The One I Was (23 page)

‘It’s all right.’ Even then, she was reassuring me. ‘I’ll put it out.’

But the combination of the ankle and the wrist injuries made her movements clumsy. She tried to stand, slipped and fell back onto the carpet.

‘Andrew,’ I shouted at the same time as I tried to reach the fallen quilt. ‘Help!’

Nobody came. I pulled myself up, the flame running up to my shoulder. Mum’s room had a hand basin in the corner. I ran the tap into her tooth mug and poured the water over my shoulder and chest, knowing I couldn’t help my mother unless I first helped myself. Smoke, thick and acrid, choked me. The first mug-full of water made little difference. I held my arm under the tap. Steam hissed.

Behind me Mum moaned.

Under the hand basin hung a towel. I soaked it under the tap and wrapped it round myself. My jumper no longer blazed, but flames were running up the sheets dangling from the bed and onto the drapings and headboard, trying to lick the bedside tables, too, and the dressing gowns hanging on the back of the bedroom door. I bent to Mum.

Strong hands were on me, pulling me away. I smelled the whisky-soured breath. ‘Leave this to me.’

Cathal. He pushed me out of the room. ‘Go downstairs, Rosie.’

‘But Mum –’

‘I’ll take care of this. Go downstairs now.’

His strong arms were too much for me to resist. I fell out of the burning room, lungs hacking up smoky air.

Andrew was running upstairs. ‘Where’s the fire? Where’s Mum?’

‘In her room. Cathal’s with her.’

He seemed to notice the burnt sleeve, the way I was holding my arm. ‘Rose?’

‘I’m fine. Call the fire brigade. Hurry.’

Smoke was curling its way downstairs now like a lock of thin grey hair. I jumped the last steps, making for the kitchen.

‘Rose.’ I turned. Mum must have pushed past Cathal, pain giving her a desperate strength. She came downstairs so slowly, almost calmly, arms out in front of her, orange flames still flickering along the sleeves of her jumper.

The smell. Burning fabric. Burning hair and skin. Always the smell.

Now the fire rippled down Mum’s torso, cackling like a goblin.

I ran through the hall to the kitchen to fill the washing-up bowl with water, flung myself back to the staircase, water sloshing over my feet.

I’d only been gone seconds, but already Mum’s face was lost to the flames now licking the banisters. I threw the water at her. For an instant the fire died down and I could make out Mum’s face again, twisted, teeth bared. She was screaming, but I couldn’t hear it: the world had gone mute. I yelled something back at Mum, some promise that I’d stop the fire, and ran to refill the washing-up bowl, my scorched arm protesting.

But the water only hissed as it hit her. I grabbed the Persian rug from the hall and pushed Mum down to the floor. Then Cathal was behind me, shouting something, pulling me away from her, his powerful body overpowering me, just as he’d overpowered our family since the moment he’d cycled down the drive. He muttered something I couldn’t hear.

I grabbed the blue vase from the console table by the front door. And then Cathal was down on the ground, blood oozing from his head. I looked at the vase I still clutched and dropped it on the parquet floor, where it cracked into pieces. Andrew was back in the hall, shouting that he could hear sirens now. Too late. Smoke whirled over the floor where Mum and Cathal lay motionless.

‘Go outside,’ Andrew screamed. ‘Tell them to hurry.’

I turned my back and staggered through the hall and front door. A coughing fit ripped through my lungs. The skin on my arm felt heavy, as though it had come unstuck. I touched it and the heat of the skin hurt my fingers. The stench of burning flesh was everywhere: inside my clothes, my hair, inside my body. Blue lights flashed, throwing up reflections on the white snow.

‘I was just doing what she showed me.’ My words were a plea, to whom I didn’t know. I’d lit the candles on the shrine, praying for a miracle. But I’d made a mess of it. Far from helping my mother, I’d brought fire down on her. I should have burned instead of Mum. The fire should have torn into my flesh, not hers.

An ambulance, fire engine and police car slooshed to a halt outside the door.

My arm now felt like a glowing cinder. I heard someone screaming and realized it was me.

27

Benny said nothing, but waited, knowing there was more. He might have been a priest in a confessional. This had been his job, interviewing people, getting them to expose more of themselves than they had ever intended.

‘It was my fault. I was careless. I started the fire.’

‘Remind me again how old you were?’

