A Perfect Home (34 page)

‘Try to relax,' the man said. ‘You've inhaled a lot of smoke.' He put a mask over her face.

‘That was quite some stunt you pulled.' The fireman from before was squatting down beside her. ‘I never expected you to do that. One minute you were beside me, the next I had a baby in my arms and you were in there.' He pointed in the direction of what had been the house. The thatched roof was completely gone, burning timbers caved into a gaping hole where the roof had been. ‘I never had such a shock in my life. Anyway, you got him out. He's alive.' He smiled at her. ‘But promise you'll never try anything like that again. Leave it to the professionals next time.' He looked down kindly at her.

Claire tried to say she hoped there would never be a next time but she was overwhelmed with another bout of coughing.

‘Your husband's in the ambulance,' the paramedic said. ‘He's in a bad way .We'll get him to the hospital and find out what the damage is.'

Claire tried to get up.

‘Don't worry,' said the paramedic soothingly. ‘We'll get you in there too. You can go to the hospital together.'

‘You must really love him to have risked your life like that,' said the fireman, still smiling down at her. ‘Good luck to both of you.' He got up and walked away.

In the ambulance, Claire sat beside William. The oxygen mask looked huge clamped over his smoke-blackened face. She didn't dare look out of the back of the window as they started to move slowly away down the hill. She couldn't stop shaking; her teeth chattered together, her arm throbbed.

William groaned and his hand pulled at the mask. Claire looked anxiously at the paramedic, but he was busy with a piece of apparatus.

‘Don't worry,' said Claire, stroking William's arm. ‘You're safe. The children are safe. They're going to Sally's house now.'

William managed to pull off the mask. His eyes opened; they looked wild and shining. He stared at her as if he didn't recognise her.

‘It's all right,' she said. ‘We'll be at the hospital soon. There was a fire in the house but everyone's all right.'

‘The magazine,' he wheezed. ‘I wanted to burn the magazine, to burn that article. It went up so quickly. Too much paraffin. Everything started to catch fire.' He took a deep rasping breath. ‘I didn't care. I wanted to get rid of it all. I didn't want any of it any more.' He started to cough and splutter alarmingly. The paramedic got up and put the mask back on. William's eyes closed as he lost consciousness again.

Claire sat numb with shock. William had started the fire. William had destroyed their home – the home he loved. He could have killed the children.

It was all her fault.

Chapter Twenty-nine

‘Original features and modern luxuries …'

William was in intensive care; linked up to monitors and kept sedated, to stop him from moving; he looked older, smaller as though the fire had wizened him up. The doctors said his lungs were damaged but they'd probably make a reasonable recovery in time, the most serious injury was to his back. The lintel from the doorway had fallen across him and fractured his spine. A doctor patently explained to Claire, in detail that her horror-numbed brain found hard to follow, that with careful care, a back brace, rest, and physiotherapy he should be able to recover fully.

‘But he could be paralysed?' Claire realised her hands were shaking in her lap and her heart was beating so fast she was sure the doctor could hear it.

‘That would be the worst-case scenario. Let's try to think positively.'

Claire's arm was badly burned and her feet had been cut by splinters of glass from the French windows. She had to have twenty-two shards extracted under local anaesthetic. The doctors gave her painkillers for her arm and feet and tranquilisers for her tears and distress. She lay between the cold hospital sheets and tried to make sense of the series of hazy, horrific images that swam through her mind. Drifting in and out of a medicated sleep she woke from nightmares only to realise that reality was just as bad.

The children had stayed with Sally. William's mother came and offered to take them home with her but they cried and begged to stay where they were. William's mother seemed relieved to have the time to stay at her son's bedside instead of taking care of three traumatised grandchildren.

‘He'll be heartbroken, of course,' she said, as she stood beside Claire's hospital bed on a cursory visit to her daughter-in-law. ‘He put everything into that house and now it's all gone.' She took a tissue from inside her cardigan pocket and sniffed loudly.

