I smiled, though stupid, embarrassing tears were pricking at the back of my eyes. ‘Thank you. I love it, truly I do. It’s the most wonderful thing you could ever have given me.’ Wrapping the picture up again in its brown paper, I packed it carefully away in my suitcase between the layers of clothes. Andreas patted the mattress beside him and I went to sit down again, trying not to feel awkward.
‘You have been for me a good friend here,’ he said. ‘I wanted to say thank you for this.’
I stared down at my lap. ‘There was so much more I could have done! For your mother, and your cousin - ’
‘You did everything you can,’ he said, ‘and I know you try to help, that is important.’ He took my hands and held them between his, and I truly thought my heart must have stopped beating. When at last I dared to look up, the sad, hungry yearning in his eyes made the breath catch in my throat. It was all there: the misery he must have kept bottled up for so long and which could never be properly expressed in words. There was no need to say anything. I knew how precious it was, this gift of trust. We moved closer -
And suddenly my bedroom flew door open. ‘Isobel?’ Mum was standing in the doorway, light flooding into the room from behind her. ‘I thought I heard voices.’
Andreas sprang off the bed, his face scarlet. ‘I come to say goodbye, that is all.’
She nodded and stepped aside, holding the door wide open. ‘I assume you’ve said it now?’
He left without another word. Mum closed the door behind him with a sharp click. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘It looks like we’re leaving just in time. How could you be so stupid, Isobel? What on earth did you think you were doing, up here on your own with a boy?’ She looked absolutely furious.
‘It’s not like you think. He doesn’t have anyone else to talk to.’ My voice trailed away. There was no point trying to tell Mum how it was; she’d never understand.
She didn’t. ‘You’re too young, and he’s too … too mixed-up. You must stay away from him from now on, do you hear? You should be thinking about School Cert and getting your life back on track, not messing around with boys.’
‘We weren’t messing around!’ I protested. ‘He needs someone to help him, Mum, honestly.’
‘Maybe he does, but that someone doesn’t have to be you.’ She sat next to me on the bed. ‘You’re too gullible and you’ll only end up getting hurt. Believe me, Is, I know. Wait till you’re older and then find some nice boy from the same kind of background as you. It won’t work otherwise.’ She patted my knee and got up. ‘You’d better stay up here this evening. I’ll bring you a sandwich if you’re hungry.’
That was almost a relief. I’d have been embarrassed to see Andreas again at supper in front of Mum. So I just lay on my bed for hours, listening to the everyday sounds of the house: the front door opening as Lord Vye took Wellington for an evening stroll around the gardens, Mr Huggins sounding the gong for dinner, busy footsteps as Alina tidied the bedrooms and turned down covers on the beds, Sissy running the twins’ bath. There’d be time to say goodbye to the girls and Tristan tomorrow; just then I felt too sad. The room grew darker and eventually I heard Stan and Alfie coming up to bed. Mum put her head round the door but I pretended to be asleep and she went away. I couldn’t sleep, though, not for ages. Apart from having had that nap in the afternoon, there was too much to think about. How could I leave Andreas like this? What if I never saw him again? How could we write to each other without Mum knowing? ‘Find some boy from the same background as you. It won’t work otherwise.’ It suddenly struck me that she must have been thinking about Dr Hathaway.
At last I gave up on sleep and tried to read, although the words kept dancing in front of my eyes without making sense. Eventually, hours later, I fell into a doze and that strange dreamy state between sleeping and waking. I could hear a barn owl screeching somewhere in the woods, and smell the earthy, autumn scent of bonfires and burning leaves, but my eyelids were too heavy to force open. Yet I couldn’t drift into deep sleep, either. A vague sense of unease nagged away at me, a feeling that something wasn’t right. Was that Wellington barking? Could that unearthly sound really be an owl?
Suddenly I sat bolt upright in bed, terrified. The room was already thick with fumes as a silent, remorseless tide of soft grey smoke came seeping under our door.
Confusion. Panic. I couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. Tearing off the blankets, I stumbled out of bed and across the room, my eyes already smarting. It felt like walking through a pea-souper, except that I was floundering in a fog of smoke. ‘Stan! Alfie!’ I screamed, stumbling across their sleeping, sprawled bodies. ‘Fire! Wake up!’
