Night of Fire Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Colin Thubron

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  1 Landlord

  2 Priest

  3 Neurosurgeon

  4 Naturalist

  5 Photographer

  6 Schoolboy

  7 Traveller

  8 Landlord

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  A house is burning. Its six tenants include a failed priest, a naturalist, a neurosurgeon and an invalid dreaming of his anxious boyhood. Their landlord’s relationship to them is both intimate and shadowy. At times he shares their preoccupations and memories. He will also share their fate.

  In Night of Fire the passions and obsessions of these unquiet lives reach beyond the dying house that holds them. Ranging from an African refugee camp to the cremation-grounds of India, their memories mutate and criss-cross in a novel of lingering beauty and mystery.

  About the Author

  Colin Thubron is an acknowledged master of travel writing, and the author of six award-winning novels. He has been numbered among ‘the current masters of the short novel’ (TLS), and called ‘one of our most compelling contemporary novelists’ (Independent), as well as writing the classic travel books, Behind the Wall (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award), The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia (Prix Bouvier) and Shadow of the Silk Road (all available in Vintage). In 2010, Colin Thubron became President of the Royal Society of Literature.

  ALSO BY COLIN THUBRON

  Non-fiction

  Mirror to Damascus

  The Hills of Adonis

  Jerusalem

  Journey into Cyprus

  Among the Russians

  Behind the Wall

  The Lost Heart of Asia

  In Siberia

  Shadow of the Silk Road

  To a Mountain in Tibet

  Fiction

  The God in the Mountain

  Emperor

  A Cruel Madness

  Falling

  Turning Back the Sun

  Distance

  To the Last City

  For Margreta

  ‘Just as there are phantom limbs there are phantom histories, histories that are severed and discarded, but linger on as thwarted possibilities and compelling nostalgias.’

  Adam Phillips, On Balance

  1

  Landlord

  It began with a spark, an electrical break like the first murmur of a weakening heart that would soon unhinge the body, until its conflagration at last consumed the whole building. Years ago, at the end of the Victorian century, the house had been built in dignified isolation, but later developers split its storeys into separate flats, and the once-grand staircases now ascended past empty landings and closed doors. It was slipping into stately old age. Its balconies sagged behind their wrought-iron balustrades, and chunks of stucco pediment were dropping off on to the dustbins fifty feet below. The garden behind, which had once been the landlord’s pride, lay half forgotten, and its shrubs – photinia, daphne, rosemary – burgeoned unclipped over the lawn.

  Somewhere in the bowels of the building, behind a damp wall, a kink in a carbonised wire had become a tiny furnace. Down this half-blocked artery it travelled to a worn Bakelite socket, and the tenant asleep in the basement – it was past midnight – never woke. The January night was cold. Far below, the sea made an angry rasping. Inland the town showed broken threads of light where it had gone to sleep.

  The landlord was watching other fires. From his rooftop terrace the sky was so clear that he – an insomniac muffled in scarves and padded jacket – could write his notes by starlight. Hunched in the circle of his makeshift observatory, he watched his breath misting in the night air, and listened to the sea, and wondered if his wife was yet asleep. The tube of the telescope was ice cold under his palms. This refractive model was not like his old one, grown friendly over the years, but a computerised tyrant. In the dark his fingers would blunder uncertainly over its keypad, or jog the ocular as he coupled it with his camera. But after long minutes of fumbling, the focused sky would startle him with a revelation far beyond his ageing naked eyesight. A supernova would appear like a ghost in a zone he had thought empty, or he was transfixed by a nebula whose mist now splintered into a blaze of separated stars.

  His gaze had changed over the years. As a younger man the remoteness of these galaxies had swept over him with an icy faintness, as if he were falling upwards. Their voids, their silence, sometimes left him physically trembling. He even wondered about his lapsed belief in God. But little by little this night-time hobby toughened into something more familiar. He observed all the prime objects catalogued by Herschel, and in the hope of making a small contribution to science, he embarked on a fruitless search for undetected dying stars.

