‘You work too hard.’ It would seem that Festa hadn’t noticed the garden spy, thank goodness. ‘Are you going to make some coffee?’
‘I’m leaving now. We want to catch the tides,’ she lied. ‘I’ll put the water on.’
That’s exactly what she’d done. She had half noticed the lamp, she’d say, either underneath the common-room table or on top of it. She wasn’t sure. She had, she thought, taken her still burning cigarette with her into the common room. It was just possible that she had left it standing on its end on the veranda floor. That was her habit, balancing a narrow cigarette to knit its thinning scarf of smoke while she was busy doing something else. Or — so many oversights, so many ways to fail — she might have left the cigarette standing on the table by the sink while she splashed her face and filled the saucepan with water for Festa’s coffee. Or she might have stubbed the cigarette out in the sink. She was too hurried to take much notice. Two things were certain. When she left the study house on this, her grimmest day, Festa was half asleep and smoking in her bed. And there was a naked light below the saucepan on the unattended hob.
Here, then, were several possibilities. There was no evidence to say which one occurred. The study house — all wood and glass — was too badly burned for autopsies. The unextinguished lamp, left to burn all night and left to burn by Joseph, too, as he went out that morning, finally gave purchase to a second flame on the underside of the table in the common room. The wood had blackened, charred and finally surrendered to combustion. The flame was upside down and would not have burned for long if this had been a modern table, its polish and its lacquers emasculated by the safety rules of modern manufacturing. The timber of this table had been sealed by combustible varnishes, which were too old to liquefy when heated, but dried instead, went scaly, lifted from the wood in flakes and dunes, and let the flames migrate across the table’s underside.
Or else the unwatched hob, in a sleeping house, boiled off the water in the coffee pan until the pan itself began to cook. Its bottom would have enamelled first, bright greys and blues. Then the gas flames would have begun to spread. They’d have licked the sides and tongued the plastic handle of the pan. Pan plastic doesn’t melt. It flares. And if the heat becomes intolerable it turns the energy it cannot cope with into squibby detonations, which crack and spring with flames. The pan, unsteadied by the discharges, could have fallen off the hob and spread its molten metals on the boards.
Or maybe one of those nicely balanced cigarettes, which Celice might have left burning on the table by the sink, on the veranda floor, had toppled over to smoulder on the splintered wood in its sweet time. Or Festa might have fallen back to sleep and dropped her own kingsize, her first gasp of the day, on to her mattress to bake herself in man-made flaming fibres. Or she might have stumbled out to make her coffee from the boiling water and caught the lamp beneath the table with a toe on her way back to bed. The spilt kerosene would race across the floor. So would its chasing flame. Or else. Or anything. Or something different. The dead don’t speak. It could have started in a thousand ways.
Whatever the initial cause, whosever fault it was, whoever volunteered to take the blame, a tongue of flame could hardly wish for more dry wood.
The three sleeping men were lucky: their door was closed so when the first flame dipped and reached for fuel and oxygen, stretching its neck for sustenance like a little orange chick, they could not hear the flexing of the floorboards or smell the scorching timber and the melting paint in the adjoining room. They did not wake at the explosion of the lamp with its shallow reservoir of kerosene or sit up startled as the kindled wood finally ignited and combusted with the detonating crackle of musketry.
The fire seemed to have two speeds, the thorough and methodical, and the racing. First there was the toasting of the wood, the snacking, fervent torching of everybody’s coats, the melting of their boots, and then the sudden, tindery conflagrations — a cereal packet left out on a kitchen surface, their books and lecture notes, the pile of magazines. The tongue became a sheet became a wall of flame.
But even when the fire had spread across the common-room floor and reached the men’s door, it could not slip into their bunk room and race across the mat and their abandoned clothes to wake them in their beds. The door lips were too good a fit. Wood swells. The flames could only climb to singe and blister the outer, painted surface of their door, then set to work on the soft joists, the panels of the ceiling and the timbers of the roof.
The fire and smoke were drawn instead by their love of space towards the light and towards the open door on to the veranda where Festa slept. They sent their roasting thermals and simooms out of the furnace through the unprotected door to rape the cooler air with singed and pungent breath. If Festa woke before the flames reached her or the smoke suffocated her, she’d either have to squeeze her plump and warmly brimming self through the too-small window-panes or make her escape through the fire into the common room and out into the yard. She’d not get through the common room: within five minutes of the toppled cigarette, the overheated coffee pan, the spilt kerosene, the common room was an inferno, a box of bluing flames, containing all the gaseous wastes of burning wood. Hot walls. Hot floors. And a furnace ceiling returning its white heat on to itself until it broke through into the open air beyond the roof and sent its celebrating fireball up to the sky to glut on oxygen. Now all the self-consuming blues within the study house leaped up, five metres high, to liberate their reds and yellows on the roof.
This — the bang — was when the three men woke. Their door had lost its middle panel and the bunk room was already filling with smoke. The whole house sounded like a grounded ship, protesting timbers and collapsing joists, the fire as swelling and as rolling as the sea. It didn’t take them long to spot the one way out. One of them smashed the bunk-room window with a stool then knocked out the centre struts to make a hole big enough for them to squeeze through. It didn’t matter that they cut their hands and chests and didn’t have time to dress or rescue any of their clothes. The flames were catching up with them and torching the two bunks and their bedding. Their oxygen had disappeared. Their lungs and legs were scorched.
It wasn’t warm outside. Their naked backs were cold. Thank goodness for the flames. They stood and watched the study house blaze and carbonize. They watched the fusing and the melting of the metal pipes, the draining-board, the door handles and locks. They listened to the tom-tom of the exploding window-panes in the house and its veranda. They watched the fire attempt — and fail — to cross the remains of that once-fine garden to the outer walls and bid for freedom in the undergrowth.
It was not long before the study house was a charred and branded frame containing embers, cinders, charcoal, bone ash. All that remained (apart from a protracted claim from Festa’s family against the Institute for neglect and damages) were concrete steps, foundation bricks, a sink, a seared and smelted fridge, charred and wheezing wood, the blackened metal corners of Joseph’s fussy suitcase, a pall of drifting, marinating smoke and the deep, nostalgic smell of boys and bonfires.
No one could say exactly when Festa had been kippered and cremated or whether she had even had the chance to try to save her life. At first, it did not occur to the men that anyone had died. They themselves had slept too late as usual. The world would have breakfasted and gone to work before they woke. Their three missing colleagues would be where they always were by that time in the morning, down on the coast pursuing doctorates, up to their knees in flame-consuming sea.