The Backward Shadow

by Lynne Reid Banks

  He turned his half-empty face towards her slowly, and gave her a piteous look, like a scolded child fearing nothing so much as the loss of its mother’s love. His slack, trembling mouth framed the words, ‘I didn’t mean to—’ and suddenly Mrs. Stephens doubled over, holding her waist as if in some unendurable pain, and began to run blindly towards the fire.

  For a second nobody moved to stop her, so I ran after her and caught her easily. ‘What—’ she gasped, weakly struggling against me, ‘What have I done—what did I say to him—oh, somebody save us—save our cat or I can’t go on, I can’t go on like this any longer …’ She began crying, feebly and helplessly, shaking her head to and fro heavily between her hands.

  ‘You stay with Mr. Stephens. I’ll try and find Muffer.’

  I handed her back to her neighbours. I knew I had offered to do the impossible—looking at that fiery interior left me in small doubt that the poor little beast was charred to a cinder by now. But still, cats are supposed to have a strong instinct for self-preservation. If it were not actually trapped, it might have escaped. I couldn’t help feeling it was terribly important to find it if I could; only by putting the creature unharmed into Mrs. Stephens’ arms could I save her from hating that poor old man forever.

  I remembered that the only window in the house that was ever opened was at the back—the larder, or what had once been the larder, where the cat slept. Getting to the back through the passage was quite impossible—one couldn’t approach the building from the front at all, since the wind was blowing the heat that way. But by running down to the end of the block and turning left twice, I came into a narrow alley which led past the bottoms of the tiny gardens. From here things did not look half so bad. The back part of the house was in silhouette from the blaze in the front, but it seemed to be intact, and so, I noticed, did our shop on the far side. Things were uncannily quiet here too, compared to the uproar in the front, to which was now faintly added the belated clanging of an old-fashioned fire-engine bell.

  I scrambled over the fence into the Stephens’s back garden, falling into the soft earth which I myself had loosened on that fatal Billings day. Standing there in the eerie, spark-filled dimness, wreathed in stray curls of smoke, I called urgently for the wretched cat. ‘Muffer! Muffer! Sh-wsh—wsh—Come on, pussy, come on—’ I couldn’t see a thing. I found my way to the back of the house. The smoke was thicker there, and all the windows seemed to be closed, but I got my fingers under the sash of the larder one and it jerked open. I expected the cat to come shooting out, but nothing happened. Apart from the smoke, and the crackling, it was hard to believe the front of the building was ablaze. Here, everything was dark and still. I felt quite safe in climbing in over the sill.

  The cat wasn’t in the larder. I opened the door, and a gust of smoke billowed out and nearly knocked me over backwards.

  I choked and coughed and wanted to clear out, but there was no sign of any flames so I thought I’d just make sure the cat wasn’t in the kitchen. I got down on hands and knees and crawled forward; there was much less smoke near the ground, and I could breathe all right, but it was pitch-dark and I bumped into several pieces of furniture before I reached another door on the far side.

  This time I did hesitate. The ominous crackling was very loud now, and I remembered that the front part of the building, the shop part, which was now only one room away, had collapsed. I touched the door; it was hot. I knew that a sudden draught going through the house might bring the whole lot down in a moment. But then I heard the damn cat mewing in the living-room. It was a dreadful sound, quite unlike the ordinary voice of a cat—it was a high-pitched all-but-continuous miaow which convinced me that animals, too, can reach a point of despair. I really couldn’t leave it there. It wasn’t because of the Stephenses any more. It was the cat itself, and I don’t even like cats, but you can’t turn deaf ears to anything that’s crying like that, in such hopeless terror of abandonment and nameless death.

