Myra felt a sort of appalled admiration at the cruel way they went for each other, surprised that they could take it, and still stay together. ‘It won’t settle your problems that easily,’ he said, splashing out a large glass of soda-water and drinking it off. ‘It’s so damned hot in here. We must be in for a heat-wave.’ Enid also felt a strange warmth in the room, that pressed against her eyes and temples like a headache. ‘Give me a drink as well, and some for Myra.’
They stood by the table, as if for protection and reassurance. ‘I don’t like it tonight,’ Albert said. ‘The devil’s around, or maybe it’s just the bloody moon eating through my veins.’
Enid laughed. ‘You’re so funny when you get in this mood.’
‘As long as you love me,’ he said. Their hatred had gone, but Myra felt that something worse had taken its place, and wished for the hundredth time that she had not left her own house where she felt spiritually undisturbed. She preferred not to witness this sort of life while her own was so much confused.
‘You’re spoiled and self-indulgent,’ Enid said, ‘to get into such moods.’
He ignored her so successfully that she thought he might not be well. He leaned out of the window and sniffed, then turned an altered face towards them. Hot oily smoke, almost invisible yet pushing upwards like a wall, was coming from the kitchen.
He ran for the door. ‘The house is on fire.’
On the floor below he pulled Ralph out of Mandy’s bed, so that his thick naked figure stood tall before him. ‘Quick,’ Handley roared at his bleak face that even the pleasures of love had been unable to soften, ‘get up to my studio and steal every painting you can lay your hands on. The house is burning down.’
Mandy ran by with a bundle of clothes. ‘Get the Rambler and the caravans clear,’ he shouted. Richard and Adam had been talking, and were still fully dressed. Thank God for the gift of the gab, he thought, as the three of them descended to the kitchen. The skeleton of a flaming door fell across their toes, and they drew back. Handley picked up a carpet and, using it as a shield, fell inside. Acting blindly in flame and smoke he plugged both sinks and turned on the taps, then opened the window and dived out into the mud.
Paintings were sailing out of the sky like eagles, falling on fences, bushes, into mud, the ruination of his sweat and dreams. Mandy towed both caravans at once down the over-leafed lane, those inside not knowing what peril threatened as they swayed and bumped along in the safety of their bunks. At the bottom she met a fire-engine, and by a swift efficient manoeuvre drove clear and let it through.
Richard and Adam hosed water towards the centre of the fire, but heat and smoke drew it short. He knocked the rubber pipes from their hands. ‘Too late. Get out what you can.’
They ran up the stairway into his studio. Ralph who had made a rope, turned into a naked sweating demon impervious to sulphur and smoke. He hooked up boxes and bundles of papers and slid them down the still cool wall. Myra caught them, sent the rope back. Enid stacked them. Handley freed Eric Bloodaxe and tied him to the outer gate, then watched the house reddening slowly, put on its mantle of smoke so as to expire in dignified secrecy. He stored the more precious objects inside the large kennel, for a few drops of rain were scattering. The garden was littered with clothes, books, papers, bric-a-brac, furniture. A radiogram smashed to pieces on a concrete bench. It’s a good job I never furnished it Well, Handley thought, as fire-engines arrived and turned on the foam. Or had many possessions. The caravan idea was brighter than I thought. His limbs trembled, and he lit a cigar in order to feel more at home now that he plainly had none. ‘Anybody left inside?’ the fireman said. Handley pointed to the studio, still floodlit with electric light. ‘There are three in there, but they’ll get down by the tree.’
‘Where?’
He pointed. Adam was already in the tree-top, a bundle tied to his back. Enid and Myra were carrying things to the front of the house and laying them out tidily. Hot smoke boiled as floors and roof dropped into the centre. Foam seemed to help it. Richard fought his way through crinkled char-edged leaves, and with Ralph above him they slithered through in a few seconds and fell to the ground. Handley assembled his canvases by the gate before paint on them melted.
Lurid scorching air threw them back, pushing, until they were half-way down the lane. Red of the fire mixed with red of the morning. ‘What are we going to do, Albert?’
They stood with arms around each other. He’d always imagined that losing one’s house by fire was a great boon to a free spirit such as himself, that he’d laugh in its face as long as no one was hurt. But this impossible child-dream seemed to have burned him completely hollow. After such a fire there was a law of silence which you could not disobey. They sat among bushes on the damp bank of the lane. He walked up again, to see house and tree vanishing in their own cocoon of destruction, eating each other up. He couldn’t take his eyes from it. Even the fences were burning. A deep crumbling sound lay under the crash of great sparks. The past was burned out, and the future was unthinkable. The spoor of twenty years had gone. The whole edifice was rumbling and rendering down through an enormous mincing machine, fascinating, fantastic, frightening under the crude shock. Foam was still pouring over in a useless attempt to show willing, though Handley thought you might as well piss on it for all the good it would do. He shivered, gooseflesh patching his face and arms, teeth jumping so that his brain was drowned by the noise. He made a great effort, paced up and down till it stopped. A line of fencing collapsed, the limits of the house and its grounds merging with the fields.
‘There’s not much we can do, sir,’ a fireman said.
Handley offered a cigar from his tin. ‘It’s all right.’
‘Thank you, sir. A hell of a fire. I haven’t seen one round here like that for a long time.’ He put the cigar in his pocket: ‘I’ll smoke it later with my tea.’ Handley walked away. The intensity was weakening, the world falling apart.
Mandy had parked the caravans on open ground by the pub. Leaving the Italian girls in charge she backed the Rambler up the lane and passed out two tea-flasks and a bottle of whisky sent by the publican. ‘You’re an angel,’ Handley said. ‘A real heroine. What a family I’ve got, even though the house is down.’
‘They’re eating beans on toast,’ she said, wide-mouthed with pleasure at her father’s compliment. ‘They’ve never had such an adventure, all sitting on the caravan steps in their nightshirts. Even Mark’s awake and enjoying himself.’
‘It’s a bit of an adventure for me as well,’ he said wryly.
‘The whole village is around them.’ She wore slippers, and a coat over her nightdress, her long hair tied into a pony-tail flashing outside. ‘We can get your paintings on the back of the Rambler, Dad, and then they’ll be safe. They’re fixing up rooms at the pub for you lot up here.’
The whole lane was softly lit by the glow of the house. ‘If anyone asks what I’ve done with my life I can now truthfully say that I made a fire.’
‘Someone did,’ Enid said, drinking tea from a paper cup. Handley passed the whisky bottle, then took a drink himself. ‘But where are we going to live till we get somewhere?’
‘Come down to Buckinghamshire,’ Myra said. ‘I’ve a large house, and a flat over the garage. There’s room for everybody, and the caravans.’
‘There’s not much stuff to move,’ Handley said, relishing the fact now that whisky made him feel better.
‘You live near the motorway, don’t you?’ Mandy smiled. She seemed happy and decisive, even mulling on future pleasures, while the others were sluggish, and too wan to think about much.