  Then an old passion for photography surfaced. With a single-lens reflex camera mounted on the telescope, he accessed even distant galaxies. After focusing on nebulae to the south, where light pollution faded over the empty sea, the results of his half-hour aperture exposures shocked him into something close to fear. On his sensitised prints the mammoth hydrogen clouds boiled in great articulated explosions of gas and dust, scattered with blue asterisks where new stars were shining. Each of these lurid turmoils, he knew, was an ungraspable ferment of new creation, often the birthplace of a million suns. The photographs were beautiful and petrifying. Whole galaxies turned like Catherine wheels silently in space. And most spectacularly his camera yielded crimson images that burst and spilled out like intestines on the blackness. He could not look at them without the illusion of some celestial wound. Whole seams of stardust – a hundred thousand light years across – undulated like arteries in space, or blistered up from nowhere. And the constellations shone so dense that scarcely a gap of night showed between.

  But tonight, although the sky was full, he ignored his camera. He was expecting the annual meteor shower of the Quadrantids. A sharp wind had got up and was ruffling the sea into faint crests. Once or twice a solitary meteor flared and died across the sky. But the rain of fire he had anticipated – sixty Quadrantids could stream out in less than an hour – was still impending. They would come, he knew, from the radiant of Boötes, where in 1860 an enigmatic new star – a brilliant nova – had blazed and vanished within a week. This star would perhaps reappear – it survived in the charts as the invisible T Boötis – and it had taken on a stubborn significance for him, so that he had returned to its site again and again, like a mourner to a grave. Its void, far beyond the light of Arcturus, seemed to promise some mysterious epiphany. His computer-controlled telescope mount could lock on to its site within a single minute, and he did this obsessively now as if he must personally witness its resurrection. But when he refined the focus on it, there was only a circle of dark. And this deeper void, he knew, was seven hundred million light years from Earth.

  Occasionally these numbers trembled out of the meaninglessness of their charts and lodged in the real sky. The near-infinite speed of light yet travelled so slowly through the firmament that it might reach humans thousands of millennia after its departure, transmitting the image of a star as it had been long ago. Sometimes it dawned on him that everything he witnessed up here was long departed. He was watching only the dead. He saw the Coma cluster as it had existed when creatures on Earth were still confined to the sea; and the light of dim blue galaxies, now invisibly touching him, had started out before the Earth came into being and might replicate for people’s eyes, as if in a time warp, the process of Earth’s creation. And time itself, of course, was not an absolute; it might be bent
by the force of gravity, even reversed within a black hole. Given light and time, he imagined, his own past life could shake back into fragmented being.

  The meteor shower stayed desultory, and the wind had hardened. He thought he smelt something burning. He imagined it a neighbour’s dying bonfire, and peered down into the garden. But he saw nothing. Another hour would pass before the rain of meteors reached its climax, so he descended the narrow stairs to his studio, pushing between heaped files and film cassettes, and eased open the bedroom door. His wife was sleeping. He could hear the harsh whisper of her lungs – the sound that had first distressed him four years ago – and saw the laboured rise and fall of her upper body under the blankets. She was facing the ceiling from a tangle of auburn-grey hair. Her slanted eyes were closed. He stooped and softly kissed their corners, then went out, shutting the door.

  The faint stench of burning rose again. He assumed a tenant overcooking something, but the smell was acrid, unfamiliar. Sometimes the tenants themselves seemed alien to him. Immured in five storeys beneath him, most had been here on old leases almost as long as he could remember. Some rarely left their rooms. Others came and went seemingly at random. He saw them on stairways or in the corridors, where often the timer switch was defunct, and in the gloom he barely recognised them, while they, in turn, might not acknowledge him. One or two looked haggard and frail, as if life had discarded them. But over time his distaste for them had dissipated, and now he felt towards several a remote indulgence, even tenderness. Occasionally he asked them questions in passing (they did not always answer). He had come to think of them as uneasy acquaintances.

