Bad Girls Good Women (45 page)

And then she recalled their first visit to Ladyhill, when she had seen Alexander in the different light of this silent, sombre place, and had fallen in love with him. He had told her that he would live here one day. ‘After my father dies,’ he had said. ‘That’s the understanding.’

She had accepted the provision then. She had known it all along. She had even envied Alexander for his roots, spreading out through the Ladyhill earth. There were, of course, no grounds for dissent now. It was in Julia’s nature to understand all that in the few seconds that they stood looking at each other, and to reach her own decision.

‘Well,’ she said lightly, ‘jobs come and go. If we’re going to live here, Alexander, we shall have to liven the place up.’

He beamed at her, pleased and happy, and Julia felt satisfaction in her own secret generosity. Alexander wound his arms tighter around her. ‘Of course we will. You said the house needed lots of people. Everyone will come, you know. We’ll make sure of that.’

‘We owe ourselves a party. A housewarming.’ Julia slid out of his arms, spinning around the room, suddenly excited. ‘We’ll make it a wonderful housewarming. New Year’s Eve. The best party of all time. Shall we?’

Alexander watched her, loving her. ‘Of course,’ he answered. ‘What else?’

So Julia gave up her job, and they closed up the Markham Square flat.

‘Don’t sell it, or even let it,’ Julia begged. ‘There are still weekends, and holidays, aren’t there?’

Alexander could afford indulgence. ‘Of course. We’ll keep it for you to use whenever you want,’

They moved down to Ladyhill together.

A little to Julia’s surprise, Faye quickly moved out to a cottage on the estate.

‘Don’t want the old folks in the way, do you?’ she insisted. Julia grew to like her, seeing Sophia’s innocent good nature in her mother too. She also thought that, beneath the perfectly judged display of grief for the loss of her husband, Faye seemed rather relieved to be handing over responsibility for the estate to Alexander and retiring in peace to the chintzy cottage set in its manageable little garden.

Whether or not she had enjoyed it, Faye had filled the public role of Lady Bliss much better than Julia promised to do.

‘I’m not Lady Bliss,’ she wailed to Alexander. ‘She’s someone old. Your mother. Your stepmother.’

Alexander was indifferent to his tide. ‘It’s only a name,’ he shrugged. ‘It doesn’t get the roof repaired. I wish it did.’

But Julia couldn’t get used to hers, nor to the obligations that seemed to go with it.

‘It isn’t me.’

‘Yes,’ Alexander said gently. ‘It is you, because you are my wife.’

At Ladyhill, all the people in the village and on the surrounding farms called her Lady Bliss. ‘I’m Julia,’ she insisted, over and over again. They stared at her distrustfully.

‘Don’t you see?’ Alexander asked her. ‘They want you to be who you are. They don’t want some way-out London dolly.’

After a moment, Julia had asked him, ‘And do you?’

He kissed her then. ‘I want what I’ve got, and I don’t ever want anything else. I love you.’

So it was, for the few weeks that they had together before the night of Julia’s party. Julia chafed at the conventions of country life and at the matronly role her position required her to play, but in private, within the thick walls of Ladyhill, she was surprised by the depth of her happiness. She loved new challenges, and she was amused and entertained to find herself mistress of a household as grand as Ladyhill. She was full of plans for it and she rummaged through the silent rooms, moving the furniture and dragging back the curtains. She even went out into the wintry gardens and poked in the flowerbeds, under the suspicious eye of the old gardener.

‘We’ll bring the place alive,’ she promised Alexander.

‘You already have,’ he said softly. He reached out for her and caught her as she pretended to evade him. They clung together, laughing and then breathless and then greedy for each other. Alexander drew her down and they made love on the floor in front of the big stone hearth.

Two weeks before Christmas, Julia’s doctor confirmed that she was pregnant.

She kept the secret to herself, without really understanding why. She had planned to tell Alexander on New Year’s Eve, at the party.

Then the fire came.

In the aftermath of it, it seemed that the flames had consumed everything. Not just the house, but their hopes, the soft growths of their happiness, and in the end the love itself.

