by Rosie Thomas
Julia screamed, ‘Stop him. Don’t let him go in there.’
People ran after him, some trying to pull him back, others beating towards the stone portico behind him.
The others stumbled backwards from the fire, defeated by it, but it took Alexander into itself and the noise seemed to grow louder, the red glare intensified.
‘He’ll die in there,’ Julia heard herself screaming.
The silence and stillness of the crowd of people seemed the more shocking because of the fire’s wild energy.
Mattie was there. The fierce shadows thrown by the blaze made their faces like skulls as she and Julia faced one another. The two of them, as they had always been. They heard the bells of the fire engines.
Julia ran towards the big red engines. The torn tails of her satin dress swished around her calves as she plunged forward.
‘My husband’s in there. Save him. Oh, save him.’ Her screams tore her throat. ‘And Johnny, and his girl. Save them.’
The firemen were big men in helmets, and their silver buttons reflected the red light. They put Julia aside and ran past her, their helmets tilted as they looked up at the roof. The black ribs of it showed now, as the bright flames broke free. Fire hoses uncoiled like serpents and a turntable ladder swayed upwards. Julia saw the firemen running, as Alexander had done, in under the stone arch.
Mattie stood on one side of her, and on the other was the man with the sideburns, Flowers’s friend. Julia had danced the conga with him in the candlelight, seemingly an eternity ago. The rest of the guests stood in a silent huddle, frozen with shock. A spout of water arched from the brass mouth of a hosepipe and fell between the black roof beams. The water hissed into steam, seeming no more than a trickle against the fire’s triumphant strength. Julia’s eyes were fixed on the door arch and the pulse of its smoky breath. Her mouth and chest burned with the smoke, and tears poured unnoticed down her face.
She didn’t know how many minutes they stood there. The hiss and crackle and the fearful red light took control of time and will and left her with nothing but terror. She was still calling out, ‘Bliss.’
She saw a sudden movement in the doorway. There was a beam of healthy light, the yellow glaze of a strong flashlight catching an oilskin shoulder. A fireman ran out of the shroud of smoke, and Julia saw that the bundle slung over his shoulder was the body of a girl. Mattie’s hand clutched at Julia’s wrist, but she shook it off and ran forward. An ambulance had come, and more dark uniforms dashed past her with a canvas stretcher.
They laid it out on the ground, in the shelter of one of the clipped yew trees.
The fireman stooped and tenderly laid his burden on it.
What she saw there stayed with Julia for the rest of her life.
The girl was alive, because her head rolled to one side. But the beat of relief in Julia’s throat was followed by a spasm of horror. She was looking at her face as it turned, thinking, Who is she?
But no one could have recognised Flowers’s girlfriend. Her face was nothing like a face. It was a raw slab, like red melted wax, with ragged black holes punched into it.
And then broad backs knelt down in front of it, and hid the burned face from Julia’s sight. She put the back of her hand up to her mouth and bit into the knuckles. The pain of it seemed a long way off, belonging to someone else. But it competed with the nausea that rose to choke her, and stifled the moan in her throat. The stretcher was lifted, swaying, and carried away to the ambulance.
Someone was shouting.
Julia turned her head, back to the doorway. She saw the gleam of yellow light again, and the firemen with another burden. There were two of them, and they were carrying Bliss between them. His head lolled backwards out of her sight. He had lost one of his patent leather shoes and his foot dangled in its black silk sock. The legs of his trousers were torn, showing smoke-blackened skin.
‘Julia …’
It was Mattie again, her arm around Julia’s waist to support her.
‘I want to go to him,’ Julia said clearly.
She blundered forward and knelt down as they were lowering Bliss on to the second stretcher. Julia ducked her head for an instant, and then looked at his face. It was blackened, and there was blood oozing from a deep graze on the left cheek. The eyes were closed, but it was Bliss’s face. His mouth hung open and he took a ragged gasp of air.
