An End to Autumn (19 page)

“That’s all right with me,” said Tom and waited till the others had got into the car before easing himself into the driving seat. They had been driving for a while down a more winding road than the ones they had hitherto encountered when Angela shouted. “This is just the place here, don’t you think?” Tom brought the car to a halt by a large stretch of pale dry grass with a loch on the westward side of it and a small stream and fence on the other.

He manœuvred the car on to the grassy verge so that other vehicles would be able to pass and got out, the others following Angela who had the kettle and teapot in her hand while Vera carried the bag with the cups, and sandwiches and sugar and milk and tea. His mother stood about, not quite sure what she should be doing.

“Now then,” said Angela again the organiser and director, “I will tell you what we will do. We shall first of all gather some branches and then a circle of stones. Oh, look at that, do you see him? Over there among the reeds.”

They looked but couldn’t see anything and then she shouted excitedly. “It’s a divine little duck and he’s peering out at us. He’s camouflaged by the reeds. Don’t you see his head, the poor little shy thing?” And then they finally did see the duck, hiding behind the reeds, its head peering out from between the green stiff bars and gazing at them. Across their faces passed a slight breeze as if the wind was beginning to rise.

They spent the next few minutes wandering among the trees at the side of the road gathering branches for the fire, Tom breaking them across his knees in order to make them small enough. Finally they had made a reasonable pile which they laid down beside the ring of stones that Angela had arranged.

“You may go for a walk if you wish,” she told them grandly. “I shall prepare the tea for you. That will be my work for today.”

“Are you sure you will be all right?” said Tom glancing at the dry pale grass.

“Of course I shall be all right. This is not the first time I have built a fire. You go and see what you can see.”

They left her bending over the circle of stones, her red cloak flaring and burning in the dry sunshine, as if it were itself a flame that she had coaxed out of the day, and walked along the side of the road next to the trees. They strolled in silence and finally stopped by the loch which was sharp and green with reeds and in which they could see some ducks swimming, and once a large white swan, bent down into the water drinking, its white rump high in the air, its beak deep in the water. Beyond the loch and in the distance they could see a farm with two horses cropping grass in front of it, one white and one brown.

They had been standing there for a little while in the autumn silence when Tom suddenly sniffed and said. “I think I smell smoke” and turning instinctively towards the place where they had left Angela he saw that there were little fires springing up in red rings around her and that she was waving her hands and shouting at them, though they had been so immersed in their gazing that they hadn’t heard.

Tom immediately ran back, Vera following him, and his mother walking last.

When he arrived at where Angela was standing in the middle of the rings of flame he saw that the grass, pale and dry, had caught fire in various places, as if the growing breeze had cast sparks here and there away from the centre.

“What are you doing?” he shouted in panic, sensing already that a conflagration was on the way, that the Fire Brigade would have to be sent for, that the flames might spread so rapidly that they would devastate the whole countryside before they could be put out: and indeed they could very well have done that, for the separate burning rings were becoming more and more numerous and searching for union with the others.

He began to jump into the burning clumps and stamp on them with his shoes but as he almost managed to extinguish one ring another sprang up fiercely to his left or right.

“Don’t be frightened, “Angela was shouting. “Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it lovely? Where’s your sense of adventure?”

And on the outer rim of the scattered fires he saw Vera and his mother, both watching, and neither making any effort to involve themselves though he could see his mother wringing her hands helplessly and Vera coolly gazing as if she were saying to herself, “What a stupid woman. What else could one expect of her?”

He jumped from clump to clump stamping fiercely, grinding his shoes into the flames whilst at the same time leaping away from them in case he got singed and shouting to Angela, “What the hell did you think you were doing? This fire will spread for miles. We should phone the Fire Brigade.” And he had visions of men in yellow helmets descending from a red engine spraying water from their hoses while their leader took his name and those of the others and said, “You can’t even walk in the countryside without making a nuisance of yourselves.” It was the inefficiency of the whole episode rather than its danger that irritated him.

