Night of Fire Read online

  Walking along the beach at Arromanches. On the horizon the remnant of the wartime harbour, towed over the Channel from England, looks like a discontinuous railway train strung across the sky. The sand is hard under our feet, and runnelled by receding waves. I stuff my hands into my jeans to deter Jean-Paul from holding one. His talk is slowing down. Every time it peters out he mutters, ‘Alors’, the only French he uses to me. ‘So you will be going back to England on Tuesday. Alors . . . I think the tide is coming in now . . .’ Alors throws a bridge of fading hope over our silence. It says: We are not yet finished.

  He asks about my life and future, and my orphaned state elicits pity again. His eyes are watering. I tell him I hated my father.

  The lights are coming on along the esplanade above us. War memorials, and leftover anti-aircraft guns and jeeps intermingle with crêperies, ice-cream parlours, and a carousel where children are riding painted horses and giraffes.

  Jean-Paul slips his arm around mine, so we walk, linked like lovers, across the sand. Black-headed gulls march in front of us. When I try to detach my arm, he finds my hand. I’m starting to hate this. Can’t he feel it? My fingers freeze in his. Iron caissons from the disintegrated bridge lie beached along the tideline, hung with seaweed. They are painted Accès Interdit. Danger. I wish this was written on me. Children are playing hide-and-seek inside them. And Jean-Paul starts his feverish talk again. He says I must begin a new life. Do I plan to attend university? That’s good. He himself went to Dijon, studying literature. He loves literature. Alors . . .

  Poor Jean-Paul. There is nothing you can do. Let’s go back. Because it doesn’t work: not pity, not talk of butterflies. I hear myself saying that I have a boyfriend back in England. His hand goes clammy in mine. You skunk, Stephanie. Why don’t I just tell him I don’t care? Not like that. Instead I secretly turn to steel. I start to despise him. He makes me hate myself.

  ‘Let’s go back.’

  10 July. I dreamt about my mother last night. She was standing at her window looking out into the garden. I waved to her – I was the height of a small child – but she gazed through me at the orchard or at something else, and her eyes were clouded. They did not contain anything, only reflections. I even saw my figure in them, very small, as if I were translucent. Just a reflection in my mother’s eyes. Then I heard my father’s voice, loud and rasping: Do not disturb her.

  The weather changed today. The waves are crashing in against the grey shore. Gulls flying inland. We go to the broad forest rides around Lessay. Heavy, sunless air. The pine trees grow out of the bog and marsh of the Ay watershed. Silver-studded Blues are fluttering above the heathers, but other butterflies have gone to ground.

  Our group is easing apart. The two older women have taken against Mr Gilbert, whose massive ginger head obliterates any view of a butterfly as he clambers to photograph it. One of them has offended Jean-Paul by disputing his identification of a Mallow Skipper, and the Yorkshires, for some reason, have stopped speaking to one another.

  I follow an Alcon Blue among the pines, but the forest floor is stubbled with hummocks and hidden marsh, and I have to go back. A weak sun glimmers out. For a while Samantha comes and walks beside me. The ride is shining with brackish water, and there are swathes of orchids unknown to Britain.

  Suddenly Samantha asks: ‘Why are you so angry, Stephanie?’

  Why what? ‘I’m not angry.’ Does she mean now, or always? ‘Sometimes I think the world’s angry with me.’ The things that come out of my mouth. ‘No, I’m not angry at all.’ I don’t know. No.

  We go in silence. I feel a surprised perplexity. I imagine I normally convey reserve or diffidence. Samantha slows her pace to mine. I find nothing to say. Then all at once she points. ‘I think that’s a Purple Emperor.’

  It is sailing high up along the treeline, like a bird. The first time I’ve ever seen one. ‘It’s settled.’ I stare up, but I’ve lost it now. ‘There.’ I follow her pointing finger. It has perched on an oak branch, wings outspread. A shimmer of dark purple. My binoculars find it, and we gaze up together. ‘It’s moving . . . wonderful . . . no, it’s staying . . .’ and our shared pleasure creates this unforeseen intimacy, as it was with Cousin Arthur. But of course she is not Arthur. There seems no frailty in her. She looks very lithe and strong.