He was alive. Julia was shuddering with relief, and they gently put her aside and began to work on him. It was then that she saw his hands. They were drawn up into claws, and they were red and melted like the girl’s terrible face. The sleeves of his dinner jacket and the shirt underneath were charred, and the fibres stuck to the burned flesh. Further up, up to his shoulders, there were little coils of scarlet where the cloth still smouldered. Julia broke free again from the restraining hands, just as the rescuers lifted Alexander’s stretcher. She reached forward and tried to beat out the burning threads with her own hands.
‘Let me go with him,’ she begged, but they closed the ambulance doors on the two stretchers.
‘The police will take you down to the hospital. Let the ambulance get there as quickly as it can.’ One of the firemen led her away. The blue light on the ambulance roof flashed impartially over the watching faces as it began to revolve. The high white vehicle rolled away and the siren sawed through the darkness. The sound of it was suddenly louder than the fire.
‘Flowers,’ Julia said. Her eyes fixed on the door again, and the firemen. With a sudden surge of hope, she saw that the jets of water were stronger than the flames. Wherever new tongues of fire flickered out, water spurted to douse them The smoke was thicker and blacker, and the crackle of the fire’s progress had given way to the hiss of rising steam.
She stared through the rolling smoke at the exposed black ribs of the roof beams. Little blazing fragments fell, and thick, oily smuts drifted in the light wind. The smell of the fire was like a gag thrust into her mouth.
She shouted, ‘Flowers. Flowers is still in there. Help him.’ Mattie, and Flowers’s friend, and all the other guests stood around her, watching and praying. ‘They’re trying to get him,’ somebody murmured.
A fireman loomed in front of Julia, creaking in his protective clothes. ‘There’s a constable here with a car, Lady Bliss. They’ll take you to the hospital.’
Julia looked wildly around the circle of blackened, shocked faces. The women were shivering in their thin dresses and it was only then that Julia realised she was trembling uncontrollably herself. She twisted round to face the house. ‘I can’t. I must wait here, for Flowers.’
The fireman’s face was stiff under his helmet. She understood. They don’t think he’ll be alive. Mattie’s hand took hold of Julia’s, drawing her away.
‘Come on,’ she murmured. ‘We’ll go to the hospital.’
Numbly Julia let them lead her to the waiting car. She sat in the back seat with Mattie beside her. Someone had brought a red blanket and wrapped it around them, and Julia felt Mattie’s bare arm against her own. They looked at each other, and there were tears pouring down Mattie’s face.
‘He can’t be dead,’ Julia said, in a high, sharp voice. ‘Not Flowers. They’ll save him. I know they will.’
Her last glimpse of Ladyhill that night stayed with her through the nightmares and the waking horrors. It was a huge, halfextinguished pyre with fear and death trapped within it, and its smoky fingers reached malevolently after the car as it sped away.
Mattie and Julia huddled together as they followed the ambulance through the night. Under the cover of the red blanket Julia’s bitten knuckles dug into the pit of her own stomach.
Johnny Flowers died in the fire. The firemen discovered his body, barely identifiable, lying half in and half out of the bedroom door. The post-mortem later indicated that he had almost certainly been overcome by fumes before the flames reached him. Alexander’s hands and forearms were badly burned. Julia waited in the hospital into the middle of New Year’s Day, then went with him
in the ambulance when he was transferred to a special burns unit at another hospital thirty miles away. In the ambulance, still dazed with shock and with his face twisted with pain, Alexander whispered, ‘We’ll build Ladyhill again. Every brick and beam. Just a fire can’t destroy Ladyhill, you know,’ He stirred on the narrow shelf bed, as if he wanted to lift his arms from under the protective cages and begin the work at once.
‘Of course we’ll rebuild,’ Julia soothed him. Within herself, she shuddered. The flames, and the girl’s face, and the last glimpse of the smoky pyre of the house filled her head. Those images would stay with her, she knew that, night and day. And the weight of guilt for what she had caused to happen was already like a stone inside her. She leaned forward to Alexander, letting her mouth brush his forehead. He winced even at the lightest touch, and the nurse who was travelling with them moved her gently aside.
‘I’m sorry,’ Julia said hopelessly. ‘It was my fault.’
Alexander closed his eyes. ‘No, it wasn’t. How could it have been?’
