Authors: M. R. Hall
The Burning
For Will and Tom: tough guys
ONE
T
HE EVENTS OF THAT EVENING
so long ago had condensed over the years into a single scene that he played over and over in his mind. But the passage of
time had not caused the images to fade or the exquisite sensations to dim. Not at all. They were as vivid as ever.
Exquisite
. The word came close to capturing what he had experienced that
day, but not quite. There had been so many layers, so many aspects to his ecstasy.
Heaven
. That’s what it was. Such a simple word, but the only one that would do. The second he had
breathed into the depths of his lungs as the life left her eyes had been pure
heaven
. His blood had turned to light; his body had felt as if it were hovering: quivering and gravity-defying
in mid-air.
And then he had done it again.
He could feel the stirrings already: the tension tightening the fibres of every muscle; the delicious anticipation like the first touch from his angel. His angel with the full red lips that
tasted of honey and wine, his angel whose flesh was as soft as velvet and down. His precious angel: the beginning and now the end of all this.
Reaching the end of the roughly gravelled farm track, he struck out across a field frozen concrete-hard and carpeted with frost, the cold air sharpening his senses until they were as keen as a
wild animal’s. The bony knuckles of a solitary, leafless oak clawed at the silver-bright sliver of moon and an infinity of stars sprayed over a tar-black sky. He looked up like a child in
wonder. The universe was smiling on him.
At the hedgerow on the far side, he climbed over the stile and made his way along the rutted path that crossed the stretch of woodland sloping down towards the hamlet of Blackstone Ley. As the
darkness of the trees closed in around him he caught occasional glimpses of the lights from the scattering of houses below. His fingers tightened around the smooth, polished butt of the shotgun.
The only sounds were of his footsteps and the gentle sloshing of diesel coming from the rucksack strapped tightly across his back.
After a quarter of a mile the path dog-legged sharply through a dense stand of birch, widened slightly, then finally delivered him onto the narrow lane at the foot of the hill. He stood for a
moment in the shadow of the hedgerow, safely outside the pool of hazy orange light cast by the single street lamp. He glanced left and right.
All was quiet and still.
It was time.
T
HE MORPHINE WAS SUPPOSED TO
make her sleep through the night, but for a little over a fortnight now, Clare Ashton had slept for only two hours before
waking again at eleven. It was the same pattern each night. As the grandfather clock on the landing beat out its inexorable rhythm, she would lie cold and restless with the dull pain mounting in
her chest and spine while her mind flooded with long-forgotten memories as vivid, sometimes more vivid, than the original events themselves. Tiny, irrelevant details – a stain on her
sundress, a patch of unshaved stubble on her father’s cheek – would manifest with dazzling clarity. Smells, too: her mother’s scent, the smoke from the woodstove in the living
room, the damp wool of her winter coat. The odd thing was, these recollections were only of childhood. Her body, and she was always conscious of her body, was flat-chested and slender-hipped. A
boy’s body, her grandmother had once said in gently mocking tones that still rung hurtfully in her ears. A little girl with the body of a boy until she was nearly fourteen years old. The last
among her friends to grow breasts. The last to bleed.
Yet in most other important respects she had been first. The first to marry. The first to give birth. The first – and only one among them – to lose a child. And soon, aged only
thirty-five, she would be the first to die. Something had gone wrong somewhere along the line. Not something that had
happened
to her, but something in her make-up; in her wiring. For as far
back as her memory stretched she had always felt more than a little off-kilter. As a girl she had found no words to express it. As an adult nearing the end of her life, Clare had found the perfect
encapsulation: it was as if she had always been a reluctant visitor to this world. Part of her, she had come to realize, had never wanted to arrive here in the first place. If the prospect of death
in two months’ time held any consolation, it was in the hope that she would finally get to meet that reluctant part of herself, and to understand who in fact she really was. And if there was
nothing to come, if the lights simply were to extinguish, then none of it mattered anyway. Everything from beginning to end would have been meaningless. A monstrous joke.
It was nearly 11.30 when she heard Philip’s footsteps on the lane and the creak of the gate as he returned from one of his increasingly frequent late-night runs. The closer Clare came to
the end, the more restless her husband seemed to become. More often than not he would sleep in the spare room. ‘I didn’t like to disturb you,’ he would explain softly, but it was
he who was disturbed, not she. A man who ran marathons and began each day with 200 press-ups was never going to feel comfortable lying next to a dying woman. Who could blame him? Besides, he had
students to teach in the morning. A classroom full of bright-eyed private-school teenagers brimming with hope for the future. He was too considerate not to meet them each day with energy and
optimism.