  I say childishly: ‘How can I be angry in the same world as that?’

  ‘Even a great naturalist, Henry Walter Bates,’ she answers, ‘wrote that the contemplation of nature was insufficient to fill the human heart.’

  ‘And you,’ I say, ‘a biologist!’

  ‘We biologists are human too.’ She laughs. ‘Some of us.’

  The others have caught up with us now, and we pinpoint the Emperor high in the trees. But our first intimacy has gone, as though the butterfly had lost some magic by being shared. Samantha walks away.

  At supper all is conciliatory. Mr Gilbert buys us cider again; he says there are no good Normandy wines. The Yorkshires are talking too, thanks to the Purple Emperor, and revelling over their photographs. The extension tubes and telephoto lenses on their Nikons make mine look puny. But their close-ups seem intrusive to me, capturing the creature unaware a hundred feet above, its wings unfurled in privacy.

  We have one day left. I wonder if I will see a Swallowtail, or a passing Painted Lady. Mrs Gilbert has set her heart on sighting a peregrine.

  We part for sleep more cordially than usual. In the passageway by my room, Samantha says goodnight. Then, drawing me lightly to her, she kisses me on the lips.

  Nothing I write can understand this. I doubt if I will sleep. It seems so natural. As if these are the lips I have always longed for.

  11 July. On the Britanny ferry Barfleur. I’ll never know where we went today. Nowhere on any map I can imagine. As our group fans out among the beech trees, the sun emerges and a cloud of butterflies hovers over the bracken. The air fills with the nervous chatter of blackcaps, while a sparrowhawk patrols overhead.

  Samantha and I take a higher path than the others, going through silver birches and hazel. She is telling me about butterflies in Mexican belief: not the fairy tales of Jean-Paul, but stranger things. To the Aztecs, she says, butterflies were the returned souls of the slain, and in promise of resurrection the love goddess slept with young warriors on the battlefield, a butterfly between her lips. Butterflies are more versatile than humans, she says, their self-sufficiency prodigious. There are butterflies born half-male, half-female, their wings on each side different. There are even females that never mate, but lay eggs, unfertilised, which hatch out other females.

  These miracles drop lightly from her. She no longer talks like a teacher. I know she is wooing me, in her dark way. We wander through knee-high grasses and flowering broom, sprinkles of pink germander. I answer the grip of her hand. A secluded glade is shining with asphodel, the flower of the dead. She lays down a waterproof coat. The ground is very soft. Clover and mauve rampion. I thought this only happened in folk tales, or perhaps in Aztec make-believe. Her kisses release something deep and long-waiting. My lips pour back her fervour. As she peels off my clothes, I am amazed to be easing away hers. Her eyes are fiercely tender on me. Her shoulders beautiful in my hands. I can only say her name. Her lips understand everything: on my breasts, between my thighs. Her fingertips also. Her dark hair unloosens over me, as if to keep secret the enchantment she is performing. After we are over, she teasingly relates my body parts to those of a butterfly. And out of the asphodel the tiny brown creatures of the glade – the Ringlets and Meadow Browns – alight on our entwined bodies, on her back, my breasts, sucking our sweat and dappling us like fallen leaves.

  I do not know what you have done, Samantha. But whatever else happens, I will have understood this – it seems a kind of understanding – this consummation in my flesh, saying that I may be released from my childhood, and become a woman, even.

  * * *

  In the dark she imagined that an earthquake was breaking not far away. Beside her h
ead the wall tingled and hummed. She sat up, shaking. An acrid stench was growing in the room. A bottle of mouthwash was clinking on the bathroom shelf, and all the window panes were rattling. By the night light that she kept burning – a sentimental leftover from another time – she saw that nothing around her apparently had changed. Then an explosion reverberated below, as if a great beam had cracked apart, and a second later she heard a glass smash on to the kitchen floor.

  When she stumbled into the sitting room she saw that the lorikeet had dropped into the sawdust of its cage. The thrashing of its wings had died to a rustle and its cry of ‘Well here we are’ had become a hoarse whisper.

