But I did hear it once, and I was stunned. Not just by the sound-high and loud, with a rusty edge like an old hinge-but by what had caused it. An overcast day, not long before Henry disappeared, with a quiet breeze blowing. We were in Mickey and Mo’s motor home, listening to the radio and playing rummy with Dinny, who had a slight temperature and had been told to stay indoors, much to his disgust. I tried to tempt him out, up into the tree house to play there instead, but he did what Mo told him. He was more obedient than Beth and I. The camp was quiet, most of the adults out working. Outside, sheets were drying on a line strung between the vehicles. They drifted in and out of view through the window, moving with a regular swell and fall. I could see them, in the corner of my eye, as I shifted my thighs against the vinyl bench and silently urged Beth to discard a four or a Jack. So I saw it first-the change in the view from the window. The sudden oddness of the sheets, the color, the way the sky above them thickened.
The sheets were on fire. I gaped at them, stunned by this unexpected thing. Pale yellow and blue flames tore across them in odd patterns, scribbling lines of charred black, pouring smoke up in clouds, reducing the fabric to dark shreds that tore away like cobwebs. There was a shout from outside and Dinny got up, leaned past me to look out of the window.
“Look!” I gasped uselessly.
“Erica! Why didn’t you say!” Beth admonished me as Dinny ran out and we followed. Outside, two women who had been laid up with the same bug as Dinny were yanking the sheets from the line, stamping at them frantically. The plastic-coated line itself had melted and fallen into pieces, scattering the burning remains of the sheets on the ground, which was perhaps for the best. On the side of the motor home, an ugly, brownish smear showed how close the flames had got.
“How the bloody hell did that happen?” one of the women swore, catching her breath as the last flames went out. Hands on hips, surveying the smouldering remnants.
“If we hadn’t been here… Mo only hung those just before she went off-they can’t even have been all the way dry yet!” the other exclaimed, fixing us kids with a serious eye.
“We were inside playing cards! Swear to God!” Dinny said emphatically. Beth and I nodded in frantic support. The smoke got into my nose, made me sneeze. The first woman crouched, picked up a shred of fabric with her fingertips, sniffed at it.
“Paraffin,” she said grimly.
Beth and I left then, running as soon as we were out of sight. We skirted the stables, looked in the coach house, found Henry in the woodshed. He had a flat plastic bottle of something, with a squeezy red nozzle on it. I thought of the patterns the flames had made, almost as though they’d been following lines. He put the bottle back on a high shelf, turned to face us, smiling.
“What?” He shrugged.
“You could have set the vans on fire. You could have killed somebody,” Beth said quietly, watching him with such a grave and serious look that I was even more upset, even more afraid.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Henry said loftily. The stink of paraffin clung to him, was on his hands.
“It was you!” I declared.
“Prove it.” He shrugged again, smiling now.
“I’m telling. You could have killed somebody,” Beth repeated, and now Henry stopped smiling.
“You’re not supposed to go to the camp. You won’t tell,” he sneered. Beth turned on her heel, stalked away toward the house. I followed, and so did Henry, and soon it became a race, and we thundered into the hall, shouting for Meredith, out of breath.
We thought that it was too serious not to tell. We thought that, even though Henry was her favorite, she would have to reprimand him for this. Making dogs sick was one thing, but Beth was right. The fire could have killed somebody. Even for Henry, it was too much.
“Henry set fire to the Dinsdales’ washing!” Beth got her words out first, gasping them as Meredith looked up from the letter she was writing, sitting at the davenport in the drawing room.
“What is all this racket?” Meredith asked.
“We were at the camp, and I know we’re not supposed to go, but we were only playing cards, and Henry set fire to the sheets that were hanging out on the line! He did it with paraffin from the shed! And the motor home nearly caught on fire, and somebody might have been killed!” Beth said, all at once but enunciating clearly.
Meredith took off her glasses, folded them calmly. “Is this true?” she asked Henry.
“No! I haven’t been near their filthy campsite,” he said.
“Liar!” I shouted.
“Erica!” Meredith silenced me, the word like a whip crack.
“So how did this fire start, if indeed there has been a fire?”
“Of course there’s been a fire! Why would I say-” Beth protested.
“Well, Elizabeth, you also said you weren’t going to associate with the tinkers, as I have repeatedly requested, so how am I to know when you are lying and when you are not?” Meredith asked, evenly. Beth clamped her lips together, her eyes fierce. “Well, Henry? Do you know how the fire might have started?”
“No! Except-well… these two seem to get on with the gyppos like a house on fire. Perhaps that’s what did it,” he said, looking up at her carefully, almost smiling, gauging her reaction. Meredith studied him for a moment, and then she laughed. That rare, loud sound that startled us all, even Henry. Two bright spots of pleasure bloomed in his cheeks.
In spite of the fact that Caroline never, apparently, went to visit her in Surrey, in spite of her no-show at Charles’ funeral, Meredith did come back to live here with her. Perhaps life got too hard, with no husband and two children. Perhaps Caroline needed looking after, and Meredith loved her in spite of everything. And she was to be the next Lady Calcott, after all; perhaps she thought it was her duty to return to the family seat. I’ll never know, of course, because the letters stop upon her return. I think of the care and attention she showed Caroline when she was ancient-feeding her, dressing her, reading to her. What if she did all that and still got no love back for her pains? What if she’d hoped for some deathbed confession that never came-that her mother had always loved her, that she had been a good daughter? What if she’d had dreams of marrying again, of starting over? Perhaps she expected Caroline to die soon after she returned, and had ideas about bringing the house back to life, of tempting a new husband with it, of having more children to fill it? But like the queen, Caroline lived on and on; and the heir grew old, waiting to ascend. I think it must have been something like that-some crushed hopes, some vast disappointment. To make Meredith turn out the way she did. To make her treat our mother so harshly, when our mother refused to make the same sacrifices.
These are my thoughts on Monday morning, as I dress in warm cords and slide the teething ring into my pocket. The bell makes a cheerful little giggling sound. I go to the study, look in the desk drawers for a pen and a pad of paper and stuff them into my bag. Outside is another of those crystal-clear days, painfully bright. I try to feel the optimism I felt the last time the sky was this blue, and we went to Avebury, and Eddie was here to make us glad. I leave Beth on the phone to Maxwell, bargaining for the return of her son. She sits by the kitchen window in a shaft of incandescent light that blanches out her expression.
The sun is low in the sky, inescapable. It stabs at me through the windscreen, lances up from the wet road so that I must drive through a blinding wall of light. I turn gingerly out of the village onto the main road and see a familiar figure walking along the frosty white verge. Light clothes, as ever; hands thrust into his pockets the only concession to the biting cold. Something leaps up inside me. I pull over, wind down the window and call to him. Dinny shades his face with one hand, hiding his eyes, leaving only his jaw visible-that flat line of his mouth that can look so serious.