Seconds later they’d snapped into life, fumbling for clothes and belongings littered across the floor. ‘No time. Go!’ I heaved Alfie up by his pyjama jacket and pushed them both towards the door. But smoke was billowing underneath it by now and I didn’t know what to do. Should we try and get out, or block the gap with a towel and open the window instead? Alfie made the decision for me, flinging the door wide open. As he vanished into the grey tunnel that used to be a corridor, I heard a dull roaring in the distance which frightened me even more. The thought of being trapped in this room was worse than anything and besides, I had to reach Mum and Gran. Following the boys outside, I tripped over something on the floor. My gas mask! It was there in its cardboard box next to my suitcase and Wellington boots, ready for the morning.
I usually hate this gas mask more than anything else in the world - that sickening rubbery smell, the feeling of claustrophobia when I put it on, ‘Chin first!’ as Mum’s always reminding us - but just then I could have kissed the ugly thing. Even if it didn’t keep out all the fumes, at least it meant I could open my eyes. It was even hotter with the mask on, almost suffocating, but I knew it’d be much harder to breathe without some help. Arms outstretched, I felt my way down the passage to Mum’s room and bumped straight into her.
‘Where are the boys?’ she screamed, and I pointed past her down the corridor at the lumbering misty shapes that had to be my brothers. I hoped Alina was with them, too. Mum vanished for a second to reappear wearing her own gas mask, and then we both had to duck suddenly as a creature came swooping over our heads with a furious beating of wings, screaming like a banshee. Someone had let Punchy out of his cage. A shadowy figure emerged through the fog to meet us: it was Tristan. I herded him along the passage towards the clearer air at the other end and saw Stan reach out to take him.
Where was Gran? And Sissy and the girls? Their rooms must have been closer to the source of the fire because the heat blasted my chest as I went back to find them. Just as well I was still sleeping in a thick woollen dressing gown; it protected me from the flames that were surely close now. Gran was out of bed. I couldn’t find her for a moment, then spotted her struggling to open the window. She resisted when I grabbed her arm, fighting against me. Perhaps she didn’t know where she was, or perhaps she thought it would be safer to stay, but there wasn’t a second to spare. If we didn’t get out right away, the fire would cut us off. To my relief, Mum appeared behind me and together we took Gran under each arm and hauled her out of the room.
Thank God! The door to the night nursery was opening and there stood Sissy with the girls. Except that she was only carrying one of them. It was Julia, and she was screaming, ‘Nancy! Nancy!’ over and over, and trying to wriggle out of Sissy’s arms. Sissy was choking, but she managed to keep a tight hold on Julia and followed Mum and Gran down the passage with her. The smoke was so thick now I could hardly see, even with the mask, but I dropped to my knees and crawled the other way, towards the open door of the nursery. It was easier on all fours. Here were the flames: bright tongues beginning to lick around the margins of the room and creep up the curtains. There was no sign of Nancy anywhere and I couldn’t bring myself to go any further. ‘Nancy? Come out!’ I screamed in despair from the doorway, knowing it was hopeless; she couldn’t possibly hear me in my gas mask above the noise of the fire.
Suddenly someone pushed roughly past me and, by the time I looked up, a dark figure was plunging into the furnace. Another second and it had vanished, swallowed up in the billowing smoke. Who could possibly come out of that room alive? I couldn’t even stay this close and began to back away, sobbing in fear and shock. Wait any longer and there’d be three bodies to find. And then I was hauled to my feet, and a limp bundle was shoved into my arms, and somehow I was running blindly down the passage and not alone any more because there was a retching, choking sound coming from somewhere behind me and a pressure at my back forcing me on. I looked down at the bundle in my arms. It was Nancy, lying very still. She didn’t seem to be breathing.
Twelve
God is on high.
He can see you.
You will die. Men will die.
