Yet Sheila and I, just off the road, in broad daylight, managed to go back. We did nothing more than hold hands and talk, yet it was the same as it used to be -- half an hour was a minute. We talked about nothing at all, certainly not about Miranda or Jota or Dina.
We moved on in the end only because, despite the magic, we were hungry. And the magic needn't necessarily fly away.
By this time I had made up my mind irrevocably about Dina. Something which she couldn't help was strangling her life. But it couldn't be allowed to strangle three lives instead of one.
The roadhouse was long and low. The noise from it as I parked the car rather took me aback, because we'd thought it was a fairly quiet place. Then I realized that on such a hot night all the windows were wide open.
Sheila had put on a new dress, and I didn't get the effect until she emerged from the ladies' room. She flushed with pleasure as I looked at her, knowing that I meant what I looked.
She wore a short green dress with just enough cleavage, and I saw in wonder that she was much more beautiful than she had been the |ast time I looked at her in this way. A business associate who had married a lovely girl and then divorced her had told me once, over a drink, that he had never wanted her more than when he saw her for the first time after she had remarried.
I was lucky. I was having the same sort of experience, only for me it wasn't too late.
I tried not to think of Miranda, and then, as Sheila went ahead to our table, I let myself think Of Miranda . . . and Sheila didn't suffer by comparison after all.
Miranda was the actress in the safari picture. Her perfection had the same unreality. She wasn't a girl who worked wonders with nothing at all. She had access to tricks far beyond anything available even to the girl in the safari picture.
Sheila didn't have any tricks. And Sheila was my wife.
We had a wonderful time. It was easily the best evening we had ever spent together. And with every second together, we came closer.
Only once more during the evening, while Sheila and I were dancing, did Miranda come to mind. And it was with gratitude, for I knew that if I had not somehow been released that day, Sheila and I would not be spending this evening, this kind of evening together.
We didn't prolong the evening greedily. We knew that unlike kids out on such a date, we didn't have to part afterwards. We could go home -- and to a home without Dina.
So it was not long after ten when we got back in the car and started to drive home.
"What's that, Val?" Sheila said idly.
I stared, and then put my foot hard down.
The sky ahead of us was on fire.
I'd seen fires at night before. Quite often they look far worse than they are. An empty barn aflame can light the sky, over a hill, like a burning town.
But this was something more than a burning barn. We could see flames shooting high, flames and smoke -- and Shuteley was still ten miles away.
The flames that seemed to be shooting miles into the sky really were what they seemed.
At once it all fell into place. The giants knew . Now I understood Greg's visit and his bizarre idea of insuring against disaster in the next twenty-four hours. Of course he hadn't meant to collect. He hadn't even meant to have the policy drawn up. He had merely been amusing himself.
Other things began to assume more significance. Miranda had known . I'd stay at home, and I'd gone out partly to make her wrong. Had she known then I'd die? Or had she been thinking something quite different, that I'd be safe out of it, because the Queen Anne house was in a bend in the river hundreds of yards from the town?
Dina . . . my heart missed a beat. Gil's house was in the middle of old timbered houses in the oldest part of town.
Then, with hope, I remembered that Miranda knew where Dina was and had said she expected to see her later.
The giants, who had known all about this fire, surely didn't propose simply to stand and watch, did they?
"What is it, Val?" Sheila said, and for a moment I thought she didn't even realize Shuteley was on fire. But then she added: "What are you thinking about?" and I knew that she'd been watching my face.
"About the giants," I said.
"You mean -- they did this?"
I hadn't been thinking that, and still didn't, on the whole. It seemed far more likely that, knowing this was going to happen, they had booked their seats for the show in advance. Maybe last week they'd watched the Great Fire of London, seeing St. Paul's burned down, and eighty-seven parish churches, and 13,200 homes.
At the thought, I jerked convulsively and so did the car. The Great Fire was in 1666. This was 1966, the three hundredth anniversary of the London disaster. Could that be coincidence? Or did it, in a twisted way, explain everything?
"Sheila," I said. "Can you remember the date of the Great Fire of London?"
"Sixteen something," she said wonderingly.
"No, I mean the day and the month."
"You must be kidding," she said.
It was a possibility that the giants were teenage vandals of time, destroying for the sake of destruction and doing it on a scale beyond belief. Things I knew made this possible too -- the way, for example, in which the giants, even Miranda until a few short hours ago, obviously regarded Shuteley and the people in it as mere shadows of living creatures.
Was that what Miranda had meant when she used the word tragic -- tragic because suddenly, because of what had happened between us, she realized that the people of Shuteley were something more than names fading from ancient gravestones?
