The Vanished Child Page 16

  She blinked desperately, trying to see motion. Nellie was scared and hiding. Under the bed, maybe; but where was the bed? She groped forward, fanning out both arms to find it. “Nellie, please!”

  “I can’t! My dolly doesn’t want to!”

  “Where are you, honey?”

  Only a shriek. Where was the closet? She could not even find the bed. There was the slightest sagging in the floor. She crouched down, touched the floor with her fingers; it was hot. She felt her way forward, trying to find the closet door, a window—

  She had lost the door to the room. She didn’t know where it was; she had let its position get away while she was looking for the bed.

  She didn’t know how to get out of the room.

  Downstairs someone shouted. “Here!” she cried out.

  “Stay there! I’m coming.”

  Not Harry, but Richard. She stood stock still on the hot floor, waiting until she felt his hand. He took her by the arm, holding her tightly.

  “This way—” He was coughing too. “Quickly. The stairs won’t last.”

  “Nellie’s here! In the closet!”

  “Right.” She heard a door bang open. Nellie shrieked in panic; Perdita held out her arms and he thrust the heavy little girl into them. Nellie kicked and twisted; Perdita held tight. Reisden pushed her forward. Perdita’s shoulder scraped against the doorjamb. The hall floor shook delicately, like a dance floor; the house creaked; the smoke streamed past them. She felt the knob of the stair rail, and then quite suddenly the smoke cleared and she felt a sudden shock and saw a bright red and yellow light. She stared, fascinated, over Nellie’s head; there was a rumble overhead, she flinched—“Back, fast!” he shouted and pulled them back with him; he pushed her into the shelter of a door and slammed it shut between them and the stairs. She heard a screaming like nails pulled loose from wood, and a buffeting, and a moan.

  “It’s the stairs,” she choked.

  “It’s the stairs.”

  “But there’s no other way to get out—”

  The smoke was less thick in this room; for a shade of a moment too long she could feel him, through it, only looking at her. “But we have to,” she said, “can’t we get out?” and she felt him give a great gasp, and he said, “Oh no. Not you.” She screamed out because she did not understand it and because he sounded so strange and desolate, and she ran at him pounding with the fist of her free hand at his chest and arms, as if he were some sort of machine that did not work, and he caught hold of her and held her awkwardly while she struggled, and Nellie threw back her head and screamed in panic.

  “Not you,” he said, coughing, “I’ll get you out, I promise it. I promise it, both of you.”

  Outside the door, the wind of the fire screamed.

  “Window,” he said against her ear. “Find it.”

  The room was crowded with hot dim objects they bumped against in the smoke. They knocked against a brass railing, something that careened crazily away from them, and finally something hard with a smoldering cushion over it. He kicked it out of the way, and knelt, and felt along the floor for something to throw through the window, but it had no lock and no catch; he reached out through the smoke and slid it up. The cold air blew into the room. A great yellow fan of sunlight made the smoke misty; then it was quite thin and he could see.

  The ground was too far. Four or five people were huddled in a group in the yard. Down below was the stone carriageway of the house, hard grey blocks fitting smoothly together. The figures down below waved and pointed and all turned at once, away from them, looking at something else. Two men came around the side of the house carrying a long ladder. One of them was Harry.

  “You’ll go first with the child,” Reisden said. “You can carry her?” Perdita nodded. The end of the ladder scraped against the house and crumbled away paint with it. It rested below the sill. “Out, now.” He took Nellie awkwardly while she clutched at the side of the ladder. It was so long it was springy; it bent under Perdita’s weight. He passed Nellie to her, then held the end of the ladder. Nellie had grabbed her around the neck; she had Nellie around the waist and only one hand for the ladder.

  Perdita felt for each of the rungs. The bushes by the house were burning; the heat and smoke runneled up; she lowered herself and Nellie from rung to rung. The ladder would char; it would burn. Halfway down she looked up and she could no longer see him; there was what seemed like smoke pouring out the window, and he was still inside, with the flames. She slid and stumbled down toward the bottom, almost falling. Hands reached up to her, she gave Nellie to someone familiar—she blinked, it was Uncle Gilbert—and she jumped from the last rungs off the ladder and looked up.

  Reisden felt through the wood the jar of its sudden lightness, and almost at the same time felt a larger jar that shook the frame of the house. The window shuddered and slid an inch or so downward. Below, at the foot of the ladder, he saw a crowd of people. He ducked under the window and steadying himself with a hand on the sill, found his foothold. Just off balance on the ladder, he felt another jar go through the building. The sill had cracked from end to end; he looked up, at the top floor and the overhanging roof, and saw them move.

