The Burden (6 page)

Laura grabbed at the baby, clutched her close beneath the sheltering wet towel. She stumbled towards the door, her lungs gasping for air.

But there was no retracing her steps. Flames barred her way.

Laura had her wits still. The door to the tank-room – she felt for it, found it, pushed through it to a rickety stair that led up to the tank-room in the loft. She and Charles had got out that way once on to the roof. If she could crawl across the roof …

As the fire-engines arrived, an incoherent couple of women in night attire rushed to them crying out:

‘The baby – there's a baby and the nurse in that room up there.'

The fireman whistled and pursed his lips. That end of the house was blazing with flame. ‘Goners,' he said to himself. ‘Never get
them
out alive!'

‘Everyone else out?' he asked.

Cook, looking round, cried out: ‘Where's Miss Laura? She came out right after me. Wherever can she be?'

It was then that a fireman called out: ‘Hi, Joe, there's someone on the roof – the other end. Get a ladder up.'

A few moments later, they set their burden down gently on the lawn – an unrecognizable Laura, blackened, her arms scorched, half unconscious, but tight in her grip a small morsel of humanity, whose outraged howls proclaimed her angrily alive.

‘If it hadn't been for Laura –' Angela stopped, mastering her emotions.

‘We've found out all about poor Nannie,' she went on. ‘It seems she was an epileptic. Her doctor warned her not to take a nurse's post again, but she did. They think she dropped a spirit lamp when she had a fit. I always knew there was something wrong about her – something she didn't want me to find out.'

‘Poor girl,' said Franklin, ‘she's paid for it.'

Angela, ruthless in her mother love, swept on, dismissing the claims of Gwyneth Jones to pity.

‘And baby would have been burned to death if it hadn't been for Laura.'

‘Is Laura all right again?' asked Mr Baldock.

‘Yes. Shock, of course, and her arms were burnt, but not too badly. She'll be quite all right, the doctor says.'

‘Good for Laura,' said Mr Baldock.

Angela said indignantly: ‘And you pretending to Arthur that Laura was so jealous of the poor mite that she might do her a mischief! Really – you bachelors!'

‘All right, all right,' said Mr Baldock. ‘I'm not often wrong, but I daresay it's good for me sometimes.'

‘Just go and take a look at those two.'

Mr Baldock did as he was told. The baby lay on a rug in front of the nursery fire, kicking vaguely and making indeterminate gurgling noises.

Beside her sat Laura. Her arms were bandaged, and she had lost her eyelashes, which gave her face a comical appearance. She was dangling some coloured rings to attract the baby's attention. She turned her head to look at Mr Baldock.

‘Hallo, young Laura,' said Mr Baldock. ‘How are you? Quite the heroine, I hear. A gallant rescue.'

Laura gave him a brief glance, and then concentrated once more on her efforts with the rings.

‘How are the arms?'

‘They did hurt rather a lot, but they've put some stuff on, and they're better now.'

‘You're a funny one,' said Mr Baldock, sitting down heavily in a chair. ‘One day you're hoping the cat will smother your baby sister – oh yes, you did – can't deceive me – and the next day you're crawling about the roof lugging the child to safety at the risk of your own life.'

‘Anyway, I
did
save her,' said Laura. ‘She isn't hurt a bit – not a bit.' She bent over the child and spoke passionately. ‘I won't ever let her be hurt, not ever. I shall look after her all my life.'

Mr Baldock's eyebrows rose slowly.

‘So it's love now. You love her, do you?'

‘Oh
yes
!' The answer came with the same fervour. ‘I love her better than anything in the world!'

She turned her face to him, and Mr Baldock was startled. It was, he thought, like the breaking open of a cocoon. The child's face was radiant with feeling. In spite of the grotesque absence of lashes and brows, the face had a quality of emotion that made it suddenly beautiful.

‘I see,' said Mr Baldock. ‘
I
see … And where shall we go from here, I wonder?'

Laura looked at him, puzzled, and slightly apprehensive.

‘Isn't it all right?' she asked. ‘For me to love her, I mean?'

Mr Baldock looked at her. His face was thoughtful.

