Blackground

by Joan Aiken

  I felt cross, though. I’d really wanted to finish the Rosy and Dodo serial, and hear public reactions to it. My best part! And, I thought, how aghast poor Randolph Grove would be at yet another of his cast being snatched away untimely.

  The cat’s yelling distressed me very much. Why should it have to perish, poor beast, just because it took shelter from the rain? I felt responsible for its welfare. I should have steeled myself and put it out.

  Then I recollected the wheelchair and its mad turn of speed. Its weight. Its solidity.

  “Mind now, cat!” (The cat had followed me. It relied on me to get it out of this predicament.)

  I remembered seeing a teatowel, neatly folded, on the counter, by the plate and cup.

  The towel was still there, just where it had been before, which cheered me a good deal. (My mind was still groping, perplexedly, after those keys. Where could they have got to? Both of them? Was there some other reason why the doors would not open? Were they simply new, stiff? Or bolted, latched in some unexpected way? There had certainly been a front door key. Could Parkson have absent-mindedly gone off with it?)

  Meanwhile I wetted and wrapped the teatowel over my face as best, with only one functioning hand, I could, and hoisted myself back towards the bedroom, keeping eyes closed because the smoke stung and burned them, doing my best to breathe as little as possible.

  Abandoning my faithful crutches, putting myself in the wheelchair, which I had left parked by the rail, was hard to do. Morally hard, I mean. Suppose the chair wouldn’t work, refused to start, suppose I couldn’t steer it through the smoke into the kitchen?

  As I had feared, nudging the chair through the doorway was indeed frightful. I was nervous, my hands shook. I kept catching the door jamb and bruising my fingers. Once I gave my ankle an almighty wrench, as the chair somehow got caught cornerways and swung round. But finally, mercifully, I was through. Now — as I recalled — there should be a straight run from one door to the other across the room.

  Watch out, cat, I thought. Mind out of the way.

  The cat had fallen silent. I hoped he was still alive. The smoke was so dense in here, now, as well, that my own head was beginning to swim; I knew I had no time to waste.

  Turning the chair, so that its back and mine faced the glass door, I set the lever to Reverse, and pulled the handle back as far as it would go.

  The result was like the Crack of Doom. That chair had superb acceleration; it seemed as if, by the time we reached the door, we were travelling at take-off speed. The glass door totally disintegrated under the impact. I and the chair hurtled out through the gap into cold, fresh air — travelled onward for what felt like three or four feet, and came up against what I thought was a box hedge. (It proved to be close-planted cupressus.)

  The rain had ended and, by the light of a small sickle moon, I could see the back of my house. It was square and white, a vine had been trained up beside the kitchen window; through the shattered glass door, thick black smoke was pouring.

  I wondered what I was supposed to do now. Summon the fire-brigade? But how? Where were the other inhabitants of Glifonis?

  I was not obliged to reach any decision about these matters, for a couple of neighbours, roused (how could they not be?) by the almighty crash, almost immediately made their appearance.

  Voices could be heard round the corner of the house, so I steered my chair in that direction. Marvellous piece of mechanism: breaking the door had not impaired its action at all. It had probably cost a fortune, and was worth every penny. Moving easily over wet marble-slabbed pavement, I glided like the Queen of Sheba round to the front of the house and there encountered two female figures with tousled hair and outer garments hastily donned over nightwear.

  “Good heavens? What happened?” said the larger of these, while the smaller one cried, “Lady Fortuneswell? My dear, is that you? Are you all right? What is the matter?”

  She was a little gnome-like woman with a shock of thistledown hair, which gleamed in the moonshine. Her face contained more creases than a dried fig. She was squinting, now, with distress and amazement; she looked like a cracker just about to be pulled.

  “Yes, I’m quite all right,” I said, “but I think my house is on fire.”

  “Believe you’re right,” said the other woman concisely. “Better call the brigade.”