  He could not sleep. Yesterday, trying to bring coherence to past disorder, he had assembled his old 8mm cine films – many still in their Kodak envelopes, shot over fifty years ago – and started splicing them together with the same thin brush and pungent glue left over from his youth. He began this as a night-time chore, with the feeling – nostalgic and uneasy – of reviving a practice abandoned long ago. He did not know if the lamp would blow on his obsolete projector, or if the acetate glue would still hold.

  Tonight, in the darkened room, as he waited for the hour of the meteors, the first film strip bunched on its spool with a brittle crackling. He eased it free, started again and a yellowish light appeared on his screen. In its dust-framed rectangle, the image came up of a young woman on a bare stage. With the film’s celluloid flaking away, she seemed to move under black rain. It was a second before he recognised her, that elfin brightness. She was fooling about as usual, gesturing at nobody in sight. The theatre seats were empty. In a lull between rehearsals, she had lifted an auburn wig from her blonde-streaked hair and was addressing it like Hamlet his skull. The camera strayed playfully, affectionately, over her. Without cinematic sound, her mouth opened and closed in noiseless exclamations, and her laughter was a silent hiatus. Once she turned to the camera, complaining of its gaze on her. The next minute she was clowning again, mimicking the curtain calls of her fellow actors, curtseying coyly, bowing augustly. Then her hands lifted and splayed, blacking out the screen, and she was gone.

  He threaded the reels more nervously now, unsure what they would resurrect. The subjects of old snapshots seemed to occupy a time irretrievably vanished; but in these cine films people moved unnervingly in the present. As they flickered into life, he found himself gazing back at a once-familiar past – his childhood home – that had yet turned strange. Those who were once old to him had grown magically younger, far younger than he was now. But as if he were seeing them bifocally, they harboured like a memory trace his early perspective. His father on the screen was barely fifty, yet sealed in his son’s memory now, impregnably senior. The woman walking among the fruit trees in the garden seemed vivid and girlish, but she carried the mother’s power of his remembrance.

  Several film strips snapped inside the projector, or their sprocket holes tore and they jammed around its gate, where the lamp’s heat blistered them within seconds. Each time this happened he was touched by momentary panic. He had not viewed these pictures for decades, but now the loss of a few frames produced an incommensurate sadness. Each cassette seemed to enclose its own time capsule, where people continued in a bright-lit parallel existence. Yet like the light departed from a dead star, the life they projected was an illusion from years ago. And their celluloid inhabitants – loved or forgotten – were bitterly mortal. Their world could be destroyed by a pittance of glue, and each breakage was like a death. He noticed how his hands trembled as he repaired them, scraping away the emulsion to hold their cement: hands that he remembered as a child in old men, wondering at the corded delta of their veins, their liver spots, and had at once been repelled and fascinated by what could never, surely, come to him.

  For half a minute the camera panned across parched scrubland. In a settlement like an improvised village, a woman is sitting on a rough bench. He feels the hard sun again, the smell of dust, and torpor. It is hard to look at her now. She no longer exists in the context of the refugee camp, alongside others less than herself. She is alone, on his screen, gazing back at him. His throat has gone dry. She does not smile. Maybe it is not the custom (he cannot remember). Her face is young now, of course, although she was older than him. She looks shy and unexpectant. Her black skin is lighter than he remembers, the illusion of dark silk. She remains perfectly still (she does not understand the cinecamera) so that his film has the stasis of a portrait. It carries with it the bitter pathos of something long ago. Aeons, lives, ago. He whispers: ‘Forgive me . . .’ She goes on staring.

  In the cramped studio the smell of burning has intensified. He thinks it comes from the projector now, and switches it off. Then he remembers the Quadrantid meteors predicted after midnight. He climbs the staircase to the rooftop, where their fire is falling from the sky.

