Hills End (24 page)

The stove flamed out through the mist and exploded against the ground, not so much with sound, but with a sheet of yellow fire, and the bull stampeded in its final panic. It rushed into invisibility towards the hills, back towards its home.

Paul swung on his heels, panting, shaking, with a sharp pain in his side that came as much from fear as from breathlessness. Butch was frantically beating at the flames with a bag, but seemed to be feeding the fire with the draught. He wasn't getting anywhere, and the fire had to be stopped or the shop was gone.

‘Stop it, Butch!' he screamed. ‘You're making it worse.'

Paul spun along the counter, desperate for help. He wanted water, but there wasn't any; he wanted an extinguisher but couldn't find it; at least a few buckets of sand, but not even any sand.

‘Stop it, Butch!'

Paul dragged the fat boy from the counter and panted, ‘No, no, no! Some other way.'

Frances appeared at the window, deathly white, took one look and sobbed in bitter dismay. She didn't see Butch, didn't see Paul, saw only the fire crackling up the wall into the rafters.

Surely it couldn't be happening? Surely they had taken enough without this, too? It was her doing. In her haste she had used that beastly old stove again when she had vowed that she wouldn't.

She threw herself over the windowsill and saw the boys, standing helplessly, actually watching it burn, doing nothing, gaping. That one was Butch and that he was alive didn't register, but that the other was Paul did register, and she shrieked, ‘Do something! Put it out!'

Paul scarcely seemed to hear her. He seemed to be mesmerized, as he was, by his own helplessness, and by the simple fact that too much had happened. He had reached his peak and passed it. Frances felt she wanted to hit him, but she rushed past him to the storeroom door, flung it open, and slithered into that awful room. The extinguisher was beside the sink. She dragged it from the wall and smashed the glass seal on the edge of the bench and skidded out of the room again, turning on the tap, and directing before her an intense spray of liquid.

Paul saw her coming and had sense enough to dodge the vapour and thrust Butch out of its path. He stepped in beside Frances and took the extinguisher from her and vaulted onto the counter top and had smothered every flame in less than twenty seconds. The wall and the rafters were charred and smoking, but the fire was out.

He remained standing on the counter, sheepishly, fumbling for the tap to turn the extinguisher off.

‘We couldn't find it,' he said. ‘Didn't think of the storeroom.'

Frances nodded and wanted very badly to cry, but she didn't. She had become aware that it was Butch who was beside her, absently licking honey from his fingers. She didn't understand why and was much too near hysteria to question anyone. Instead, she said, ‘It was my fault, anyway. I shouldn't have left the stove unattended…I'll light a new one.'

Her hands were trembling so violently that Paul said, ‘I'll light it for you.'

‘No, no. You—you get Miss Godwin. Butch, find yourself some clothes, or you'll catch your death, then get me some water. You used it in your filthy old sausages so you can get it for me.'

Paul didn't know what she was talking about, but Butch did, and all went their separate ways.

 

Adrian came down into the township with a slender notebook in his pocket and a very fat volume tucked under his arm. He was escorted by a pack of dogs—a boxer, two spaniels, a collie, a Scottie, and the infamous mongrel terrier known to his master as Buzz. Where they came from Adrian didn't know, except that their sudden appearance had given him a big fright.

They were the dirtiest looking dogs he had ever seen, caked in mud, but in boisterous good humour, obviously delighted to find him and all too affectionate. They jumped over him and pawed him, barking and yelping with excitement, and he wisely decided that there were too many of them to resist. Adrian had to take their mud and suffer it. He didn't want to be torn to pieces. Dogs in a pack were not to be argued with.

Adrian had reached a decision, and it was a difficult decision for a boy so burdened with his fears of what other people thought of him. Adrian liked to be on top, and usually was, where there was no real challenge to his courage. That by his own actions he had dropped to the bottom had forced him to look hard at himself, and his judgment was much harder than the judgment of his friends. They understood him better than he understood himself.

