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Bad Day in Byzantium
Bad Day in Byzantium
Bad Day in Byzantium
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Bad Day in Byzantium

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Murder, rape, persecution and random acts of cruelty - this is the fare dealt up to the weak and defenceless lodgers of the crumbling mansion ‘Beauregard’ by its resident managers, the identical twins Asquith and Bacon Mudeford.
But forces are at work to change all that.
Asquith has been stabbed at the edge of the pool in Finnian’s Wood, close by the Anglican church of St Columba, which is the centre of 1950s life for several of the lodgers and for Asquith’s mother, Eve. She has a lover, St Columba’s vicar, Rev David Beddow. Together they wheelbarrow the dying Asquith into a wild part of the wood to his steel tomb. In a moment of consciousness, Asquith hears the terminal words of abandonment, ‘bless you my son’, before he is shut in for eternity.
Eve lives in town with Tom, her violent husband. He works a menial job, cheats on Eve with other women, punishes his sons, hates everyone, and is hated in return by Eve. She secretly hoards money in the hope that a world without him would be a much better place. How convenient that Tom develops heart failure.
The boarding house ‘Beauregard’, on the edge of town at the foot of brooding Finnian’s Wood, was originally the home of the twins’ grandfather, the founder of the fire-ravaged Imperial Bearing Company. Gathered there, by reason of poverty, bad luck or desperation, are the vulnerable misfits who see little chance of brighter and glorious days. Their rich Byzantium is under siege, thanks to Asquith and Bacon, hunters with an open season ticket.
Bacon is a petty bully- to the lodgers he offers physical and mental abuse, of a warped but survivable kind. Asquith is something else - he’s a furtively evil and criminal sadist. His bag of tricks includes rape, extortion, pet slaying, theft and constructive murder.
Alive to the nature of her sons and knowing something of their acts, Eve is preoccupied initially with enduring her hellish marriage to Tom and then, following his welcome death, with her affair with Beddow. The good reverend is a man too handsome for his calling and of ambivalent morality. Just as well for Eve. She finds both characteristics go a long way towards her quest to rid herself of a husband and a pernicious son.
As for Beddow, he has a history of womanising, noted well by females of his flock. He is not a schemer nor is he malevolent but he is a survivor, a shallow pragmatist, and as events unfold he turns to trying to rekindle a former love affair with the daughter of the previous vicar of St Columba’s.
The tormented lodgers yearn for the death or disappearance of Bacon and Asquith, especially Asquith. Several visit Finnian’s Wood to escape the depredations of the twins or to satisfy their personal obsessions. In time, Asquith goes there too, intent on a further rape, that of the young, obsessive Carol. Bacon, who is sweet on the girl and beginning to reveal his underlying humanity, follows Asquith and in an act of decency and courage, threatens to expose Asquith’s obscene plan.
There can be only one outcome - death and disappearance. Someone gets dumped into the pool in the Finnian’s Wood. Each of the lodgers finds out about a body in the pool and identifies it as the twin they most want it to be. But silence is best. Who cares who did the killing? This is a good day in Byzantium.
When Asquith and Bacon are both found to be missing, the lodgers enter into a conspiracy of silence - the revenge of the little people.
But rejoice at your peril - all is not over. Beddow find himself mired in the dirty business of corpse retrieval and burial, to save face, to atone, to conceal an act of sincere and vicious and triumphant murder.
All things come to those who wait - don’t they?

LanguageEnglish
PublisherKit Peek
Release dateJan 3, 2014
ISBN9781311693280
Bad Day in Byzantium
Author

Kit Peek

Not young, not ancient; not beautiful, not plain; not exotic, not bland - it seems I’m average. Let’s hope the writing is not. And have I always wanted nothing else than the writer’s life? - no. But I want it now, after some time doing what most of us do - waste youth, get married (happily), raise a family, and look about at the wide world. I’ve written a few pieces for publication, done a writing-connected course, and have partially completed several longer stories which will, with gritty effort, see the light of public appraisal.

