She made a moue. ‘Is it corned beef?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘It’s cheese. I kept it back for you, specially.’
That cheered her, and I wished my predicament could be solved as easily. Presently she went off to join the other children and I got busy clearing up.
Later, Pat said to me, ‘About the uniform, I think I can help you out, if you don’t mind hand-me-downs.’
‘Of course not,’ I cried, thrilled.
‘The Methodist minister’s wife has twin girls two years ahead of Awan. She has two lots of everything, all grown out of but perfectly good. I’m sure she’ll let you have them.’
I could have wept with gratitude.
Towards evening, when the crop was all undercover and the stubble fields peppered with birds foraging for stray kernels or macerated rabbits, I found Kenneth half-lying, half-propped against the bole of an old oak. His shirt was undone, filthy with dust and oil, the sleeves turned up to the elbows revealing forearms reddened by the sun. I recognised the trousers he wore - heavy duty cotton, much mended - I could even see Rose’s neat stitching around a repair. I sat down next to him and it was like falling into a familiar and very comfortable chair; his grunt of welcome, his slight adjustment to allow me some support from the tree, his earthy, wholesome smell.
‘Good job, today,’ I said, nodding towards the neatly cut fields.
‘Nice food,’ he replied.
‘Boys all right?’
He nodded, ‘’Cept for Anthony. Terrible hay-fever. Had to leave him with Mother. Doing all right are you, down at the house?’
I shrugged. ‘It’s a mess. I can’t keep up with everything. The roof of the tool shed has fallen in and there’s a wasps’ nest in the greenhouse so I lost all the grapes and tomatoes.’
‘You should have told me,’ he chided.
‘I know. But you’re busy.’
‘I’m never too busy to help you,’ Kenneth growled.
‘There is something you can help me with,’ I told him. ‘Bobby’s upset Awan.’
‘Oh?’
‘He says he’s too old to play with her, now. Quite the little man, isn’t he?’
Kenneth frowned. ‘I’ll have a word,’ he said. ‘They’re like brother and sister, those two. You don’t grow out of that.’
‘Like us,’ I said, with a laugh, giving him a playful push.
‘I wouldn’t say that, exactly,’ he replied, quickly, sitting up to pull strands of straw from his boots.
‘You were as old as Bobby is now when you took me under your wing, all those years ago, and I was younger than Awan. What must I have been? Four? Five?’
I saw the corner of his mouth twitch. ‘’Bout that. You were a lonely little thing,’ he muttered, and then, so low I could barely catch the words, ‘you still are.’
‘I hear that you’re not so lonely,’ I joked. ‘Miss Eccles?’
All at once Kenneth scrambled to his feet and began to button up his shirt. ‘Better get the lads home,’ he said.
‘It’s all right, Kenneth,’ I said. Looking up at him, the evening sun was slanting into my eyes and I had to put my hand over them like a visor to make out his expression but, with the sun behind him, his face was shadowed. ‘It’s perfectly natural and Rose… Rose would understand.’
‘Rose always understood,’ Kenneth said, so savagely it took me by surprise.
‘I know, I know,’ I soothed. Clearly, I had touched a raw nerve.
Immediately, his ire evaporated. I saw his shoulders relax, and I saw the glint of his teeth as he smiled. ‘Mother’s doing,’ he said. ‘Don’t believe everything you hear. She doesn’t always get what she wants.’
He turned and walked away into the lowering sun, and gave that piercing whistle which Bobby and Brian would know was designed to bring them running.
‘She usually does, though,’ I called after him.
It was late when Awan and I arrived at the gatehouse, but not entirely dark. A low moon hung in the clear sky casting an ethereal light over the moor; the tufted heather, spiny grass and soft mosses looked like intricate fretwork on a sheet of antique silver, the work of an ancient craftsman from days of yore. Everything, in fact, had a ghostly hue; the lane was a pewter ridge between indistinct embankments, the trees were steely spires, unnaturally still, and everywhere a miasmic vapour hung over the land as the cooling air met the hot earth. We dismounted from our bicycles and entered the driveway, a throat of misty darkness. We knew the way as we knew our own faces but we both quailed a little at the prospect, so disorienting was the fog which hung beneath the canopy of the trees and coiled itself around us. The narrow, yellowish beam of my bicycle lamp failed to penetrate the cloud of murk and, worse, cast outlandish shadows on familiar boulders and contorted ordinary shrubs into demons. The fallen tree looked like an elongated body with broken limbs all awry. We stepped around it as though it was a veritable corpse.