  The smoke seemed thin at first. It was only when she opened the door on to the landing that she realised. Then the heat hit her like a molten wave, and the pouring smoke snuffed out her light. She thought she heard something falling in the corridor, but she could not reach the door again, even to close it. Beneath her the deep inferno roar was broken by crackling like rifle shots, and through the smoke a dull orange glow lit up the door frame.

  Frantically she hunted for her coat, a blanket. Anything. By her relit night light, as she reached the sitting room, the air was thickening black, and her gaze swept over everything she might save, not realising that this was useless now: the stacked files of her biology students, the photographs in their tortoiseshell frames: Louisa’s smiling family, Samantha haggard and brave in her last year. In the kitchen she pulled the fire blanket from its place on the wall, and for a moment held it like an apron in front of her, then tossed it away. When she opened the window, the smoke was sucked after her – she imagined flames behind – and she scooped the lorikeet from its cage and threw it crying into the night.

  Then, with its release, a satiated calm came over her. She was fleetingly amazed at herself. Perhaps it was lack of oxygen, she thought, or because this unreality belonged most certainly in a nightmare. Was she dreaming? She peered down from the window into pure smoke. She knew the ground was seventy feet below, and that it would kill her. The fumes and heat were banking up behind. But this unearthly clarity continued, as if her consciousness had separated from her body. When she climbed on to the windowsill, there came into her mind no future that she longed for. She imagined stepping on to solid cloud. It would not be like dying at all.

  She spread her arms.

  5

  Photographer

  You cannot enter the basement rooms at will. Such flats are all but buried out of sight. Even the landlord can barely remember the layout. The tenant has changed the locks and does not answer the door. Yet dry rot or rising damp can undermine the whole building, and a musty fetor sometimes leaks into the house, seeping out of this underground obscurity into the upper storeys.

  Occasionally the tenant’s music percolated up to the ground floor, but thinned to a faint throb of drums. Listen to such sounds under the spell of cannabis, and the individual notes become a hypnotic parade of dissociated chords and instruments. After the music from his old CD player stopped – cut off with the severed electricity – the tenant went on hearing the sounds of the sea. Infused by five smoked joints and a bottle of vodka diluted with Diet Coke, each fall and pull of the waves became a constellation of scattered water drops, endless and transfixing, so that he lay in the darkness for what seemed many hours, listening.

  If he gave up smoking dope for more than a few days, an inchoate anxiety surfaced: the fear of some visceral loss, in which his whole body seemed to be drifting apart from him. But after four or five joints this no longer mattered. Nor did the smoke now drifting in his nostrils from another room. The vodka separated his head from his body, and hallucinations arose – images whose origins he could not have traced – beyond any control, into half-sleep.

  But towards midnight the fear of some nameless deprivation returned. Steve dreamed that his memories were being extracted by forceps, one by one, from his surgically opened head, until he saw his own emptied body suspended, as if through a doorway, rotating to gaze back at him. Whatever experience this travestied might have been attributed to the impact of cannabinoids. But he never woke to explain it. When the flames entered the sitting room they found it full of inflammable furniture, old and now illegal. This fatal stuff – the landlord had never replaced it – had lain for years in the dimness, as if waiting.

  The smoke was denser now than the stench from the spliffs that lay discarded by his head. Soon afterwards, his anxiety settled to memories so diffused and ungraspable that they would have eluded him altogether, had he woken. There swam into his mind’s eye images from early childhood: a forgotten beloved, more potent than any he would know as a man.

  When he saw her again, he recognised her by her eyes: Cleo, the care worker who had helped his mother. It was from her that he had learnt of his mother’s death. She had thought at first that his mother was sleeping. But she had died sitting upright in her chair, with the arm of her record player oscillating at the disc’s end, where Elizabeth Harwood had been singing ‘How Beautifully Blue the Sky’.

