Tim Parks - Goodness

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.

How gloriously instinctively one acts. Without knowing where I’ve picked it up, I find, as I climb the ladder Shirley holds, that I have a hammer in my hand. Though it does occur to me as odd that Freddy hasn’t opened the window himself.

The top of the ladder is three feet short of the sill. Hammer clamped between my teeth I place my hands flat against the gritty brick, hugging the wall, and very precariously raise my feet to the second-to-top rung. Shirley shouts encouragement, begs me to hurry. ‘George, George, please!’ But her noise comes as if from a distant television. I am not listening to her. Extraordinarily lucid, what my mind is actually registering as my hand comes down with the hammer on polished glass, is that there is now a wavering glow sharpening the edges of the house to either side, that as yet there is no sound of a fire engine, that a group of guests are gathering at the base of the ladder.

The glass shatters. My hand reaches in for the catch. At the same time I’m shouting down that no one else should come up. I can handle it. And in the distance I distinctly hear Charles voice calling urgently for Peggy. Indeed. Where is she? Why haven’t they saved the kids? I heave myself forward over the sill, tearing my shirt on the pin that holds the bar.

The small room is acrid with a slow, almost leisurely grey smoke which flaps and curls as I open the window. Frederick is not on the bed.

My mind speeds up, spacily aware. Crossing rapidly to the door, I’m shouting for Frederick at the top of my voice. ‘Freddy, for Christ’s sake!’ No reply. Just the loudening roar of the flames. Through the door there’s laundry room, another bedroom and bathroom to the left, stairs to the right. I go right, towards danger, the fire; perhaps he tried to go down the stairs. I’m calling more and more urgently, Freddy, Freddy, fighting the urge to cough, to turn back; until, advancing into ever thicker, yellowish smoke which stings my eyes and makes me retch, I stumble over him, stretched on blue pile carpet, his slight body sprawled in red pyjamas, his blond hair, outflung arms.

In only a moment, less, I have snatched him back to the open window. He weighs nothing. He’s a feather. And I am sure he is alive, he must be. He can’t have lain there more than a minute. How long has it all been? Not more than a minute or two, surely. He must be alive. Suddenly I find I have faith. Am I breathing a prayer? No. I just know the worst can’t happen, it can’t. I race through the spare room and simply pass this dear child directly into the hands of the small balding man from St Elizabeth’s (my wife’s ex lover?) who, disregarding my orders, is standing at the top of the ladder looking in.

It’s so incongruous. As if I were living in my dreams. Or is that the key? For instead of throwing a leg over the sill and following Frederick down the ladder to safety, I stand at the window, filling my lungs, preparing to turn back, just as in my dreams I will insist on going back and back, looking and looking for that horrible thing that remains forever hidden. I turn back. And only now in this scorching, unbreathable heat, when I could perfectly honourably retire, do I begin to appreciate why I have acted as I have. It must have been, I see as I fill my lungs at the window, it must have been to force myself, in these precious seconds of action and drama, to truly decide once and for all, and in decision to find myself, that mutilated part of me I spend my nights seeking, that missing face. At the door to Hilary’s room presumably.

My chest painfully full of air, I grab the blanket from off the bed, gather it about me and run at the thickening smoke and flames at the top of the stairs, from where, forming a right angle, the other landing leads off to airing cupboard, our room, Hilary’s room.

I pass through flames. Screaming inwardly, breath fiercely held, I blunder, eyes closed, along the corridor, blanket tight about my head, legs scorching. The noise has become deafening, a rage of spitting, crackling explosions above a steadily booming roar. I pass through it. Weeping. Then suddenly there are no more flames, the landing beyond the stairs is clear, though the smoke here is dense as thick wool. Another sudden crash shakes our house.

How long can I hold this breath?

I turn toward the flickering quick orange light through an open doorway to the left which must be flames in the curtains of Hilary’s room (I planned for this). And I am just crossing that fatal threshold when I realise that they are already here, at the end of the landing. It was the smoke and my almost closed, burning eyes kept me from seeing them. My mother is slumped against the door to our bedroom. Her dress, her underskirt, are burnt up to the waist. Her skin is black. Despite the urgency, I experience a strange sense of revelation at the sight of her heavy vulnerable flesh. My mother. And the ragged bundle left to roll to one side, half in the airing cupboard, must be Hilary. She is motionless. I reach for the handle of our bedroom door, the only escape route, but even before I touch it I know what has happened. They locked it, Peggy and Gregory. Mother couldn’t get through to take the child out.