From Reading Without Tears, 1898
It’s hard to remember exactly what happened after we ran down the corridor, and in what order. All I can come up with is a series of images: Lady Vye racing along the landing, silk nightgown streaming out behind her, to tear Nancy from my arms; Gran fighting for breath; Alina silently clutching a photograph of her family, wide-eyed; Julia shaking Nancy to wake her up with Sissy crying over them both; Punchy soaring up to settle at the very top of the house on the ledge beneath the cupola; Andreas holding out his arms, shreds of his pyjama sleeves falling away from the burnt skin underneath. He was the person who’d pushed past me to rescue Nancy.
What did we do next? Somebody brought blankets, I think, and Mr Huggins and Lord Vye carried Gran down the main stairs. We all went outside and before long, fire engines and an ambulance were tearing up the drive with their sirens blaring. Nancy and Andreas were loaded up, with only Lady Vye allowed to accompany her daughter. I could hardly bear to look at Andreas: a dressing had been put over his arms but his face was streaked black, his hair singed in places, and he was huddled over in pain. It was all I could do not to jump into the ambulance and throw my arms around him. And then I heard a commotion behind me: Mum was trying to persuade Gran to get in the ambulance too. ‘No!’ She tore herself out of Mum’s grasp. ‘I shan’t go! You can’t make me.’
‘It’s all right, Mrs S,’ came a calm voice, and there was Dr Hathaway with his black bag. ‘Sit down for a minute and I’ll check you over myself.’
It was wonderful to feel that somebody was in charge who knew what they were doing. Gran let herself be led over to a bench and Mum knelt beside her. Even at a time like that, I couldn’t help noticing how beautiful she looked, the ruddy glow of the fire on her face and her hair spilling over the blanket she’d thrown over her nightgown. ‘Thank you,’ she said to Dr Hathaway, which made me glad even though I was so upset and everything was so terrible.
‘Shouldn’t someone take a look at you, too?’ Mum asked me. ‘You were in there longer than any of us.’ But the gas mask had helped protect my face and lungs; apart from a sore chest and throat, and not being able to stop coughing, I felt more or less all right. So I stood on the grass with the boys and watched the Hall burn. The firemen had unravelled several endless hoses and Stan worked out they must have been pumping up water from the lake. Ash swirled on the air, timbers groaned and fell. Lord Vye paced up and down the terrace, shouting to point out where he thought new flames were gaining ground (although nobody seemed to be paying him a great deal of attention). So far the fire was contained in the old servants’ quarters and the upper floors on our wing; if they could only keep it there, the damage to the main house might not be too bad.
Mr Oakes had come up from the gate lodge with his wife, still in her curlers. She offered to take the children with Alina and Sissy back there for what was left of the night, since the firemen wanted as many people as possible out of the way. They let me stay, thank goodness, to help look after Gran. I sat beside her on the bench while Dr Hathaway talked seriously to Mum a little way off where no one could hear them. He’d listened to Gran’s chest with a stethoscope and given her some oxygen from a tank and mask the ambulance men had left behind. They’d obviously decided there was no point forcing Gran into hospital if she was so dead set against it.
Finally, miraculously, we heard someone say that the fire had been brought under control: there was no danger of it spreading to the rest of the house. Mum and I helped Gran back inside. There was a guest bedroom on the ground floor near the library where Lord Vye said she could go for the time being, which was decent of him, and a sitting room next door which we could use. Dr Hathaway brought the oxygen tank along and showed Mum how to use it, while I found sheets and blankets for the bed.
‘Stop fussing! I’m all right,’ Gran told us, but she clearly wasn’t. She had to fight for every breath and I couldn’t bear to hear the wheezing rattle in her chest. When we’d settled her into bed, Mum told me she’d doze in the chair beside for the bed for a while, just to make sure Gran was all right, so I could curl up on the sitting-room sofa. I made her promise to call me if Gran got any worse.
The next morning, it took me a good few seconds to work out where I was, before the acrid tang of smoke in my nostrils brought the nightmare flooding back. Yawning, I wrapped the blanket more tightly round myself and put my head around the bedroom door. Gran was alone in the room, looking very small in the high half tester bed. Her breathing seemed a little easier, though, so I set off in search of Mum. A couple of firemen talking together in the hall, brass helmets tucked under their arms, didn’t bat an eyelid as I walked past. They must have been used to seeing people in their night-clothes. All the windows in the house had been flung open and through one of them, I could see Lord Vye standing next to PC Dawes, the village bobby, and pointing something out to him on the roof. An air of unreality hung over everything.
