Dawn came. I could sense rather than hear or smell the preparations for breakfast going on below. I shifted in my chair; my legs were stiff, and I had the beginnings of a headache. The whisky, I thought; I’m not used to it. My desk lamp still burnt feebly. I heard Julia stir. I turned, stood up shakily, and saw myself in the mirror that hung beneath Mrs Webster’s shelf; I was narrow, a bar of darkness, a shade.
Julia sat up, yawning. ‘Is this Wednesday?’ she asked. Our faces looked bruised, half in shadow and half in weary light.
I had three tutorials that morning. Getting from floor to floor seemed more difficult than usual, and crossing the narrow street from building to building. At one o’clock I sat in one of the coffee bars over a cup of weak tea and a roll filled with grated cheese. The first oily filament of cheese on my tongue, my heart began to skip again; I put the roll back on my plate. An odd thing had happened that morning. My tutor asked me a question to which I knew the answer – but when I opened my mouth to reply, something completely different came out.
My tutor gave me an impatient smile. ‘No, no, no . . . hardly Hartley v. Ponsonby. That is the case of 1857, where a sailor obtained remuneration in excess of the terms of his contract because nineteen persons of thirty-six had deserted, leaving only some four or five able seamen. No: I was adverting rather to Hadley v. Baxendale. Late delivery of replacement crankshaft for a mill, remember? Your very diligence is defeating you, Miss McBain. You look exhausted. Shall we pass on?’
It must be throat deafness, I thought. What might it be like to inhale a smoke ball . . . perhaps some mixture of disinfectant and steam – my tutor’s face altered slightly, slipped out of focus as if its planes had slid and subtly realigned themselves. I blinked. His face returned to normal. Another student was answering the question.
And now – it was another odd thing – I was not convinced that the canteen table was quite solid. When I touched its surface, it felt like last night’s orange pulp beneath my fingers: sticky of course, but also yielding. I stood up. I’d better get back to Tonbridge Hall, I thought; I knew that on a Wednesday Karina was home early.
I can dash back to the library later, I said to myself. Perhaps it would be better to miss dinner, as eating didn’t seem to suit me. I drank off the dregs of the weak tea; it was a comfort.
My walk home then became a journey; not just a trek, but a voyage full of surprises. As soon as I got out into the street I saw that nothing was solid, not the pavements, not the walls; everything I saw seemed created of waves, water, pure motion. I sailed along the Aldwych, around the bend in the river; paddled the shallows of Drury Lane until I reached the wide, shining expanse of Holborn. The traffic was hushed and muted, cars become gondolas; Londoners bobbed and floated towards me, buoyant despite their February clothes.
Bloomsbury Street was a rank canal, with green weeds that pulled at my ankles, impeded me, exhausted me. By the time I dripped into Montague Place, my chest was crushed, my limbs quivering: my breathing was harsh and audible. Blood roared in my ears: or maybe it was the sea?
When I swum into Tonbridge Hall, the foyer was deserted and there was no one at the reception desk. Usually I ran up the stairs to C Floor, but today I decided to use the lift. But its door was wedged open, a scrawled ‘OUT OF ORDER’ notice taped to the wood. I began to walk upstairs. A sound, a certain noise, a rhythmic noise, began to thud in my ears. Surely I must be close to the sea now; I could hear the waves, I could hear the crash and roll of breakers. I have sailed away, for a year and a day, on a boat with a skeleton crew . . .
Somewhere between B Floor and C Floor, I sat down on the stairs. Not at once, but gradually, the sound of the sea diminished; but the world remained liquid, diffuse, unstable. My bag of books floated by my side. I didn’t think I would move again; wouldn’t ever bother. Just keep my head up, butting for the necessary air.
I grew cold, very cold. After a time, I wondered if I had fallen through ice; if so, the dying was not instantaneous, as I would have expected, but ridiculously prolonged. My head at least was still above the ice-line; while my body froze I engaged my mind in debate, and my still-unfrozen mouth in badinage with would-be rescuers and passers by.
No one came, though. And time passed. Not much, perhaps; but this was early in the year, and soon there was a change, light to dark. I struggled for air, throwing out one arm to get a purchase on the banister. I gripped the wood, but my muscles had no strength any more. My hand slid away. I went under.
