Tears glistening in her wide eyes, an extraordinary yearning look on her face, Shirley whispers: ‘Shall we dance?’ Her voice conveys infinite tenderness and irony. It’s a voice that says, ‘Despite everything, George, here we are, so we may as well celebrate.’ She begins to lead me in a slow lilting embrace.
Am I crying? I register such intense alarm. What am I doing? She hasn’t guessed the slightest thing. If she knew, if she knew even what I dreamt last night she might never touch me again. She might sense the lobster arms, the cancerous jelly protrusions.
Instead here she is being very sexy, pressing her whole slim body against me, her small breasts. The guests part into two lines forming an aisle down the lounge as we drift in slow and frankly clumsy rotation toward the fireplace end where a huge cake has appeared on a glass trolley. Behind it stands my mother, knife in hand, beaming almost tangible sentimentality. I recognise at once her Christmas cake recipe from Gorst Road days, it will be full of a pension’s worth of dry fruit and suet. Though instead of the usual Mary, Joseph and Jesus plus farmyard friends in adoration, another holy family are standing on the icing: three figures, toy figures, cuddly bears but dressed as human. There’s Daddy with a peaked railwayman’s cap, Mummy in an apron, and little girl. Us. Except that the child is standing up.
I glance at my watch. How long has it been?
A sudden hush. Mother pushes a knife into the cake. ‘Bless you, my dears,’ she says. ‘Many happy returns.’ Charles pops a champagne bottle. He says, ‘Good on you, George lad,’ in a fake downwardly-mobile voice. Shall I tell him that Peggy is having it off with Gregory upstairs? Around the happy figures on the cake, in rose-pink icing, Mother’s shaky hand has traced with how much love, ‘10TH ANNIVERSARY’. Loud cheers go up with the first splashing of champagne. Everyone crowds round to kiss and squeeze.
Then someone cries: ‘Speech, speech from the happy couple.’
‘Speech!’
A slow handclap begins: ‘Speech, speech, speech.’
My house is burning.
Shirley says: ‘Go on, George!’
I can feel the muscles in my face working. What is happening? Why has nobody said anything? Obvious. Because everybody is in the room here, looking at me. It couldn’t have been more perfectly timed. The jostle of glasses, plates of cake moving round, jokes, red faces, comments. Two or three flashes pop.
Frederick. I must hurry. Unless it has already gone out. Just say something and get it over with. Say something.
‘Oh come on, George.’
Why can’t I speak!
‘Tongue-tied by love.’
‘Give the man a drink.’
‘Spoilsport!’
My mother says: ‘Come on, love.’
And now I am perfectly aware that I am breaking down. This is what it is like, then. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. My whole body surges with damp nervous heat. My bowels are melting. I gaze at all these faces, eager, grinning. They find my bewilderment so touching. Probably all I have to say is thank you, thank you, for this wonderful surprise. But I feel my jaws locked, paralysed. They will not speak. I can sense tears rolling down numbed cheeks. Until finally I manage to croak, ‘Help me.’
But nobody hears; my whispered plea is drowned in a fierce yell from the door: ‘Fire! There’s a bloody great fire. Everybody out.’
An Act of Goodness
I should say, if for no other reason than not to appear ridiculous, that I always knew my plan was a risky one, that it could perfectly well have an entirely different outcome from the one I intended. Or, most probably, no outcome at all. At the time I reasoned that this was precisely why I was choosing it. In this sense: that no one with only moderate insurance and no financial problems could ever be suspected of arson against his own household; and second, that no one could ever be suspected of a murder attempt when the outcome was so spectacularly uncertain and in circumstances where so many people might, theoretically, rush upstairs to save the handicapped child who couldn’t save herself. That said, however, I felt fairly confident that in the selfish tipsy hubbub that is a party around midnight, the general reaction to a fire that in the secluded back study under cover of the thump of music and a haze of cigarette smoke ought to be well advanced before being discovered, would be to panic and rush to get out.
I was worried, of course, about Shirley and Mother. It was unlikely they would forget the little girl. Which was why I’d much rather Mother had never been invited, or had gone home early. But my idea was that I, being mentally prepared and well placed at the foot of the stairs, would shout commandingly to the others to stay down and dial 999 while I went up for the children. Given that Hilary’s room was directly above the study, given that both windows would be open, given that curtains are reasonably inflammable, and given above all that I would have the excuse of going for Frederick first, I very much hoped that on arrival in her room the child would be beyond saving, already liberated I liked to put it to myself, and why not for heaven’s sake? from the prison of her body. I would rush down with Frederick only seconds before the staircase was engulfed in flames from burning varnish beneath, and by the time the fire brigade arrived all would be over.
Looking back now, I realise that this schoolboy-fantasy scenario was never really entirely probable, for who can know where or how fast a fire will spread? Nor in the end perhaps was it why I had decided to act as I did.
The voice shrieked fire, a voice I didn’t recognise. The reaction of this party crowd, these people we had sought out for this improbable celebration, was, as expected, first confusion, then a strong fast surge to the door. My problem was that I should have been at the foot of the stairs, ready. In the event, as I threw myself into the crowd, screaming, ‘The children, the children!’ it was to feel the whole house suddenly shudder; a deep crash rumbled the walls and a blast of hot air rushed to meet the fleeing party guests. Perhaps the place wasn’t as well built as the estate agents had led me to believe.
Desperately forcing my way, and being forced in turn, through urgent bodies out into the hall, I found the stairs already invaded by quick low flames. How could that be? At the same moment all electric light — this I had never even thought of — went out, throwing the whole scene into a lurid flickering relief that was simultaneously bright and dark. Looking up, aghast, disaster dawning, I saw my mother at the halfway landing where, behind candlestick columns of polished oak, the staircase turned. Incongruously she had lifted her long satiny party dress to hurry through fire licking across blue carpeting. As she scuttled round the corner out of vision, three or four stairs on the main flight crashed down in a fierce spouting of sparks and flame. The varnish, it seems, had been something of an excess of zeal. The armchairs must have been veritable incendiary devices. They shouldn’t be allowed. In any event, the scene, as I backed off from the heat, was lost in a billow of dark smoke and cinders, chokingly hot. And I paused.
Shirley grabbed me from behind in hysterics. She was shrieking. I didn’t turn to her. Now the drama had begun in earnest and so much was at stake, I found myself quite cool in that heat and thinking so rapidly.
The last of the guests were forcing their way out of the front door. Telling Shirley to follow me, I crossed the hall to breakfast room and kitchen, suddenly almost normal after the choking bonfire of the stairway. I sensed a curious adrenalin-filled togetherness as we dashed through the twilit spectre of our domestic life, a table laden with dirty dishes and party snacks, a black gleam from the door of the microwave. She reached for my hand. I pulled her along, shouting commands which she obeyed. So in just a few moments we were out through the side door, had opened the garage, pulled out the light aluminium ladder there and were stumbling to the house through flowerbeds and rockery to prop it wobbling against the wall below Frederick’s window. It will be quicker, I tell her, to cross the house once in, than to walk the ladder round to Hilary’s room.