  I half-stood up and opened the door a very little. A lot of things seemed to happen at once. A terrific roar met my ears, like a furious live animal about to leap on me. After an eternal moment, the cat came bolting out with its fur full of sparks, its tail like a brush, fairly screaming from a wide-open mouth. It flashed past me and was gone, heading unerringly for the only escape route. The smoke seemed to fall into the room as if the opening door had released a great weight of it which had been leaning against the other side. I bent double and ran, my eyes clenched shut, stinging and burning, and not daring to breathe. I don’t think I breathed again till I had fallen out through the larder window head first into the open air.

  I lay stunned for a minute—I had actually fallen partly onto my head—and then picked myself up and fled down the garden and over the fence. I spotted the cat almost at once, and it was as well I did, because its coat was smouldering and its tail was actually alight in one place. I caught hold of it quite brutally and rolled it over in the dirt and damp grass behind the fence. It sank its teeth and claws into me, of course, and for a second I had a brilliantly clear flash of memory—Mavis’s cat clawing me as I let it out of its basket. Then I picked it up round the middle and carried it, kicking and struggling and raking my knuckles with its back feet, round the corner and into the main street again.

  The crowd had increased considerably in the interim, and in the midst of it was the fire-engine, the men, their hoses already linked up, playing quantities of white foam all over the front of the post-office, or where it had once been, and, incidentally, all over the front of our shop as well. For the first time I noticed that the door of this was open and I caught a glimpse of Dottie, appearing briefly in the doorway with a huge crate which she handed to someone and then vanished again into the blackness—the electricity must have failed. Henry was nowhere to be seen, but a torch was playing around the inside of the shop, as I could see through the descending cascades of white foam which were pouring down the bay window. I had a sudden longing to be near him, and wondered how I could have left his side for so long.

  Looking round desperately for the Stephenses, or for anybody on whom I could unload the terrified cat, I saw a policeman, a very youthful one, gaping open-mouthed at the wonder of the shiny fire-engine. He came to himself with a jerk when I spoke to him to ask where the Stephenses had gone. He directed me perfunctorily to the chemist’s across the street, from which lights were now shining, and then went back to his fascinated contemplation of the fire, hands behind his back, face aglow with innocent enjoyment.

  When I went into the chemist’s the door-bell tinkled and everyone looked round, and then there was a general gasp, the reason for which I understood only when I caught sight of my face in the large mirror behind the counter. I had not realised at all that I was quite filthy, face, clothes and all, and furthermore rather bloody—I had a cut on my head and my hands were quite a mess where that idiot cat had savaged me for my pains. When Mrs. Stephens saw it she let out a shriek and flew towards me, embracing me and the cat together. Then she took the poor scorched brute away from me, and cradled it passionately in her arms: ‘Oh, poor pussy! Poor pussy! Mother’s poor little pussy then! Did it get burnt, poor girlie, did it get burnt?’ She carried it tenderly to the chemist, and looked up at him wordlessly, her eyes red-rimmed from smoke and tears, her hands all the time in motion, fumblingly stroking and gentling the cat, who now lay quite still in her arms—so still that I had the awful thought that it might have died of shock. The chemist gave a deep sigh, but he didn’t argue. ‘Bring it behind the counter, dear, we’ll see what we can do for it.’ Everyone crowded round and watched with fascination as the cat’s hurts were anointed and neatly bandaged. Then the chemist turned to me and said, ‘Now we’d better clean you up, miss.’ He winked. ‘Sorry, but you see how it is. First things first.’ With that the tension broke, everyone burst out laughing, even Mrs. Stephens, and the old man, who sensed somehow that a crisis had passed, could be heard cackling away in senile merriment, his mischievous
hands once more innocently at rest on his knees.