The kitchen was more or less intact, amazingly enough, apart from a window being smashed and every one of Gran’s precious pans black as coal instead of shiny copper, as well as the wall they were hanging on. Mum sat at the table, dressed in a man’s shirt over a thick tweed skirt, having a cup of tea with Mrs Oakes. Grim Mrs Oakes had risen to the occasion. She had brought some clothes for me to wear, too: an old-fashioned liberty bodice, a pair of red flannel bloomers, a cotton blouse and a tartan kilt I could have wrapped twice round my waist. She was letting the boys sleep in, she said, and they could come up to the house when they were ready. ‘They can stay with us in the gate lodge a while longer, Grace,’ she added. ‘And Isobel, too - I’m sure we can fit her in somewhere. You won’t want to be going home until you see how your mother is.’
‘What did Dr Hathaway say?’ I asked Mum. ‘Does he think Gran’s going to be all right?’
She didn’t answer straight away. ‘He says she needs complete rest. I’m sure she’ll be fine, but it might take a few days to be sure. And she might get worse before she gets better so we must be prepared for that.’
This wasn’t the reply I’d been expecting, not at all. ‘Lady Vye rang up from the hospital first thing,’ Mum went on, changing the subject. ‘Miss Nancy’s doing very well. They don’t think she’ll have any lasting ill effects and she could even be home by the end of the week. That’s wonderful, isn’t it?’
Yes, it was. ‘What about Andreas?’ I asked. ‘Has anyone heard how he is?’
‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll be fine.’ She put the clothes in my arms. ‘Now find somewhere to put these on and then come back here for some breakfast.’
‘There’s a lot of clearing up to be done,’ Mrs Oakes added, ‘and we might as well make a start. Many hands make light work.’
After getting dressed, though, I went outside for a look around first. The gaping windows of the old servants’ quarters looked like sooty eyes, an ugly black smoke stain around each one, and the roof above was burnt completely through. The fire must have started there and leaped up the back stairs towards our bedrooms and the main roof of the house; a chimney stack had gone, although the attic dormer window further along was more or less intact. A few firemen and a couple of men from the vil
lage were still there, sorting through debris and gazing up at the roof from outside the house. And suddenly there was my suitcase! Sitting on the terrace as though about to head off on holiday all by itself. It had changed colour from brown to black and the catches had fused with the heat, but Mr Oakes could probably force it open for me. It would be a relief to have my own clothes back but the only thing I really cared about was Andreas’s painting. Dragging the case away, I left it against a wall to fetch later.
A little way off, Lord Vye was standing on his own with his back to the house, both hands deep in the pockets of his tweed jacket, gazing out across the lawn. I watched him from a distance, wondering what was going through his mind. Without making a conscious decision to move, somehow I found myself a few feet away, waiting for a chance to speak to him. We stood there for a minute or two and I was wondering whether to creep away unnoticed when he suddenly turned around.
‘Yes? What is it?’ His eyes were anxious and preoccupied. ‘Ah. Lizzie, isn’t it?’
‘Isobel, sir,’ I said.
‘Isobel, of course. I was going to come and see you this morning - say thanks awfully for what you did, rescuing Nancy like that. Jolly brave of you, my dear. How are you feeling?’
‘Not so bad, sir,’ I said. ‘But, really, it wasn’t me who rescued Nancy, it was Andreas. He was the one who found her and brought her out of the nursery. I don’t know how he had the courage, with the fire being so fierce, but somehow he managed it.’
‘Did he really? Well, I must say, I’m extremely grateful to him. Awful thing.’ He shook his head. ‘You were lucky to get out alive. I must call in at the hospital and shake the boy by the hand, say thanks very much.’
Not the best thing to do, given Andreas’s burns, but I didn’t point that out. It was now or never; if I didn’t speak up now, I’d probably never have another chance. ‘There is something you could do for him, sir, that would mean more than anything. It’s just that his mother is still in Germany, as you might know.’
Isobel's Story Page 12