  The ladder began to fall in toward the flames; he threw his body backward and hit out at the wall, trying to overbalance the ladder in the other direction. It balanced, hesitated; in front of him the whole window, frame and glass, cracked and disintegrated into splinters; he flung his arm up to protect his face and felt himself falling, he didn’t even know which way. By instinct he kicked the ladder away from him and simply dropped. Something hit the ground inches from his skull; he rolled and ended up on his back, stunned. There was sky; there was grass under his face and fingers; nothing he moved seemed to be too much damaged. He sat up dizzily. The ladder was on the ground, broken-spined, one end burning merrily. The lawn and carriageway were littered with burning debris: shingles, a broken rocking chair, part of the roof, every sort of wreckage; but he had landed clear. The grass was singeing brown. He stood up and got rather uncertainly as far as the fence that ringed the yard. He leaned against the gatepost, watching the house burn down. He could hear the little girl coughing and crying. That was all right then. Someone touched him on the arm; he recognized Perdita, who was looking at him with a mixture of horror and shyness and concern. When she saw he was all right, she hugged him and burst into sobs. Perdita wasn’t dead. He put his arms wordlessly around her and held her. The straight parting of her hair was tousled and her hair was wet; that seemed to him very touching and important, that she had thought to wet down her hair. The fire belled up from the wreckage. He watched it as if from a very great distance. How had he got out? At best, he knew, they should have got out her and the child.

  Gilbert Knight stood in front of him. Eyes like the stare of a tragic mask, wild white hair sticking up. Brown liver spots stood out on his face. Richard, he said soundlessly. Reisden saw the scene through Gilbert’s eyes. I nearly killed your Richard, didn't I? The burning beams of the house cracked and a part of the wreckage swayed lower. Gilbert was flinching with his need to be reassured. Reisden would not look away from him and would not reassure him. Gilbert’s eyes filled and he blinked. He groped for Perdita. “You’re all right, my dear?” he asked, safe to ask. She soundlessly put out an arm to hug him too. She was still trembling against Reisden. “My dear, you aren’t hurt?” Gilbert quavered. “You mustn’t cry?” He put an arm around her, and as if it were an afterthought, put the other around Reisden. Something broke in Reisden and he reached out and put an arm around Gilbert too.

  “I’m all right, don’t worry,” he said.

  “Oh,” Perdita said, half laughing, crying as unselfconsciously as a baby, and still holding on to them both, “oh, I’m so scared now.”

  “Don’t,” Reisden said. “If you’re scared I will be.” True. He could be terrified if he thought of it. One of the last windows broke with a pop, flinging glass. He held up his arm to protect her. “We’d better move ba
ck.” They retreated, still in a huddle. None of them would let go their unlikely triple knot, clinging to each other. Reisden was afraid that if he let go of her, stopped looking at her even for a minute, she would not have got out, she would be crushed under the smoke-steaming beams, screaming like the dreadful horse they had not saved. He bent his head over her and they held each other so tightly that he felt the press of her breathing against his own. He was intensely grateful to her for being still alive. “Richard saved you, you know!” Gilbert was saying, laughing a little, patting them both on the arm, making a little joke.

  Richard?

  “Not Richard,” said Harry behind them. “Pet, come away.” But for a moment she still clung to them; and Reisden, looking up at the big blond boy, saw something crack in his assurance, his certainty that he was everything to someone. Idiot boy, your woman is alive, you have someone to love, don’t ask for hostages. But Harry stared back at him, flat-eyed.

  Noticing Perdita; talking with Mrs. Fen

  In the aftermath of the fire the whole landscape seemed black, skeletal, ghostly in smoke. The fence that had kept the Clinic children away from the road was twisted metal in blackened grass. The children touched the hot fence and stepped gingerly in the hot grass, feeling the crackling and pricking of the lawn that had been soft.

  Everything smelled like caramel with a nauseating underodor of char. Perdita did not know how to deal with the change in her landmarks, fences that had melted, trees that had disappeared in an afternoon. She clung to Harry. But all the time she felt Richard’s arms around her. When the ladder had fallen she had screamed out so loud that she was hoarse afterward. She loved Harry, but Richard had been about to die.

  “I saved you,” Harry said. “I brought the ladder.”

  She said nothing for a moment, rationalizing that her throat still hurt. “Yes, that’s true.”

  “I always do the right thing,” Harry said quietly, “and nobody ever gives me credit.”

  Tvo months, a month ago, she would have said, “That’s right, poor Harry,” and she wouldn’t have done it out of loyalty to him but because it was true. And it was still true, but Harry didn’t have to say it. She broke into tears, she clutched at him, weeping in futility against his muscular arm. She didn’t want to find Harry imperfect.

  “There, Pet, you’re just tired out,” Harry soothed her, and she took refuge in that, womanly and weak, and cried harder.