‘Nearly thirteen.’

‘And Cathal? What on earth was his game?’

‘It looked as though he was trying to stop me from helping her. The police interviewed him in hospital, but he claimed he didn’t remember anything about the fire because of the head injury I’d caused him.’

‘Why would he have stopped you?’

‘He was furious that Mum had ended the relationship and he was going to be booted out of Fairfleet. But he was just plain drunk, out of his mind.’

‘He sounds psychopathic as well, from what you’ve told me of his mood swings and violence.’

‘We never found the letter Mum wrote to the solicitors, cancelling the legal agreement she’d made with him. I also wondered whether there was more she knew about him. Or suspected.’

‘Shame you couldn’t find what she’d written,’ Benny said. ‘If she’d left some good evidence you might have had him in court.’

*

It was the arrival of a letter from Cathal’s solicitor that prompted the search for whatever it was Mum had written to her own lawyers.

A month had passed since the fire. We were settled in with Dad and Marie, in the house they had hastily rented in Abingdon to provide us with a home. The letter from Cathal’s lawyer was addressed to Dad as the parent of Rosamond Madison, a minor who’d caused serious injury to Cathal Pearse.

Cathal was making a civil claim against Mum’s estate for injuries received at my hands and for loss of earnings resulting from the fire at Fairfleet. The letter also told us that the police were making investigations into possible arson, in which case criminal charges might follow the civil case.

I concentrated hard on the torn-open white envelope sitting on the kitchen table.

‘This is madness,’ Dad said. ‘Blaming Rose, claiming against the estate. Don’t you worry, sweetheart.’ He pulled me into a bear hug. I’d missed my father’s physical presence while he’d been away. Now I just wanted to melt into his arms. ‘I’ll speak to Meadows.’

He was the lawyer Dad had appointed for Andrew and me to help with the winding-up of Mum’s estate.

‘Meadows is a property lawyer,’ Marie said. ‘He won’t be able to fight this kind of claim.’

‘He may know someone else in the firm we can talk to.’

‘If we could just find Mum’s letter that would show them what Cathal was like,’ I said.

‘What letter, darling?’ Dad asked.

‘Mum wrote it all down: everything Cathal had done.’ I didn’t know how to describe the way he’d wriggled into Mum’s affections and taken charge of things. ‘I put the letter in the chest of drawers down in the storage room in the basement. That’s what I was doing when Cathal locked me in down there.’

Marie squeezed my arm. I instinctively started to move away but felt real warmth in the gesture. ‘Your mother was acting very sensibly and calmly.’

Dad made a sound with his tongue. Marie gave my father a look which told him to mind what he was implying about Mum’s state of mind. ‘She did what she could with a fractured wrist and sprained ankle,’ Andrew said.

‘We’ll look in the basement.’ Dad put a hand over mine.

Dad and Marie returned to Fairfleet. They searched the basement, and indeed every other part of the house, for the letter, and filled a van with our clothes and possessions.

‘Cathal’s already been back to the house to collect his things. Apparently a policeman came with him, but obviously he wasn’t watching him very closely. He’s helped himself to some bits and pieces.’ Dad slammed the van door. ‘It was like Kim’s Game: going into a room and trying to work out how many ornaments and clocks there used to be there. No doubt he helped your mother make an inventory of the house contents after your grandmother died. He knew what was worth taking.’

‘Where is he now?’ I tried to make it sound casual, but Marie gave me one of her sympathetic looks.

‘Apparently he’s undergoing further surgery. He discharged himself from hospital to return to Fairfleet for his stuff. Then collapsed in the bed and breakfast he’s rented.’

‘Good,’ Andrew said.

‘Did you find the letter?’

‘I’m sorry.’ Marie squeezed my hand.

‘There’s something else.’ Dad glanced at Marie. ‘We found out quite by chance, from the woman in the village shop actually, when we stopped for cigarettes. It’s Alice, Miss Smith. I’m afraid she was in an accident.’

‘Smithy?’ I hadn’t thought about her much, if at all, since the fire. The loss of my mother had pushed other losses out of my mind.

‘Knocked off her bike.’ Dad shook his head. ‘I thought it was odd she didn’t come to your mother’s funeral. She was nuts about the family.’

‘Smithy’s dead?’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘When did she die?’

‘Just a week or so ago. But she’d been in a coma for a while. Head injury.’