But then I remembered a small item in a TV program some weeks ago, unimportant at the time. That had been the exact anniversary of the Great Fire. It was past. So this wasn't just a fantastic, manufactured playback for the giants' amusement, three centuries later.
"Talk to me, Val," said Sheila. "And don't drive so fast. You nearly went off the road at the last corner."
I slowed a little. As we approached Shuteley the fire seemed to spread until it was all around us, although that couldn't be so.
"Shuteley," I said. "The most old-fashioned town in England. Oh, afterwards it's always easy to see . . . the Titanic, instead of being unsinkable, was constructed so that if a certain thing happened she absolutely had to sink. The Lusitania acted as if she wanted to be sunk, paying no attention to instructions and being in one of the last places she ought to have been. At Pearl Harbor, half a dozen warnings were ignored, disbelieved, and what should have been expected was an unbelievable shock -- "
"What are you talking about?" she asked, bewildered.
"Fire risk. Well, who should know better than me? Naturally, every new building in Shuteley has to conform to all the latest safety regulations. Modifications are always being made in all the old houses. But how much has it amounted to? Shuteley's the most inflammable town in England -- perhaps in Europe."
"You mean, a fire only had to start, and it would be bad?"
"Something like that." My thoughts were jumbled. Sometimes I thought the giants had done it all, with my black-halted playmate Snow White as the schemer-in-chief. Then I found myself dismissing the giants as an irrelevance, mere spectators.
"Gradually, of course, the risks have been lessening," I said. "But you know Shuteley . . . changes that would take ten years anywhere else take fifty in Shuteley. And this summer there's been hardly any rain. Not only the town is bone dry, but the grass, the bushes, the trees. The river's as low as it has ever been."
"You think it's very bad, don't you?" Sheila said quietly.
I did, though in an oddly theoretical, uncommitted way. So far I was only guessing.
So I mused: "Maybe this is the fire that's going to change our whole conception of safety measures. When the Titanic sank; there was no rule that there had to be lifeboat accommodation for every passenger. The company thought they'd done pretty well because they'd done far more than the regulations demanded . . . We did the same. I'm sure of it. A lot more could have been done in Shuteley."
"What could you have done?"
"Nothing, I suppose. I don't know. Tried to get the police to move the giants on, perhaps. Watch them. Make sure they didn't have a chance to do any damage."
"Then you do think they did it."
"I don't how. But if they didn't start the fire, they knew it was going to happen."
"Miranda too?" She said it quite evenly, with no detectable malice.
"Miranda too," I said bleakly.
It seemed to take an interminable time to drive ten miles. The road was narrow and winding, It was not possible to average more than forty, and in trying to do the journey too quickly I was losing time, and knew it, and lost more time trying to make it up. By this time I had realized we'd have reached Shuteley sooner if I'd asked Sheila to drive. My brain was too involved with other considerations to allow me to drive well. But I didn't want to stop now to let her take over. The time lost might be greater than the time saved.
"I never knew this road was so long," I groaned.
"What can you do when you get there?"
"I don't how. At least make sure the firemen, the police, everybody involved, know about the giants, if they don't already."
"Val," said Sheila quietly, "calm down. Think -- no matter how bad it looks, it's only a fire -- "
"Only a fire!" I almost screamed.
"Please, Val . . . Shuteley doesn't consist entirely of wooded houses. You said yourself safety modifications are always being made. Spaces have been cleared. And we have a modern firefighting service, with the latest equipment. You know that as well as I do. Better."
Her calm words took effect, although we now smelt smoke, burning wood, burning rubber, and -- I hoped I was imagining this -- burning flesh.
Of course she was right -- despite the inferno we were driving towards, the orange gouts of flame shooting high into the dark sky, the billowing clouds of smoke pouring upwards, the sudden spurts of flame which told of oil explosions or gas leaks.
What we were seeing, the red-orange-yellow glow which made driving difficult, dimming the headlights, must, simply had to be, far worse in appearance than it was in actuality. It looked as if we were approaching a city the size of Manchester ablaze from end to end. And Shuteley would be lost in a suburb of Manchester.
I took a bend with a screaming of tires and for a minute or two, frustratingly, we were tearing along at right-angles to the blaze, getting no nearer. There was a slight rise just this side of the river, which meant that we wouldn't get a direct view of the town until we were within two hundred yards of the Suspension Bridge.
