The Backward Shadow (29 page)

He didn't move or speak, but I felt such a pressure of silent anguish in him that I had a spasm of terror that he would somehow burst through my fingers, that he would lie in a moment or two like a blown tyre, in broken chunks round my feet. I felt more for him in that dreadful moment than I'd ever felt for anyone in my life, more than for Toby, even more than for David, who might one day—God forbid—need help as terribly and ask for it as silently and rawly, and then turn away with a wrenching, sobbing groan because neither I nor anyone else could give it to him.

I took him in my arms as well as I could—poor, stiff, defenceless, terrified, admirable man. His hands, so male and protective and capable, now kept clenching and opening, clutching at me as if he were plummetting through emptiness, and I felt my heart break. I'd have given anything—my body first of all—to help him, and I tried to let him feel that; but I think he was beyond understanding anything so earthy and ordinary as the offer of what is, after all, the most basic life-thing. A little while before, he had needed this, he was within reach of its help; but now he had gone beyond it. He didn't need or recognise any of the more refined feelings or desires; the one great lust which was firing and rending him was the final one, the violent, passionate, undefeatable will for life itself.

Everything changed for me in those extraordinary moments. I felt myself expanding inside, as if the wind of Henry's suffering were blowing my soul up like a shrunken rubber balloon. I felt that, till then, I'd known nothing, seen nothing and been nothing—I had hardly scratched the surface of life. Perhaps—is such a mammoth irony possible?—one never does taste life until death is closing in. Henry has been dead now for five years, and inevitably I've forgotten many things about him, including his face (incredibly, no photograph of him seems to exist). But his hands at that moment I can remember precisely, down to the last hair, the last small callous beside one flat, practical thumb-nail. And I remember the weave of
his jacket across the shoulders, the sandy bristles on his neck, the wet feeling of his tears through my shirt. Exactly, I remember them. And when I do, I feel myself beginning to cry as one only cries for a dead person whom one deeply loved, and loved with a special intensity. When I think of him now, and of Toby, both lost to me, I think perhaps I loved Henry more; certainly the pain of remembering and longing for him is just as acute. Perhaps it's because I loved him
better
; nothing ever spoilt it until his death. But then, with Henry things were relatively simple.

For a long time after the tears stopped he just sat there, passive and exhausted, his head on his arms on the table, with me touching him fearfully here and there—I couldn't bring myself to stroke or kiss him; I didn't know what to do with him. I loved him and pitied him so much that my skull ached and my skin crawled; I was afraid to look at him, afraid he would be ashamed to look at me. But after a long time he slowly and stiffly sat up, took out his handkerchief and blew his nose, and then got awkwardly to his feet, leaning against the table. There was a great emptiness in the air between us, the emptiness of a question—what could we say now, what could we do—what could we even safely feel? He stared at the black window and I sat down limply, worn out and still aching from that moment of sudden growth. And so we stayed, still and apart, until the knocking began.

Henry turned, and our eyes met for the first time—for the very first time, it seemed to me. The looks we exchanged simply said, ‘Who's that?' and ‘I don't know.' But with that much said, our eyes clung together, fascinated by the depths each saw in the other's, now that we were truly friends.

More knocking came, heavy and urgent. Henry, suddenly calm and controlled, came across to me and gave me his hand to help me up. We stood for a moment, facing each other, close together, and he held my hand very lightly and we stared at each other; the kisses I had for him then, and which he knew about although I kept them back, were the same sort that I gave to David.

The knocking stopped for a moment, then began again. Henry dropped my hand. ‘I'll go,' he said. When he walked away from me, I was left there, staring at the wall. Something tremendous had happened to me. I didn't know what it was then. I recall a pang of guilt that had some connection with Dottie, so perhaps, in the bewildered aftermath of that emotional explosion, I was confused enough to wonder fearfully if I were in love. But I need not have worried. It was love all right, but not—if only she had realised it!—of a kind which threatened Dottie. It was something right outside the experience of both of us, unfortunately. It seems to me now incredibly sad that she and I, who could have sworn that the word ‘friendship' applied to us, didn't know the real meaning of the word, at least not until later. Friendship, like other kinds of love, has to be tested in the fire. Henry's and mine was born in it.