‘He's still got his family,' Claire tried to say. ‘He's lucky …'

‘One careless act and his life destroyed,' her mother-inlaw interrupted. ‘You must have left the iron on or let something burn on top of the Aga. I expect it's easy to forget when you're struggling to look after so many children.'

Claire opened her mouth to protest but felt too weak. Anyway, the truth was so much worse and she was more culpable than if she had simply made a domestic slip.

Elizabeth and Brian arrived from France while Claire was still in hospital. Her mother held her hand and stroked her hair as if Claire was a little girl again. It made her feel guilty. She knew she didn't deserve sympathy or kindness.

Brian went to the house and found Macavity, frightened and hungry, hiding in the old wood shed. He left him there but took food and a box of blankets for him to sleep in.

‘It's not a pretty sight up there,' Claire overheard him say to her mother when they thought she was asleep. ‘There's not much left. The roof is gone and half of it is just a burned-out shell.'

‘Come and stay with us in France until you sort yourselves out,' said her mother when Claire opened her eyes. ‘We've room for all of you.'

Claire shook her head. She needed to be close to William, even though he turned away whenever she approached the hospital bed where he lay linked up to oxygen by plastic tubes.

After two blurred days the doctor told her she could go home. Home? She smiled and thanked him, but she knew she no longer had a home to go back to.

Claire swapped her hospital bed for Sally's spare one and held Oliver, Emily, and Ben tightly to her through the long, awful nights. She couldn't sleep for fear of nightmares, but the thoughts that filled her head as the children breathed quietly beside her were just as horrifying in themselves. Guilt, horror, fear of what could have happened, what still might happen to William if his spine didn't heal – it all seemed to pin her down like a heavy weight, crushing her, making her feel sick. When she closed her eyes she could see the fire, the burning house, the terror on the children's faces. She could still feel the heat on her face. The smell of smoke was inescapable, as if the thick, black, acrid air had got inside her permanently. She couldn't bear the dark and kept the bedside lamp on all through the endless nights.

She wouldn't let herself think of Stefan or the texts or remember her early morning drive to London or the woman with the long dark hair. She pushed the memories away into a painful corner of her mind.

Instead of school the children sat on Sally's sofa watching daytime television and wearing borrowed clothes. They were quiet; too quiet. Oliver and Emily's eyes looked empty and hollow, dark shadows underneath them. Claire couldn't bear to think of the terror they must have felt as they tried to get out of the burning house. They didn't talk about what had happened, though every now and then Emily would remember a toy or book or piece of clothing that was lost forever and start to cry and Oliver asked Claire repeatedly what they were going to do. Ben was confused; he wanted to go home. He clung to Claire, following her, climbing on her, crying when she disappeared from sight.

Gareth took the boys to stay with him in the room he rented above a newsagent's in town so that the cottage wouldn't be too crowded. Every day he came to check that Claire and the children were all right. He seemed nearly as traumatised as they were. It was as though he needed to reassure himself that the children were really there, that he really had succeeded in getting them out of the burning house.

Sally didn't ask too many questions about what had happened after their night out. Every day she drove her to the surgery to have the dressings on her cuts and burns redressed and to the hospital to visit William, conscious now, he refused to talk to Claire, or hold her hand or look at her. Claire had given Sally a brief outline of the events following her return from the restaurant, omitting to mention what William had told her in the ambulance. Only once did Sally chastise her.

‘If only you could have just forgotten about that photographer. I told you not to play with fire.'

‘Is that meant to be a joke?' said Claire, flatly.

‘I'm sorry,' said Sally, changing gear as she approached the hospital car park. ‘Bad choice of phrase. I meant I warned you not to get involved with Stefan again. I know the fire was an accident but if only you'd been there at the time it might not have been so bad.'

‘I know.' Tears welled in Claire's eyes and she searched in her handbag for tissues. ‘I know I was stupid.' Sally handed her a tissue from the glove box. ‘And to make it worse when I got to London to see him he was with another woman.'

Claire started to sob into the small white square. She couldn't stop, tears kept on coming. She wiped them away with her bandaged arm. It felt as if all the pain was pouring out, all the remorse, the shame, the loss; it kept coming out in heaving sobs.