Yet as Sheila said, it couldn't be all that bad. Shuteley being a town in which fires that did occur could be more serious more quickly than in other places, the fire-fighting service was that much more efficient and better equipped. In the Great Fire of London there could have been little the Londoners could do except throw buckets of water over smoldering timbers. In Shuteley, a great deal of damage was undoubtedly being done, lives might be lost, but the outbreak would be contained.
I remembered Dina again, and caught my breath as I found myself thinking that if she died, one problem was solved . . .
No. I didn't want problems to be solved that way.
At last I reached the end of the straight and was able to turn towards the maelstrom again. Suddenly I braked, briefly, as I saw something across the road.
Sheila screamed and cut her scream off abruptly. I was able to slow the car enough to hit the obstruction gently, but not enough to stop short of it. It looked like molten lava flowing sullenly across the road . . .
There was a brief check, nothing more. It was water flowing across, turned dull red by the glow in the sky.
The car hit the last rise, and we both coughed. We were breathing thick wood-smoke. My eyes stung so fiercely so quickly that I braked again, braked harder as a cloud of smoke swept across the road, obscuring everything.
Yet it was a practically windless night, and most of the smoke and flames rose straight up. Nor was there even a breeze to fan the flames. That was something.
Then we were over the hill, almost at the river, and we saw the hell that was Shuteley.
Chapter Six
When you try to burn damp garden refuse, you have to create fierce heat before the green twigs, sappy cuttings and weeds begin to smoke, smolder and finally burn. Yet no matter how wet everything is, the greedy maw of a roaring fire will in the end swallow everything.
In Shuteley that summer night, everything inflammable or uninflammable was as dry as tinder. Everything that would burn was ready to do so at the first touch of flame; everything that wouldn't was neutral in the onslaught, neither helping nor hindering.
All along the river on the other side, buildings blazed as if they'd been prepared for a fire display and then touched off at a dozen points. Orange flame painted the gaunt shells of buildings which were all that was left along the riverside. Every few seconds, above the crackling roar of burning wood, there was a crash as somewhere masonry collapsed.
Nothing could be alive across the river from us. If anyone by some mirade escaped alive from any of those blazing buildings, there was no sanctuary in narrow streets swept with flame. I could only hope that the people who had been in these houses, the most densely populated part of the town, had already managed to get out.
Nothing could be alive. In such a furnace, even a fireman in full protective clothing would collapse and melt like a tallow candle.
"The whole town," Sheila whispered beside me. "Everything's burning. There's nothing left."
She was right: the fire stretched on both sides to the limits of the town, and although we could see practically nothing through the wall of fire, the flames and smoke which gushed into the red sky showed that behind what we could see the fire was just as intense.
Where we were, a hundred yards from the river and looking across it to a strip of scorched earth and stone and concrete that could burn no more -- perhaps three hundred yards from the nearest flame -- we were facing a blast of heat that would have killed us in time and must already have been toasting us, although we were protected by the car's body and were looking through glass. But we were too fascinated to draw back.
Only after we had seen all there was to be seen on the other side of the river did we look closer.
Sheila gasped. The Suspension Bridge was buckled, twisted, still spanning the river but with its metals glowing and a huge pile of rubble in the river bed below it.
The river was practically dry. Only thin crimson trickles ran through the mud and stones and weeds.
To the left, the New Bridge was piled high with masonry and still-burning timber. The warehouses across the river had collapsed into the dry bed.
There were people and machines this side of the New Bridge, a few hundred yards along from where we stood, but I had little attention to spare yet for this side of the river, where there were few buildings and those not on fire.
Instead I looked the other way -- and saw that the Old Bridge was down. It lay shattered in the bed of the river, an astonishingly vast pile of rubble, apparently the blockage that was holding back the river. But that way I couldn't see distinctly, because something close to the Old Bridge on the opposite side was shooting out dense clouds of smoke.
And I began to realize the full horror of the situation, which I had scarcely thought, a moment ago, could be worse.
There were two footbridges beyond the bridges I could see, but both were partly wooden and it could be taken for granted they were impassable. And the next nearest bridge was twenty miles away.
Shuteley was a backwater at the best of times. Yet in the middle of a well-populated country, the town could never have been described as isolated -- until now.
The main road, the big Midland towns, the rest of England were reached from this side. On the other, lanes meandered through villages, brooks,
farms, woods. Of course help could reach the town that way, but it would take hours. And this was a lightning fire.
Sheila was pulling at my arm, trying to make me reverse back over the hill. But before I did anything else, I looked back at the New Bridge.
It was hard to see exactly what was going on there, because sheds and warehouses cut off the view and at this point there was no road along the bank. But I saw two fire engines and men in gleaming helmets.
And they were on this side of the river.
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