Abby finished dessert and carried away the dishes. “Mail came from New York today,” she said. “I left it by your chair.”
He was grateful to be released from this dark chain of thought. He moved into what Abby called “the living room,” though it was only the long south end of the plain rectangular house Guilford had built, largely by hand, a decade ago. He had framed the structure and poured the foundations; a local contractor had plastered and shingled it. Houses were easier in a warm climate. It was Abby and Nicholas who had brought the house to life, with framed pictures and tablecloths and antimacassars, with rubber balls and wooden toys lurking under the furniture.
The mail amounted to several back issues of Astounding, plus a stack of New York papers. The newspapers looked depressing: details of the war with Japan, better reporting than the wire-service coverage in the Fayetteville Herald but more dated.
Guilford turned to the magazines first. His taste for fantasy, had ebbed in the years after he lost Caroline and Lily, but the newer magazines had drawn him back. Vast airships, planetary travel, alien life: all these things seemed to him both more and less plausible than they used to. But the stories could be relied on to carry him away.
Except tonight. Tonight he finished whole pages without remembering what he’d read. He contented himself with staring at the gaudy and infinitely promising cover illustrations.
He was nodding in his chair when he heard the fire truck clanging its way into town from the station on Lantern Hill.
Then the telephone rang.
Telephones were relatively new to Fayetteville, and he hadn’t grown accustomed to having one at home, though he’d used the one at work for more than a year. The grating ring went up his spine like a fish knife.
The voice at the other end was Tim Mackelroy, his assistant at the studio. Come quick, Tim said, Christ, it’s terrible, but come quick, the shop is burning down.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Guilford had built his house away from town, a half mile by dirt track from the nearest paved road. He could see Fayetteville from the front door, a distant grid of streets and homes, and a plume of smoke rising from what was probably Spring Street.
He told Abby he’d sort this out. She shouldn’t wait up for him. He would call as soon as he had solid information. Until then she shouldn’t worry pointlessly; if worse came to worst, the business was insured with the Oro Delta Trust. They would rebuild.
Abby said nothing, only kissed him and watched from the window as he drove the battered Ford away in a rising cloud of dust.
It had been a dusty month. The sky was gaudy, the sun about to touch the rim of the western sea.
Guilford passed Nick, who was still cycling toward town. He stopped long enough to toss Nick’s bike in the back and make room for the boy up front.
Nick was somber when he heard the news, but Nick was often somber. Large eyes in a small face. He frowned constantly. No smiles for Nick, only different frowns. Even when he was happiest — playing, reading, working on his models — he wore his frown of concentration, a firm compression of the lips.
“How could the studio catch on fire?” Nick asked.
Guilford said he didn’t know. It was too soon to figure that out. The urgent business was to make sure Tim Mackelroy was safe and then to see what could be salvaged.
Wild hillside gave way to terraced fields. Guilford turned onto the paved High Road. Traffic was light, only a few motorcars, horsecarts from the Amish settlement up toward Palaepolis, a couple of farm trucks coming back empty from the granaries. Follette Road was Fayetteville’s main sheet, and he saw smoke as soon as he took the corner by the feed and grain warehouse. A pumper truck blocked the intersection of Follette and Spring.
There wasn’t much left of Law Mackelroy, Photographers. A few charred timbers. A shell of blackened bricks.
“Wow,” Nick breathed, the smoke reflected in his eyes.
Guilford found Tim Mackelroy standing under the marquee of the Tyrrhenian Talking Picture Theater. His face was streaked with smoke and tears.
Across the cobbled road the F.F.D. pumper played a steady stream of water over the smoldering ruins. The crowd had already begun to disperse. Guilford recognized most of the people there: a lawyer from Tunney’s law office, the salesgirl from Blake’s; Molly and Kate from the Lafayette Diner. When they saw him they made shy, sympathetic faces. Guilford told Nick to wait in the car while he talked to Mackelroy.
Tim had been his partner since ’39, when the shop expanded. Tim ran the commercial side of the operation. Guilford stuck to photography these days and spent most of his time in the portrait studio. It was — or had been — a good business. The work was often routine, but he didn’t mind that. He enjoyed the studio and the darkroom and he enjoyed bringing home enough money to pay for the house on the headland and Nick’s school and a future for himself and Abby. He did some electronics repair on the side, now and then. He had arranged to import a big stock of Edicron and G.E. receiving tubes when the radio tower went in above Palaepolis — did a booming business for a while, since half the radios people had brought in from Stateside arrived with bad tubes, solder joints eroded by salt air, or parts knocked loose by the sea voyage.
Things had been rough after London, of course. Guilford had spent his first five years in Oro Delta crewing the harbor boats or taking in crops, exhausting work that left little time for thought. Nights had been especially hard. The Campanian farms were already producing bounty harvests of grain and grapes by ’21, so there was no lack of local liquor and wine, and Guilford had taken some solace — more than a little solace — in the bottle.
He put the bottle down after he met Abby. She had been Abby Panzeca then, a second-generation American-Sicilian who had come to Darwinia with family stories of the Old World rattling around her head. In Guilford’s experience such people were usually disappointed; often as not they drifted back to the States. But Abby had stuck around, made a life for herself. She was waiting tables at an Oro Delta dive called Antonio’s when Guilford found her. She joked with the Neapolitan longshoremen who frequented the place, but they didn’t touch her. Abby commanded respect. She wore an aura of dignity that was almost blinding, like the glow around an electric light.
And she clearly liked Guilford, though she didn’t pay him serious attention until he stopped coming in to Antonio’s with the stink of fish all over himself. He cleaned up, saved his salary, worked double shifts until he could afford to buy the gear to start his own photo studio — the only portrait studio in town, even if it wasn’t much more, in those days, than a storeroom over a butcher shop.
They were married in 1930. Nick came along in ’33. There had been another child, a baby girl, in ’35, but she died of influenza before she could be christened.
The shop had fed his family for fifteen years.
Nothing remained of it but bricks and char.
Mackelroy stared woefully through a mask of soot. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There was nothing I could do.”
“You were here when it started?”
“I was in the office. Thought I’d make up some invoices before I headed home. A little after business hours. That was when they came through the windows.”
“What came through the windows?”
“Milk bottles, it looked like, full of rags and gasoline. Smelled like gasoline. They came through the window like bricks, scared the crap out of me, then boom, the room’s burning and I can’t get through the flames to the fire extinguisher. I called the fire department from the phone in the diner, but the fire burned too fast — it was just about a done deal before the pumper got here.”