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Authors: Clare Curzon

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BOOK: Last to Leave
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‘Somebody was watching me?' It was meant to be sarcasm but it came out feeble.
‘Your cousin Madeleine noticed a figure staggering off from the rear of the house and making for the wood. At that point things were pretty disorganized, so one more was ticked off as having got out. Are you still saying that wasn't you?'
‘Does it matter? I'm out, that's all I know.'
‘It matters,' the man persisted, ‘because you were all
counted
out, not ticked off by name. And it looks as if you were counted for a second time when you staggered out of the wood later. So the new number tallied with the list of residents.'
Eddie stared at him in disbelief. Even in his doped state he saw the significance.
‘You mean an over-count? Someone was still missing – left in there? Oh, my God! Who then?'
‘I'm sorry, sir. I have to tell you we haven't been able to find your sister, Miss Jessica Dellar.'
 
He is running again. Same corridor, same wood, only now, ghostly to either side are gauzy white drapes floating in the wind. He's fleeing someone? Seeking someone?
Trees dissolve into people. They stand over him, demanding answers as he lies on his back staring at the sky burning behind waving treetops. Questions he doesn't know any answers to; can't find the strength to find.
An exasperated voice – ‘Don't you care what's become of her?' A vague memory of disaster stirs in his befuddled brain.
‘Become of who?'
‘Of your sister. Can you tell us where she went?' Jessica. My twin. That's who I was searching for.
But in the cellar?
And why doesn't Kate come? Mother, where are you?
Then he knew it was all beyond him. He was dying, perhaps already dead.
Stumbling away from the burning house, the roar of flames and hoarse shouting, Kate's first worry had been for Carlton and Claudia. Such an appalling shock could have destroyed them. Then her brother-in-law's voice reached her, fluting away beyond a wall of rhododendrons. She rounded them to find him seated on an artistically prone Greek
pithoi
with Claudia's tartan cloak over his shoulders, his wife standing ramrod straight behind him like some Victorian ghillie posed for a photograph with the local laird.
For a moment Kate thought Carlton had shaved off the right side of his wild white beard. But it was there all right, flattened to project ridiculously, like an airfield's windsock, from the farther cheek. It was the way he'd slept on it, adding to the mad Don Quixote appearance of his scarecrow figure.
Claudia was drably austere in a charcoal velvet housecoat, her iron-grey hair in schoolgirl plaits. She turned stiffly to face the other woman. ‘Ah, Kate, this is a grim business. Most disturbing for everyone.'
In total control. If she was aware that her home and everything in it was likely lost, she gave no indication. Her voice of doom was the one she normally employed for everyday observations.
‘Just look at that,' piped her elderly husband, staring upwards into the fiery reflections on the underside of billowing smoke. ‘What incredible colours. You know, my dear, we don't appreciate the night sky enough. When did we last come out and truly look at the dark?'
Unsurprisingly she didn't answer. ‘I'm so very sorry,' Kate whispered, leaving her to guess whether she referred to the fire or to Carlton's increasing dottiness.
Claudia drew an audible, deep breath. ‘It's fortunate we increased the insurance cover.'
That was startling. ‘All the same,' Kate couldn't help saying, ‘to lose so much that you've built up over the years …'
‘Accumulated,' Claudia corrected her.
Had she regarded all Carlton's valuable acquisitions as so much encumbrance then? While it shocked the other woman she stored it for consideration later. ‘I wanted to be sure you were both all right,' she said. ‘Robert's rung for a minibus to take us all to the Greythorpe Hotel. Naturally it will catch them on the hop, so some of us may need to share rooms for the present, but at least there will be beds for the rest of the night.'
She offered her arm and between them the two women raised Carlton to his feet and got him moving in the right direction. As they passed round to the front of the house the full heat struck at them again. Three fire appliances were present and a battery of hoses was being directed on the house, already reduced to a glowing shell. It seemed impossible that such devastation could have happened in so short a while. Piles of smouldering debris lay where thrown from windows in a panicky attempt to save what seemed precious. They had to pick their way through it all to where the family had been herded together, a phalanx of stunned strangers in oddly assembled garb.
An ambulance was pulling away, circling what had been a reasonably tidy stretch of lawn before so much trampling, and just then the promised minibus, bright yellow, appeared at the far end of the drive.
