The Little Stranger (27 page)

They worked on the room for far longer, probably, than they really needed to, for at first they would beat out a patch of flame, only to turn their backs on it and find that, a few minutes later, it had begun to glow again; so after that they took no chances, and made their grim, methodical way from one ruined surface to another, pouring water, and using pokers and fire-tongs to riddle up and beat out embers and sparks. They were all three of them sick and wheezing from the smoke, with running eyes that left pale tear-marks on their soot-stained cheeks, and soon they found themselves shivering, partly in response to the drama of it all, partly simply with the cold, which seemed to rise up in the hot room with appalling swiftness the moment the last flame was doused.

Roderick, apparently, kept at the open window, clinging to the frame. He was still very drunk, but added to that—and not surprisingly, I suppose, bearing in mind everything he’d been through during the war—the sight of the flames and the choking smoke seemed to paralyse him. He looked on wildly but uselessly as his mother and sister made the room safe; he let himself be helped indoors, but by the time they had got him down to the kitchen and put him to sit at the table with a blanket around him he had begun to understand just how near they had all come to disaster, and he clutched at his sister’s hand.

‘You see what’s happened, Caro?’ he said to her. ‘You see what it wanted? My God, it’s cleverer than I thought! If you hadn’t woken—! If you hadn’t come—!’

‘What is he saying?’ asked Mrs Ayres, distressed by his manner and not understanding. ‘Caroline, what does he mean?’

‘He doesn’t mean anything,’ answered Caroline—knowing full well what he meant, but wanting to protect her mother from it. ‘He’s still drunk. Roddie, please.’

But now, she said, he started acting ‘like a madman’, putting the heels of his hands to his eyes, then catching at his hair, then looking in horror at his fingers—for his hair had oil on it, and the oil had turned, in the smoke, to a gritty sort of tar. He wiped his hands on his blackened shirt-front, compulsively. He began to cough, and then to struggle for his breath, and the struggling sent him into one of his panics. He reached for Caroline again. ‘I’m sorry!’ he kept saying, over and over. His breath was ragged and boozy, his eyes were crimson in his sooty face, his shirt was soaked through with rainwater. He grabbed, with shaking hands, at his mother. ‘Mother, I’m sorry!’

After their ordeal in the burning room, his behaviour was too much. Mrs Ayres looked at him for a second in absolute horror, then, ‘Be quiet!’ she cried, her voice breaking. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, be quiet!’ And when he still babbled and wept, Caroline went to him, and swung back her hand, and struck him.

She said she felt the sting of it in her palm almost before she knew that she had done it; and then she put her hands to her mouth, as startled and as frightened as if it were she herself who’d been hit. Rod abruptly fell silent, and covered his face. Mrs Ayres stood watching him, her shoulders twitching as she caught after her breath. Caroline said unsteadily, ‘We’re all a little mad, I think. We’re all a little crazy … Betty? Are you there?’

The girl came forward, her eyes wide, her face pale, and striped like a tiger’s with streaks of soot. Caroline said, ‘You’re all right?’

Betty nodded.

‘Not burnt, or anything like that?’

‘No, miss.’

She spoke in a whisper; but the sound of her voice was reassuring, and Caroline grew calmer.

‘Good girl. You’ve been very good, and very brave. Don’t mind my brother. He—he isn’t himself. We’re none of us ourselves. Is there any hot water? Light the boiler, will you, and put some pans on the stove, enough for tea and three or four wash-bowls. We can take off the worst of the muck before we go up to the bathroom. Mother, you should sit down.’

Mrs Ayres looked vague. Caroline went around the table to help her into a chair and to tuck a kitchen blanket around her. But her own limbs trembled as she did it, she felt as nerveless suddenly as if she’d been lifting impossible weights, and when her mother was settled, she drew out a chair for herself and sank heavily into it.