‘It's all right for
you
, young Laura,' he said. ‘Oh yes, it's all right for you …'

He relapsed into abstraction, his hand tapping his chin.

As a historian he had always mainly been concerned with the past, but there were moments when the fact that he could not foresee the future irritated him profoundly. This was one of them.

He looked at Laura and the crowing Shirley, and his brow contracted angrily. ‘Where will they be,' he thought, ‘in ten years' time – in twenty years – in twenty-five? Where shall
I
be?'

The answer to that last question came quickly.

‘Under the turf,' said Mr Baldock to himself. ‘Under the turf.'

He knew that, but he did not really believe it, any more than any other positive person full of the vitality of living really believes it.

What a dark and mysterious entity the future was! In twenty-odd years what would have happened? Another war, perhaps? (Most unlikely!) New diseases? People fastening mechanical wings on themselves, perhaps, and floating about the streets like sacrilegious angels! Journeys to Mars? Sustaining oneself on horrid little tablets out of bottles, instead of on steaks and succulent green peas!

‘What are you thinking about?' Laura asked.

‘The future.'

‘Do you mean tomorrow?'

‘Further forward than that. I suppose you're able to read, young Laura?'

‘Of course,' said Laura, shocked. ‘I've read nearly all the Doctor Dolittles, and the books about Winnie-the-Pooh and –'

‘Spare me the horrid details,' said Mr Baldock. ‘How do you read a book? Begin at the beginning and go right through?'

‘Yes. Don't you?'

‘No,' said Mr Baldock. ‘I take a look at the start, get some idea of what it's all about, then I go on to the end and see where the fellow has got to, and what he's been trying to prove. And then,
then
I go back and see
how
he's got there and what's made him land up where he did. Much more interesting.'

Laura looked interested but disapproving.

‘I don't think that's the way the author meant his book to be read,' she said.

‘Of course he didn't.'

‘I think you should read the book the way the author meant.'

‘Ah,' said Mr Baldock. ‘But you're forgetting the party of the second part, as the blasted lawyers put it. There's the reader. The reader's got
his
rights, too. The author writes his book the way
he
likes. Has it all his own way. Messes up the punctuation and fools around with the sense any way he pleases. And the reader reads the book the way
he
wants to read it, and the author can't stop him.'

‘You make it sound like a battle,' said Laura.

‘I like battles,' said Mr Baldock. ‘The truth is, we're all slavishly obsessed by time. Chronological sequence has no significance whatever. If you consider Eternity, you can jump about in Time as you please. But no one does consider Eternity.'

Laura had withdrawn her attention from him. She was not considering Eternity. She was considering Shirley.

And watching that dedicated devoted look, Mr Baldock was again conscious of a vague feeling of apprehension.

Shirley walked at a brisk pace along the lane. Her racket with the shoes attached was tucked under one arm. She was smiling to herself and was slightly out of breath.

She must hurry, she would be late for supper. Really, she supposed, she ought not to have played that last set. It hadn't been a good set, anyway. Pam was such a rabbit. Pam and Gordon had been no match at all for Shirley and – what was his name? Henry, anyway. Henry what, she wondered?

Considering Henry, Shirley's feet slowed up a little.

Henry was something quite new in her experience. He wasn't in the least like any of the local young men. She considered them impartially. Robin, the vicar's son. Nice, and really very devoted, with rather a pleasant old-world chivalry about him. He was going in for Oriental Languages at the SOAS and was slightly highbrow. Then there was Peter – Peter was really terribly young and callow. And there was Edward Westbury, who was a good deal older, and worked in a bank, and was rather heavily political. They all belonged here in Bellbury. But Henry came from outside, and had been brought along as somebody's nephew. With Henry had come a sense of liberty and detachment.

Shirley savoured the last word appreciatively. It was a quality she admired.

In Bellbury, there was no detachment, everybody was heavily involved with everybody else.

There was altogether too much family solidarity in Bellbury. Everybody in Bellbury had roots. They belonged.

Shirley was a little confused by these phrases, but they expressed, she thought, what she meant.