They were dragooned into a semblance of order, oldies first, and, busy with getting Carlton's stiff old legs to cope with the high steps, Kate hadn't time to look around for the twins, assuming they'd be equally occupied with organizing their elders and board last.
A trio of firemen clumped across to the bus. One wearing a soot-smeared white helmet put his head through the bus doorway. He had a list on his clipboard. ‘Mrs Kate Dellar?' he accused her, as though she might have denied it. ‘Could I have a word, please?' So she climbed down.
Then, as the others were driven off, he told her: Eddie had been injured. He was on his way to High Wycombe Casualty Unit. And, after a recount of survivors, one was missing: her daughter Jessica.
Eddie? Jess?
Both
her children? ‘But they said everyone was safe!' she shouted at him.
A policewoman, fair hair straggling from an untidy bun under her crushed uniform hat, took her arm. Kate shook her hand off. Then the full horror exploded on her. She stared back at the collapsed frontage of the still glowing ruin. Jess – somewhere inside that inferno? No, no! Impossible.
‘We'll drive you to the hospital,' the policewoman offered.
But how could she leave? There might, by some miracle, be just a chance that … But then Eddie – badly hurt? She was torn apart.
In a daze she let herself be manoeuvred into the rear of the police car. The girl climbed into the driving seat. Kate was aware of the dark outline of a man beside her. He turned briefly to look at her as the siren crudely broke out after the doors slammed. He had a round, expressionless, puppet face with a sharp nose.
‘Cut that row,' he ordered the girl, and leaned across to silence the siren and switch on the windscreen wipers. Twin jets of soapy water spurted up to dislodge the film of black detritus that had settled. The flip and slick of the blades on glass were the only sounds now above the low hum of the engine.
The car swung out of the driveway and into leafy Windmill Lane, headlights stabbing the dark through a tunnel of golden trees. Nothing was real. Kate felt her heart beating up in her throat. She closed her eyes, hugged her chest tight, desperately hunting for the words of some prayer.
There had been no point in their rushing. Eddie was no longer in the Casualty department.
‘Gone to theatre,' a doctor explained. Kate had a ludicrous vision of a floodlit Edwardian proscenium, all gilt plaster and cherubs. The ruby velvet curtains were closed, like a crematorium chapel's after last viewing of the coffin. She found herself retching. A nurse brought her a chair. They were handling her like a Friday night drunk.
In the surgical ward Eddie wasn't expected back for at least an hour, and even then not awake enough to talk. Come back tomorrow, she was told: not too early.
She wanted to insist she'd just wait there, not be in their way, simply hold his hand when he returned; but it was fear of her son's embarrassment that held her back. Over-imaginative and by nature protective, she'd always forced herself not to fuss, never let the twins feel she smothered them. Even more so since losing Michael.
She hadn't known that one day she'd need them there so badly for herself.
‘I have to go back to the fire,' she said after they insisted that Eddie, with his injured head and chest, was in the safest hands possible. She believed they'd do their best, but had a fatalistic premonition. Distraught, and so recently widowed, she saw her little family being picked off, one by one.
She was barely aware of being helped into a taxi. When it stopped she found she'd been delivered to the Greythorpe Hotel. She stood outside shivering on that early May morning as dawn slowly broke, and knew she couldn't yet face the others.
There was too much grief. Not only her own. Carlton had lost the home where he'd been born and lived in for most of his eighty years. If the reality of it hadn't yet reached the old man, Claudia, totally aware, would be indomitably in command of both herself and him. Kate did not trust herself to be with them for now.
She told the driver to take her to the Monkey Puzzle. From the pub she'd ring the family and explain she needed to be on her own at present.
Which was far from the truth. But who was there now to be with?
 
The Monkey Puzzle was named after the monstrous tree in its forecourt, which lodged the dust and traffic pollution of almost a century. Desiccated and hang-dog, it was shamed by the sprucely painted version of its kind on the inn's swinging sign.
The pub boasted a second tree at the rear, where it dropped confetti-like blossom on the little square of lawn referred to as the Beer Garden. A cherry tree, it had gone wildly leggy, the productive part of it isolated aloft like a ship's crow's-nest. Lower, it could have had nets thrown over in the fruiting season, but skied up there on its pine-straight trunk it was only a drop-in for scavenging blackbirds and pigeons. Whenever she thought of the pub, even before the casky beeriness of its smell and the dim, smoky interior swam into her mind, she remembered those two overgrown trees.