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    Book preview

    Bad Day in Byzantium - Kit Peek

    CHAPTER 1

    The breath of a storm shaking leaves and birds into the turbulent sky far off in the outer world, passed over the fields and towns and rivers and stole on to whisper to the pond on Finnian’s Hill where it trembled and shimmied on the open water. The woman felt the ghost of the breeze lift from the pond and watched as it scurried to the cover of the trees. She turned slowly, searching deep into the pond like a heron fixed on fishing, seeing shadows and shapes and loss. With a sigh she numbed her eyes, stepped one pace back from the edge and rounded on the poor, sad, loathsome object.

    The stiffening body strained, its face hard down, devouring the spotted crust off a great, flat, scabby rock poking a tongue across the pool. The waters, pure and cool and perfectly indifferent, were inches from its mouth. The struggle lay behind. All that remained was bewildering demise, life seeping out through rips in consciousness and pain. Inexorable end of being in progress.

    The woman took a firm grip on the killing tool and tugged it from the body’s back. She turned the dying man to face her. Through bloodied teeth he mouthed a word which she ignored, instead obliging with a smile. She told him help was needed. His forehead crimped, fighting off unease and doubt, but she was pleased to take the gesture as concussed relief.

    This was her chance. There was the body, a nearly dead man but for a slight nudge. Fate had listened, knowing she was owed, and fate was keen to take the matter further. It pricked her brain and instantly she knew the means by which the ailing man’s affliction could be treated. All she needed was the wheelbarrow, the one thrown down on the veranda of the old pump house.

    It was an effort not wholly appreciated by the unco-operative carcass to wrestle it into the barrow but wheezing through slit teeth she started off along the track leading to the church. Locking her fingers around the handles she heaved the iron frame forward. And then the vicar materialised from the close woodland beside her. She didn’t even jump. He glanced down at her burden and wanted to help but she shrugged him off. Of course he’d be there. Of course he’d show no more than slight surprise. He would have known.

    ‘Rushing, aren’t we?’

    ‘We? Don’t know about you. We here think it’s ideal. No time to gloat, David.’

    ‘Still, all things come to those who...’

    ‘What? Wait? Spare me.’

    ‘It’s just we might get into trouble, being hasty.’

    ‘Who’ll find out? Anyway, I’ve been patient long enough. You of all people, how can you ask it?’

    The load was dragging at her arms. She was pulling apart. How could such a compact sod be so damned heavy? Weight of sin, that was it, the nasty little beast. Thank God someone had invented the wheel - she couldn’t have carried him. But the thought of touching him again made her stumble and for a moment her live hands fought to seize more firmly the rotting rubber grips. She jolted along through pits of leaf litter while the body just enjoyed the ride, one arm flung over the iron side of the barrow and with goggle eyes staring at an unmoved distant sky. Pity him? No fear. She knew as sure as night would follow day that on his back or on his knees, the only plea the almost-corpse would make was ‘dare you’. And she dared.

    She tightened her shoulders and pushed on, heading off along a ribbon trail, ducking and thinning like any other animal. The massed bushes folded behind her. Two yards astern and thrashing branches as he went, the cleric thought she said the time had come to finish it. Then with the force of shoving the wheel around a hump of rock she spoke out loud and clear: ‘Don’t drift away. You’re in this too’.

    The narrow path jinked upwards climbing Finnian’s Hill, through whipping twigs and leaves dark and spongy underfoot. She dipped off behind a huge mound of honeysuckle and the vicar rushed forward to take some of the strain of the listing cargo. Even as he thought - what would it matter had the whole thing tipped, after all, I’m gazing down at a wheelbarrow full of someone looking beautifully, wonderfully dead - the point was made on him that the job at hand could not be put off. The load made a low moan. It looked as if it wanted to breathe. Perhaps the tines of the little fork lying sharp against its side had contributed. Too late. She’d passed the turn-off to second thoughts. With a thud of mixed earth and metal, the barrow banged nose-first into a solid object which was about to embark upon a new and useful career. She had knocked on the front door of the old refrigerator.