  But his mother could not really be gone, Steve knew. She was somewhere close, she was listening. She wasn’t dead at all. She was sitting in her orchard, under the pear trees, or standing behind his shoulder. Why then this old terror of dismemberment? How thin he was without her! He could no longer hear even her accusation: the intolerance that would surface out of nowhere, her anger a dark contralto. She had sung for two seasons with the revived Carl Rosa Opera, and her voice would remain to him indelibly beautiful and angry. Pull yourself together, Steve. Stop dreaming. You’re like your father . . . Now she had gone away, but he was still here. She too must then be here. Her low voice, after all, was his own, her soliloquy inside him, a voice that strived to root him in reality.

  The seance medium is thin, with a greying beard. His washed-out pallor might come from the strain of accessing other worlds. His eyes are smoke blue. He sits before his clients without ceremony. Steve is at the back, nervous now. He hears the medium shuffling some papers before he stands up for a moment and says formally: ‘My friends, all life survives death. We survive in all our faculties: our personality, our intelligence, our memory. Take heart. We are all joined in the Infinite Intelligence. If you do not recognise what follows, I can only say I’m sorry. I can make no guarantees. I simply relay to you what I see and hear . . .’

  How strange. These are Christian people filling the tall room, people who believe in a just heaven. Like him, they want to talk with the dead, but their dead are in some communal paradise, while his stands in her pear orchard, trying to speak. ‘When I’m gone,’ she had said, ‘will you still hear my voice?’ These people probably go to such a seance every week. He knows she would despise him for coming here. She is close, so close, yet not there, not there at all. Two months gone now, and nothing. Her voice just out of hearing, sounding in his mind, but weak, too far. Now even her anger would come as a relief.

  The medium pauses, his eyes closed. There is silence. Then he gestures to a woman sitting in the front. He says: ‘I have someone for you. He has asked to come forward and speak to you. I think it is your husband . . .’

  The woman hunches forward. She is elderly, clutching a pair of gloves. ‘Yes . . . yes . . .’

  ‘Your husband is a sturdy man . . . I see . . . he loved the countryside . . .’

  ‘Yes . . . yes . . .’

  The medium goes on to touch on her husband’s appearance, his hobbies, while the woman rocks a little, and nods. Sometimes the medium asks: ‘Would you understand?’ and she goes on nodding slightly, and sometimes breathes, ‘Yes’, and sometimes does not respond.

  The medium’s eyes are closed again. He says: ‘I feel fluid in my mind . . . Now I am with another presence from the spirit world . . . She is very strong . . .’ His eyes open on Steve. ‘Is this your mother?’

  ‘Yes!’ He meets the man’s stare now. Cold air is beating up from his stomach, into his mouth.

  ‘I hear singing . . .’ The mediu
m’s words have turned light and wondering. ‘I think she is singing. Would you understand?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Her voice is very pleasing.’

  ‘Yes.’ Suddenly the banked waters of a lifetime are overflowing, flooding through him with unbearable relief. He aches to embrace her, even if she turns her back. He half stands.

  ‘Your mother is sending you encouragement. This is a difficult time for you. She wants you to know that she is holding your hand. There is no need to fear . . .’

  Steve stares down at his hands, clutched at his chest. He opens them to receive her. He is weeping. He feels something glide over one hand, he is sure of it, like a breeze or a wing. He closes his fist. She is there. He tries to speak but chokes, in an ecstasy of relief, and sits down again, sobbing. He is aware of others watching him, intrigued but tender, not as surprised as he. He only says: ‘Yes . . .’

  The medium goes on: ‘She is singing folk songs, nursery rhymes to you years ago . . .’

  He nods, breathes, ‘Yes’, because he wants to believe, he is caught up in the truth of the medium’s vision, which can recreate anything. Perhaps his mother had sung nursery rhymes to him. He did not know. Perhaps she’d been a gentler woman before he could remember. ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘She wants to take you in her arms.’ Steve wonders who this woman is. Is it somebody else? Can the words be for somebody else in the room? ‘Would you understand?’

  He cannot answer.

  Desolation is spreading through him. His mother is sliding away, becoming another. She had never wanted to take him in her arms.

  ‘She is smiling at you. I think she is remembering driving you to school.’

  ‘No, no, no!’ He shakes his head. His mother had not driven him to school.

  ‘It is she speaking now, not me. She is saying: “Go on with your life. Don’t look back. I’m here with you. Don’t regret the change called death . . . ”’