The knocker was a policeman who had come to tell us that the post office was on fire and that the fire was threatening to spread to our shop. Dottie, warned by some sixth sense—I wondered why it had not functioned with respect to Henry—that something menaced her treasures, was already dressing, white-faced and jittering, when I rushed up the stairs to call her. With Henry already in the police-car, and Dottie half-way out to join him, I hesitated about leaving David alone. But he never woke in the night and the emergency was so great that I had to leave him. It was a ridiculously, an outrageously wrong decision, I should have stayed, but luck was with me in this at least. When we returned, hours later, he was just as I had left him.

We drove at what seemed a fantastic speed back over the pitted roads to the village. The whole place was awake; we could see the glow from the far end of the High Street, and the crowd, like clotted flies on blood, against it. Dottie was out of the car before it had stopped and was forcing her way through, threshing and hitting out like a madwoman. I didn't see her again for some time. The fire-engine from the neighbouring town must have had a break-down because it had still
not arrived; the post office was well alight, and in fact the roof fell in just as we got there, sending up a vast curling blast of smoke and sparks and a deep, baying grunt from the crowd as if from a blow in the stomach. As the people in front pressed backwards, the policeman, Henry and I managed to wriggle through to the front. There was a wide open space between the crowd and the shop, but even so their faces were infernally lit up like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, with gaping holes for mouths and the effect of their hair being ablaze. The sparks and bits of burning wood were raining down on the roof of our shop, which was separated from the post office by the narrowest of passages.

The policeman was shouting to another, who was ineffectually standing in front of the crowd, ‘Have you got them out?' I thought he must mean all Dottie's beautiful things, some of which I could see in the darkened window when the glare was not reflected on it; the heat was ferocious, and I shielded my face, feeling Henry close beside me; I was quite quiet inside. Then the other policeman said, ‘Yes, they're both out,' and I suddenly knew he meant the Stephenses. He went on shouting: ‘The old boy started it, of course … dotty—I always said he should be put away—' Just then some other part of the house's interior fell in, and the increased blast of heat sent us all cowering a pace backwards.

I looked round for Dottie, and spotted the two old people. They were in the centre of a little knot in the crowd rather thicker than the main body of it. I sidled over towards them, trying to protect that side of my face from the heat. Mr. Stephens was sitting in the road on a chair from somewhere; a rug had been thrown over him and he was staring blankly at the inferno he had caused, only his hands twitching and dancing like two rabid animals on his knees. His wife was beside him, gripping his shoulders. Unlike his, her face as she looked at the burning building was alive and full of horror and shock. Neighbours were clustered round, some obviously trying to urge them to come away, but they remained there, caught and ossified, as it were, by the awfulness of the scene. They both
wore nightclothes with coats on top; her hair was all undone and wild and her face was black with smuts. Shock and the violent glaring light had wiped away the lines of age for the moment; she looked like a grubby, horrified little girl in her nightgown.

Suddenly she seemed to come to herself a little, and began to turn her head this way and that, looking for something in a dazed sort of way. She saw me, her eyes slid past then snapped back. ‘Jane!' she screamed out. ‘Jane!' The crowd moved to let me get to her side, and she clutched my arm, shaking me and saying something that, because of the general hubbub, I couldn't hear at first. But then she put her mouth to my ear and shouted: ‘Mufferpaws! Where's Muffer! He's not in there, is he?' I shouted to one of the bystanders, ‘Where's their cat?' Nobody knew. The old woman clutched me with both hands and began to cry. All at once she looked old again, the illusion of childishness was gone and she looked old and ugly with rage and pain. ‘If he's killed my cat, I won't forgive him! I won't forgive him this time!' Then she actually turned on the old man, sitting there helplessly, and screamed at him, ‘I told you to leave the matches alone! Now see what you've done, you old villain, you've been and killed my Muffer, I shan't overlook it this time, not this time I won't! You'll see!'