At the second hairpin Awan hesitated. ‘Perhaps we ought to go back, Mummy,’ she said. ‘I don’t like this.’
‘Back to the farm?’ I said, my voice too loud and falsely confident. ‘They’ll all be a sleep, by now.’
‘Back to the gatehouse, then,’ she suggested. ‘There are things there. We could manage, for one night.’
It was awkward, wheeling our bicycles over the pot-holed drive, keeping ourselves away from the precipitous edge which, no matter how I tried to navigate a line away from it, kept throwing itself under my front wheel. ‘Let’s leave our bikes here,’ I said, laying mine down at the side of the route. ‘We can collect them in the morning. Then we can hold hands and keep each other safe.’
‘All right,’ she agreed, in a brave, thin little voice.
I unclipped my lamp and we went on together, hand in hand, through the clinging mist.
About halfway down the driveway the quality of the fog changed. I don’t know if Awan felt it too. The air, which had been damp and cloying but fresh before, laced with botanical scents, clean and natural, changed. It became thicker and smelt woody, and caught the back of the throat so I was suddenly conscious of a raging thirst. It made me think of the trees, sweltering all day in the summer heat, their sap liquefying like treacle in a saucepan and the distinctive thick, sugary, sticky smell which rises when you have left it just that second too long.
I swallowed, trying to find some saliva to slake my dry throat, but my mouth was as arid as bone.
When we came out of the shelter of the driveway we only knew it by the falling away of the skirt of trees. The whole hollow of the basin was filled with thick fog. It boiled and churned around us. Rather than emanating from the earth it seemed to pour from above, like thick cloud weighed down by water which it cannot release. I could scarcely see the house through it; the outlines of the roofs, the columns of the chimneys, the jutting gables and overhanging eaves were blurred, a pencil sketch which has been smeared with a greasy thumb. The woody smell which had intrigued me in the woods was much stronger and more acrid, and in spite of the dryness of my throat, my eyes began to water. At last I realised.
‘Fire,’ I croaked. ‘The house is on fire.’
At that moment a breath of breeze dispersed the smoke just enough for me to get a clear view of the house. I could see no flame, but thick smoke poured from the gap between the slates and the gutters and fell like a dirty grey curtain down the front of the house. Tendrils of smoke snaked from between the slates, as though a thousand cigarettes were being smoked within. Then the fug closed and I could see nothing.
Awan’s face was white with panic, her mouth an open maw. She gripped my hand with super-human strength.
‘Go to the icehouse,’ I told her, gently disengaging my hand from hers. I knew there were blankets there, and candles, left behind from when we had equipped it as an air raid shelter. Everything would be damp and dismal, but she would be safe. I handed her my bicycle lamp. ‘I’m going to telephone for help, and then I’ll join you.’
‘You mustn’t go in
to the house,’ she warned.
‘I won’t,’ I promised her. ‘I’ll use the telephone extension in Kenneth and Rose’s place. But you must go to the icehouse.’
She looked like she might refuse. ‘On your way,’ I told her, ‘check the outhouses.’ Our last dog had died in the terrible winter of ’47. We had no poultry or livestock. But a wild creature occasionally bedded down in the old stables, and a feral cat had had kittens there earlier in the year. ‘Make sure the cat and her kittens are gone.’ I knew they were long-gone, but giving Awan responsibility for another creature’s safety would serve my purpose.
‘All right,’ she agreed.
No doors at Tall Chimneys were ever locked and the door to the old estate office which had served as the entrance to Kenneth and Rose’s house opened at my push. We had had no electricity for months and months, unable to afford fuel for the generator. I dismissed the idea of looking for candles or a match. I groped my way to the corner of the room where the telephone apparatus sat on the floor, and dialled the operator.