  Chapter 19

  IT was after midnight before we got home. The same policeman took us back in his car. Dottie sat in the front with him and I in the back with Henry. I wanted to hold his hand, but mine were too painful to touch, even in the bandages. A doctor had been found who had given me a shot of something against infection and I was feeling pretty woolly and absolutely deadly tired as well. I was scarcely aware of what was going on any more, only of Henry’s steady, comforting presence beside me, and Dottie’s head, kerchiefed and still miraculously erect, silhouetted against the windshield in front of me. She and Henry, with some help from bystanders, had had to shift everything back again into the shop after the danger had passed. Our shop had not caught fire. I didn’t stop to think beyond that. If I had any anxiety it was for David, but this had been nagging at the back of my mind all the time and now that I was heading back for him I already felt easier about it. I fell asleep almost at once from the motion of the car …

  I have a dim memory of Henry helping me up the stairs; I seemed to be completely befuddled by that time, but I did go in and make sure of David before dropping my outer clothes on the floor and falling on the bed. I was already asleep again when Dottie woke me.

  ‘Jane,’ she was saying in a harsh, loud voice, shaking me by the shoulder. ‘Jane! You’ve got to wake up.’ I peered up at her through a haze of sleep and resentment.

  ‘What is it? I’m dead beat. Won’t it keep till morning?’

  ‘No, I’ve got to talk to you now, I can’t possibly sleep until I’ve talked to you.’ She sounded like a stranger, her voice rough and violent, scraping on some jagged edge of hysteria. I heaved myself up in bed, wincing at the smart of my hands.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Wrong!’ She gave a shrill laugh which might have sounded theatrical if I hadn’t known her very well. ‘Plenty. You didn’t see the shop, did you? Where the hell were you, anyway?’

  ‘Saving the Stephens’s cat.’

  She hesitated, not sure if I could possibly be serious. ‘Christ,’ she said. ‘A cat! Never mind, it’s too late to go into that now. We managed—Henry and I.’ Her voice softened and relaxed a little at the conjunction of names. I said, ‘I’m sorry, it all sort of overtook me. But the shop’s all right, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s not bloody well all right. It’s not burnt to the ground, and that’s the only all-right thing you can say about it.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You want it item by item—tonight’s damage?’ Her hands were clutching my eiderdown and kneading it as Mrs. Stephens’ had the cat’s fur. ‘The wall on the fire side is scorched black and four or five shelves fell down with everything on them, most of it breakable. Most of the fabrics are ruined by the soot and smoke. The paint’s black and blistered. Most of the window panes cracked with the heat, and the foam came in and damaged the floor and a lot of other things.’ I stared at her in horror. ‘We’ll have to start more or less from scratch,’ she said.

  I couldn’t speak. I had had no idea. It was awful! Worse than anything I’d imagined when the policeman first came to the door. Surely the total destruction of the place in one fell swoop wouldn’t be quite as appalling as this disaster, which obliged us to decide whether to pack it all in or, as Dottie said, start again from scratch. The thought of doing that fairly winded me.

  I reached up and switched on the bed-light to see Dottie better. What I saw really frightened me. She looked distracted, half-mad. I don’t think I had fully realised until that very moment what that place meant to her—the shop itself and every piece of work it contained were vital to her, integral, as if she had done every single part of it herself, as in a way she had.

  A look at her pale, pinched face, drawn so taut that there were suddenly age-lines all over it, led me to expect her to burst into tears, but she didn’t. Her eyes, wide open and wild, were dry; she showed no signs whatever of breaking, though her body and manner were so taut and tense that she seemed to quiver all over. It was I who cried, because again I had failed her. I put my head into the bandages and sobbed.

  ‘Stop that, stop it!’ Dottie said fiercely. ‘What does that help? We’ve got to plan, to …’ She stopped abruptly and then went on, her voice slightly altered, ‘Jane, I want your four hundred pounds.’

  I stopped crying and looked at her. Her eyes pinioned me, glittering. She had the look of a fanatic and I knew she would never give up.

  ‘All right,’ I said, not giving myself time to think or bid goodbye to my dream, which had become a stupid and unworthy one anyway.

  ‘You mean it? You won’t change your mind?’