I had slipped beneath the sea. I had thought there would be starfish, castles of coral; I saw only wetter, deeper darkness. For a moment I fought. I wanted a spar, a piece of jetsam to save myself. But now I was drowning, and the current was tugging me away: the salt, the oil, the wrecking wave.
The next thing I heard was Karina’s voice; and when I breathed, I gulped in not water, but the hot re-used and re-circulated air I had breathed since last October. ‘Slumped on the stairs,’ she said. ‘Lucky I came along, really. She could have rolled right down and broken her neck.’ There was an interval of nothingness. I heard a door slam.
I had a dim memory of someone – it must have been Karina, I suppose – diving through the waters that had closed over my head. I remembered hands under my arms, and a terrible, implacable hauling . . . and my feet trailing after me, lifeless and numb. It was something that happened years ago, years ago when I was a child . . . so I told myself. My mouth had gaped, drowned by air; from deep inside came a wailing, panic-stricken, starved, unappeasable.
Now I was on my bed. Julia was leaning over me. She took my hand. It rose up on the end of my arm, floating into the air. She held it in hers for a long time, and felt each separate bone, so that I was hideously conscious of my own mortality.
‘Why starve?’ Lynette said. ‘You wonder.’
‘There are many reasons,’ Julia said. ‘Twisted religiosity. Poverty. Sexual disturbance. Inheritance. Zinc deficiency. Deficiency.’
‘I have honey in my room,’ Lynette said. ‘Unless Karina has eaten it.’
‘Yes, honey, that would be good. Do you have milk?’
‘No, it was off this morning, I forgot to put it out.’ I saw that Lynette was holding her purse. It was a little Italian change-purse, a draw-string bag as soft as skin, soft and puckered and weighted: she bounced it in her hand, waiting for instructions. ‘I’ll go to the milk machine on Store Street,’ she said.
‘Get two packets,’ Julia said. ‘Let’s hope she’ll keep it down.’
There was an interval of vacancy. The world might have stopped; I don’t know. The next thing I remember was that Julia was leaning over me again. She had stacked up three pillows behind me, and now she helped me to sit up, and put a mug of milk into my hand, letting go of it herself only when she was sure I had taken a grip. I began to cry. The tears were painful, as if they were washing gravel from under my eyelids. Iser, rolling rapidly.
The milk warmed in my hand. I slumped back against Julia’s enfolding arm; tentatively, as if my skull were glass, she allowed her fingers to brush my temple. They rested on my pulse point; I stopped crying. Julia patted at my eyes with a white handkerchief sewn with her initial. I took it in my fist, gripping it tightly, and blotted my own cheeks. Slowly, my vision cleared.
I looked down at my body. I saw the skeletal line of my ribs. I saw my legs like pallid twigs, ready to snap and bleed. I looked up, questioning. Lynette reached forward, and smoothed my stubbly hair. ‘Oh, Carmel,’ she said. ‘We saw it happening. At first we were pleased for you. But then, we didn’t know how to stop it.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said. My voice rasped, as if a rusty blade were in my larynx. ‘Everything’s repairable,’ I said.
And my heart slowed. The lines of poetry faded from my brain. For the first time in months my thoughts were my own; slow thoughts, falling away into nothingness. I breathed; I sipped the milk. I was a machine for breathing: a machine for living.
The milk tasted thick, almost sweet. I drank i
t, and slept.
ten
I woke to the sound of a shattering scream. God has turned out hell, I thought, the devils have been evicted; they are loose on the streets, they have climbed up to C Floor, they are bellowing for beds for the night.
The light snapped on, and I threw my arm up to protect my eyes; the brightness intensified the shrieking, so that I thought I would vomit or die or fall apart from the horror of it.
‘Come on!’ Julia shouted. ‘Get up! Fire practice! Bloody hell, what a night to choose.’ She was knotting the belt of her dressing-gown. ‘Come on, Carmel.’ She flung a pair of shoes at me. ‘If we don’t do this right they’ll make us do it again next week.’
I moved; too slowly for Julia’s taste. She crossed the room, yanked back the covers, gripped me by my upper arms and hauled me out of bed. Vaguely, I was upright. The devils were howling; they went on howling, and a thin stream of bile rose in my throat.