Julia knew that it was all her fault. Everything that happened on New Year’s Eve, the terrible things, and everything afterwards, Right at the beginning, while the ashes were still smouldering and Alexander and Flowers’s girl were lying in the hospital, guilt took root inside her.

The flames were swift and devastating, but the slow spread of guilt was just as deadly, like a malignant tumour, the more frightening for its invisibility. It took a long time for Julia to understand that against the fire and the guilt, she and Alexander stood such a small chance together. It took longer still for her to forgive herself for what happened.

And up until the moment when the flames took hold, she might have believed that the two of them were invincible.

Julia enjoyed every moment of the preparations for her party. She invited all the old friends from London, and Alexander’s country friends and neighbours. Only Felix couldn’t come, because he had gone to New York with George. Julia persuaded a rock and roll band from the Rocket to make the journey to Ladyhill, and she ordered champagne and planned the decoration of the house in minute detail.

The huge Christmas tree was to be the centrepiece. When the men carried it in, Julia clapped with pleasure. The tip touched the ceiling of the panelled drawing room, and the dark, aromatic branches fanned out in perfect proportion. It was Julia’s idea to decorate the tree with real candles. She wanted to recreate a Victorian Christmas, like the ones she had dreamed of as a girl in Fairmile Road. Alexander argued in favour of ordinary tree lights, but he gave way to her in the end, as he did in all small things.

The house was decorated and the food was prepared and laid out with the silver and glass in the dining room. The musicians set up their instruments, the candles were lit and the guests came, flooding into the old house until it shook with music and laughter.

Julia floated through the rooms, watching her party, her creation. If she didn’t feel quite a part of it she believed that was because she had made it, and her sadness was all for the decade that was slipping away.

Then at the best moment of the party when the best guests were drawing closer under the spell of it, and the tree was shining at the height of its beauty, it shivered, and fell in an arc of flame.

The flames burnt themselves into Julia’s head. Wherever she looked, in the days after the fire, she saw them dancing. They came back most often in her nightmares, bringing convulsions of horror and fear, but even in daylight they leapt in front of her eyes. Over and over again the black outline of Ladyhill reared over her. The windows were obscene red mouths, and their light licked the swelling underside of the smoke pall. The noise was always there too. It was a merry, hungry crackle of flames, and the splinter and roar as old wood and brick succumbed to them.

At first, it had seemed that the house was their only victim.

There were the seconds of blind panic as the flames licked up the old velvet curtains, and the wood panelling began to crackle, and then the guests choked and stumbled, screaming directions to each other, out into the courtyard. They huddled together, shivering in the cold, seeing the busy flames shoot upwards.

It was Julia who remembered Johnny Flowers and his girl. She and Alexander blundered between the huddles of people, searching for them.
The party to end all parties
, Johnny had said. Johnny and the girl were nowhere to be found. Alexander had turned to face the house, and Julia had seen the light of the fire reflected in his eyes. ‘They must be still inside.’

Alexander broke away from her side, unthinkably running towards the house. The heat and the smoke seemed to reach out for him.

Julia screamed, ‘Stop him. Don’t let him go in there.’

People ran after him, some trying to pull him back, others beating towards the stone portico behind him.

The others stumbled backwards from the fire, defeated by it, but it took Alexander into itself and the noise seemed to grow louder, the red glare intensified.

‘He’ll die in there,’ Julia heard herself screaming.

The silence and stillness of the crowd of people seemed the more shocking because of the fire’s wild energy.

Mattie was there. The fierce shadows thrown by the blaze made their faces like skulls as she and Julia faced one another. The two of them, as they had always been. They heard the bells of the fire engines.

Julia ran towards the big red engines. The torn tails of her satin dress swished around her calves as she plunged forward.

‘My husband’s in there. Save him. Oh, save him.’ Her screams tore her throat. ‘And Johnny, and his girl. Save them.’

The firemen were big men in helmets, and their silver buttons reflected the red light. They put Julia aside and ran past her, their helmets tilted as they looked up at the roof. The black ribs of it showed now, as the bright flames broke free. Fire hoses uncoiled like serpents and a turntable ladder swayed upwards. Julia saw the firemen running, as Alexander had done, in under the stone arch.