For all its unpretentiousness, or perhaps because of it, she was fond of the place. This was where she'd stayed weekends in her late teens when Michael, very much the youngest of the three Dellar brothers, used to steal away from the manor house to meet her. She was supposedly in college and, skint as students always are, they could afford no plushier venue for their secret meetings.
The then landlord had long departed, replaced by a disabled ex-midshipman from the Royal Navy, whose name remained over the door while the main work fell to Duncan and Lily Crick, his brawny son and motherly young daughter. For two decades now Kate and Michael had established the habit of dropping in, once she'd become an almost-accepted member of the Dellars' extended family.
The Cricks made her warmly welcome. They had woken to see the fire reflected in the sky. It was only half a mile from Larchmoor Place if you went straight through the
woods, although three miles round by road. Duncan had rung the house, found the line down and then contacted the local police for information.
With surprising tact they refrained from questions. Lily showed Kate to a comfortable room under the eaves, bringing up a tray of cold cuts and salad with a half bottle of good Merlot. She declined the food, poured a glass of wine, showered to get the stench of smoke off her body and hair, then climbed into bed wearing a kindly-lent outsize nightdress.
Determined to sleep, she found it impossible. Against her will, incidents of the past day ran through her mind time and again, as if in a loop of film. She was forced to re-live all that had happened since her taxi drew into sight of the house – her husband's home until the day they'd eloped together.
She'd come a long way since then and considered herself a pragmatist. She knew that in his family's eyes she remained little more than an outsider, valued only for having provided a brace of junior Dellars. But, released from close socializing since being widowed, she felt that she could withstand any disdain the family chose to display towards her. Or had done, until this moment.
Loyalty to Michael's ghost had made her accept old Carlton's eightieth birthday invitation, although she hadn't looked forward with any pleasure to the family gathering. She knew Eddie had felt much the same. About Jess – always the rebel – she wasn't sure, and she'd been uneasy on seeing her daughter across the drawing-room, partly because of the circumstances of their last meeting.
That had been when the girl told her she intended living openly with Charles Stone. Kate knew him only by reputation, a wealthy married man who had made a name in the City. Despite her determined policy of non-interference, she'd had to speak out against him.
‘It's what we both want,' had been Jessica's excuse.
‘That isn't reason enough, Jess. Marriage
means
something. He has a duty to his wife. Have you thought what you'd be doing to her? And the monster you'd be making of him? How could you ever trust him yourself, if he could walk out on the woman he'd solemnly promised to love and protect for life?'
‘Mother, you should just hear yourself!' she jeered. ‘I wish, I really, really wish I'd a tape recorder for this moment. You sound like something out of the ark.'
‘Because I'm looking straight at what you're thinking of doing? Be honest, Jess. Admit you're valuing sexual attraction above loyalty. It's downright shoddy.'
Jess's face flamed. For a moment she looked almost ugly. ‘You're a Dodo!' she'd screamed. ‘We love each other and that's what we mean to do. What we're doing already. I should have known better than to mention it to you at all! You go on and on about how you loved Pa, but I was there, remember? It wasn't some great heroic passion that changed the world. You only think that now because you've lost him. If he was alive today, who knows …'
And then Kate had slapped her. A stinging blow across her cheek. She left her standing there, head bowed, hands hiding her eyes and her chestnut hair tumbling about her shoulders.
Ashamed because she had never before raised a hand to either of her children, Kate stumbled out of the narrowboat. She almost ran, with the wind in her face, along the canal towpath until weariness took over and she found herself at unfamiliar lock gates. A man leaning over his elbows on the bar advised her to go a quarter mile back and cross by the bridge, where a short walk would bring her to a railway station with a taxi rank.
She had arrived home exhausted, fell into bed in broad daylight and slept for ten hours. They had never quarrelled like that before. There had never been cause to. Other dramas had been cautiously steered clear of crisis. Not this time. It seemed – if not the end of the world – a point
passed to which they could never return: something both needed, now irrevocably lost.
BOOK: Last to Leave
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