    It lay on its back like a small iceberg, all but submerged in a mat of brambles and vines. She crawled onto it as if it were a waterlogged pontoon. There were some muffled, soggy snapping noises as it settled further into the vegetation. Quickly brushing aside the strings of creepers, she began to heave at the big ribbed handle clamping down the door. It took the two of them to budge it. He was waist-high in cascades of dank foliage, levering at the joint with the ladies’ garden fork; she redoubled her lugging at the handle. And then, having fought the good fight, the door screeched open, the rubber seal ripping like elastoplast peeled from a bare leg. Stale, evil air enveloped the vicar. He all but quailed. What was required was a good dose of Standforthness, an injection of simple courage, straight out of the Boys’ Own Annual. But the feeble man was chilled by the odour, like a grave robber petrified at exposure of the decay of his sweaty work. Standforth never felt like that. Neither did his chums. When they wrenched at the lid of a sarcophagus and it grudgingly grated aside, all they knew was Victory. Success for good old us, for Britannia, for all the Annual’s young readers. It was hearty stuff for latent stationmasters, stockbrokers, colonial administrators, army officers naturally, not to mention vicars.

    Together they slid the slack remains onto the floating fridge. It was no good. All the shelves would have to go. In the end, the body was backed in semi kneeling, with its shoulders twisted around and head jammed up beside the icebox. Neat enough in the circumstances. The combined weight had been helpful and the living abandoned ship, leaving the fridge in a sinking condition. She touched her vicar’s hand and peace settled over them, freeing their taut faces. The good reverend reached out to remove the fork doing duty as a door prop. It was then that the eyes of the body flickered open. It stared and knew. They stared back a final benediction and in the eternity between vast space and black, stealing through the closing crack, the words fell on its utter isolation.

    ‘Bless you, my son.’

    CHAPTER 2

    The patron saint of the recluse and those who dwell in lonely, slighted, god-forsaken settlements beached at the edge of civilisation is none other than that venerated Ulsterman known as Saint Columba. Called to Paradise in deep Dark Ages, he continues to defy ungrateful history from a handful of these string-bag outposts dotted round the world. Nameless faithful do what can be done to keep his memory bright and then they die, forgotten. They fill the cemeteries siamesed to churches dedicated to the saint.

    So it was on Finnian’s Hill where one such colony existed, more or less: a church becalmed upon a sea of graves encircled by a tract of forest - St Columba’s tonsure. Buried there the pleasing number of former residents of the wide world was oblivious now to popular culture, fashion, feats of science or madness, to anything at all really, but there they lay as Church and State and the funeral business intended, under a quilt of weeds, blessed once a day but every day by the shadow sweep of the steeple cross.

    Wheelbarrow man, the man with hopeful, anxious eyes, was dumped well clear of primly consecrated ground. Not that his scorn for churches, priests and gods had done him any harm. But nonetheless some agent had decreed the act. By the pool on Finnian’s Hill the will of someone had been done and the man had felt it, this step on the road to the steel box. So, there discovered he could be if chance had played that part, enclosed not in the glove of the church but, safe to say, within a spitting distance. Crushed in a back pocket of his bloodied trousers he carried a flyer for a screening of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They’d have to work hard to grab him. Sunk in a dark hollow to the west, he curled tight-packed within his tomb, an exhausted shriek from deceased companionship, snug behind an insulated door with a shiny chrome lock.

    Down the slope from the man’s resting place stood the broad pool. It was spring-fed. The waters issuing into it somewhere near the shallow end were of the crisp, translucent kind and could be drunk, if one had a mind. Handy when drowning. The experience was bound to be bad enough without suffering the intake of water tasting like tin.

    Over the pool stretched branches lightly leaved like giant fans. A shelf of granite rolled out from a jumble of lichened rocks, lying along the water where it was clearest. The still surface swept around a couple of promontories arrowed with reeds and came to rest at the mossy wall of a stone weir. It was a fine construction, ashlar of mixed weight. The long-defunct Imperial Bearing Company had needed water with a decent head and at the pool they found their source. Dredging was necessary, of course, and a right cow of a thing that had been. At the weir the water stood black-green and thick, freezing in unyielding gloom. Twenty feet deep, they said. Deeper than three tall dark men and blacker than any one of them. Dense enough to hide the Devil. No-one bathed at the weir end.