Poor, poor Smithy – she’d loved the house and my mother and grandmother.

*

Dad and Marie fought for us to keep the house. The lawyer Dad found wrote back to Cathal’s solicitor rebutting his claims. The police showed no interest in pressing arson charges against me.

But Andrew and I owed the government the death duties on Fairfleet: tens and tens of thousands of pounds. Dad sat in his office with bank statements and a calculator, trying to see if he could raise the money so we could keep the house.

‘But I can’t,’ he said. ‘Not all in one go like this. I’m so sorry. I know how much it meant to your grandmother and your mother that you should have Fairfleet.’

So my mother’s executor, a local solicitor, briefed a land agent. And Fairfleet was sold.

‘Mum’s letter wouldn’t have made any difference.’ Andrew tried to cheer me up. ‘Whatever happened, we can’t afford to keep Fairfleet.’

‘Writing it all down mattered to Mum.’

*

‘The letter she wrote to you mattered because it showed she was trying to undo the damage,’ Benny said, sounding as though he really understood what had been going through my mother’s mind the day before her death. ‘I’ve never found anything like that in Fairfleet and I know every inch of this house.’ He spoke very quietly. ‘We’ll talk more about this, Rose – if you’d like to, that is?’ He gave me a look that was almost shy. ‘I think I need to sleep again now.’

I fell back into my role of nurse, settling him. I stayed in the chair by his bed, thinking about what had happened after the abortive search for Mum’s letter.

*

We’d gone off to our new schools. By then I’d had the first of the operations on my arm. It looked much better, Andrew told me. Marie told a series of PE teachers that I couldn’t wear short-sleeved Aertex shirts for games. Mostly they understood

Dad found a job in London and bought a house. I didn’t even mind too much when he and Marie married in a registry office with just Andrew and me as guests. We spent most of the school holidays abroad.

Mum’s solicitor arranged for the smoke-damaged bedroom, staircase and entrance hall at Fairfleet to be quickly repaired and repainted and the woodwork replaced. Dad was
impatient to see Fairfleet gone. We knew that someone well-known bought the house, but the name of Benny Gault didn’t mean much to Andrew and me. All we knew was that he’d once lived in the house, one of Granny’s German refugee boys.

‘Forget about Fairfleet,’ Dad said, after the sale had gone through and the last of the paintings and silver had been removed from the house and sold for us. ‘Put it all behind you. You’ve both inherited a good amount from this sale, even after paying the death duties. You can probably do what you want in life without worrying about money.’ We were sitting, one on each side of him, at a table in a Swiss mountain restaurant during a ski holiday. He put an arm around each of us. ‘Nothing can compensate for your mother. But you must try to move forward.’

I looked at the sunlit snowy mountains, which might have represented the unmovable barrier I felt between me and any future worth having.

Andrew went on to study science at university and eventually invested most of his capital into starting his own laboratory in southern California, researching all kinds of new drugs. Sometimes I’d read an article in the science pages of the
Times
mentioning my brother’s company and felt a rush of pride for him. Andrew only rarely returned to England with his family.

I had an aptitude for science, too, gaining good enough A level results in physics, chemistry and biology to be accepted into medical school.

During my post-clinical training, I was sent to the burns unit of a London hospital to complete an elective. I thought I’d be all right in such a setting. Medical school had desensitised me, I told myself. I’d seen awful things during my time in A&E, and elsewhere. I was a trained professional.

One of the patients in the unit was an Asian woman in her late thirties. Her husband had accused her of adultery and thrown a pan of hot fat over her face. I stood at her bedside with the specialist while he explained the treatment she’d need.

As he talked I tried to focus on the stand holding up the woman’s drip, rather than her bandaged face. I’d seen burns victims many times by now. I tried to rationalize. It meant nothing that this patient was a mother the age Mum had been at her death. My mind was trying to trip me up. Best to ignore it, to concentrate on the drip stand, the half-full plastic jug of water on the bedside table, the chip in the paintwork on the wall.

I smelled burnt flesh. I told myself it was simply the sickly smell of hospitals But I kept thinking of how I’d smelled my own scorched arm that day at Fairfleet. And Mum, I’d smelled her burning body. At first I managed to keep a look of concentrated interest on my face, nodding as the consultant turned to tell me something. I even answered his questions and scribbled something in my notepad.