Of the two of them, it was Philip who had always been the selfless one, the coper, the one who had kept up the daily routines in the bleak months after they lost Susie. Without Philip’s
strength Clare was certain she wouldn’t have lasted one year, let alone ten. Sometimes she pictured him as a widower, alone in the house, quiet and stoical, his hair cut shorter as it slowly
turned grey, his body even leaner and harder as he doused his inevitable guilt at surviving her with an ever more punishing exercise regime. There would be women, of course, but she couldn’t
imagine him falling in love again. He had already done that twice in his life and each time it had brought him nothing but unhappiness. No, despite his best intentions the women he let into his bed
would never possess him as she had done, and it would trouble him deeply that he couldn’t give the devotion they craved.
Perhaps when he was old, when she had become nothing more than a faded photograph, he might let down his defences again and lay himself open, but by then he would be a stranger about whom,
imagining him now, she found it hard to care. That was another thing she had noticed about dying: it was making her selfish. As her life force diminished so did her capacity for empathy. With a
little luck, by the time she reached the end, the process would be complete. It would be a small blessing, but a blessing nonetheless, to be allowed to die without pity for those left behind.
Clare closed her eyes and tried to banish a procession of uninvited mental images of her nursery school in the small village on the Welsh borders where she had grown up. She had loathed the
place and all but erased it from her mind, yet here was the outdoor sandpit with its weathered boards and plastic buckets and spades; now the grey lumps of Plasticine stored in a biscuit tin and
the red-and-white chequered apron with her name embroidered across the chest; now the tightly crammed coat pegs, the beanbags in the reading corner. And here came Miss Allsop, or at least her fat
calves and ankles stuffed into heavy brown shoes. Her smell: sour milk and face cream. ‘Which book shall we read today?’ Miss Allsop’s voice cut through her tiny child’s
body, demanding and judgemental.
Clare slipped in and out of a shallow doze with the childhood memories still unbanished, trapped inside the emotions of a fearful four-year-old. Monsters and other unknowable horrors lurked
around each corner. Miss Allsop led her along the corridor and into her office. She produced scissors from her cardigan pocket. ‘Now give me your fingers, Clare.’
She jolted awake. Her heart was racing. Her pyjama top was glued to her body with sweat. The dark was frightening her. ‘Philip? Philip?’ she called out faintly, hoping that if he had
left his door ajar he might hear her. There was no reply. She called louder and was met with the implacable silence of a still and empty house.
A sensation of rising panic began to overwhelm her, but the stubborn quietness of the night was interrupted by the distant sound of a siren; no, several sirens. They were drawing closer, heading
into the village from the Thornbury Road. She reached for the lamp at her bedside, and fighting the pain, forced herself to her feet and limped stiffly to the window. She drew back the curtain and
lifted the blackout blind to see a column of flames on the far side of the three acres of common around which the dozen or so houses of Blackstone Ley were randomly arranged. The lights from
numerous flashlights were converging from several directions. She dimly made out excited voices and wondered if the villagers were having a bonfire, but for what? New Year? Wasn’t it three
days too early for that?
There was a sudden and violent explosion. A spectacular fireball erupted just to the left of the burning house. The rolling flames surged upwards and lit up the entire common, exposing a small
crowd of horrified onlookers whose hands flew simultaneously to the exposed skin of their faces. Seconds later, Clare felt an intense wave of radiant heat travel through the cold glass and in the
same moment realized that it was Kelly and Ed’s house that was alight, and that the explosion must have been the large tank of propane gas that stood alongside it in the garden. She thought
of Kelly and the three children and wondered if they had escaped the inferno. Then of Philip. Had she seen him among those on the common? She hoped he hadn’t tried anything heroic. It would
be just like him.
Please, no. Not now. Not like this.
She pressed her face to the pane, praying for a glimpse of him. She waited and waited, growing more and more desperate, until at last
she saw him captured in the headlights of a fire engine.
Thank God.
He was standing absolutely still: tall, lean, strong, staring into the flames. Even as the fire crew busied themselves all
around him, he remained unmoving. Clare could read his thoughts as if they were her own: he was seeing their own lost child among the flames. Their Susie. And after ten long years, he was wondering
if this place might at last be about to give up its secrets.
A
SHROUD OF DENSE FOG
had settled over the Wye Valley on Christmas Eve and for several days now, Jenny Cooper had been able to see no further than the
far side of the lane. Even the usually raucous crows that nested in the crown of the vast oak in the next-door meadow had sunk into subdued silence. The only sound in this isolated corner a mile up
the hill from the village of Tintern was that of her axe as she worked her way through the pile of logs, mechanically splitting one round of wood after another. Each strike issued a report that
rang out like a warning shot into the gloom. It was a sound of defiance that mirrored her mood.
Jenny’s fingers ached with cold inside the tough leather work gloves that were made for a man. There had been none in the hardware store cut for a woman. No one imagined feminine hands
wielding heavy tools or hauling firewood in a hoar frost. She prised another frozen log off the shrinking pile that had been dumped in a heap at the side of the cottage, struck it with her heavy,
wedge-shaped maul, and tossed the two halves into the high-sided barrow. It was one of several jobs Michael had promised to do. He was going to have it all split and stacked in the dry before
Christmas. But as with most of his promises, he had failed to make good on it.