Night of Fire

by Colin Thubron

  The sounds and the light dim. He starts to breathe again, and wipes his streaming eyes. Then, touched by a sad, unexpected calm, he enters the bedroom. His torch beam finds her asleep under the duvet. He sees the rise and fall of her breathing. The smoke hangs only thinly. He thinks: this is how her suffering will end. He lies down behind her, his arms around her shoulders. He doesn’t know whether this is for her comfort or for his. Under his hands he feels the heaving of the too-wide barrel of her chest, inflicted by its years-long struggle for breath.

  She stirs awake now, mumbles: ‘What’s that smell?’

  He says: ‘It’s burning. The house is burning.’

  She says: ‘Oh. Some fuckwit must have left a fire on,’ then turns over and goes back to sleep.

  He finds by her bedside the bottle of sleeping pills that she takes against night panics. It is almost full. He gets up and pours a glass of water, then tumbles twenty pills into it, and presses it to her lips. She mumbles, ‘What’s this?’ but she has lapsed into confusion, and obediently swallows them. He crams the rest into his own mouth. She says: ‘Where are we going, then?’ and falls asleep again.

  His lips touch the hand curled against her neck. He whispers in his head: Yes, think of it like a journey. Imagine a journey.

  There is silence and stillness. On either side glide scarps and domes of ice whose contours, in this elemental light, look as intentional as sculpture. The ship floats on a glacial calm. The air is frozen cold. It is a universe of gleaming immobility, its colours pared to dazzling white and the intermittent black of mountain walls. Sometimes thin floes scatter the sea like icing sugar. Everything inessential – movement, sound, humans – has been shorn away.

  It was a fantasy from the start, of course: the idea that this crystalline air might cure her. There is no cure for emphysema. But for years she had wanted to see the mountains of Antarctica, and now she stands for hours at the ship’s prow, clutching the cold rails, and watches the towering procession of ice forms in the white silence, and seems at peace. The other passengers avoid them. They have seen her with her concentrator pack, exhausted by climbing the stairs on to deck, inserting the oxygen cannulae into her nostrils; and they assume her need for privacy, or are tacitly repelled by her oddness, as if she might mar their holiday. She laughs at her quarantine. She is happier alone, she says, with him. Although she cannot disembark with the others to photograph seals on the pack ice, she follows through binoculars the colonies of penguins where they waddle along some snow-suffocated massif, and can gaze for hours at the passing icebergs, their blue gleam under the water.

  It was this vivid quality of attention that had first arrested him years ago, when neither of them was quite young. He had met her three times before he kissed her startled lips. Later, to his infatuated gaze, her slanted eyes and cheekbones gave her the look of a beautiful gazelle, and her quickened intelligence and mood swings could dilate the same eyes into confusing orbs of alarm or sadness.

  He noticed her frailty first on their cliffside walks. She would stop, perplexed, to stare at the view, as if it were this that had taken her breath away. Later, angry, she fought the disease with too-violent exercise, and daily hours of yoga. Often she couldn’t rest for coughing, but would sleep exhausted during the day; and all the time – despite hospital intubation to relieve her lungs – her breathing grew shallower, faster, until even when at rest she was wheezing through pursed lips. At length the vibrant precision of her speech faltered, so that her sentences would sometimes die into confusion, she too tired to finish them.

  On board ship, for a full week, she sleeps deeply. There are no panic attacks. In the half-dark of the Antarctic summer they often go on deck alone. They watch the ship’s prow parting a white flotsam that closes in after them as if they have never been there. They do not know if this is the detritus of a whole ice world melting round them: if they are leaving behind a ruined planet.

  Then one night she wakes afraid and is coughing up green sputum. At the ship’s prow next morning he hears her banging her fists on the iron parapet, furious, cursing, so that people edge away. This swearing, he knows, is a violent assertion of herself still breathing. Even close friends could often seem strangers to her, because they were on one side of death, she almost on the other. Even he was alien to her sometimes. He would see it in her eyes, as if he had withdrawn to a great distance, and there was mist between them, something that made him not quite there, and she would speak in angry bursts. Because he was going to live on. And sometimes, in retaliation, he would consciously withdraw from her, tell himself that she was beyond loving, to quench the dread of his bereavement.

  But these separations would barely last a day. He would only have to catch a helpless semiquaver in her cough, or glimpse the pulse awakened in her neck, to feel a racking sorrow. He wondered if his love for her was too much powered now by compassion, which might demean her: she who had once dispelled his solitude, and redeemed in him a past too full (as he conceived it) of his own betrayals. He had even loved her ageing – eleven years his junior, she was far behind in this – and liked to caress the new lines that crinkled her eyes, and forbade her to dye her hair. He was surprised by himself. Before her disease, he had thought she would always seem young to him. Now he saw her physical beauty transform – her chest and neck thickened, her face gaunt with sleeplessness – and even her radiant mind dimming. Soon, he thought, she might become pure memory, his own, and he did not know what he would be loving.