  She turned back the way they had come, but came face to face with another neighbour now climbing my front steps. This was a bulky man, quite bald, wearing overalls under an aged and baggy cardigan. His face appeared impressive, like that of a Roman emperor, until one noticed the weak, petulant mouth.

  “What is it, what in the world is the matter?” he said querulously. “I was just walking about, enjoying the cessation of the rain, relishing the silence and the sounds of the night — when — all of a sudden — this truly atrocious crash —”

  “Lady Fortuneswell’s house is on fire,” explained the larger of the two women. To me she added, “I’m Pat Limbourne. This is Elspeth Morgan. We live at Number 2. And this is Laurence Noble, from Number 4.”

  “How do you do,” I said. Laurence Noble, I recalled, was a composer. He had written a piece called Ebb-Tide Variations — something like that — which Joel thought poorly of. We had heard it at a lunchtime concert in Smith Square.

  “I’m going to call the Fire Brigade,” said the woman called Pat Limbourne.

  An expression of distaste crossed Laurence Noble’s face.

  “Is that really necessary? They make such a noise! The fire does not appear to have established much of a hold, as yet. Can we not deal with it ourselves?”

  He climbed the steps to my front door and tried it.

  “It’s locked,” I said. “That’s the trouble. I couldn’t get out that way. Couldn’t find the key. And the back door was locked too. That was why I had to break it.”

  They looked puzzled, as well they might.

  I said, “The smoke seemed to be coming from a couch — from a sofa in the front room. If — I suppose — if we could break that front window, and throw some water in — there don’t seem to be any flames yet —”

  “If it does break into flame it’ll really blaze,” said Pat Limbourne doubtfully. “I really do think —”

  She glanced downhill towards the house across the road, theirs, I supposed.

  “All the more reason to do something quickly,” Mr Noble pronounced with unexpected decision. “The firemen would probably take about forty minutes to get here.”

  He glanced about. In the empty patch uphill from my house was a builders’ tank and pile of rough tools, shovels and plasterers’ trowels. The tank, filled by the recent storm, was brimming with water. Noble filled a pail with water from the tank and picked up a heavy shovel.

  “Stand back,” he ordered authoritatively. The two ladies did so. I was in no position to move, so stayed where I was in my chair. Mr Noble briskly approached the front window and smashed it with his shovel. Out poured a coil of black smoke. Through the pane he had broken out he dashed his pailful of water, then hastily stepped aside. More, and much messier smoke, laden with bits of papery ash, gushed out, but no flame. Pat Limbourne was instantly at hand, offering another pail of water. Even tiny old Miss Morgan appeared keen to play her part in the bucket gang, but I said to her,

  “Won’t you please stay with me? I really think they seem to be getting it under control.”

  “Oh, but how can it ever have started?” she cried distressfully. “Could you have dropped a cigarette end? A match?”

  “I don’t smoke. I only got here two or three hours ago.” In the moonlight my watch said 2.30.

  “We did mean to sit up and welcome you — but I’m afraid we keep early hours —” she grimaced apologetically — “when ten o’clock came, we thought perhaps you had deferred your arrival — I know! We have a spare key!—we have keys to all the houses
— I will just run and get it.”

  By the time she returned with the key, the other two, taking turns to toss pails of water through the front window, seemed fairly confident that the fire was under control, if not out. Noble unlocked the front door, opened it, put his head in with caution, and shone a powerful torch which he pulled from an overall pocket.

  “The couch is certainly just about burned up,” he came back to report. “Nothing left but a black mess. Made from that repellant plastic foam, I don’t doubt. Curious how it smoulders and smoulders before it begins to burn.”

  “But the smoke is deadly,” said Miss Limbourne. “You were very lucky to wake up in time — it could easily have asphyxiated you.”

  “The cat woke me. Howling.”

  “You have a cat?” They looked around.

  “It seemed to come with the house? A big tabby.”

  “Oh, Arkwright.”

  “It was so wet, I let it sleep on my bed. And its yelling woke me.”

