Who ought to take responsibility at times like this? There always has to be a volunteer. When the airport hydrant, two firemen and a policeman had arrived to dampen the embers and begin the search for Festa’s remains, the two men there — Celice’s lover and the ornithologist — said they could not suggest or even guess how the fire had started. It was a mystery. They had no theories so they could accept no guilt. But Celice, not noticeably self-sacrificing in lesser matters, was eager for the blame. Embraced it, actually. She knew her only shelter was the truth. She half remembered seeing the kerosene lamp under the table, she admitted to the policeman. She couldn’t say whether or not it was still alight when she’d got up and hurried out that morning.
‘Let’s get this right. You left a lamp to bum all night? Underneath a wooden table?’ The policeman’s prejudices were reconfirmed. Here was a science graduate with a fine accent and no expenses spared who hadn’t yet found out that wood was combustible and that flames were hot. ‘That takes the prize,’ he said. But there was more. Celice could not stop confessing, despite Joseph’s restraining touch in the small of her back. That was a touch she hated all her life. She would not hide behind white lies or plead ignorance like him. She told the policeman, then, about the boiling coffee pan and her smouldering, toppling cigarettes. She’d later write to Festa’s parents, repeating all her burning truths. She’d admit the same again in court for the inquiry judge.
Now, middle-aged and only half as reckless as she’d once been, Celice was hiding in her husband’s wake as he pushed through the undergrowth of untrimmed shrubs to the side of the study house’s tumbled western wall. Joseph had been behind her as they’d crossed the rubble hills. But he had taken too many opportunities to help her on the loose earth and the gradients by spreading his fingers flat across her bottom and pushing. This was a lover pushing her, looking for the acquiescent flesh, and not a simple helping hand. She was annoyed. What had come over him? Could he not guess how tense she was? Or how angry she remained at his dishonest and restraining touch that age ago?
Sometimes she feared that there was nothing grand in their relationship, nothing to secure her loyalty or admiration, even, since that first encounter with his singing voice, that great sustaining wave on which her love had surfed for almost thirty years. Where had been the zest since then? Where, indeed, had been their common ground? She had become the pepper to his salt. They were the fruit of different, and opposing, trees.
So many times she’d asked herself, Why had their love proved troublesome? Celice could count the ways. First, she was a warrior by nature, unafraid of battle, quick to raise her fists. Her husband was an appeaser, loath even to raise his voice. She was assaulted and defeated, when they argued, by his lazy patience and his infuriating tact. After any argument she was mostly angry for one week. And he was eloquently hurt for two. Second, as she grew older, she wanted company and friends; he was unsociable and courted privacy. Next, she was dissatisfied with her life; he was only anxious about his. She wanted everything to get better; he was nervous that all the hard-earned certainties might disappear — he’d lose his health, his work, his monkish peace of mind. She had no fear of death. He cowered from it all the time, and lived his middle years with one foot on the bottom rung of a descending ladder, ready for the looming fall, the streak of blood in his urine, the tell-tale black deposits on the toilet paper, the colonizing lumps and swellings that he seemed to search for twenty times a day, the sharp pains in the arms and chest, the sudden stroke. He had become obsessed with symmetry: two legs aching was old age; one leg aching was a clot, arthritis or a growth. Lastly, he saw their marriage as a success; she was unsatisfied by it. Despite their early promise and ambitions they had not left as many marks upon the world as she had hoped. One daughter was the only product of their lives — and one that was not promising, pretended to no plans, and had fled from the family home as if it were a prison cell. Celice’s audit of herself and her long years with Joseph was not uplifting. Their legacy, she’d be the first to say, would be less than their inheritance.
Yet there still was love, the placid love that only time can cultivate, a love preserved by habit and by memory. Their tree had little rising sap, perhaps, but it was held firm by deep and ancient roots. Old, lasting love. Celice had never doubted it. Their marriage had initiating strengths. A great sustaining wave, no matter how old, is more than most couples can boast of and enjoy. Her husband angered her, perhaps, from time to time. Most of the time, in fact. He was too weak and watery. And she was disappointed with herself. But their beginnings were indelible and strong. Joseph could still evoke for her — infrequently — those sentimental choruses, that great subversive bass, that guiding star, that midnight bride, the peaking of her body and the song in that far, haunted place. When they were young.
Yet this was not a haunted place, as it turned out. The study house was fertile ground for rock shrubs and carbon-loving plants. The bunk room and the common room were oblong beds of stoveweed and pyrosia, the green bells of the one almost a perfect match for the high bracts of the other. The last remains of bricks, masonry and walls were colonized by nettles, brambles, buddleia and mortar roses. The house was razed but the architect’s blue building plans were still adhered to by the plants. What roof beams had survived the fire and years, were skeletal, stripped of all the charring, tapered by erosion, and clad in the reds and greens of timber algae.
Celice stepped across the porch stone and walked into the middle of the common room, next to the almost buried sink. The doorway to the veranda was now two heaps of weed. There was no evidence of any building on that side of the house. The scrubby backshore plants, the hollow-stemmed flute bushes and the thorns had colonized the long rectangle of the glass veranda and were growing deeply. Celice could not reach the spot where she and Festa had spread their mattresses and sleeping-bags, and shared their cigarettes. She squatted on her heels and peered beneath the bushes. What did she expect? Some bones? A snake? A woman, sitting up in bed? The red glow of tobacco? The odours of a barbecue? A scream? The sudden ending of her guilt as if the study house had pardons to give out?
The smell was only vegetation and the sound was only leaves and stalks. All she found to show that there had once been shelter here were shards of grey and thinning glass, a riddled piece of corrugated iron, and what could be the rusting helix of a mattress spring. She was tempted to say something to Festa, but did not. She might have, if she’d been by herself. An apology, perhaps. A reassurance of some kind. But Joseph was in hearing range. He wouldn’t understand. Men had no emotional imagination, she had found. That’s why he hadn’t felt the guilt she’d felt. That’s why the death of Festa had been so readily survived by him. Perhaps, that’s why men were more stable than the women she knew. They accepted the eerie truth of life and death, that one is passing and the other is conclusive. We live, we die, we do not need to understand. There are no ghosts to lay. There is just ash and memory.
Celice was still shaking and a little nauseous when she walked back through the denuded common room to join her husband for the walk down to the coast. She took deep breaths. The anticlimax had been shocking. How little she had felt. How tearless she had been. How mute the ruins were.
‘Not what I expected,’ she said. ‘So much has grown here. I thought it would be bleak.’ She should have known — a doctor of zoology — that vegetation would have buried all the past, that death would be absorbed.