He had admitted that he was a coward. He had admitted that Paul had gone out in the middle of the night to carry on with a job that he had started. He had eaten his humble pie and all he really wanted to do now was hide. But he couldn't hide. He had to return to them and face them, but it was not his nature to return to the bottom. He had to go back and climb to the top again. He admitted to himself that he couldn't sit on top if it were to demand physical bravery. He wasn't made of the right stuff, but if he set his mind to it he could think and he could plan. And he had done that. He had planned for more than an hour at his father's desk, picturing Hills End as it had been and as it was now, gradually seeing it not as a wreck but as a tremendous challenge.

Gradually, Adrian had become excited. With no one to hear him and no one to see him, working only in his own mind, carried forward by the power of his imagination, lost in his concentration, he had devised his plan as his father had done, years before him. His only doubts had come when he had finished, when he had started down the hill. How was he to convince the others? How was he to regain their confidence? They'd laugh him out of the shop. Some boys could laugh themselves out of those situations by laughing with the people who laughed at them, but not Adrian. If they laughed at him it would be the finish.

In the midst of the yapping dogs he moved towards the shop, still excited, but nervous, still blushing whenever he thought of the miserable spectacle he had made of himself before his friends. That had been early in the morning, about seven o'clock, but now it was well after nine and the fog had lost its density. Perhaps the warmth of the invisible sun was managing to penetrate deeper into the great cloud bank. Perhaps the clouds were lifting. Perhaps soon the fog would begin to swirl up out of the valley and vanish into nothing, mysteriously, as it sometimes did.

How wonderful it would be to see the sun again!

Yes, the fog was going up, because he could see the timber mill and the river of mud that was the Magnus, still high above its banks, but less violent, less far-reaching than it had been. He could see the power shed, still standing in the midst of destruction. Its floor was of concrete eight inches thick, and its walls and roof were of iron, bolted together. It was strong enough to survive almost anything.

And there was the shop, visible now, at a hundred and fifty yards. Deserted it seemed to be. The sound of the dogs had brought no one out. Perhaps they were not there!

Could it be that he was alone? Could it be that they had fled or journeyed out towards the bridge at Fiddler's Crossing? No, they would have gone to search for Miss Godwin! Or perhaps Paul had not returned. His thoughts and emotions were possessed by one doubt after another, and he realized he had caught himself at his old game. He was allowing his imagination to run away. He was frightening himself simply by thinking of things that might not have happened. His plan would never work if fear were permitted to tangle him up again.

He moved off, went a few more yards, then saw a movement at the shop window. He could have sworn it was the barrel of a rifle. That really startled him until he heard Paul calling, ‘Come on! I thought you might have been the bull.'

Adrian hurried on with all the speed he could produce, short of breaking into a run. He had forgotten the bull, not entirely, but certainly as a threat to himself. The dogs accompanied him joyfully and he became aware of them again. With six dogs to protect him, no bull could hurt him, so he slackened his pace to a carefree amble and arrived at the shop window feeling pretty sure of himself.

Three heads were there to greet him—Paul, Maisie and Harvey. Harvey, certain that he had recognized Buzz's bark, was overjoyed and leapt to the ground and romped with his dog. Maisie, too, had heard her family's boxer, and hugged the bedraggled thoroughbred to her, and for an instant thought again of the twenty-five guineas he had cost, but if he had cost a hundred pence or a hundred pounds it wouldn't have made any difference.

Maisie, then, glanced towards Adrian. ‘Thanks for finding him,' she said. ‘I—I just didn't guess that you'd gone looking for the dogs. I've thought some awful things about you. I'm sorry…'

Adrian knew he had gone pale and he saw Maisie's words as yet another test of his honesty. Maisie didn't mean them that way, but Adrian knew if he dared let them pass unanswered his self-respect would be gone again.

‘I didn't find the dogs,' he said. ‘They found me.'

Perhaps Maisie didn't hear him, or if she did she was kind enough to ignore it. ‘Thanks,' she said. ‘I'm so glad you've brought him back.'

‘Where have you been?' said Paul.

‘Home.'

Adrian climbed over the sill and dropped inside. ‘Did you get Miss Godwin?'

Paul nodded coolly. ‘Didn't think you cared, but we got her. And we got a lot more. We've had trouble one way and another. I hope you were comfortable at home?'