  “Saved your life,” said little Miss Morgan, nodding.

  “I hope it got out all right.”

  “Oh, Arkwright can take care of himself. He’s got plenty of lives saved up. But come now, you poor thing, you had better spend the rest of the night in our house. Yours is still full of smoke.”

  Laurence Noble had been back, prospecting carefully with his torch inside my front room. He now emerged with a bright silver key.

  “This was on the floor, right along in the left-hand corner. Must have got knocked out of the door evidently. By your wheelchair, perhaps. I don’t suppose you’d ever have found it.”

  “No, never,” I said, thinking of trying to find my crutch on the floor. “I’m so grateful to you all . . . Do you think the house is safe to be left? It would be dreadful if the fire broke out again. Defective wiring, could it have been?”

  “Miss Limbourne,” said Mr Noble, “perhaps you’d help me lift the piece of furniture out of doors? It is not at all heavy.”

  Between them they carried out a charred skeletal object which could hardly have been recognized as the neat little couch I dimly recalled from my arrival.

  “Why are you all bandaged up?” Miss Morgan asked me, studying my plight with sympathetic curiosity.

  “Oh — I had a bad fall in Venice. I wouldn’t have come down here in this state if I didn’t have to — but we have to re-shoot some scenes —”

  “Are you by yourself? Nobody to look after you?”

  She seemed very scandalized.

  “You see — my husband had to go off to Paris —”

  The other two came down the steps, brushing soot from their hands.

  “I do not believe there is any further risk,” pronounced Mr Noble.

  I looked at him with a good deal of respect. He had really been very efficient.

  “So I will say goodnight to you ladies,” he added with a little bow, and ambled off down the hill.

  “Come along,” said Miss Morgan. “Pat will push your chair. It’s only four steps down to our house. You can have my bed and I’ll sleep on the sofa — and let’s hope that doesn’t burn up in the night.”

  VI

  WHEN I WOKE, I could sense at once that the hour was late. And by the time I had stiffly rolled myself along to the ladies’ bathroom, combed my hair, and made some sort of elementary toilet, it was later still.

  I felt low: by no means at my best. Too many things seemed to be going wrong with my life. I don’t suffer from the common superstitions that actors affect — ladders and birds and quotations from Macbeth; but I do have a strong feeling that there are currents, wavelengths, forces blowing and roaring away out there, alongside our narrow bubble of human life; run counter to those, and you are in trouble. Just now, I certainly seemed out of synch with my Destiny; and I wondered rather gloomily what next it had in store for me.

  The house was silent. My two kind hostesses must have gone out, considerately leaving me to sleep off the effects of my adventure. It was now eleven a.m. and I rolled myself in the direction of the kitchen (their house was on the same plan as mine but with an upstairs) hoping they might have left a pot of coffee keeping warm — or at least a jar of Instant and a kettle.

  Then, as I reached the hither side of the kitchen door, I heard a voice. It seemed to be talking to itself; it must be telephoning.

  “Darling Mervyn,” said this voice, “could you be a saint and do something for me? Go round and get the key of my place from Swit — who must be in bed, ill, or something, that line is continually busy — and go to Lexham Gardens for me and see if there’s a bill from Tagus, and if there is, pay it — and pacify Nefertiti Press and say I’ll soon be in touch — can you do that?—You have? Oh, but that can wait — you know they never worry about that sort of thing —”

  The voice was familiar to me, most depressingly so; and when I had laboriously manoeuvred my wheelchair round the door jamb and into the sunny kitchen, my gloomiest apprehensions were confirmed. At the phone, just finishing her talk and replacing the receiver, was the person who, above all others, filled me with dejection, dislike, and horrible guilt feelings.