Now Henry, definitely, didn't belong. The nearest he would get to it, she thought, was being somebody's nephew, and even then it would probably be an aunt by marriage – not a real aunt.

‘Ridiculous, of course,' said Shirley to herself, ‘because after all, Henry must have a father and a mother, and a home like everybody else.' But she decided that his parents had probably died in an obscure part of the world, rather young. Or possibly he had a mother who spent all her time on the Riviera, and had had a lot of husbands.

‘Ridiculous,' said Shirley again to herself. ‘Actually you don't know the first thing about Henry. You don't even know what his surname is – or who brought him this afternoon.'

But it was typical of Henry, she felt, that she should not know. Henry, she thought, would always appear like that – vague, with an insubstantial background – and then he would depart again, and still nobody would know what his name was, or whose nephew he had been. He was just an attractive young man, with an engaging smile, who played tennis extremely well.

Shirley liked the cool way in which, when Pam Crofton had pondered: ‘Now how had we better play?' Henry had immediately said:

‘I'll play with Shirley against you two,' and had thereupon spun a racket saying: ‘Rough or smooth?'

Henry, she was quite sure, would always do exactly as he pleased.

She had asked him: ‘Are you down here for long?' and he had replied vaguely: ‘Oh, I shouldn't think so.'

He hadn't suggested their meeting again.

A momentary frown passed over Shirley's face. She wished he had done so …

Again she glanced at her watch, and quickened her steps. She was really going to be very late. Not that Laura would mind. Laura never minded. Laura was an angel …

The house was in sight now. Mellow in its early Georgian beauty, it had a slightly lop-sided effect, due, so she understood, to a fire which had consumed one wing of it, which had never been rebuilt.

Irresistibly Shirley's pace slackened. Somehow today, she didn't want to get home. She didn't want to go inside those kindly enclosing walls, the late sun streaming in through the west windows on to the gentle faded chintzes. The stillness there was so peaceful; there would be Laura with her warm welcoming face, her watchful protecting eyes, and Ethel stumping in with the supper dishes. Warmth, love, protection, home … All the things, surely, most valuable in life? And they were hers, without effort or desire on her part, surrounding her, pressing on her …

‘Now that's a curious way of putting it,' thought Shirley to herself. ‘Pressing on me? What on earth do I mean by that?'

But it was, exactly, what she was feeling. Pressure – definite, steady pressure. Like the weight of the knapsack she had carried once on a walking tour. Almost unnoticed at first, and then steadily making itself felt, bearing down, cutting into her shoulders, weighing down on her. A burden …

‘Really, the things I think of!' said Shirley to herself, and running up to the open front door, she went in.

The hall was in semi-twilight. From the floor above, Laura called down the well of the staircase in her soft, rather husky voice:

‘Is that you, Shirley?'

‘Yes, I'm afraid I'm frightfully late, Laura.'

‘It doesn't matter at all. It's only macaroni – the
au gratin
kind. Ethel has got it in the oven.'

Laura Franklin came round the bend of the staircase, a slim fragile creature, with an almost colourless face and deep brown eyes set at an unusual angle that made them, in some curious way, look tragic.

She came down, smiling at Shirley.

‘Enjoy yourself?'

‘Oh yes,' said Shirley.

‘Good tennis?'

‘Not bad.'

‘Anybody exciting? Or just Bellbury?'

‘Mostly Bellbury.'

Funny how when people asked you questions, you didn't want to answer them. And yet the answers were so harmless. Naturally Laura liked to know how she'd enjoyed herself.

If people were fond of you, they always wanted to know –

Would Henry's people want to know? She tried to visualize Henry at home, but failed. It sounded ridiculous, but she couldn't somehow
see
Henry in a home. And yet he must have one!

A nebulous picture swam before her eyes. Henry strolling into a room where his mother, a platinum blonde just back from the South of France, was carefully painting her mouth a rather surprising colour. ‘Hallo, Mother, so you're back?' – ‘Yes, have you been playing tennis?' – ‘Yes.' There would be no curiosity, practically no interest. Henry and his mother would both be quite indifferent to what the other had been doing.