The Count of Eleven (6 page)

Laura looked exactly as her mother had when he’d tried to reassure her wishing she could be convinced. What he had to tell them had already transformed the sight of the flames into a dance of celebration for Jack, but he shouldn’t tell them while there was an audience. “I wouldn’t let you down, would I?” he said, lowering his voice, which had caused several bystanders to glance at him. “I’ll tell you as soon as we’re home.”

Laura was staring at the crowd. “Why can’t they go away? Why do they have to watch?”

“We all like a bit of excitement in our lives, don’t we? Maybe I needed this to make me realise.” He wiped away a tear which had begun to trickle down her cheek. He was saying too much if he didn’t intend to say everything now. “I’d better stay, but you needn’t if it bothers you.”

“Of course she’s bothered,” Julia said almost accusingly. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

Take her home. I’ll be as quick as I can.” He hugged them both and winked at Julia. “Think of the insurance.”

He hoped he hadn’t spoken loud enough for anyone outside the family to hear. When he sneaked a glance at the crowd, the woman in the housecoat and the hooded man and Mr. Pether were watching him. Jack gave them a toned-down smile as he walked uphill, hearing Laura say shakily Tve left my T-shirt at Jody’s‘ and Julia’s response, a shade too enthusiastic: “I saw you had a new one. Is that from you, Jody? It’s lovely.” The trio of watchers peered at him as he rejoined the crowd, and he could only grin. “Got to laugh, haven’t you?”

“He thinks this is funny, what he did to my wife’s shoe,” Mr. Pether cried, flourishing its remains. “She couldn’t walk for the last six months of her life.”

Most of those who heard him seemed more embarrassed or bewildered than roused to anger. Some glanced at the tartan slipper which a nurse from the retirement home had persuaded him to wear. Jack solemnised his face and went to the old man. “I’m sorry about your wife and I’m sorry about your shoe. I’ll buy you a new pair if you like.”

His choice of words didn’t strike him until they were out of his mouth. He felt a giggle gathering itself like an uncontrollable sneeze as he saw the old man preparing to object. “I don’t want a pair, I only want one to match this,” Mr. Pether protested, stamping the shoe that was left.

Jack covered his mouth and emitted a snort which he willed to sound more like a sneeze than like mirth. “I’ll do my best,” he said when he could.

“I should come along now, Mr. Pether,” the nurse said, taking the old man’s arm. “We’ve had enough excitement for one day.”

Their departure acted as a signal to the crowd. The spectacle was mostly smoke by now, only a few subdued flames struggling to fend off the jets of water. The quilted woman returned to her house, the cars swung away from the striped cones. A few of the youngest members of the audience lingered, apparently in the hope that the dousing of the fire would prove to be as false an ending as those of all the horror films they watched, and so did the cowled man. “It’s under control now,” a fireman told Jack. “I’m afraid there’s nothing salvageable.”

“That’s fine. I mean, thanks for trying. For succeeding, I should say,” Jack blethered. “Will I need to tell someone how it started?”

That will be necessary. Tell me if you wish.”

“Ask him about the kind of films that conveniently got destroyed.”

“That isn’t our job, sir.”

The cowled man treated him to the suspicious glare he had previously reserved for Jack. “Aren’t you supposed to uphold the law of the land?”

“Are you a witness, sir?”

“The only kind. God’s.”

Then shouldn’t you be in church, sir?” the fireman said, and told Jack “I think it’ll be advisable if we confer in the appliance.”

Once they were in the cab of the fire engine the fireman said “Has he something against you?”

“Working on the Sabbath.”

“Well, we all need some kind of belief to keep us going. Just so long as we don’t try to impose it on others, I always say. My daughter’s been born again, as if her mother didn’t go through enough the first time.” He cleared his throat as though he wanted to spit and watched the cowled man flouncing downhill. “What have you to tell me?” he said.

Jack pointed at himself with all his fingers. “Imagine Oliver Hardy with a blow lamp

“Go on.”

“Did you notice the old codger who was waving his shoe about? If you cast him as Stan Laurel… I hope I don’t sound as if I’m trying to make light of anything, but I feel such a fool now I think of what happened.”

