by Rosie Thomas
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 cl
inic, 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.’
‘For him?’ Julia echoed.
‘There isn’t going to be very much money,’ Alexander added, without seeming to hear her. ‘It seems that the house was underinsured.’
‘I don’t care about the money,’ Julia said despairingly.
Within days, they were installed in the undamaged wing.
Immediately, Alexander flung himself into plans for the rebuilding, and for raising the money to do it. His determination became almost fanatical. He was always busy, and Julia grew lonely, increasingly isolated from him by his preoccupation, her own guilt, and her fears of the house that her husband adored. A distance came between them, and widened to the point where Julia could hardly remember or believe in the happiness they had known before the fire. She huddled in their uncomfortable corner of a demolition site, haunted by her bad dreams.
Then, a little while before the baby was due, there was a reprieve. Julia insisted that the baby must be delivered at a London maternity clinic, and both Faye and China supported her. Alexander gave way to them, as he was prepared to do in anything that concerned the baby. They opened up the Markham Square flat again, and the two of them settled in to wait for the birth.
At once, everything seemed almost all right again. Alexander was working on the score for a new film and Julia enjoyed cooking for him, and pottering in the safe, familiar rooms. Away from Ladyhill, Alexander seemed to look at her with some of the old tenderness.
‘I love you,’ he told her. ‘I’ve neglected you, because I wanted so much to make the house whole for us all.’
‘I know,’ Julia said softly. She felt so heavy and ripe that she could hardly move. It was a huge relief to be in London, to be near to Felix and Mattie and the old places again. She met Sophia, or Mattie, or other friends for lunches, and shopped for the nursery. She wandered through the department stores, picking up toy lambs and fingering the tiny garments, wondering what she was doing there, and if she would really have her own baby soon. At the end, dreamy with late pregnancy, she half believed that they could go on like this for ever.
Early one morning, when they were lying in bed together, the contractions started. ‘I can feel it,’ she told Alexander. ‘The baby’s coming.’
He knelt over her, then pressed his ear to the bare mound of her stom
ach as if he was listening for music inside it. ‘Our baby. A baby for Ladyhill,’ he said triumphantly.
He helped her to dress, led her downstairs to the red Mini, and drove her to the maternity clinic.
Fourteen
June, 1960
‘Wake up, dear. You’ve got a lovely baby. A beautiful little girl. Don’t you want to see her? Lady Bliss, are you awake?’
That was all right then, Julia thought. They were talking to someone else. Her name was Julia Smith, and it must be someone else’s baby …
She didn’t want to wake up, because if she did she would start hurting again. She could keep the pain at bay by clinging to sleep. But the voice was insistent. ‘Wake up, dear.’
Through her eyelids she could see the red-gold of threateningly bright light. And across her stomach she could already feel a tight, burning band. She knew that she was awake.
Julia opened her eyes.
There was a nurse in a striped dress and a white butterfly cap, and sunshine stabbing in through the window behind her. The light hurt Julia’s eyes, and the rest of her body hurt much more. But the muzzy folds of anaesthetic were dropping away, and she remembered why. There had been all the hours of yesterday — was it yesterday? – when the contractions had gone on and on, and the pains had assaulted her until she screamed. The midwives had held her arms and sponged her face, and Alexander had stormed away to find the doctor. They had come then to tell her that, after all, her pelvis was too narrow and they would have to deliver the baby by Caesarean.
Then even Alexander had been hustled away, and faces in green masks peered down at her through the fog of pain.
After that, she remembered she had half woken, sick and exhausted, when they put her into this bed. And now, somehow, it was bright morning and there was a pretty, dark-haired nurse beaming at her.