But Angela not at all perturbed was dancing among the red rings crying, “It will go its own way. Fire will take its course. Isn’t that right, Vera?” she shouted. “It will go out eventually. Enjoy it while you can.”

And in her red cloak joyous and free and seemingly irresponsible as if it were all a show that she was presenting for their benefit she leaped among the flames that she had created, her face almost as black as a gipsy’s, while on the edge of the fire Vera stood disapprovingly glacial and remote saying nothing except that once she shouted to Tom, “Come back from there or you’ll burn yourself.”

And the fire began to roar around him as he stood in the middle, stamping and dancing, thrusting his foot into a flame and then withdrawing it and feeling the stink of smoke in his nostrils till a surprising thing happened and in the heat and glare he suddenly felt free and abandoned as if he had yielded to the fire’s power, as if since there was nothing that he could do about it and his efforts were having so little effect (for all around him sprang the remorseless living rings) he might as well let it rage recklessly and maliciously around him.

It was then when the fire was at its fiercest, the breeze whipping it to a peak, that Vera perhaps suspecting that it had become a phenomenon more dangerous that she had expected ran towards him and began to drag him away.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she shouted angrily. “Come back. You will be burnt. Come out of there. Will you come back? I’m going to send for the Fire Brigade.” And she pulled furiously at his sleeve.

“No,” he cried in a rapture of abandonment. “No, we’ll stay in the middle of it. It’s an adventure.”

“Will you come out of there?” Vera insisted pulling at him but he couldn’t follow her. “In that case,” said Vera, “I’ll stay with you.”

And she too began to jump up and down stamping the fires with her shoes, her face turning red in the light, with spots of dirt from the fire on it, her white dress losing its purity: so that the two of them were jumping up and down in the middle of the rings of fire, dancing and shouting at each other, as if they were prancing round Angela in a primitive form of worship, while on the outside of the ring the unconsidered Mrs Mallow stood passively suffering what she was unable to do anything about.

The fires sparked and hissed all around them, the light flashed from face to face, their shoes singed and black felt hot on their feet and as if intoxicated by the fire they danced and shouted while Angela answered in a gibberish of her own, improvised it almost seemed for the occasion, and for the first time for many months Tom felt light and free as if he were willing the fire to burn and destroy, to gather its power and annihilate everything in its path.

Suddenly in the middle of the conflagration he began to laugh and Vera looked at him in amazement till she began to laugh too, her face red and dirty, and Tom shouted, “It’s all right. How stupid we all were, apart from Angela. She knew all the time, didn’t you?”

“What are you talking about?” Vera shouted above the crackling of the flames, grasping his hand tightly.

“Don’t you see?” he shouted, “there’s no danger. The fire is going towards the loch and on the other side of it there’s a stream. It’s safe enough. It’ll burn itself into the water.” He looked back at the burnt blackness of the grass behind and forward to where the fire was burning though less furiously now that it had reached the marshy ground bordering on the loch on one side and on the stream on the other. Hand in hand with Vera he left the centre of the fires to find Angela standing beside his mother and talking to her. When the two of them arrived Angela turned abruptly from his mother and said, “It’s all right. I knew it was all right all the time.”

And so they stood there watching the fires burning themselves out, spluttering exhaustedly as they met the moistness, till they were finally all extinguished, and only a black waste lay across the ground over which they had travelled: and Tom felt a deep sadness as if some virtue had gone out of him.

“How did you succeed in doing that?” he asked Angela at last.

“I couldn’t have made the ring of stones tight enough and then the breeze strengthened,” she replied unabashedly. “Anyway you enjoyed the adventure and don’t say you didn’t.”

He didn’t answer her and then Angela who had been looking for a handkerchief to wipe her face said, “I seem to have lost my handkerchief. I must have dropped it.”

She left them and walked out into the scorched area where the grass had all been burned and bending down began to search.

“Maybe it was burnt,” said Tom as he and Vera began to search as well.