They reached the hospital, and he was wheeled away from her. Later, a specialist came and told Julia that he would need skin grafts, and weeks of special care before they would know if his burned hands could work again.
‘He’s a musician,’ Julia said. ‘He plays the trumpet, and the piano.’
‘Yes,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s very early days yet. We can’t tell what will happen.’
‘I see,’ Julia answered wearily. ‘Thank you.’
Mattie came, and took her back to Faye’s cottage on the Ladyhill estate. Julia went to bed, but she couldn’t sleep because she saw Alexander’s hands, and the girl’s face, and Johnny Flowers’s huddled body whenever she closed her eyes.
Flowers’s girl had almost died. For long days after the fire she had been too ill to be moved from the general hospital, but then at last they had been able to bring her to the burns unit. Julia went to see her where she lay behind white screens. She knew by now, of course, that her name was Sandy. They had met, just once, a long time ago, at the Rocket. Sandy was someone else’s wife, and she had slipped away with Johnny Flowers to see the New Year in at Ladyhill. Julia remembered the old, conspiratorial brilliance of Flowers’s smile when she had seen him at the top of the stairs. The dancers’ bright colours blurred like an exotic carpet below them.
Shh. You haven’t seen me, Flowers said.
Julia remembered it, over and over again, the words and the violent images replaying themselves in her head. Flowers and Sandy had paid everything for their night’s truancy.
Julia sat rigidly beside the girl’s bed, looking at the burn dressings that masked the destroyed features. Sandy would need months of skin grafts, years of plastic surgery. With an involuntary movement Julia put her fingertips to the smooth skin that stretched over her own cheekbones.
Sandy whispered through the shredded Ups, ‘Tell your husband … thank you.’
Alexander had saved her life. He had snatched a towel from the kitchen, wrapped it around his head, and then dashed through the smoke and up the burning stairway. He found Sandy lying unconscious, huddled against the wall of the upstairs corridor. The heart of the fire roared behind her. The heat flayed Alexander’s skin. Choking and gasping he had crawled towards her. Sandy’s hair and clothes were already on fire. Alexander beat out the flames with his hands and then, somehow, he dragged her to the top of the stairs. The oak treads gaped into red mouths. Alexander pitched himself downwards, hauling Sandy with him.
The firemen found them lying at the foot of the great staircase.
Julia pieced the fragments of the story together for herself. Almost nothing beyond the bare details had come from Alexander.
‘I couldn’t see Johnny Flowers anywhere,’ he explained. ‘I just couldn’t see him. If only I could have seen him, I could have tried …’
‘You did everything you could have done,’ Julia soothed him.
Alexander’s bravery silenced her. She loved him for it, but it was awesome and she felt it between them, another distance. Julia knew that she possessed no similar quality.
She leaned closer to Sandy and said in a low voice, ‘I’ll tell him. Of course I’ll tell him.’
The mask nodded its tiny, painful movement and Julia’s eyes looked through the burn dressings into the red, molten flesh.
In the burns clinic, on the same day as her first visit to Sandy, Julia at last told Alexander that she was pregnant. She could hardly believe that the baby was still inside her, silently growing, oblivious of so much sadness and suffering, but her doctor assured her that it was.
Alexander’s delight at the news was almost frighteningly intense. He lifted up his big, bandaged paws in a gesture of impotent celebration. ‘A baby. Regeneration, you see? Everything will be all right. We’ll be a phoenix, the three of us, and Ladyhill.’
Julia was ashamed of it, but she had no dreams of regeneration. The fire smoked inside her and guilt stalked her everywhere. She had wanted to fill Ladyhill with people; she had bought the pretty candles for the tree and fixed them to the branches herself. Now Alexander’s beloved house was destroyed, and his thin, musician’s hands had melted into padded stumps. Flowers was dead who had been so alive, and Sandy lay along the corridor, unrecognisable. Julia shivered at the thought of Ladyhill and its ghosts. She stayed with Faye in the cottage, going every day to visit Alexander, and never once went back up the driveway between the trees to look at what was left of his house.