  This, of course, is their last journey. He finds her on the deck at midnight, a night still bleached by refracted sunlight. She says: ‘You know it’s not working.’

  Yes, I know, I know. We always knew. He holds her against him. Her hands touch his back. He thinks: this is my loved one, this is until the end. The Antarctic skies are different from any he has known. Beyond the Southern Cross, even in this half-light, you stare up into the Milky Way as through a great funnel, littered with stars.

  The smoke reaches them as he holds her. For a while he imagines he might fall unconscious, still beside her, while the sleeping pills take effect. Now he is unsure if she is breathing. She feels very calm. She does not move as the smoke condenses round them. But his panic returns and he clambers shaking from the bed. He has an idea that he will find an open window, clear sky. A stench of carbonised wood and smelting iron fills his study. His torchlight wavers over everything he ought to save, hoarded from seventy years: letters from friends in schools, seminaries, hospitals, tiers of catalogued photographs, inflammable cine films, astronomy records, neurotic writings on girlfriends, his mother, sister, brother, Africa, Asia, Antarctica. He remembers that items stored in a fridge may survive fire, and scrabbles among snapshots and forgotten correspondence, and empties out a box of old gifts. There is a quaint souvenir of India, bought by Dick; a Greek icon of the Virgin of Tenderness from long ago (but worthless); a Toledo paper knife. He lights on a crystal ball from his schooldays, in which a tiny wizard waves his wand, with snowflakes falling; and finds a photograph of Samantha, still handsome in her last year, its back inscribed with Leonardo’s fable of the butterfly and the flame (‘I thought I would find happiness in you, and instead I have found death’).

  He is on the floor, not knowing how he fell. His lungs are rasping. He wants to vomit, his legs gone. A burning void is opening in his chest. For a full minute he tries to get back to the bedroom, but cannot move. But the pain is leaving him now, flowing away. It drains into hallucination. He thinks in a half-trance: My lungs have stopped, my brain is alone. He is swimming away from his body. He knows the brain, of course, how it forgets, and how it can remember without love, if the operation takes you deep into the limbic system. But he has lost his body now, his mind floating. She stares up at him from the hospital trolley. ‘Remember.’

  The brain may live for minutes after the heart and lungs have stopped. Emotions detach themselves from their causes, and flow free. He feels he dreams what he has forgotten, or what never happene
d. Maybe he lives the memories of others. Their essence has escaped him, eluded the camera. She wears a salmon-coloured dress, and her hair is twined in gardenias: a house agent for cottages they might have lived in. But he buried her trust under his concrete floor. And he loved her most on stage. She is a perfect Edwardian lady in her cream lace gown. There are others too, their eyes averted, looking in and out of coastal paths and sitting rooms. And then she, shining black in her crimson dress. She gazes back at him like stone. There is nothing you can do for me now. He reaches out to touch her, to kiss her should she allow it, as if to remove a mask and uncover a face.

  Crystal-clear this morning, the Antarctic light. On the ship’s railings their hands rest side by side. And gently her little finger hooks around his. The hand is as he remembers it, the tendons spread like harp strings. And she whispers, ‘Thank you.’ It arises from her stillness, almost like breathing.

  It is dark now. He begins to part the chapel curtains. There is a dead butterfly on the altar, still glistening. Passages lead off beyond, to other curtains, other rooms. He is nothing now, or somebody dreaming, dreaming of the dark one whose breast in ecstasy he held in the firelit orchard. The house is shaking round him, and its rooms are empty except for his dreams. As the synapses of the brain close down, its memories hang isolated, waiting for their own dissolution. There is no one to awaken them. They constitute a person who has disappeared. He might be sinking into the black throat of a wormhole. Perhaps a light bursts beyond, like the flaming of a once-invisible star. Or it flows over him in a river of fire, until the brain – ninety billion neurons of it – spills out as it might into the Ganges, to reach the ocean at last and disintegrate under the gleam of unfamiliar stars.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I owe special thanks to William Gray, Professor of Functional Neurosurgery at Cardiff University School of Medicine, for critical information and insight, and for granting me access to brain surgery. Likewise to Andrew McEvoy, consultant neurosurgeon at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London.

  I am much indebted to my sensitive editor Penny Hoare.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781473524958

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  Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Vintage,

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  Chatto & Windus is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  Copyright © Colin Thubron 2016

  Cover painting: The Fire of London by Gino D’Achille / Bridgeman Art Library

  Colin Thubron has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published by Chatto and Windus in 2016

  penguin.co.uk/vintage

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library