamas to his bedside. The bed was empty and the sheets held only a trace of his warmth.

  Downstairs the house was in darkness. The clock on the dresser showed her that it was twenty to three. Devil wasn’t there, and the garden door was locked on the inside with the big key still standing in the lock.

  She turned the key anyway and opened the door, shivering a little in the draught of cold air. Beside the path she could see the steely glint of Cornelius’s glass cold frames, and at the far end the massy bulk of the tree in the opposite garden.

  ‘Pa?’

  He couldn’t be out here. She turned to face the back of the house, tendrils of association snagging her as she did so. The thought of Emmy Simmons came briefly before the Uncanny exploded around her. Without warning she was enveloped. It was denser and more potent than she had ever known because she had believed it gone.

  In place of the house there was a burning building, exactly as she had glimpsed once before, with flames licking out of the windows to devour the oxygen from the heated air. With its greedy roar crackling inside her skull Nancy ducked, covering her face with her hands. Her terror of the fire was overpowering but she forced herself to take one step forwards and then another, as she had done onstage to meet the mirrors before escaping past them to Sylvia and the sanctuary of the wings. She peered through her fingers and to her horror she saw a human figure, tiny as a bird, embedded in the heart of the fire.

  A voice thrummed, Help me.

  Nancy staggered, but somehow she still moved forward. A second later she stumbled through the back door and the Uncanny lay behind her, shrivelling into tatters as it evaporated.

  Gasping for breath she ran t
o the row of pegs and found that Devil’s old coat was missing from its usual place. She was already on her way to rouse Cornelius when she remembered that Jinny might be lying in his bed. It was an absurd reluctance, when she didn’t even know if Jinny had stayed or gone home, yet she couldn’t make herself overcome it.

  The urgent need to find her father took over. He was in danger: that was what the fire meant, and the figure at its heart. He might be hesitating at someone else’s door, confused and lost. Or far worse. Without stopping to reason she slipped her feet into her boots and pulled on her coat and hat.

  The thought of his frailty, the bewilderment he would be suffering, sent her flying out of the house.

  Waterloo Street was deserted and there were no lights in any of the windows. She peered into the shadows, praying for a darker outline, but there was no one to be seen. At the corner she hesitated. A car raced past on the distant main road, its headlamps drawing a brief yellow cone. She drew her coat more tightly and hurried two hundred yards to the point where low-built houses like theirs gave way to bigger ones with steps protected by iron railings. She peered down into cellar areas, her eye accommodating enough to distinguish sacks of coal, piled logs, tin buckets and spindly shrubs, but no sign of Devil. The scrape of her breathing was harsh in her ears.

  At the main road she paused near a lamp and gazed back into the recessed darkness. The stillness behind her was eerie. Another car swept by. She was standing so close to the kerb that the draught flapped her coat hem against her pyjama legs. The next car slowed and pulled up. Her imagination was racing ahead and it took her a moment to notice that it was a taxi. The driver peered out. He must have seen her nightclothes and now the collapsed socket of her eye. She hadn’t thought to put on her patch.

  ‘You all right, miss?’

  ‘I need to get to the Strand.’

  ‘I’ll take yer.’

  She patted the empty pockets of her coat. She must have looked desperate enough because the man said he was going up west anyway, to catch the gents on their way home. Good tippers, they were, at this time of night, if they hadn’t spent it all. He didn’t mind taking her along.

  They whirled through Farringdon, past Lennox & Ringland, and swept up Fleet Street. Print workers were busy here. Vans were being loaded with the morning papers and all-night pigeons bobbed amongst the crumbs of late suppers and early breakfasts.

  As soon as they reached St Clement Danes they saw it.

  ‘Gawd, look up there,’ the cabbie grunted.

  A pall of smoke filled the sky, darker than the night, its underside burnished flickering umber. The cab nosed along until they could smell and almost taste the fire.

  ‘I won’t go no closer.’

  Nancy gabbled her thanks and flung herself into the road.

  ‘You watch it,’ the driver shouted but she was already running. The fire was real. She heard its dull roar backed by the sharp snap of flames. Heat scorched her face and she fell into the partial shelter of a shop doorway.

  The front of the Palmyra had been shrouded in smoke and even as she watched a wall of fire burst through the roof, roaring up like a living thing to snap at joists and beams. The ribs enclosing the cupola resisted for a moment longer before bursting into flames too, releasing columns of sparks and billows of acrid smoke. Chunks of smouldering debris rained down from the sky, setting miniature bonfires on the theatre steps and melting the tar in the street. A blackened poster shrivelled in the exploded glass case next to the foyer doors.

  the posters had once announced.

  Or The Wix Family proudly presents

  She pulled herself together, covering her mouth and nose and stumbling ahead. Her blind socket stung and tears poured from both sides.

  A helmeted policeman barred her way. Two fire engines blocked the Strand and firemen raced to unreel hoses. Their faces were pale sickles in the smoke. Nancy tried to dodge past the policeman but he stretched out his cape, arms wide to restrain her, like some giant bat.

  She screamed at him. ‘My father is in there.’

  ‘You can’t go any closer. It’s too dangerous.’