  I hate the thought of breaking up a marriage. I have had lovers — some — but they were never married people. Human relations are so delicate, vulnerable, easily unbalanced — a fact of which I was even more forcibly aware, just at present, than I had ever been — that I think being instrumental in smashing one of those fragile frameworks must be one of the major sins, one of the most destructive and wicked human acts.—I recall that agonizing story of the Queen, accidentally sitting down upon the thousand-piece bird-bone fan that some aged Islander had just presented to her. “Oh, I’m so very sorry — I do hope that you can make me another?” “Well, Ma’am, I can start . . . ”

  But once I, myself, did become involved in such a deed. At that time Olga Laszlo was married, had been married eight years or so to a barrister (he has since become a judge, Creighton Pendennis), and they had two dear little girls. He loved her besottedly. But she had fallen in love, she was conducting an undercover romance, a wild, whirlwind, romantic passion (or so it then seemed to me) with an actor. What was his name? No matter. He had a lead part in a play where I had a walk-on. Olga was a friend of the woman who had done the sets. She became friendly with me. I was very impressed by her romantic devotion for her lover. To me, the pair seemed enwreathed in glamour, Romeo, Tristan, Juliet, Isolde, all rolled into one bewitching scenario. What did I know of her husband and children? Nothing at all. So I made her free of my primitive garret, just around the corner from the theatre, very convenient; they used to meet there, and finally they decided she must leave her boring husband, run away from him, with the children, and set up house with this other fellow. Axel Grift, that was what he called himself; I wonder what’s become of him? You never hear his name any more.

  So, it was arranged; they were going to meet at my place one Saturday, she with the children, and go off to France or somewhere together. But somebody must have blown the gaff — friend? neighbour? servant? — and suddenly there’s her husband at my flat, bursting in the door like an avenging angel, breathing outrage, fury, hatred and disgust. Axel hadn’t even turned up yet, Olga was there alone with her bags and the kids. Screams, shouts, tears and denunciations. He has a waiting car, whisks the kids away — poor little devils, not knowing what’s hit them — and that’s the last Olga sees of them for years. And years. With his legal connections, she had as much chance of custody as a butterpat in Vesuvius. She and Axel got married, of course, after the divorce, and she proceeded to make life miserable for his child, a sad little boy called Peter, who was promptly bundled off to boarding school, because Olga, you see, couldn’t take to him. Was still too anguished about her own lost darlings. Last I heard of Peter, he had dropped out of college and was on heroin; of course that might have happened anyway. And Axel and Olga didn’t stay together ver
y long; things, one way and another, just didn’t work out for them.

  This sad and cautionary tale was one of the reasons why I have always taken great pains to steer clear of married persons. And why, also, I had not tried to keep in touch with Olga; I found the sight of her, haggard, tragic, perpetually contriving to give the impression that it was all somebody else’s fault, too painful a reminder of my own silly gullibility when younger, and the far-reaching harm it had led to. Maybe, if I had not allowed Olga to meet her lover in my attic, the affair would have fizzled out for lack of occasion, and those three children could have grown up with their own parents. Children should be with their own parents, I think.

  Or at least (putting it more realistically) I need feel less responsibility in the matter of Olga’s ruined life.

  So I greeted her rather soberly. But she gave me a great big hello, widening her large haunted dark eyes with apparent delight.

  “Isn’t this such fun? Darling Cat — here we are together again after so long! But, you poor dear, what a time you’ve been having!”

  “Getting married, you mean?” I said, deliberately misunderstanding.

  She gave her humourless laugh, like a hopelessly blocked drain.

  “Well, that too, of course — darling, congratulations!—I’m so excited for you — but I meant all these fatalities, breaking your poor leg and then nearly getting burned alive —”

  “Yes, quite a run of bad luck wasn’t it,” I said, occupied in a search for Nescafe among the amazing clutter on the counter — washing dishes was a chore plainly left by the ladies at Number 2 until every dish and utensil had been used at least twice — “I only hope it isn’t contagious,” finding a steaming kettle on the hob (bless them) and filling a mug.

  “Contagious, darling?”

  “Like typhoid Mary. Anyway, how are you, Olga? What are you doing down here?”