It was while investigating the bank of the stream that they found the frog, completely scorched and black, its limbs stretched out. Tom touched it delicately with an exploratory finger and it jerked convulsively.

“It’s alive,” he shouted to Vera. “Look. It’s still alive. Quick. Let’s take it to the stream.”

Very carefully he who in the past would have been content to look without touching gathered it in his hand, its body, like a miniature foetus, black and scorched and twitching slightly. He placed it on a wet stone in the middle of the stream but it remained motionless. He touched it delicately again and each time it made a faint movement under his hand. Vera watched intently and then suddenly shouted “Be careful.” She was gazing with an obsessed fixity. Then very delicately she tipped the frog into the stream and it lay there moving its limbs feebly, still alive, a rough black star. “It will live,” said Tom, “it will live.” He and Vera had their heads together and as he was about to rise to his feet she touched his arm urgently and said, “Wait, I want to see if it will swim.” They watched and slowly, slowly, it began to swim, it began to move its limbs in the water. Without raising her head, Vera said, “Tom, I’m going to have a baby.” He gazed at her uncomprehendingly in a dazzle of darkness and was about to speak when she said, “Don’t tell the others. Don’t tell them. Pretend that I haven’t told you.”

At that moment as he squatted beside his wife, whose white dress was flecked with black spots and whose face was red and dirty, and at the same time as he watched the frog gathering power in its scorched limbs in the water below, he felt as if he were in a dream, as if he couldn’t believe that what he had heard could refer to him. It was as if her announcement drawn out of her by the frog’s struggles must relate to someone else, so that he almost turned his head to look for the stranger to whom she was talking. Suddenly it was as if the whole sky, the whole earth, changed, as if there settled on him a weight of responsibility like a stone cloak, as if among the extinguished rings of fire he saw a new world. Clamping his lips together he took her hand and they walked towards the car.

“Well, I’m afraid,” said Angela unrepentantly, “that I’ve lost my handkerchief and my little experiment went wrong. We shan’t have any tea either, though I’m sure you enjoyed yourselves. It’s the little unexpected things that make life so interesting.”

They stared at her in astonishment, she was so determinedly unaffected by her own clumsiness, she seemed in fact to revel in it so much, she was not in the least ashamed or embarrassed and indeed she said, “We must accept the stray chances of life, my dear children. If that fire hadn’t occurred we would have had a boring day which we should not have remembered. In any case we may eat our sandwiches.” And they sat down on the bank of the road and ate them and Tom gazed at his wife as if seeing her for the first time, as if she contained within her both a hope and a threat, and yet at the same time the inexplicable remorseless thrust of life. He felt on the sandwiches the tang of smoke, the taste of the fire itself.

When they eventually got back into the car, she said with an effort, “I think we should go home now. There’s a breeze getting up anyway and it will turn cold.”

They drove back the way they had come very slowly as if Tom for some reason of his own were showing the countryside for the last time. After the hectic flurry of flames the trees seemed calmer and stiller, the lochs clearer and bluer, and the silence of the autumn day more present and insistent. They saw birds flying about the sky as if they were preparing to migrate and some perched on fences and telephone wires, their feathers trembling slightly in the breeze, their small heads already turned towards the lands that they would soon inhabit. There were bodies of rabbits on the road, squashed red and raw and flat, by travelling cars, and here and there were also the carcasses of seagulls.

Once they had to stop for a while in the middle of the road to wait for a crow that had alighted on the body of a rabbit and was pecking at it, raising its shining head now and again and looking around with a blank stare. Tom had an impulse to go out and throw a stone at it, as if he felt something obscene in its innocent feeding, and would have done so but that it reluctantly rose of its own accord from the ravaged rabbit whose guts he could see hanging out.

“Oh, look,” said Angela, “there’s the train,” and sure enough it was the four o’clock train winding among the brown hills, heading away from the small town towards the city. Tom refrained from looking at his mother who was sitting beside him, her hands clasped in her lap.