  2

  Priest

  How quiet it is here. Sometimes at night you can hear the waves falling and receding on the shingle, like a slow-beating heart. The sound becomes sadder as you listen, and at night, as now, it grows inexorable, as if a cosmic clock were beating out time to its end.

  The tenant felt this melancholy while slipping into sleep, and at first, when the smoke began rising through the floorboards, he covered his head obliviously with the duvet. His ground-floor flat should have been simple to escape. But over the last hour the basement below had become a contained furnace, its explosion delayed by an old fire door and fast-disintegrating plaster. In the end his flat could offer little to the flames. He was a lean, rather ascetic man, and he kept things clean and spare. His clothes barely filled one wardrobe, and his books had been pared down to those he remembered having loved. Only that morning his gaze had travelled over the familiar shelves, wondering at their fleeting knowledge. He had put on an old LP record of the St John Passion, and was listening with agnostic pleasure when out of its sleeve fell the yellowed photograph of the seminary.

  And there they all were. Standing self-consciously on the chapel steps, they looked dated and formal in their jackets and ties, with their hair combed forward or neatly parted. This was not as he remembered them. Their faces looked pale and enclosed, but their different smiles – intent, open, prim – seemed to coalesce in a bland happiness whose secret he had mislaid.

  He wondered what had become of them all. After he left, their mutual correspondence had lapsed through a distance that was more than geographical, and they had faded into the past. Except Ross, of course. How embarrassingly innocent he looked, with his sunburst of hair and cherub’s cheeks! The child of an infantilising God. Yet his imagined purity had once exerted a quiet moral force on his fellow ordinands. Beside him Vincent looked twice Ross’s age: a figure already of lean authority. Even now it was hard to believe that this louring presence, with the caved-in cheeks and the black focus of a Byzantine saint, was then only twenty-seven. Vincent often talked of the unending spiritual journey, but he had already arrived at his changeless convictions.

  Alongside Vincen
t there was a gap where the photographer – himself – had stepped from the group to record it, and he had playfully inscribed ‘Stephen’ in the empty space. And smiling there beside it was Julian, sporting fashionably wide lapels and a perky bow tie. Among all their chaste smiles, only Julian’s looked equivocal. His head was a different shape from everybody else’s – it was enough to convince you of phrenology: a triangle dwindling to a little cusped mouth that sometimes emitted qualms of mistrust. Of all of them, Julian was the one he most wondered at. He had never understood him, and even in the snapshot his expression was indefinable: amused, perhaps cynical, in a way ungiven to priests.

  The problems and passions in those cramped lecture rooms and seminars, the intellectual ferment around the Gospels, the suppressed doubts, the strained questioning of his foremost teacher – a man huge in rhetoric and learning, but without human sympathy – all these belonged to a civil war from which Stephen had been invalided out. Now he wondered, baffled at his past belief, how he had created God in private prayer. Yet this thought came to him always with the ringing of an alarm bell – faint and harmlessly far away – as if perhaps, after all, he had once been right, and now, in his half-examined life, he had fallen from the grace of self-judgement.

  Sometimes in the seminary at night he tried to imagine the prayers that were rising from those darkened rooms: not the communal worship of chapel or even the impromptu petitions at study meetings, but the night fears and confessions of men kneeling alone by their beds.

  Often he felt extraordinarily light and happy. It seemed to him that he had discovered the only meaningful life. Sometimes he felt he loved his fellow ordinands, with their earnest smiles and confidences, their reticent ardour in workshops. He imagined compassion even in his teacher, whose rubicund jowls and bursting waistcoat contradicted the implacable rigour of his mind, and identified a discreet sweetness in the seminary principal, who looked like an ancient boy. And he thought gratefully of his chosen friends, with their conflicting integrities. At such times they seemed all to be living in a charmed circle, a brotherhood of revelation and trust. It was easy to pray for them. These were the blessed nights.