Mattie stood on one side of her, and on the other was the man with the sideburns, Flowers’s friend. Julia had danced the conga with him in the candlelight, seemingly an eternity ago. The rest of the guests stood in a silent huddle, frozen with shock. A spout of water arched from the brass mouth of a hosepipe and fell between the black roof beams. The water hissed into steam, seeming no more than a trickle against the fire’s triumphant strength. Julia’s eyes were fixed on the door arch and the pulse of its smoky breath. Her mouth and chest burned with the smoke, and tears poured unnoticed down her face.

She didn’t know how many minutes they stood there. The hiss and crackle and the fearful red light took control of time and will and left her with nothing but terror. She was still calling out, ‘Bliss.’

She saw a sudden movement in the doorway. There was a beam of healthy light, the yellow glaze of a strong flashlight catching an oilskin shoulder. A fireman ran out of the shroud of smoke, and Julia saw that the bundle slung over his shoulder was the body of a girl. Mattie’s hand clutched at Julia’s wrist, but she shook it off and ran forward. An ambulance had come, and more dark uniforms dashed past her with a canvas stretcher.

They laid it out on the ground, in the shelter of one of the clipped yew trees.

The fireman stooped and tenderly laid his burden on it.

What she saw there stayed with Julia for the rest of her life.

The girl was alive, because her head rolled to one side. But the beat of relief in Julia’s throat was followed by a spasm of horror. She was looking at her face as it turned, thinking,
Who is she?

But no one could have recognised Flowers’s girlfriend. Her face was nothing like a face. It was a raw slab, like red melted wax, with ragged black holes punched into it.

And then broad backs knelt down in front of it, and hid the burned face from Julia’s sight. She put the back of her hand up to her mouth and bit into the knuckles. The pain of it seemed a long way off, belonging to someone else. But it competed with the nausea that rose to choke her, and stifled the moan in her throat. The stretcher was lifted, swaying, and carried away to the ambulance.

Someone was shouting.

Julia turned her head, back to the doorway. She saw the gleam of yellow light again, and the firemen with another burden. There were two of them, and they were carrying Bliss between them. His head lolled backwards out of her sight. He had lost one of his patent leather shoes and his foot dangled in its black silk sock. The legs of his trousers were torn, showing smoke-blackened skin.

‘Julia …’

It was Mattie again, her arm around Julia’s waist to support her.

‘I want to go to him,’ Julia said clearly.

She blundered forward and knelt down as they were lowering Bliss on to the second stretcher. Julia ducked her head for an instant, and then looked at his face. It was blackened, and there was blood oozing from a deep graze on the left cheek. The eyes were closed, but it was Bliss’s face. His mouth hung open and he took a ragged gasp of air.

He was alive. Julia was shuddering with relief, and they gently put her aside and began to work on him. It was then that she saw his hands. They were drawn up into claws, and they were red and melted like the girl’s terrible face. The sleeves of his dinner jacket and the shirt underneath were charred, and the fibres stuck to the burned flesh. Further up, up to his shoulders, there were little coils of scarlet where the cloth still smouldered. Julia broke free again from the restraining hands, just as the rescuers lifted Alexander’s stretcher. She reached forward and tried to beat out the burning threads with her own hands.

‘Let me go with him,’ she begged, but they closed the ambulance doors on the two stretchers.

‘The police will take you down to the hospital. Let the ambulance get there as quickly as it can.’ One of the firemen led her away. The blue light on the ambulance roof flashed impartially over the watching faces as it began to revolve. The high white vehicle rolled away and the siren sawed through the darkness. The sound of it was suddenly louder than the fire.

‘Flowers,’ Julia said. Her eyes fixed on the door again, and the firemen. With a sudden surge of hope, she saw that the jets of water were stronger than the flames. Wherever new tongues of fire flickered out, water spurted to douse them The smoke was thicker and blacker, and the crackle of the fire’s progress had given way to the hiss of rising steam.

She stared through the rolling smoke at the exposed black ribs of the roof beams. Little blazing fragments fell, and thick, oily smuts drifted in the light wind. The smell of the fire was like a gag thrust into her mouth.