For five or ten minutes after that, the only sounds in the kitchen were the roars of flame at the stove, the rising stir of warming water, and the clink of metal and china as Betty went about setting down bowls and gathering towels. Presently the girl called softly to Mrs Ayres; she helped her over to the sink, where she washed her hands, her face, and her feet. She did the same for Caroline; then looked doubtfully at Rod. He, however, had calmed himself down sufficiently to see what was wanted of him and to stumble over to the sink. But he moved like a sleepwalker, putting his hands into the water and letting Betty soap and rinse them, then standing limp and staring while she wiped the smudges from his face. His tarry hair resisted all her attempts to wash it: she took a comb to it instead, catching the crumbs of cindery oil in a sheet of newspaper, then screwing the paper up and setting it down on the draining board. When she had finished, he moved dumbly to one side, to let her pour the filthy water down the sink. He looked across the kitchen and caught his sister’s eye, and his expression was such a mixture, Caroline said, of fear and confusion, she couldn’t bear it. She turned away from him, meaning to rejoin her mother.

Then a very strange thing happened. Caroline had just taken a step towards the table when, from the corner of her eye, she saw her brother make some movement—something as simple, she thought at the time, as putting up his hand to his face to bite at a fingernail or to rub at his cheek. At the same moment, Betty also moved—turning briefly away from the sink to drop a towel into a bucket on the floor. But as she turned back, the girl gave a gasp: Caroline looked properly and, to her absolute amazement, saw, beyond her brother’s shoulder, more flames. ‘Roddie!’ she called, afraid. He turned, saw what she had seen, and darted away. On the wooden draining-board, a few inches from where he had been standing, there was a small bundle of fire and smoke. It was the newspaper Betty had used to catch the cinders from his hair. She had screwed it into a loose sort of parcel—and now, somehow, unbelievably, it had managed to set itself alight.

The fire was nothing, of course, compared to the terrifying small inferno they had tackled in Roderick’s room. Caroline went quickly across the kitchen and knocked the bundle into the sink. The flames rose higher, then rapidly dwindled; the blackened paper, gossamer-like, held its shape for a moment before collapsing into fragments. But the dumbfounding thing was how such a fire could have started at all. Mrs Ayres and Caroline looked at each other, thoroughly unnerved. ‘What did you see?’ they asked Betty, and she answered, with frightened eyes, ‘I dunno, miss! Nothing at all! Only the smoke and the yellow flames, coming up behind Mr Roderick’s back.’

She seemed as bewildered as everyone else. After thinking the matter over, they could only conclude, doubtfully, that one of the cinders she had combed from Roderick’s hair still had the germ of a fire in it, and the dryness of the newspaper had encouraged it back into life. Naturally, this was a very disturbing thought. They began to glance nervously about, half expecting other flames. Roderick, in particular, was distressed and panicky. When his mother said that perhaps she, Caroline, and Betty ought to go back up to his room for another rake at the ashes, he cried out that they mustn’t leave him alone! He was afraid to be on his own! He ‘couldn’t stop it!’ So, mainly in fear of his breaking down altogether, they took him with them. They found him an undamaged chair, and he sat in that with his legs drawn up, his hands at his mouth, his eyes darting, while they went wearily from one blackened surface to another. But all was cold and dead and filthy. They gave up searching just before dawn.

I
woke an hour or two later, rather wearied by my bad dreams, but blissfully ignorant of the catastrophe that had very nearly swallowed up Hundreds Hall in the night; in fact, I knew nothing of the fire until I heard of it from one of my evening patients, who in turn had had the damage reported to him by a tradesman who’d been out at the house that morning. I didn’t believe him at first. It seemed impossible to me that the family could have gone through such an ordeal and not sent me word of it. Then another man mentioned the incident to me as if it were already common knowledge. Still dubious, I telephoned Mrs Ayres, and to my amazement she confirmed the whole story. She sounded so hoarse and so tired, I cursed myself for not having called her sooner, when I might have gone out there—for I had recently started spending an evening a week on the wards of the district hospital, tonight was one of those evenings, and I simply could not get away. She promised me that she, Caroline, and Roderick were all quite well, only weary. She said the fire had given them all ‘a little fright’: that was how she phrased it, and perhaps because of those words I pictured the incident as something relatively minor. I remembered all too vividly the state that Rod had been in when I had left him; I recalled the bullishness with which he’d been slopping his drinks around, the way he had dropped a lighted spill so that it burned unheeded on the carpet. I supposed he’d started a small blaze with a cigarette … But I knew that even a small fire can produce a great deal of smoke. I knew, too, that the effects of smoke inhalation are often at their worst a day or two after the fire itself. So I went to bed worried about the family, and passed another uneasy night on their behalf.