Sally took her in her arms and rocked her as though she was a baby. She kissed her hair and stroked her back.

‘It's all right. It's all right,' Sally repeated until Claire was able to sit up and compose herself enough to go and face William's silence again.

A fire officer phoned and made an appointment to discuss the results of their investigation into the cause of the fire. Claire could feel her hands shaking with fear as Sally showed him into the living room. They must have found out that it was started with paraffin. She hadn't told anyone about what William had told her in the ambulance, she could hardly bear to think it was true, maybe it was some sort of post-trauma hallucination, she hoped that she had just imagined it but in her heart she feared that it was true. What would she say when she was questioned? Would the police be involved? Could William go to prison for arson? How would he cope with prison if he couldn't walk? She couldn't bear it, it was all her fault, she had driven him to do it.

Claire could feel her heart beating fast. It seemed to bang in her ears as the fire officer exchanged comments on the weather with Sally and accepted her offer of a cup of coffee.

When Sally had gone he ruffled through a sheaf of papers on a clipboard, breathing loudly, his bulky frame perched uncomfortably on the edge of Sally's sofa. Claire stared at his plump, shiny cheeks; they were mottled red and purple. She wondered if they were discoloured from years of facing into flames and heat. The thought of fire made her want to be sick.

‘Sorry to keep you,' he said, looking up at her. ‘I'm just making sure I've got everything in order before I start.' Claire had a terrible feeling she really was going to be sick.

Sally returned with coffee and a plate of bourbon biscuits. The fire officer started talking to Sally about the diet he was meant to be on. Claire could hardly bear it and willed him get on with what he had come for.

‘Now then,' he said when Sally had finally left the room. ‘We take cases like these extremely seriously and do everything we can to find the cause. We want to know how a fire has started and of course you want to know how it started.'

Claire nodded silently.

‘My team, my very experienced and conscientious team, has searched the scene extensively, using all methods of investigation available to them.' He took a sip of coffee; the mug looked tiny in his large, fleshy hands.

Get on with it
, thought Claire,
just tell me
.

The fire officer sighed. ‘But I'm afraid in this particular case we couldn't find a definite cause.'

Claire could hardly believe it. She tried not to laugh.

‘It was most likely a burning log that rolled out onto the rug in front of the fireplace,' the fire officer continued, helping himself to his third biscuit. ‘It's very common with open fires. Leave them unattended and
whoosh
, the whole house gone in no time.' He illustrated the ‘whoosh' with his hands, spilling coffee onto his jacket. He didn't seem to notice. ‘And then once a fire gets its teeth into a thatched roof …' He took another bite of biscuit. ‘Well, you've seen for yourself what happens.' He shook his head and grimaced, then he smiled. ‘You can't beat a nice bourbon cream. Got to be in the top ten for biscuits in my book.' Putting the mug down he stood up, revealing a white shirt straining across a sagging stomach. ‘We'll be passing our report on to your insurance company. There shouldn't be any problem there.' He cleared his throat and looked down at Claire who was dumb with relief. ‘I'd just like to express my condolences about the loss of your house,' he said. ‘It must be a terrible time for you. My missus said she saw it in one of those fancy magazines – she reads them in the hairdresser's. Very pretty, she said it was. Such a shame. I know the insurance company will re-home you and then rebuild and repair the building, but it's the little things you can't replace, like photographs and all the knick-knacks you'll have collected over the years, it's always very sad.' He held out his hand to Claire and she stood up to see him out.

As she closed the front door she felt almost ecstatic. She didn't know if she wanted to laugh or cry. For nights she had lain awake with worry that they would find the container or do some test that would reveal a trace of paraffin but the intense heat must have destroyed any evidence. Would they have been looking for it anyway? Who would suspect that a happy husband and father, living in the beautiful home he had worked so hard to create, would ever try to burn it down as his family slept upstairs? It could only have been a terrible accident. Claire suddenly slumped down against the hallway wall; could her betrayal really have pushed William so far?