Adrian started trembling. They were going to abuse him. Before long they'd be laughing and jeering. He took a deep breath.

‘How is Miss Godwin?'

‘Why don't you take a look for yourself?'

Adrian brushed past Paul and saw Gussie and Frances regarding him from the distance, without expression, and saw Butch with his usual, generous, cheerful smile.

‘Hi, Butch,' he said.

‘Hi, Adrian.'

Adrian's nostrils started twitching to a nasty odour. The smell in the gloomy shop was most unusual, like a doctor's surgery, like something burnt and smouldering, like something bad. There had been trouble, all right, as Paul had said.

‘Adrian has been home,' Paul said loudly, ‘to have a rest. To get away from it all. Lucky Adrian.'

It was an awkward silence, and Adrian didn't quite know what to do with it. He felt, deep inside, that it wasn't right that he should break that silence, because he'd be bound to try to defend himself. The trouble was he didn't know whether the others agreed with Paul or disagreed with him. He didn't know whether they were sympathetic or hostile. Then he saw Miss Godwin, lying like a dead person, wrapped up in blankets, with a kerosene radiator beaming its heat onto her, and he forgot his own problem and walked to her quietly and looked down into her white face.

Her eyes were closed, but she was breathing.

Adrian grunted to himself, heavily, and felt like a Judas, and saw then, beyond Miss Godwin, dozens and dozens of pieces of paper on the floor, wrinkled and torn, that had been peeled, like the skins of an onion, from a screwed-up lump of paper pulp. Instantly, he knew what it was.

Adrian was always a sensitive person; it was his nature. He could feel things. And he could feel something at this moment. It was like a black cloud pressing down upon everyone. He had the strangest feeling that they had given up, that they were all beaten. Just what had happened he didn't know. Yes, and there had been something in Maisie's manner—Maisie, of all his friends usually the most matter-of-fact—that hadn't been healthy, an unusual tremor in her voice, a nervousness about her, as though she had been trying to fight down a desire to scream.

Adrian sighed and caught a glimpse of the charred wall, of Frances, of Gussie, of Butch smiling no longer, and heard the footsteps behind him that were Paul's.

Adrian closed his hand tightly on the notebook in his pocket, placed on the counter the fat volume he had carried beneath his arm, and turned to face Paul again. ‘Leaving me out of it, what's wrong?'

Paul wasn't as full of nastiness as Adrian had thought. His lip trembled. ‘Everything.'

‘In what way?'

‘You were telling us yesterday—golly, was it only yesterday?—you were telling us that you heard my dad and your dad talking…' Paul looked very young. ‘They said if we were left on our own to fend for ourselves we'd die. Honest, when I thought about it afterwards I reckoned they were silly. Of course we wouldn't die…' Paul paused again, perhaps frightened, perhaps embarrassed, perhaps doubting the wisdom of what he was about to say. He looked at his feet. ‘We've only been alone two days and—and—'

‘And look at us now?' suggested Adrian.

‘Yeah.'

‘But it's the third day, really, isn't it?'

Paul shrugged. ‘What's the difference? We
can't
take it. We can't survive. Every single one of us, one after the other…Surviving is so much more than just finding something to eat. We haven't even got a leader. There's not one of us strong enough…That's why we're not captains at school. We're all right while someone else is telling us what to do. We're just not getting anywhere. We're all arguing and squabbling and being nasty.'

Paul started shaking and finally burst out with his greatest woe,
‘And what are we going to do with Miss Godwin?'
He couldn't stop his tears then and it was a long, long time since he had cried with anyone watching. ‘Even she wasn't strong enough,' he choked. ‘Even Miss Godwin. She tried to destroy her book.'

How odd it was! Adrian could see that Paul wasn't the only one. Paul, perhaps, had been up all night and was exhausted, but the others were not exhausted? Yet they were just as low in spirits. Adrian had to be fair, he had been like it himself, but he wasn't now. He could feel himself growing stronger; he could feel his hand closing even more tightly about his notebook; he could almost feel himself turning into a man like his father.