I clung to the edge of my desk. I trembled; I was ineffectual, elderly, one hand across my mouth. ‘Put on your SHOES,’ Julia yelled. ‘Come on, you idiot, put on your SHOES.’
She threw open the door. The corridor was swarming with evacuees. Claire was standing square across it, her arms wide: ‘Back,’ she said. ‘No. Stop. Back. That way. That way.’
‘Oh, let us through, Claire . . .’ somebody wailed, above the wailing of the siren. Claire shook her head.
I saw her face, her set jaw, and I pulled at Julia’s arm. ‘It’s real?’ I said.
We tramped as Claire directed us: our possessions abandoned, empty-handed, some barefooted, a couple of lucky souls in their boots: some shivering already in thin nightdresses, some stout in quilted housecoats. ‘Close your doors, close your doors,’ Claire bellowed. ‘Now move, move, MOVE.’ Some girls had their hair done up in elaborate rollers and scarves and pins, and two of the glamorous engaged girls from the third year proved to have identical tartan dressing-gowns and sheepskin slippers. Out into the London night we scattered, like a company of pink and blue bunny rabbits let loose from a nursery tale.
The air was cold and raw, its relief indescribable. I doubled up and retched, felt Julia’s hand warm and protect the nape of my neck as milk dribbled painfully into the gutter. Muted now, its job done, the siren sobbed within our walls. The fire brigade was already on hand, and some girls gave little practice screams when they realized, for the first time, that this was an emergency. Someone said, ‘I hope Nigel had the sense to bolt.’
Jacqueline, the receptionist, was sharp-nosed in a pink satin wrap; did she possibly, I wondered, have a sex-life of her own? Flapping her hands, she urged a bunch of us across the street. ‘Keep back, girls, keep back, a minor incident, soon be tucked up in our beds again . . . ’ But just then another fire-engine bounced down the street. The roads were being sealed off to stop anyone coming into the area; cones and tapes stopped the traffic from the British Museum direction. ‘Where is it, where did it start?’ Julia demanded. ‘I am sure we are entitled to know.’ Half the girls from B Floor had been forced to come down a fire-escape, shocked, half-asleep, a freezing metal spiral tumbling them into the dark. ‘It was horrible,’ one of them sobbed, ‘horrible.’ Her friend put an arm around her and looked embarrassed. Girls bleated about their crushed heels, and limped across the road looking for steps to sit on.
The bursar was moving among us with a list. A plume of icy breath issued from her mouth. ‘Floor wardens, floor wardens, where are you?’ she called.
I became conscious of a presence beside me: white, palely glowing. It was Sophy who moved among the displaced and dismayed, like a column of ectoplasm, like some eighteenth-century ghost. She was wearing her full fencing gear; only her head was exposed, and her face was grey under the street lamps. I turned – and Sue turned – just in time to see Sophy’s Roger legging it – bursting from a group of shivering inmates and sprinting away, away towards the safety of Bedford Square: towards the world, green leaves and taxis and safety. Never look back: never look back.
Sue turned to me, her jaw dropping, her eyes alight with a growing glee. ‘What – ?’ she said. ‘Why – ?’
‘Some unusual perversion,’ Julia said thoughtfully. ‘An unusual sexual perversion. On our very corridor. How intriguing.’
The bursar did not see Roger go. She glowered at Sophy and said, ‘Really, Miss Pattison, I hope you haven’t been clumping about in your room, ruining the parquet. Really! And in the middle of the night, too!’