He turned his half-empty face towards her slowly, and gave her a piteous look, like a scolded child fearing nothing so much as the loss of its mother's love. His slack, trembling mouth framed the words, ‘I didn't mean to—' and suddenly Mrs. Stephens doubled over, holding her waist as if in some unendurable pain, and began to run blindly towards the fire.

For a second nobody moved to stop her, so I ran after her and caught her easily. ‘What—' she gasped, weakly struggling against me, ‘What have I done—what did I say to him—oh, somebody save us—save our cat or I can't go on, I can't go on like this any longer …' She began crying, feebly and helplessly, shaking her head to and fro heavily between her hands.

‘You stay with Mr. Stephens. I'll try and find Muffer.'

I handed her back to her neighbours. I knew I had offered
to do the impossible—looking at that fiery interior left me in small doubt that the poor little beast was charred to a cinder by now. But still, cats are supposed to have a strong instinct for self-preservation. If it were not actually trapped, it might have escaped. I couldn't help feeling it was terribly important to find it if I could; only by putting the creature unharmed into Mrs. Stephens' arms could I save her from hating that poor old man forever.

I remembered that the only window in the house that was ever opened was at the back—the larder, or what had once been the larder, where the cat slept. Getting to the back through the passage was quite impossible—one couldn't approach the building from the front at all, since the wind was blowing the heat that way. But by running down to the end of the block and turning left twice, I came into a narrow alley which led past the bottoms of the tiny gardens. From here things did not look half so bad. The back part of the house was in silhouette from the blaze in the front, but it seemed to be intact, and so, I noticed, did our shop on the far side. Things were uncannily quiet here too, compared to the uproar in the front, to which was now faintly added the belated clanging of an old-fashioned fire-engine bell.

I scrambled over the fence into the Stephens's back garden, falling into the soft earth which I myself had loosened on that fatal Billings day. Standing there in the eerie, spark-filled dimness, wreathed in stray curls of smoke, I called urgently for the wretched cat. ‘Muffer! Muffer! Sh-wsh—wsh—Come on, pussy, come on—' I couldn't see a thing. I found my way to the back of the house. The smoke was thicker there, and all the windows seemed to be closed, but I got my fingers under the sash of the larder one and it jerked open. I expected the cat to come shooting out, but nothing happened. Apart from the smoke, and the crackling, it was hard to believe the front of the building was ablaze. Here, everything was dark and still. I felt quite safe in climbing in over the sill.

The cat wasn't in the larder. I opened the door, and a gust of smoke billowed out and nearly knocked me over backwards.

I choked and coughed and wanted to clear out, but there was no sign of any flames so I thought I'd just make sure the cat wasn't in the kitchen. I got down on hands and knees and crawled forward; there was much less smoke near the ground, and I could breathe all right, but it was pitch-dark and I bumped into several pieces of furniture before I reached another door on the far side.

This time I did hesitate. The ominous crackling was very loud now, and I remembered that the front part of the building, the shop part, which was now only one room away, had collapsed. I touched the door; it was hot. I knew that a sudden draught going through the house might bring the whole lot down in a moment. But then I heard the damn cat mewing in the living-room. It was a dreadful sound, quite unlike the ordinary voice of a cat—it was a high-pitched all-but-continuous miaow which convinced me that animals, too, can reach a point of despair. I really couldn't leave it there. It wasn't because of the Stephenses any more. It was the cat itself, and I don't even like cats, but you can't turn deaf ears to anything that's crying like that, in such hopeless terror of abandonment and nameless death.

I half-stood up and opened the door a very little. A lot of things seemed to happen at once. A terrific roar met my ears, like a furious live animal about to leap on me. After an eternal moment, the cat came bolting out with its fur full of sparks, its tail like a brush, fairly screaming from a wide-open mouth. It flashed past me and was gone, heading unerringly for the only escape route. The smoke seemed to fall into the room as if the opening door had released a great weight of it which had been leaning against the other side. I bent double and ran, my eyes clenched shut, stinging and burning, and not daring to breathe. I don't think I breathed again till I had fallen out through the larder window head first into the open air.