Alexander’s recovery was so rapid that it amazed his doctors. The grafts on the backs of his hands took, and began to heal, and he grew impatient with the hospital. ‘I want to go home,’ he announced. ‘I’ve got a wife, and a baby coming. I want to rebuild my house for us all.’
Julia was sure that it was his longing to get back to Ladyhill and begin the regeneration that made him recover so quickly.
At last, the burns specialist and the plastic surgeon agreed to let him go, weeks earlier than they had first predicted. In time, they said, Alexander would regain almost full use of his hands, even his fingers. But the flexibility would never come back. He could no longer be an instrumental musician.
‘I can compose,’ he told Julia. ‘I never was much of a trumpeter anyway. Let’s go home, now.’
They left Sandy behind. She was recovering, but she would have to stay in the unit for a long time yet. Her husband had come down to be with her; she had let Julia and Alexander know, without putting it into words, that they would prefer to be left alone together. Julia understood well enough that she wanted no unnecessary reminders of New Year. She was sure that Sandy had her own, inescapable ones, just as she did herself.
Julia and Alexander went home.
They went first to Faye’s cottage, but he was hardly into his stepmother’s pretty drawing room before Alexander announced that he wanted to walk up to the house. He turned to Julia. ‘Come with me,’ he said. Julia knew that it was coming. Their eyes met.
‘I …’
‘Come with me,’ Alexander repeated.
Julia bent her head. ‘I’m coming,’ she whispered. ‘Faye, will you come too?’
Flustered, Faye mumbled something about looking at lunch. Julia and Alexander set out alone together, walking across the park where the crocuses were showing, and cutting into the avenue of trees that curved up to the house. As they came to the corner, Julia glanced at her husband. His expression of fierce concentration seemed to exclude her completely. Then they turned the corner, and the house lay in front of them. Julia saw the gutted wing, the smoke-blackened bricks and stone, and the mined roof draped in tarpaulin like a shroud. She could smell the smoke again, and see the livid light of the flames. She turned her head, half listening for the bells of the fire engines.
At her side, Alexander breathed, ‘It isn’t so very bad. I dreamed it would be much worse.’
He walked on, quickening his pace, and Julia followed behind him. She clenched her fists in her pockets to stop herself shaking
. Closer to the black walls and the blank windows, the fire seemed so real and so near to her that she was afraid her flesh would singe. The reek of smoke made the tears run out of her eyes. The windows in the ruined side seemed to stare down at her, accusing her.
Alexander walked briskly round to the far side of the courtyard. ‘Are you coming inside with me?’ he called.
‘I’ll … I’ll wait here,’ she answered. ‘I’m afraid to go further.’ Alexander didn’t hear her last words. He had already disappeared round the far side of the house, heading for a side door. Julia waited for him for a long time, standing in the courtyard. The rooks that nested in the elms on the other side of the house turned in restless circles over her head, but Julia couldn’t see anything but the avid leaping of the flames.
At last, Alexander came out again. His mouth was smiling, but there were grim, vertical lines at the side of it. His fierce expression had intensified.
‘It’s a mess inside, but it can all be put right again. The staircase, the panelling, everything. It’s a question of time and money, that’s all.’
‘It would be wonderful if it could be done,’ Julia offered. She had no conviction that it might.
He rounded on her. ‘It isn’t if. It will be. It must be. Listen, I’ll tell you what we can do. The other side of the house, Father’s study and the housekeeper’s part, all that is almost undamaged. We can move into those rooms, camp there, while the restoration goes on. We can watch it every inch of the way.’ Julia shrank, but she stopped herself from scuttling backwards, away from the threat of it.
‘Alexander? Do we have to live in the middle of it? After …’ Julia’s hand moved, to the place where the firemen had laid Sandy on the waiting stretcher. They had carried Alexander out between the black stumps of the arch, and some time on that terrible night what was left of Johnny Flowers too. The images seemed more vivid than the reality of the thin early March sunshine.
‘You know we do,’ Alexander. He came to her and she almost flinched, but he put his hand over her stomach. ‘Not just for us, but for him.’