  ‘No.’ It was hopeless, the least I could do. I pushed away—temporarily—the sadness, the sense of loss. It was worth it, for the moment of the gesture anyway, just to see her face lose a little of its desperation, her hand unclench on the eider-down, leaving deep creases.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, very formally, as if in a bank or a lawyer’s office. She stared at me for a long moment, and then stood up and said, ‘I must get some sleep. It all begins again in the morning, and I suppose you won’t be much help, with those hands. Never mind. We’ll cope somehow.’ She went to the door, her back like a ramrod but her legs so out of control that she stumbled twice. Before she went out she stopped with her back turned to me.

  ‘You’re sure you mean it about the money? You promise?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, trying not to realise that her caution was entirely justified.

  ‘There’s just one more thing.’ She began to turn towards me, decided not to look at me and stood in profile, staring at the carpet. ‘I noticed Henry looking at you tonight, when we got home. I don’t blame him for anything, ever. I wouldn’t blame him whatever he did. I understand everything about him. But I just want to tell you that if you let him come anywhere near you, I’ll—I won’t bear it. I’ll do something terrible. Don’t say anything,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m only warning you. We’re all three in the same boat—anything could happen between us. Just be careful, be very careful, because—’

  She stopped talking and went out of the room, leaving the sentence in mid-air.

  I lay there stiff with shock for several minutes after she’d gone. What had she meant, ‘We’re all in the same boat?’ What boat? Perhaps it was her backward-shadow thing again. We were all in the backward shadow of fear of the future. Dottie’s fear was of a spinster’s eternal loneliness. Mine was of insecurity, moral, emotional and material, in the raising of David and my own personal subsistence. Henry’s—death, of course. How very petty ours seemed in comparison with his! Or, on second thoughts, was it not the other way round? Which was worse, to suffer agonies of fear and regret for a year and then be out of it, or to have to face endless years of struggle to keep your identity from flying apart from the lack of a love to hold it together?

  That Dottie had so misinterpreted Henry’s look as an intention to make love to me somehow didn’t surprise me after the first shock. Somehow it was inevitable that she would perceive something altered in Henry’s and my relationship, and equally inevitable that she would fail to understand it. This sudden, or no, not too sudden, flowering of love for Henry combined with my horror of the inevitability of losing him, seemed, in some part of my sub-conscious not too far from the surface, to overwhelm all other considerations whatever. But at the back of my mind, in some other place, waiting, was the disappointment, the crushing anti-climax, of the whisking away of my dream trip to the fantasy city of New York. The huge Aladdin’s cave which had been hovering there filled with glittering tinsel and fairy-lights for so long was now black-dark and empty. My £400 was pledged. New York was henceforth no more to me than any other distant unattainable city. And reality—the dog-days of slogging inescapable, problem-choked, discipline-demanding reality—were here again.

  Chapter 20

  THE next morning there was the shop. Thank God in a way that ther
e was the poor shop, blackened and soiled and looking somehow confused and ashamed of itself, to be commiserated with and looked after and nursed back to health. When I saw it I really felt with Dottie for the moment that nothing else mattered, except restoring its self-respect. Shades of the L-shaped room! How many times in one’s life can it happen that a mere place, bricks and cement and windows and doors, with its illogical subjective demands, can come to one’s rescue and save one from the lower depths of folly? Once or twice during the hectic weeks that followed I found myself wishing that the fire, if it had to happen, had happened right after my last meeting with Toby. I would certainly have pulled myself together a whole lot faster if it had.

  As it was, the work, the mutual effort to heal the shop, drew us together as a trio. None of us seemed to have time or even the desire for personal relationships à deux. Dottie never again spoke about Henry and me; Dottie and Henry were virtually never alone together; and Henry and I … we were almost never alone together either. Henry saw to that, not me. It would be untrue to say that I didn’t try, in the beginning, to be alone with him. If I still feel the tug of longing for him now, so many years later, how much stronger must it have been then, so close in time to our solitary emotional encounter! But he was having none of it. Only once was anything said. I remember the details lucidly; I can re-live the conversation as one re-lives an occasion by looking at an old photograph.