  High above them the cupola exploded like a piece of overripe fruit. The firemen fell back to take shelter behind their engines. Nancy stared up at the place where the dome had been, now a glowing furnace sending immense clouds into the darkness. Hot cinders and flakes of soot fell on her and on the policeman, dotting their clothes with smouldering points like the red eyes of insects. There was a stink of scorched wool.

  The firemen ran out again and in a moment arcs of water were pumping into the heart of the fire. Plumes of steam hissed into the sky and the flames sank within the molten walls. Her throat was clogged with soot and she was hardly able to see, but she had no thought except finding Devil.

  She peered sideways along the Strand to the gleaming windows of the Corner House. The polished sweep of glass was smirched with smoke, with the flames reflected in places so it seemed there was a second, smaller fire. She caught sight of a man standing under the arched entrance, his face upturned to the Palmyra.

  It was him.

  She yelled at the policeman, ‘He’s there. Just let me go to my father.’

  ‘Go on then.’

  She scuttled like a crab against the shopfronts and doorways. A window burst high in the theatre and diamonds of glass sprayed through the smoke. She shielded her face and plunged onwards to the shelter of the entrance.

  ‘Pa.’

  Her father looked round. At first his expression was blank. He didn’t mistake her for Eliza – he didn’t recognise her at all. Grabbing him by the arm she swung him so that his back was turned to the blazing theatre. She shook him hard enough to rattle his teeth. If it wasn’t Devil she had seen inside the blaze, who was it?

  Sylvia. Oh God, it was Sylvia.

  She screamed, ‘She’s in there. I saw her. We’ve got to get in.’

  He only grinned, flames reflected in his eyes.

  ‘You saw?’

  ‘You know I see things. Help me. Help her.’

  He shook his head, still dementedly smiling.

  ‘No, no. I hunted through every corner. Jakey’s old hidey-holes, your dressing room, under the stage where Carlo and your mother and I used to spring the boxes. There wasn’t a soul there but me.’

  His hand hovered over his pocket where the missing box of kitchen matches lay.

  ‘The gas piping, you know. It was very old. Not safe at all.’

  ‘You did this? You set the fire to burn down our theatre?’

  She imagined her father fleeing down the old passageways for the last time, past Sylvia’s little sleeping alcove, his shoes clattering on the bare boards as a tiny flame licked up in his wake.

  A fresh corona of sparks shot into the sky. Devil sighed in awe, as if he were watching a fireworks display.

  ‘There’s no Gabe, you see. All’s well. No one else shall have the Palmyra.’

  There was no time for this. Nancy thrust him aside and raced into the road where the firemen wrestled with the black hoses.

  ‘Help me. There’s someone inside.’

  ‘What’s that miss? Stand back, now.’

  Lent strength by desperation she hauled at the nearest man.

  ‘This way. The stage door, at the back.’

  Thank God, her anguish was eloquent enough. The firemen followed in her wake, clattering like an army, down into the cobbled alley. The stage door was locked and Nancy pounded on it with her two fists.

  ‘Sylvia,’ she screamed.

  ‘Step aside, miss.’

  An implement was hustled forward, a thick and heavy pillar that looked like a giant rolling pin. The men swung it, repeatedly smashing it into the wooden panels and within seconds the stage door broke into splinters and the rescuers burst in.

  Fresh air collided with the wall of smoke and torchlight probed the swirling blackness. To her horror she glimpsed Sylvia lying in a ball, her head cradled in her arms, only a few feet beyond
the stage doorkeeper’s box. Nancy staggered along the wall, coughing and retching as the fumes flooded into her lungs. Within seconds she was sightless and suffocating. Falling on to her knees she reached out and her hands grasped the dresser’s coat.

  Men’s voices bawled, ‘Get out. Mind yourself.’

  She was pushed aside as Sylvia’s inert body was hoisted over a fireman’s shoulder. Another man grabbed Nancy and manhandled her towards the faint rectangle of foggy light where the sweet air flowed. Thudding boots pounded in her head.

  ‘Anyone else in here?’ a voice in her ear demanded.

  ‘No,’ she choked. Sylvia, poor faithful Sylvia.

  She was set down like a puppet against the far wall of the alley. She coughed and wept, her stinging eye and blurred vision just allowing her a glimpse of Sylvia’s body as it was carried into an ambulance. Through spasms of coughing she gasped at the fireman who stooped over her, ‘Is she dead?’

  ‘She is unconscious, still breathing. She’s inhaled a lot of smoke. They’ll look after her. You worry about yourself for now, miss. You did a brave thing there.’

  She clutched at the man’s arm in desperation. ‘I have to go back to my father. He’s not fit to be left on his own.’

  When they saw that she could barely walk they half carried her back up to the Strand. Devil was still standing under the Corner House arch and as soon as she fell against him he reached into his pocket and took out a handkerchief. As if she were a little girl again he dabbed the soot and tearstains from her cheeks and cleaned the puckered margins of her eye socket.

  ‘There. That’s better. My pretty one.’

  Once he was satisfied with his handiwork he turned again to watch the fire. Pumped water subdued the flames although there were dark red seams glowing everywhere. The Palmyra had been devoured and the palm chandelier, gilt-faced boxes, plush fauteuils and hard gallery seats must all be in ruins.

  Nancy gaped at the place she had known her entire life, unable to absorb the spectacle of its destruction.

  Devil muttered, ‘It’s full circle, you see.’

  ‘What do you mean?’