“However’s comfortable for you.”

It seemed to Jack that there was no way of describing the events leading up to the fire other than as a joke against himself. He told it deadpan, and was almost sure that the fireman was stifling a laugh. Comedy was something that happened at a distance to you or to someone else. They were still in the cab when Andy Nation came to gaze aghast at the smouldering hole, pulling the zip of his jacket up and down as if he couldn’t bear his hands to be inactive. Jack knocked on the windscreen and called to him, and Andy looked everywhere for him but in the cab. “Up here,” Jack shouted. “I’ve joined the fire service. Starting fires, that is.”

Andy winced. “Julia told me, but I didn’t think it would be this bad.”

“It could have been far worse, Andy. This is my friend the builder.”

“Will the shop need making safe?” Andy wanted to know.

“When we’ve finished damping down,” the fireman said.

“I’ll do what needs doing, Jack. You go home to the family,” Andy said, and asked the fireman “He’s free, is he?”

“I’ve heard all I need to hear.”

Jack thanked them both profusely and climbed into the front of the van. A generalised ache had taken up residence in the area above his cheekbones, but it was familiar enough now to be ignored. He let the van free wheel backwards downhill, away from the dunces’ plastic caps, then he turned it with a drunkard’s carefulness and drove home.

He balanced the carton of videocassettes in the crook of one arm as he let himself into the house. When he carried the carton into the front room he saw a guidebook to Crete lying face down on Laura’s chair. It looked forlorn, like a bird which couldn’t fly. “You will,” he promised Laura silently, and set the carton down.

On an impulse he counted the videocassettes. Thirty-three had survived. That was a good omen, he thought, and all the more welcome inasmuch as it reminded him that he didn’t need that kind of reassurance. No need to mention it to Julia and Laura; it would take too much explaining.

They were in the kitchen, and he sensed that they’d stayed together while they tried to come to terms with the apparent disaster. Laura was painstakingly scraping potatoes, Julia was emptying grounds out of the wedding-present percolator. “I hope those aren’t grounds for divorce,” he said, and noticing the turkey pie in the cold oven, “Looks as if Christmas has come early.”

Laura gave him a wistful smile. “Come on, you two,” he said, ‘we’ll go out for a walk.”

“You can see we’ve things to do, Jack.”

“We’ll all do them later. It’s been too long since the three of us went out together, what with Laura’s homework and the shop.”

He was waiting for them to get ready when the phone rang. It was a woman in Hoylake, the other seaward corner of the peninsula, wanting to know if he still offered home deliveries of films. “I can only deliver laughs at the moment, but

I’m about to extend my range,” he said, and jotted down her name and phone number.

Bidston Hill was in Birkenhead, twenty minutes’ drive away through suburban streets which were briefly interrupted by the innermost dock and its rearing cranes. Jack swung the van around a roundabout which harboured a steepled church and drove past the vandalised graveyard of a defunct church to the track which led to the common. A few cars were parked at the top of the rubbly track. Dogs were barking among the trees, but the only people in sight on the grass between the car park and the woods were three teenagers sitting on a picnic table, their feet on the attached bench -heroin addicts, Jack guessed from the way they tried to seem not to be waiting. He took Julia and Laura by the hand and led them through the woods where nuts dropped by grey squirrels rattled through the branches. Beyond the remains of a low brick wall, slabs of sandstone patched with gorse and heather stepped up towards a windmill in chains. A bridge led across a dell occupied by a road, and on the far side the Orchards climbed a jagged natural stairway to the windmill.

It stood at one end of the sandstone ridge, the far end of which housed an observatory. The ridge appeared to be composed of giant misshapen paving stones cemented by soil overgrown with turf. Frowns that sketched the processes of weathering were incised in the sandstone, deep puddles glittered in depressions in the rock. From the exposed spine the bay beyond the peninsula was visible, while to the left the mountains of Wales massed like layers of cloud above fields misted by the River Dee, and to the right the towers and clocks and red-brick terraces of Birkenhead seemed to lead straight to the warehouses and stately offices of Liverpool, a trick of perspective having done away with the Mersey. Jack drew a breath which felt like a taste of the clear blue sky. “Well, ladies, what do you see that you like?”