It was two o’clock. We were forced down the street by a cordon of staff and firemen, but like a wave we surged back. It was clear, by now, that this was no minor incident; the fire had taken a hold. ‘Soon have you somewhere warm, girls,’ the warden called out. Her face was bleak. A rumour spread that some girls had panicked and lost their bearings, run down to the basement and had climbed out through the dining-room windows; they were caged in the building’s inner courtyard, with the withered shrubs and the smoke and the crackling timbers. ‘Oh no, oh please . . .’ someone was saying; Claire and the other wardens buzzed from group to group, saying not true, absolutely false, no girls trapped, everyone accounted for.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been at the site of a disaster. I seem to have avoided them, except for this one. What my memory retains is a series of snapshots, with some sound-effects: the fountains and jets, the steam, the crump and crash, the mouthing of men and the gleam of their helmets, the false planets of street lamps fixed and brooding over all: once, a distant screaming, and a huge flash of white light. We had forgotten we were cold; we jostled for a view, craned our necks, barged against each other in the crowd. The situation – and what we were told of it was at variance with what we could see – was changing from second to second. And naturally we were fascinated to see all our possessions go up in smoke – our clothes, our textbooks, next week’s essay in note form. Some girls held hands and sniffled; others – how odd people are – were smiling broadly, though perhaps they did not know it. ‘That’s our room,’ others said, pointing. They were picking them out, tracking fingers through the smoke. ‘That’s ours, C20.’
In front of me, in the quaking, hysterical press, an unknown voice whimpered, whimpered on and on. ‘My teddy bears,’ she said. ‘My Afghan coat.’
‘Good riddance,’ said her room-mate. ‘That coat stinks anyway. And now you’ll have to grow up, won’t you?’ She turned, and slapped the whimperer smartly across the face.
There were gasps of shock; someone said, Tor heaven’s sake, Linda, get a grip!’
The firemen said, ‘Come on, girls, we’ll soon get you taken care of, be good girls and move back now, no use crying over spilt milk.’
I thought, do they go to cliché school? Is it part of their training? Then someone screamed. It was Eva, our near neighbour: the poor sap who shared a room with Sophy. ‘Look, oh look! Up there, on our floor!’
I looked. Outlined against a window, I saw a single figure; a silhouette, a blackness against red. It was Lynette. I knew her at once: I would have known her anywhere. I saw her put up her arms, like an angel about to fly. Then flames leapt from her head.
As it happened, no one else died. Tonbridge Hall was gutted, the cause of the blaze never established, not completely; but the lists had worked, the regulations and drills and fire-wardens, the shouted commands and the hurry, hurry, the pitching out into the shivering dark.
At the inquest, it was easily established that Karina was the last person to see Lynette alive. She took the witness-stand, looking monstrous, huge; which was understandable, as we were now coming into March. Her face was grim and set as she told of the moment when the siren went off.
Woken from deep sleep, her first thought had been that the kitchen was opposite, with its fire-extinguisher; she had dived across the corridor to get it. It was not what we had been told to do; but it was natural, and even mildly heroic. But when she was properly awake – ‘I’m always a heavy sleeper,’ she said – she realized that at this point the fire was
not to be seen, not actually there to be fought. Then she did as she had been drilled and directed; she moved as fast as she could to the nearest safe exit. She assumed, of course, that Lynette was ahead of her; yes, the door of their room was closed, there was no reason why she should open it, she knew she must not go back for anything. ‘We were told that at the practice,’ she said. ‘Claire was the fire-warden for our floor, and I remember the rehearsal. Even on that night I heard her shouting, Leave it, save yourself, leave it all, don’t go back. And so, of course, I didn’t.’
Then once out in the street, in the press and confusion, with the groups of drifting girls, some crying, most distraught; in the cold, under the streetlamps . . . there was no reason to miss Lynette. Why look for Lynette, among so many others? There was no chance of looking for her really . . . When she thought to search, when she’d thought to call out for her, a fire officer had come along and ordered her down the street . . .
Eva was screaming: she was screaming so hard her body doubled up and she convulsed. Someone in uniform threw a blanket around her. An ambulance rumbled up. We were distracted; so we did not see the very moment when Claire began to run. ‘Lynette, don’t die,’ she yelled: ‘I’m coming.’
Our heads and bodies swivelled. We forgot Eva the faintee; we gaped as Claire charged back towards the burning building, her big fleecy slippers slapping the ground at every stride. She meant it; she was going for Lynette. She would die in there, if that was what it took. But what was the point? I would have run in there myself; I valued my life so little. But I knew Lynette was beyond rescue now; I had seen her head on fire, and then a blaze burst out between her ribs.
The firemen caught Claire easily, and turned her back. The warden and an ambulance man supported her as they walked her away, each holding an elbow, hustling her down the street as if she were the last recalcitrant drinker in a closing bar. I saw her eyes, which were empty; her mouth moved.