Absolute Hush (21 page)

‘Lump! Lump!' she screamed over and over.

I heard her, knew I was loved, and in that moment my existence did not seem so wasted after all.

The five young airmen, suddenly sobered with horror, stared at the bursts of fire, thrusting from the bedroom window, and, in its centre, the pale smudged face of George.

‘It was me,' gasped Billy. ‘I threw the match.'

George leant out of the window clutching a bundle. Flames stood around him like a halo, then his hair began to burn.

‘Here Sissy! Here!' he shouted, and threw.

Sissy put out her arms as a tattered bundle came tumbling and shrieking through the air like a red hot angel.

Sissy seized the baby who had come to sweeten the world – the world's last sugar lump – out of the sky. Clutching it to her body, she yelled, ‘Come on, George! Jump! Jump!'

He had become invisible in the dense smoke, but they could hear his voice.

‘I only ever loved you, Sissy.'

‘You've got no time for slop, George,' Sissy yelled, furious. ‘Come on. Bloody jump.'

She waited with her arms wide.

The five airmen yelled, ‘Come on, George! Jump!'

Window glass exploded suddenly, spraying out like Christmas decorations, then shot up into the air in a fountain of glittering fragments. When it cleared, there was no George in the window.

Sissy began to scream his name, and tears born of smoke, fear, and sorrow, started pouring, unchecked, down her face.

No George appeared.

With a great roar and a gush of flame the chimney above the Hairy Petal Bedroom plummeted into the roof, punching its path through slates, rafters, ceilings. It must have entered and filled the Hairy Petal Bedroom because a moment later a surge of fire and smoke gushed out of the window, and inside the room could be heard the thunderous sound of falling masonry.

Distantly, there came the sound of approaching fire engines. The airmen started to sink with sadness. Sissy, hugging Lump to her body, fell on her back on the grass and, rolling from side to side, began screaming with misery. Billy took off his flying jacket and gently dressed Sissy in it. She did not seem to notice.

‘What a foolish boy to lose his life to rescue a doll,' Lewis said. They didn't even know that Lump was alive, but took it to be a toy.

Elizabeth and Beattie saw the Plague House smoke from the window of Beattie's cottage.

Elizabeth sprang up, suddenly sick with dismay.

‘I've been a bad mother,' she told Beattie, as Beattie took the astonished and outraged pony out of its stable and began to harness it. Never before had anything been expected of it at one in the morning.

‘You can't be what you're not,' Beattie told Elizabeth.

‘They might be burnt to death by now,' whispered Elizabeth. ‘And I haven't loved them enough.'

Beattie assured her firmly. ‘One of the things their unusual education has given them is the gift of survival.'

‘I didn't give them education,' cried Elizabeth as she followed Beattie up the little iron step into the cart.

‘Well, there's good and bad in everything, even education,' Beattie told her, drawing the tassel of the whip across Patacake's quarters until the pony broke into a gallop. Even Patacake's fetlocks had to be sacrificed tonight.

As Elizabeth and Beattie came through the front gates, the pony, foamed white with sweat, saw the flaming bedroom and started rearing like something out of a cowboy film.

A second later the figure of George appeared swaying in the doorway. His clothes hung in tattered shreds. His skin was smeared with charcoal, his hair was almost singed away. Water blisters were rising on the edges of his ears.

‘I wasn't going to come, Sis,' he whispered. ‘I was going to stay there in the fire for ever because the only things lying ahead for me seem to be prison and having my … my … chopped off…' He paused, gasping, one eye swollen shut, the other clumped with melted lashes. ‘But something extraordinary happened.' His throat was so hoarse and scorched that his words were hardly audible, and Sissy had to lean over his mouth to hear him.

‘Just when my hair began to burn, something grabbed me round the shoulders, and I felt myself being pushed out of the Hairy Petal Bedroom and towards the stairs. It was like being blown along in a whirlwind.'

‘Perhaps that's what sometimes happens in burning houses,' said Sissy. ‘I think it was Lump,' said George, and slumped unconscious.

Elizabeth rushed towards her children, arms stretched out, as though relief following shock had liberated her from revulsion.

