Downstairs I check out the lounge. Maybe fifteen people. Almost everybody is busy dancing or at least deep in conversation. Gregory’s girlfriend is writhing particularly wildly, though always stony-faced. Very suggestive contortions, and not near Gregory either. No sign of Shirley, or Mother. Where is she? In the breakfast room Charles is at the buffet table with a leg of chicken in his mouth, defending Liverpool local council against the robust good sense of Susan’s man, Eric. One of the karate guys splits his trousers showing how important it is to assume a low centre of gravity.
There is something very stable about the hum now, as if this buzz of alcohol-fuelled voices will go on for many hours. And checking my watch it is indeed time. I planned to do it now, when in the general tipsy hubbub Hilary will be forgotten. Sensing that if I stop to think, the cold sweat which is already coating face and hands will turn into violent shivering, I move to the sideboard where the spirits are. A well-dressed, clean-shaven boy who doesn’t know who I am, offers to do me the honours. ‘Fill it up,’ I tell him. He grins as if at a fellow freeloader. I take a gulp, light myself a cigarette, and armed, as it were, to the teeth, push through people down the hall, down the passage by the stairs, round through the cloakroom, past the bathroom and the door to the cubby and into the secluded study room.
To find Peggy and Gregory.
Why, after my silly, automatic, ‘Oops, sorry,’ closing the door on them, do I have such an overwhelming sense of frustration, and more precisely of déjà vu? My childhood. Hearing, finding, knowing of Peggy with her lovers, feeling excluded, feeling somehow that my bubbly sister has a monopoly on life, on gaiety, that I am always to be in outer darkness gnashing my teeth. It’s only a couple of months since she had her abortion for heaven’s sake.
I hesitate in the cloakroom where hooks are overloaded with rain-scented jackets, duffles, macs, mohair. In the bathroom someone coughs. An explosion of laughter comes from just round the corner in the hall. My cigarette is more than half burned. I take a good gulp of the whisky, knock brusquely on the study again and push back in.
‘George, really!’
‘Sorry, I don’t want to bother you guys, but Charles is looking all over for you, Peg. Could walk in any moment.’
They’re still at the stage of fumbling in each other’s clothes. They only met at most a couple of hours back. They both came with other partners. Gregory half sits, flustered, a glint of saliva on his beard.
‘Why don’t you, er, adjourn a moment and nip upstairs. Go to our room at the end of the passageway to the right. There’s a key in the door.’
But our room is next to Hilary’s room. Why on earth did I suggest this? Do I want them to burn? Or do I want them to save Hilary? In which case, what’s the point? Or was it the only thing I could think of? In any event I’m screwing up. I’m losing control. I draw the last puffs on the cigarette with my black lobster claws and tip another gulp of whisky into the place where my mouth must be. Only half the glass left.
‘Good on you, bruv,’ Peg says chuckling. The two of them are getting up, rearranging their clothes. ‘We’ll run the gauntlet of the hall then.’ And crouching down, like a commando about to storm a beach she grabs gangly Gregory by the hand and begins to hurry out through the cloakroom.
I look around. They’ve turned on the angle lamp on the desk, pointing it down at the floor near the wall. And in this would-be romantic, shadowy light, I quickly toss my whisky onto a dusty green armchair, then dislodge the dying coal of my cigarette so that it falls at the edge of the little pool of yellow spirit seeping into the cushion. Immediately it goes out. Without hesitating I pull a lighter from my pocket and try to light the material directly. An almost invisible paraffin flame appears, but seems not to touch the material itself, seems to dance, detached and ghostlike. It surely can’t be enough. But I must get out now. I can’t wait to see. I haven’t even closed the door properly. I turn to grab the ashtray I left on the desk and spill it over the flame. But it isn’t there. Why? Why not? Has some creepy person like my mother already gone round gathering and emptying ashtrays? For heaven’s sake!
The flames are biting into the material now, the metamorphosis of fire is taking place, flaring yellow and smoky. I should put the thing out at once. Any forensic idiot will be able to see it was started on purpose. But in a trance I move to the door. And at last I realise, with the sudden lucidity of revelation that I am only acting here and now so that some action in my life at last there may be. So that I won’t keep plaguing myself trying to decide what to do. The outcome is almost irrelevant. I am acting because I can’t bear myself. I find my mental processes intolerable. I am horrible. And I may very well just go upstairs and sit out the horror with Hilary, burn away my lobster claws, my jelly flesh. My mother is right. I have been damned from earliest infancy.
The light of the flames is now brighter and fiercer than that of the lamp. I must have been here five minutes. There’s the fierce crackle of a bonfire. Suddenly frightened by the common-sense fear that somebody will hear, will smell, I hurry out of the room and close the door carefully behind me. The heavy wood clicks softly on good do-it-yourself insulating foam. And in an unplanned brainwave I go and pick up the low table at the bottom of the hall, bring it back, set it down across the study door and, unburdening the hooks one by one, place a huge pile of damp coats on top. Now back to the party. My face, I feel, like Moses returning from Sinai, is glowing with heat.
Help Me
‘You’re wanted in the lounge.’
I’ve barely turned the corner out of the cloakroom when I run into one of the church folk Shirley introduced me to earlier. The word ‘wanted’ frightens me. I would have washed my face if only the bathroom was empty.
‘Oh really. Thanks.’
I meant to hang around chatting in the hall at this point until the fire was discovered, then rush upstairs, save Frederick and report that Hilary’s room is already engulfed in flame. Can I spare a moment?
‘Hey, George,’ Charles calls through a group of talkers. ‘There you are. You’re wanted in the lounge.’
I’ll have to go. I cross the hall and start to walk across the parquet of the lounge, normally covered by carpets, where twenty or thirty people are dancing to African music I didn’t know we had. Who wants me? Is it a trick? All at once Shirley comes across from the window end and throws her arms round me in celebratory embrace. ‘George, where’ve you been? Everybody’s waiting for you!’
People dancing part about us. It’s like a scene from a film. Or a dream. It feels orchestrated. And Shirley has changed. She’s wearing a short black dress with glitter, the skirt pleating out high on her thighs, black tights with a zig-zag pattern, silver heels. Her hair is up with just two copper ringlets falling round each temple. A lot of make-up makes her look younger than I ever expected to see her again. I realise I haven’t really looked at her all evening. She must be mad at me.
She does a twirl, a pirouette, the motion lifting her skirt, then grabs me in a tight hug. Apparently this is prearranged because the music stops now and everybody cheers. But my ears are straining for some sound behind this sound. One of the school crowd, a small, smug, balding man in cord jacket and jeans, throws handfuls of confetti over us. Everybody’s clapping. ‘Give the girl a kiss,’ a voice shouts. But it’s Shirley kissing me, twining tight to me. I try to return some passion. Thankfully, the stereo crackles, starts, stops — somebody is having trouble with the faulty cueing device — then settles into ‘As Times Roll By’, or whatever it’s called. The appropriate guff, but loud enough to cover anything behind I think. Everybody is crowding into the room for the celebrations. Nobody will notice anything.