The fire brigade was stationed in the local town and it would take them at least half an hour to reach us. Then there was the driveway to negotiate - I thought of the tree which lay across it, and berated myself for leaving it there. They would have to cut it up, I thought, or at least drag it to one side, that would waste extra time. In the meanwhile, Tall Chimneys was on fire. A bile of panic rose in my chest, bitter, jealous, my home was being consumed from within. Forgetting my promise to Awan, I stepped across the yard and went into the house through the kitchen door.
The air inside was strangely still and tomb-like. I listened carefully, for the crack and snap of burning timber, for the crash of falling roof beams, for the shattering of glass, but could hear nothing. The old clock above the mantel ticked doggedly, the tap dripped.
Perhaps, I thought, I had made a mistake?
I climbed the back stairs to the hallway, my hand trembling as it gripped the worn rail. The room was impenetrably dark, the furniture mere shapeless shadows. No light shone through the windows, which were charcoal rectangles in a sea of dim. I walked as though on shards of glass, as though to avoid disturbing a burglar at work above, as if my presence there would make him redouble his efforts of pillage and devastation.
The smell of smoke was unmistakable, but not overpowering.
I placed my foot on the bottom step of the wide staircase and began to climb. On the large landing which overlooked the hall below, the smell of smoke was stronger, faintly sour, like a garden fire in autumn, but still I could hear no roar or crack. The house was deathly still, as though holding its breath, and I realised that I, too, had stopped breathing. My hand gripped the carved balustrade and the house clung around me, as though for succour. I could feel it pressing, as Awan had done earlier, and the weight of it was almost too much to bear.
I surmised that the fire was in the attics. I had been up there only a few days before, and my mind homed in on a specific lumber room which was stuffed to its rafters with boxes of mildewed books and crates of mouldy, moth-eaten linen. It had been a routine check, one which I carried out every month or so, looking for leaks or signs of rodent infestation. In point of fact I had found signs of water ingress and had stuffed some material into a gap which had appeared at the side of the roof-light. In pushing between the boxes I had dislodged a precariously balanced chandelier, broadcasting crystal drops everywhere. It came to me with blinding clarity that one of these had formed a lens, intensifying the sun’s light until the dampened floorboards had begun to smoulder. The room was airless, and a lack of oxygen would inhibit the fire. But not indefinitely. The heat, in time, would crack the glass of the roof-light, and once the fire had air to breathe, it would be an inferno.
Time was short. I might have one, at best two opportunities to save artefacts from the upper floor of the house before the fire made it impossible or the arrival of the firemen made everything chaotic. What might be the most valuable? What could I easily carry? I thought about the silver dressing table set in Mrs Simpson’s room, the little trinket box, said to be Fabergé. There was a small Constable in one of the dressing rooms and antique glassware in the cabinets. But all those things were Ratton’s, now. Why should I risk my life to save them? My thoughts flew instead to the north wing, and the room where John’s canvasses were kept. I set off into the gloom of the north landing. I navigated the awkward chicane of unexpected steps and the sharp turning without difficulty, my feet seeming to have in-built memories of them. The smell of smoke was much stronger. I cocked my ear at the bottom of the stair which led up to the old servants’ quarters in the attic; a strange, other-worldly whisper drifted down to me, like spectres murmuring secrets to one another. The place was smouldering, heat seeping like molten metal through the age-old beams. It would only need a stray draught or a pocket of stale air in a cavity between floorboard and ceiling laths to ignite it.
I hurried to the end of the corridor to the room where John’s things were stored. The room was pitch black inside, for the shutters were kept tightly closed. The air smelt dry and musty, and hot; it seared the inside of my nostrils.
John had used a large leather satchel to transport his paintings. I groped for it in the darkness and began to fill it with as many sketch books and small canvasses as I could. When it was full I picked up a large canvas with my other hand, and hurried back the way I had come.