Mrs Lovage would have been dismayed, seeing in these spontaneous gestures a lowering of standards, the dismissal of daintiness, but Mrs L was out of the village that night, aiding a
sister in the grip of a hiatus hernia. She would return in the morning to gobble with knowing horror at the sight of the black hole punched in the face of Elizabeth's Georgian mansion, and see in the charred chaos of the house and garden her own re-entry into favour.

Sissy, standing over the slumped form of her already stirring brother, clutching the saved Lump, smiling on the two beloveds, swung round at the sound of her mother's cries – ‘George? Sissy?' – and swiftly chilled her expression, unable, having so far experienced only reproach, to accommodate herself to its opposite.

The sight of the swathed thing in Sissy's arms stopped Elizabeth with a skidding abruptness of which Mrs Lovage would have approved, and Elizabeth's face, which had become rosy with the heat of the fire and relief at the rescue of her children, went pale as realisation returned.

Sissy stood numb, drained, not feeling anything – her only thought was ‘How nice to be George,' who was now comfortably murmuring, ‘What a blaze! Oh, what a blaze!' apparently unperturbed by emotions wilder than the snorting of cinders.

Mother and daughter faced each other over an impassable infinity of unacceptable grandchild across which there seemed to be no bridge.

Beattie, having managed to prevent the poor pony – who had had too many frights in the Plague House already – from bolting like Pegasus into the sky, emerged out of the smoke, and understood.

‘Come, Elizabeth,' she breathed and hugged gently till Elizabeth's trembling stopped.

Carefully, so as not to hurt him, Beattie raised George till he leant against Sissy.

Then she took the bundle out of Sissy's hands.

‘Come, darling creatures,' she said to Sissy, Elizabeth, George and Lump.

Beattie, the bridge, led the way, holding Lump, to undamaged
bedrooms. Sissy and George propped each other up, and Elizabeth followed, feeling somehow free.

Only one strange thing happened that night.

As Sissy had taken the child from Beattie, its coverings had fallen back, and for a moment its face had been exposed.

Elizabeth, with a small sigh that did not sound despairing, had reached out and gently touched the white globe of heavy baby forehead with the tip of her little finger.

I have decided to go, taking with me the memory of that precious caress.

I will try again in about two hundred years, if the human race has not destroyed itself by then.

I had hope of success when I managed to approach the heart and mind of Elizabeth and rock her on the golden water of the moat.

There was a moment when George heard me and began to understand who I was.

I had come out of Sissy's body but I saw that she had already started hankering for games in the garden with George and, to be able to fulfil my potential, I needed to be concentrated on.

God's caressing finger was born to Sissy, and, because of war, and conflict with her mother, she never knew it.

I had to go. I was too precious to waste, and no one, not even Sissy, could hear me so that, in the end, I was starting to be unable to hear myself. I was the bridge between man and Heaven, and with their screaming and their crying they have extinguished me.

‘You really are the hero now, George,' Sissy whispered that night in the Apostle Bed. ‘You saved the life of Sugar Lump,' and he, pasted with ointment and swathed in bandages, nearly smiled with pride, then yelped with pain because his lips were blistered.

They slept cautiously, George afraid to move from pain and Sissy still sore from childbirth.

She woke before dawn, realised she did not hear the usual snuffling breathing and gobbling sucking of the malformed baby and whispered to George, her words echoing among the
wooden tasselled bedposts ‘Lump is dead.' She was certain, even without looking, because of the quality of the silence.

George, sitting up wildly, then shrieking as he remembered his agony, said, ‘You haven't even looked! Hush can't be dead! I risked my life to save Lump!' as though no baby would be so inconsiderate as to die after such a sacrifice. He could hardly remember how he had wanted Lump to die – ever since Lump had smiled at him and he had understood that Lump was something wonderful.

Sissy pulled up the knitting and stared at the pathetic body.

‘Gone,' she said, her voice echoing hollowly.

‘Oh,' cried George from his heart.

Sissy began gently to stroke the lifeless body. She had done this when the Silly Dog died, and the guinea pigs too, and George knew she was saying goodbye.

