“Wendall Nash, sir,” came the chiefs raspy, high-pitched drawl. “Calling from up here in ____________________. I hate to tell you this, but I have some awful bad news. Your place Green Chimneys started burning sometime around midnight last night, and every man jack we had got put on the job and the boys worked like dogs to save what they could, but sometimes you can’t win no matter what you do. Me personally, I feel terrible about this, but, tell you the truth, I never saw a fire like it. We nearly lost two men, but it looks like they’re going to come out of it okay. The rest of our boys are still out there trying to save the few trees you got left.”
“Dreadful,” I said. “Please permit me to speak to my wife.”
A speaking silence followed. “The missus is not with you, sir? You’re saying she was inside there?”
“My wife left for Green Chimneys this morning. I spoke to her there in the afternoon. She intended to work in her studio, a separate building at some distance from the house, and it is her custom to sleep in the studio when working late.” Saying these things to Wendall Nash, I felt almost as though I were creating an alternative world, another town of ____________________ and another Green
Chimneys, where another Marguerite had busied herself in the studio, and there gone to bed to sleep through the commotion. “Have you checked the studio? You are certain to find her there.”
“Well, I have to say we didn’t, sir,” he said. “The fire took that little building pretty good, too, but the walls are still standing and you can tell what used to be what, furnishing-wise and equipment-wise. If she was inside it, we’d of found her.”
“Then she got out in time,” I said, and instantly it was the truth: the other Marguerite had escaped the blaze and now stood, numb with shock and wrapped in a blanket, unrecognised amidst the voyeuristic crowd always drawn to disasters.
“It’s possible, but she hasn’t turned up yet, and we’ve been talking to everybody at the site. Could she have left with one of the staff?”
“All the help is on vacation,” I said. “She was alone.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Can you think of anyone with a serious grudge against you? Any enemies? Because this was not a natural-type fire, sir. Someone set it, and he knew what he was doing. Anyone come to mind?”
“No,” I said. “I have rivals, but no enemies. Check the hospitals and anything else you can think of, Wendall, and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“You can take your time, sir,” he said. “I sure hope we find her, and by late this afternoon we’ll be able to go through the ashes.” He said he would give me a call if anything turned up in the meantime.
“Please, Wendall,” I said, and began to cry. Muttering a consolation I did not quite catch, Mr. Moncrieff vanished with the telephone in another matchless display of butler politesse.
“The practice of hoping for what you know you cannot have is a worthy spiritual exercise,” said Mr. Clubb. “It brings home the vanity of vanity.”
“I beg you, leave me,” I said, still crying. “In all decency.”
“Decency lays heavy obligations on us all,” said Mr. Clubb. “And no job is decently done until it is done completely. Would you care for help in getting back to the bedroom? We are ready to proceed.”
I extended a shaky arm, and he assisted me through the corridors. Two cots had been set up in my room, and a neat array of instruments-‘staples’-formed two rows across the bottom of the bed. Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff positioned my head on the pillows and began to disrobe.
8.
Ten hours later, the silent chauffeur aided me in my exit from the limousine and clasped my left arm as I limped toward the uniformed men and official vehicles on the far side of the open gate. Blackened sticks which had been trees protruded from the blasted earth, and the stench of wet ash saturated the air. Wendall Nash separated from the other men, approached, and noted without comment my garb of gray Homburg hat, pearl-gray cashmere topcoat, heavy gloves, woollen charcoal-gray pinstriped suit, sunglasses, and Malacca walking stick. It was the afternoon of a midsummer day in the upper eighties. Then he looked more closely at my face. “Are you, uh, are you sure you’re all right, sir?”
“In a manner of speaking,” I said, and saw him blink at the oozing gap left in the wake of an incisor. “I slipped at the top of a marble staircase and tumbled down all forty-six steps, resulting in massive bangs and bruises, considerable physical weakness, and the persistent sensation of being uncomfortably cold. No broken bones, at least nothing major.” Over his shoulder I stared at four isolated brick towers rising from an immense black hole in the ground, all that remained of Green Chimneys. “Is there news of my wife?”
“I’m afraid, sir, that-“ Nash placed a hand on my shoulder, causing me to stifle a sharp outcry. “I’m sorry, sir. Shouldn’t you be in the hospital? Did your doctors say you could come all this way?”
“Knowing my feelings in this matter, the doctors insisted I make the journey.” Deep within the black cavity, men in bulky orange spacesuits and space helmets were sifting through the sodden ashes, now and then dropping unrecognisable nuggets into heavy bags of the same colour. “I gather that you have news for me, Wendall,” I said.
“Unhappy news, sir,” he said. “The garage went up with the rest of the house, but we found some bits and pieces of your wife’s little car. This here was one incredible hot fire, sir, and by hot I mean hot, and whoever set it was no garden-variety firebug.”
“You found evidence of the automobile,” I said. “I assume you also found evidence of the woman who owned it.”
“They came across some bone fragments, plus a small portion of a skeleton,” he said. “This whole big house came down on her, sir. These boys are experts at their job, and they don’t hold out hope for coming across a whole lot more. So if your wife was the only person inside…”
“I see, yes, I understand,” I said, staying on my feet only with the support of the Malacca cane. “How horrid, how hideous, that it should all be true, that our lives should prove such a littleness…”
“I’m sure that’s true, sir, and that wife of yours was a, was what I have to call a special kind of person who gave pleasure to us all, and I hope you know that we all wish things could of turned out different, the same as you.”
For a moment I imagined that he was talking about her recordings. And then, immediately, I understood that he was labouring to express the pleasure he and the others had taken in what they, no less than Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff but much, much more than I, had perceived as her essential character.
“Oh, Wendall,” I said into the teeth of my sorrow, “it is not possible, not ever, for things to turn out different.”
He refrained from patting my shoulder and sent me back to the rigors of my education.
9.
A month-four weeks-thirty days-seven hundred and twenty hours-forty-three thousand, two hundred minutes-two million, five hundred and ninety-two thousand seconds-did I spend under the care of Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff, and I believe I proved in the end to be a modestly, moderately, middlingly satisfying subject, a matter in which I take an immodest and immoderate pride. “You are little in comparison to the lady, sir,” Mr. Clubb once told me while deep in his ministrations, “but no one could say that you are nothing.” I, who had countless times put the lie to the declaration that they should never see me cry, wept tears of gratitude. We ascended through the fifteen stages known to the novice, the journeyman’s further five, and passed, with the frequent repetitions and backward glances appropriate for the slower pupil, into the artist’s upper eighty, infinitely expandable by grace of the refinements of his art. We had the little soldiers. We had dental floss. During each of those forty-three thousand, two hundred minutes, throughout all two million and nearly six hundred thousand seconds, it was always deepest night. We made our way through perpetual darkness, and the utmost darkness of the utmost night yielded an infinity of textural variation, cold, slick dampness to velvety softness to leaping flame, for it was true that no one could say I was nothing.