Passing the attic stair, the whisperings above had become more strident, like an exasperated delegation complaining in a library. Smoke was pouring thickly down the stairs, now, the stuffy attic must have reached its capacity and the lath and plaster eaves must not be allowing enough to escape; it needed another way out.
I fled along the landing and down the main stairway as though hounds of hell were chasing me. The air in the kitchen was still smoke-free but I could smell it anyway - coming from myself. I dumped my treasures on the table and went back for more.
By now the smoke on the landing was quite palpable. It hovered in a grey pall beneath the ceiling like clouds in purgatory. The acrid tang of it caught in my throat and made me cough, and I clapped my handkerchief to my nose and mouth. The heat at the end of the corridor was almost searing, as though from an oven. Above my head I heard the crack and shatter of glass, and the patter of broken shards on the floor overhead.
All at once the fire roared into life. I heard it whoosh and leap like a ravenous animal, fed by the air from the broken window. A patch in the ceiling darkened, the paint curling and withering before my horrified eyes.
I dashed back into the room where the paintings were kept and snatched as many as I could carry. The larger works were too big for me. I tore the heavy curtains from their poles and threw them over the artworks in the forlorn hope they might be spared, and then stacked the smaller, experimental canvasses on top of one another until I could barely see over the top of them. I lifted them and staggered from the room, pulling the door closed behind me. The ceiling above me was fully ablaze, a roiling mass of bluish flame and orange tongues rippling across the old distemper. I could hear my hair singe as I passed beneath it, my eyes pouring, each breath a choking lungful of bitter ash. I saw the curtains of Mrs Simpson’s room ablaze as I passed the door of that room. At a distance I heard the crash of something heavy falling. The house resonated with the busy burn of a million enraged bees conscientiously consuming every sweet morsel of vintage beauty and priceless antiquity to be found.
The kitchen was cool and dark, mercifully free of smoke. I retched into the sink and scooped water from the tap into my acrid mouth, coughing and gasping until I thought I might expel my own lungs, almost swooning over the cold hard draining board. I had a sense of the house above me buckling and folding like a box, the pressure in my ears was immense, I could almost feel the ceiling above my head pressing down. When I moved again it was in a half-crouch, so vivid was the feeling that the house was collapsing on top of me. I scurried to open the strong room and hastily pushed the paint
ings inside. The tarnished silver platters and candelabra glowered at me from their dusty shelves. I slammed and locked the heavy door on them.
In my bedroom I threw the contents of my drawers onto the bed, and gathered up the corners of the quilt to form a makeshift sack before hauling it along the stone floor and into the chill of the boot room which was closest to the outer door. I went back and did the same in Awan’s rooms, remembering her favourite dolls, the bits of furniture for the dolls’ house which Cameron had made, her books and box of precious trinkets where she hoarded feathers and interesting stones picked up over the years. I cast an agonised glance at the lush mural of flora and fauna which John had painted. If I could have torn it from the wall, I would have done so.
Overhead, the sounds of a riotous party resonated; intoxicated gentlemen played an unruly game of rugby. Cabinets of curios exploded as if in applause. Furniture hurled itself into the fray. With a last, woebegone look at the dear, familiar kitchen, I dragged my bundles out into the night.
The sky above the house was lurid with orange light. Every upper window shone brightly as though a thousand candles burned within. I didn’t recall ever seeing the house so animated and alive. It looked like a jolly party was in progress, every room occupied with high-spirited guests, the crash and smash of priceless glass like careless footmen indiscriminately dropping trays of cocktails and platters of canapés. The north wing roof was fully alight now, sending showers of sparks up. Smoke and flame both spurted from the chimney pots. Before my horrified eyes first one and then another tall chimney tottered. They seemed to hesitate, and then began to lean. Further and further they tilted, with infinitesimal slowness and grace. Their decorative masonry seemed illuminated from within, incandescent, their very bricks melting back into the sand which had formed them and then regressing further to a molten, primordial floe until the structure was impossible to recognise, and they sank with a sigh into oblivion. My own cry of distress melded with theirs and rose up into the implacable night.
Tall Chimneys: A British Family Saga Spanning 100 Years Page 32