It was chilly so George pulled the Parson Quilt from the bed, moving carefully so as not to crack his blisters, and wrapped it round her.

‘Come on, George, we must bury Lump now,' said Sissy.

Like Siamese twins, held together by a seventeenth-century pornographic tapestry, they went down the stairs and into the garden, George hobbling, stiff where his skin was scalded.

George and Sissy buried Lump beside the Silly Dog and Teddy's doorkey.

Sissy had to do most of the work because George's hands were bandaged. When the job was complete Sissy patted the soil with her hands to make it even, then crept about in the dark finding crocuses to strew. Then George and Sissy stood up, bowed their heads, and said in unison, making one or two false starts before they got the words coming out together, ‘Goodbye, Lump.'

Sissy was just turning to move away when George suddenly added, ‘See you soon.'

‘You spoiled the whole thing,' Sissy accused. ‘How can you see someone soon when they're dead?'

George writhed his features around. ‘I just get the feeling that being dead is not exactly what we think,' he tried to explain. ‘Lump sort of smiled at me, and I knew hush was trying to tell me something.'

‘Oh pooh!' said Sissy who did not like to think of Lump having a secret understanding with somebody else.

Then George and Sissy went silently back into the house, speechlessly climbed the stairs and, passing the Apostle Bedroom in which they had begun the night, went on till they reached the Sad Bedroom. They climbed into the bed, George letting out little squeaks of pain as he bent his knees, then Sissy lay down on her stomach, pulled the cover over her head, and after a moment began to scream and kick. Then George started up. They cried and screamed, sobbed, roared, and whacked their legs against the mattress. They nearly fucked, but thought they'd better not in case they made another Lump. They went to sleep at last, wet with each other's tears and running noses, and slept till it was day and they could smell breakfast being made downstairs.

‘I am cured of Lump,' said Sissy.

‘I am cured of Lump,' said George.

The house was saved apart from The Hairy Petal Bedroom, and Charles, Robert and Lewis came to clear up. They worked silently and sadly this time, not only out of shame but because Billy and James had been lost over Germany.

‘Sissy and I want to make a bonfire,' said George, his voice high and nervy.

It was breakfast time.

He looked cautiously from Elizabeth to Auntie Beattie. A shiver went through his body as Beattie said calmly, ‘Be careful which way the wind is. You don't want to set the trees on fire. But how silly of me to tell you. You have been an expert with fires for years, haven't you?'

George felt his face go red, and wondered how much she knew.

‘Have some coffee,' said Elizabeth to Sissy, reaching for the jug.

‘I hate coffee,' said Sissy, trying, unconvincingly, to be the person she used to be.

Elizabeth said, ‘So do I. Well this war-time stuff anyway. You'll like proper coffee when the war is over.'

Sissy turned her gaze to the garden and saw the crocus-strewn hump on the lawn under which lay Lump's body. ‘Do you think it will be over?' she asked.

And Elizabeth knew she was not really talking about the war at all.

There came a cry of, ‘Oh! At last, ducky. Somebody left the gate open and I got in.' Mrs Lovage came running dashing into the kitchen, arms out, as though to embrace everybody in sight.
As she came closer she became quite humble and held her head a bit bowed in case Elizabeth should once more expel her.

‘I'll help with the baby. Sissy, dearie,' cried Mrs Lovage.

Elizabeth looked at her coolly and said, ‘Baby, Mrs Lovage? What baby?'

George lit the bonfire with the last most perfect match, the one that had not set Lump on fire. He laid no ceremonial Teddy's lighter as he struck, for that had been lost in the Hairy Petal Bedroom.

The bonfire was the biggest the garden had ever seen and, over its crackle, came the sound of Mrs Lovage loudly singing, so that her efforts would be noticed as she scrubbed.

Yeasty smells of Beattie's lardy cake came floating from the kitchen window.

Myrtle polished the huge doorknob and worked out how she should tell her mother that her Yank had made her pregnant and now she had discovered he had a wife in America. ‘I wouldn't have married him anyway,' she told her distorted reflection, ‘he was too ugly,' and a tear softly fell on the shining brass.