“You know I like coming up here,” Laura said.

“What about living somewhere with this kind of a view?”

“Jack,” Julia said.

“You’ve got to stop me babbling, Laura, or at least tell me what you’re afraid of. Do you think we’ll have to cancel Crete, is that it? Switch off the sun and turn off the wave machine and send all the actors home?”

“Won’t we have to?”

“Won’t it cost more to keep thousands of Greeks on the dole?” He glimpsed a smile which almost surfaced, and said “Laura, we’d go if it killed me, but we don’t need to make any sacrifices.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You know the shop wasn’t doing as well as we hoped. Maybe I should have carried more popular titles, not trash but popular. If I’d sold the films I was beginning to have doubts about I wouldn’t have got anything like I’d paid for them, but they’re insured for the full replacement value, and of course the shop is too. There could be quite a sum left over when I’ve rethought the business. No wonder people turn to arson.”

“Dad.”

He thought her shock was mostly feigned; certainly she was enjoying it. “Desperate people, I mean,” he said, digging in his pocket for the chain letter. “People who might credit this kind of nonsense.”

He sat on the wall above the woods in the shadow of the observatory dome and read the letter aloud, lowering his voice when she glanced at passers-by and shushed him. “Turn ill luck into good … Make thirteen copies of this letter … Do not break the chain … A woman in Nevada broke the chain and her husband was diagnosed as having a brain tumour, but when she sent the letters the doctors were able to operate. Presumably,” Jack commented, ‘if he’d died in the meantime he would have risen from the dead.”

“Why would anyone make up a letter like that? To frighten people?”

“No other point to it, is there?” Jack looked around vainly for a waste-bin and shoved the letter into his pocket. He yawned and stretched, feeling relaxed at last, then he shoved himself to his feet, dislodging a chunk of the wall, which rumbled down the slope and thumped a tree-trunk. “Better head for home. I’d forgotten someone’s supposed to be looking at the house,” he said, and thought for a moment that he’d forgotten something else far more important. It would come to him.

In the morning Jack’s cold was spectacularly worse. He lost count of the number of times he had to blow his nose before he felt able to breathe. His cumbersome half-melted legs had little zeal for transporting the rest of him, which seemed to have been separated from them during the night and inexpertly restored. He felt so hot in bed that he imagined yesterday’s fire had stayed with him. When Julia laid her cool hand on his forehead, however, she couldn’t find much of a temperature. She stirred two paracetamol tablets into a glass of hot lemon juice and advised him to stay in bed, and it wasn’t until he was listening to the echoes of the slam of the front door reverberating back and forth across his cavernous brittle cranium that he realised he should have asked her to phone the insurance company. He piloted himself down the stairs, feeling as if he had to balance his head to prevent it from floating away, and attempted to croak his claim into the telephone, but gave up after saying his name thrice without communicating. He wrote a letter to the company and stumbled to the post-box with it, all the way aware of how his fingers gripping the envelope were plugged into his hand which was hinged to his forearm which was composed of bones which preserved a constant length and muscles which did not…. With so much machinery to operate it seemed miraculous that he reached the post-box and posted the letter.

By the time he reconquered the lock of the front door he was more than ready for bed. He restrained himself from kicking off the covers as soon as he’d crawled under them. If he had a fever, he wished that the two women whom he’d met on returning home yesterday could have been a fever dream. But the wind had indeed lifted the elder woman’s blossoming purple trilby and deposited it beneath the right front wheel of the van, and Jack had felt as if he was handing her a trampled patch of an artificial flowerbed, and when he’d parked the van and found the women waiting on the doorstep he’d thought she meant to demand a new hat until he’d grasped that they were there to view the house.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have offered to replace the hat. As Julia had conducted the women through the house he’d tried surreptitiously to get her and then Laura to add-to the cash in his pocket. Eventually he’d written a cheque, only for the woman to refuse to give him her name, waving away the cheque with more impatience than grace. As she’d marched away arm in arm with her companion, who might or might not have been her daughter, the younger woman had started what was clearly destined to be a protracted argument “Ridiculous, wearing a hat in a place like this’ and Jack saw that he’d seen the last of them.