LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

how long the fire might last. Clara sped upstairs – but not to her sister’s room. For the moment she had almost forgotten about Edith. Instead she ran to a spare bedroom, and opening the drawers of a large chest, she began to shake out rolls of cloth and undo the great bags of woollen underwear. Mothballs bounced about the floor as she dug down into the piles with her fingers, but at last she had pulled out as big an armful as she could carry. The men were in the garden before her, however, making for the corner where a thin smoke still rose, and carrying between them as many inflammable objects as they had been able to lay hands on. With their awkward loads and anxious faces, they had the look of people working to save their possessions from a burning house, having caught up the first things which came to hand. James, in the lead, was carrying a basket-chair, piled up with raffia table-mats which he tossed on, one after the other, when he was still some distance away from the fire. Bursts of flame and a crackling like a forest going up forced them to stand aside when the chair went on; and the work-baskets, tea-cosies, clothes-brushes and picture-frames which followed the chair were lost at once in a blaze which sent sparks flying far above the chimneys of the house. This was no ordinary fire. It was more exhilarating than an explosion of sky-rockets. Beyond the vibrating circle where they stood, they caught glimpses of a house which appeared to rock gently on the quaking ground. Clouds, flowers and iron railings trembled together, and the agitation of their own faces made them appear to one another like persons undergoing, moment by moment, the most violent changes of emotion from quivering despair to the wildest glee. When the time came for Clara to unwrap her bundles of underwear their spirits were dampened.

      ‘Perhaps they will smother the fire,’ said Clara as she threw on the pants, vests and combinations bequeathed from uncles and great uncles who had died young, long before they could wear a hole in the wool. But when she saw the flames slowly eating through the outer layer she added: ‘There must be thousands of people who could do with them – people without a stitch to their backs. What a waste and a sin!’

      But the sin and the shame of it stirred them to even greater efforts, and they prodded at the fire until it leapt up again to devour a clothes-horse and a couple of small wooden cake-stands in a matter of minutes.

      It was dark before the fire at last fell apart into a smouldering heap of ashes. Clara and her brothers were so exhausted with their orgy of destruction that they could scarcely stand upright, but as they approached the house they lifted their heads and stared up at it boldly. A little of the stuffing had already been taken out of it – even through the darkness they could feel that. The stone did not seem as smooth to them now. They could imagine it dented, here and there, where the surface caved in over certain hollow patches, odd corners which were not packed so tightly as before, and in spite of their exhaustion they felt a quiet satisfaction in the evening’s work.

      After super Clara went up to see her sister. She was sitting up in bed, reading, looking fresh-cheeked and rested, and she glanced up with a smile when her sister came in. There was no mention of bonfires, but Clara asked casually, as she drew the curtains: ‘I suppose you will be getting up tomorrow?’

      ‘Hardly so soon,’ replied Edith. ‘No, not yet – it is not quite time for me to get up and come downstairs, if that is what you mean. But I will certainly dress and get up for tea in my bedroom. That will be a beginning and help to cheer you all up.’

      They were not cheerful as they brought up the heavy trays to her room next afternoon, but they sat with an expectant air, talking absentmindedly and listening for the sound of the lorry which arrived at this hour every week to remove the rubbish. They heard it at last a long distance away, coming up the steep road below their garden wall, and while it laboriously turned the corner of their drive, they excused themselves one by one and went out to meet it, accompanying it for the last few yards of the way as though guiding a triumphal car to the chosen place. When the three dustbin men saw this place – not the mean pair of ashcans, nor the paltry pile of tins, papers and grass-cuttings, but a great hillock of soft stuff, studded with glinting ornaments – they stopped some distance off and approached it reverently on foot. In five minutes, having prodded through the top layer, they returned to the family who were waiting nearby.

      ‘Say – what’s going on, here?’ asked one, pointing to what he held up in his other hand – a green china mermaid, who also pointed with a puzzled air to the wave on which she sat. ‘Are you moving off or what? Sure, that’s a funny way to be doing it – clearing out all the fancy stuff and hanging on to the plain. Maybe you’ve made a mistake, folks. We’re not buying and we’re not selling and we’re not mending and we’re not shifting the stuff to any other place. There, it’s on the lorry – Cleansing Department – and that’s us. In other words – your things are for the dump!’

      But as they only backed away, nodding and smiling, he went after them.

      ‘Tell us what’s up,’ he shouted. ‘For all I know you’ve got heirlooms and all tucked away under that little pile! And what about her?’ He brandished the mermaid in front of them, but James waved him back nervously and angrily, exclaiming: ‘Take it away! Take them all away! There is nothing to discuss. There is illness here – a nervous breakdown in the house. The things are to be removed in the normal way, and there is nothing more to be said!’ Still shouting he disappeared with the rest of them inside the house.

      The men now got to work on the pile with gusto and without wasting further words. The inmates of the house might be cracked, but the stuff they unearthed was unbelievably whole – basins and ewers, teapots and metal trays which had not taken a dint or a crack in fifty years, china baskets of unchipped violets and draped dancing figures without a pointed toe or finger missing. They lay together, smugly shining there amongst beaded shoes and piled soup-plates, as though on their usual spring-clean outing.

      The family did not come out again, but the men worked on in frenzied enthusiasm in case they might suddenly appear with a changed mind about their possessions. They now went at the pile without plan or method, scarcely looking at the stuff, but grimly lifting up the clinking armfuls towards the lorry. Small ornaments fell and were ground underfoot as they staggered about, and they began to shout and threaten one another over each coveted piece. Like some deep archaeological site, the heap revealed layers of life in the history of the house – layers which, although only laid down that morning, contained objects which had not, before that, seen the light of day for a generation. The flimsier stuff, skimmed from the tops of drawers and shelves, had been deposited first, and this the rising wind took up and whirled along with the dust and leaves. Clawing at the ground, the men ran, shouting, after ghostly, lacey evening gloves which spread themselves against tree-trunks, and oriental fruit-baskets and initialled collar-boxes which bowled, lightly as hoops, in front of them.

      At last, the furious slamming of the lorry doors brought the whole family to the windows in time to see the men drive off at a breakneck pace down the drive and around the corner. Behind them, where the dazzling hillock had stood, there was now only a churned-up patch of ground where fragments of glass and china lay, and on the long grass nearby stray ribbons and tassels hung mournfully. When the dust from the lorry had settled, the others looked at Edith who had stood beside them in her dressing-gown and was now turning to go back to her room.

      ‘You are surely not going back to bed, Edith,’ said Edgar reprovingly. ‘Not now. Not after you have seen all the changes that are going on these days. Will we expect you down for supper tonight? Surely you will dress and come down for a little while and tomorrow you will feel yourself again. Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed the gaps in the cupboards and the open space on the top landing. We have heard you opening and shutting the drawers all morning.’

      ‘I feel a different person – I admit it,’ Edith replied as she walked away, ‘– different, but not absolutely better yet. You certainly cannot hurry an illness like mine, Edgar. In a day or so. One more day, perhaps, will make all the difference. It depends on so many things.’ Her eyes rested for a moment on the things as she looked back from her bedroom. Calmly she stared through the other doors and at the heavy brass lamp on which a nymph, still smiling, writhed in an effort to hold up the fringed parchment shade, and beyond that to a massive wardrobe with its magnificent false top, and at the bursting trunks wedged so tightly under the beds that the mattresses above

Скачать книгу