I drove out to the house at the end of my round next morning and, just as I’d feared, they were all suffering. In purely physical terms, Betty and Roderick were the least affected. She had kept close to the door while the fire was raging, and had been darting back and forth to the lavatory for water. Roderick had been lying flat in his bed, breathing shallowly while the worst of the smoke collected high above his head. But Mrs Ayres was by now quite wretched—breathless and weak, and more or less confined to her room—and Caroline looked and sounded ghastly, with a swollen throat, and singed hair, and her face and hands marked crimson from embers and sparks. She met me at the front door as I arrived, and the sight of her was so awful, and so much worse than I’d been expecting, I found myself putting down my bag so that I could take her by the shoulders and gaze properly into her face.

‘Oh, Caroline,’ I said.

She blinked self-consciously, and smiled, but her eyes began to glisten with tears. ‘I look like a poor Guy Fawkes,’ she said, ‘that got snatched off the bonfire at the very last minute—’

She turned away, and started coughing. I said hastily, ‘Go in, for heaven’s sake, out of the cold.’

By the time I had picked up my bag and joined her, her cough had subsided, she had wiped her face, and the tears were gone. I closed the door—but did it blindly, shocked now by the frightful scent of burning that met me in the hall; shocked by the appearance of the hall itself, which might have been hung with mourning-veils, so thickly spotted and smeared was every surface with smuts and blacks and soot.

‘Rotten, isn’t it?’ said Caroline hoarsely, following my gaze. ‘And it only gets worse, I’m afraid. Come and see.’ She led me along the north passage. ‘The smell’s right through the house, even up in the attics, I don’t know how. Don’t mind your muddy shoes, we’ve given up on this floor for now. But be careful of your jacket against the walls. The soot sticks like anything.’

The door of Rod’s room was ajar, and as we drew closer to it I could see enough to prepare me for the devastation that lay beyond. Even so, when Caroline went in, for a second I stayed at the threshold, too appalled to follow. Mrs Bazeley—who was in there with Betty, washing down the walls—met my gaze and nodded, grimly.

‘You look like I done, Doctor,’ she said, ‘when I come in yesterday morning. And this is nothing to how it were then. We was wading in filth up to our ankles, wan’t we, Betty?’

The room had been cleared of most of its furniture, which was standing higgledy-piggledy down on the terrace on the other side of the open French window. The carpet had also been rolled up and moved out, and sheets of newspaper had been laid on the wide wooden floorboards, but the boards were still so wet and ashy that the paper was turning to a thick grey pulp, like sooty porridge. The walls were running with more ashy water where Mrs Bazeley and Betty were scrubbing at them. The wooden panelling was scorched and charred, and the ceiling—that notorious lattice-work ceiling—was perfectly black, its mysterious smudges lost for ever.

‘This is unbelievable,’ I said to Caroline. ‘I had no idea! If I had known—’

I didn’t finish, for my knowing or not knowing was beside the point, there was nothing I could have done. But I felt extremely unsettled to think that such a serious thing could have happened to the family in my absence. I said, ‘The whole house might have been lost. It doesn’t bear thinking about! And Rod was
here
, in the middle of it? Is he really all right?’

She gave me, I thought, an odd sort of look, then glanced over at Mrs Bazeley.

‘Yes, he’s all right. Only wheezy like the rest of us. Most of his things have been lost, though. His chair—you can see it out there—seemed to get the worst of the fire; that, and his desk and his table.’

I looked through the open window and saw the desk, its legs and drawers intact but its surface as blackened and crisped as if someone had lit a bonfire on it. Suddenly I understood why there was so much ash in the room. I said, ‘His papers!’

Caroline nodded tiredly. ‘Probably the driest things in the house.’

‘Were any spared?’

‘A few. I don’t know what’s been lost. I don’t really know what was in here. There were plans of the house and estate, weren’t there? I think there were all sorts of maps, copies of the deeds to the farms and cottages, and letters, and bills, notes of my father’s …’ Her voice grew thicker. She began to cough again.

‘What a dreadful, dreadful shame,’ I said, looking around, and seeing new damage with every glance: a painting on the wall with its canvas charred, lamps with blackened globes and lustres. ‘This lovely room. What will you do with it? Can it be saved? The worst of the panels might be replaced, I suppose. The ceiling you could whitewash.’