    *

    As churches go, St Columba’s was not ancient although it looked the part: weather-beaten and solid grey, the kind of grey which reassured admirals as they pointed their collective finger at the favoured swatch in the naval colour chart. Forty thousand ton battleships looked good in this shade of grey and so did St Columba’s. The granite had been rough-hewn from a small quarry halfway down the hill and hauled up on narrow wooden sleds between the stands of beech. Construction had advanced to the stage of forming the vaulted ceiling over the south chapel when the drainage cistern came to be dug and there the masons, and all others with eyes, were presented with unlimited quantities of A-grade stone, much closer to hand. The blame couldn’t be deflected onto anyone in particular and since the entire building force had grown used to cutting, loading, lugging, unloading and stacking under the present system, there was no impetus for change. Habit was a soothing thing and they were in its grip. Observations were not welcomed on the curious sight of blocks being fetched for the church from half a mile away whilst stone from the cistern was piled nearby for later use in the perimeter walling. God might move in mysterious ways but man’s behaviour was downright incomprehensible.

    Like the button on a cap, the church crowned the apex of Finnian’s Hill. Falling away to all quarters was a heavy cloth of woods, draped smooth and unbroken to the valleys below. The great green ramp surrounding God’s estate did not quarantine it, which was just as well. It was more of a sieve. Coming to church simply meant making an effort. Parishioners from the town offered praise to their Lord, cash to the collection plate, but first, their time. They gave near to an hour of their Sunday to stroll the path to and from the church. There were a few with motorcars. They ascended rapidly and in style. Arrival by motor car was remarked upon. Folk such as these would need to be bribed or blackmailed to fall back on shanks’ pony.

    Years back quite a crowd wound up the incline from the old bearing factory for weekly services and relief from the machine. What they really came for was the return journey, the chance to make something kinder of their Sunday. Liberated from the grip of coat and tie and formal stifling attire, small groups stretched out on rocks around the pool, dangling feet in calming water. Some lounged in leafy hollows. A few buttered scones appeared from a lady’s handbag, a metal flask from the pocket of a man’s vest, wisps of smoke from cigarettes or pencil-thin cheroots. A leaf smouldered in the furnace eye of a boy’s magnifying glass; stifled titters from a couple squeezed behind a tree; somewhere a murmur of secrets bubbling under a huddle of teenage curls.

    All ancient history. The factory was long gone, taking with it its working families.

    *

    From a boarding house at the foot of Finnian’s Hill, over the canal, up the escarpment and into the patterned woods, still and lush as they had never been in the days of industry, new people came – the sisters Madeline and Gloria, young Gavin and decrepit Stan, Lauren the Amazon, Carol and Samuel (no relationship), and poor old, silly old, blind old Ned. It was the time of beatniks and James Dean, sullen rubber plants lurking in the hall, new-fangled electric washing machines and men who ran the mile in less than four minutes, while over all appeared the orbiting bright basketball called Sputnik and the fat black bomb marked H.

    The lodgers of the boarding house were relics of lost prosperity. Rich in nothing but time, they took themselves to Finnian’s Wood and exercised their slights and grief, guilt and outrage. Gavin trod his troubles into submission in his role as Great White Fungi Hunter. Mad Carol, ripe with obsessions, seized on another one and fell to regimented hill running. Ned Ludwig put his eyes to his binoculars, glossed over his persecution and focussed on blurry birds. The woods fed Samuel too – Samuel, a man on the rise, from mouse to librarian and on to the heights of lady-killing sleuth. As for Madeleine and Gloria, on passage to their church and with more reason than most, they committed their sorrows to the cure of the woods not to mention to the healing power inherent in close proximity to their vicar. And then there was Lauren. A boarder, yes, but she was not going to walk anywhere. She’d once roared up the road to the hilltop in her little silver sports car and spurted stones around in a couple of quick circuits of the parking court but as it became plain that the only places to go were either where she’d just been or to peel off and take a rip around the water tower, she whipped the car through the choices and wasn’t seen at St Columba’s again - that is, only when much later they gathered up what was left of her and gave her burial there.

    Asquith and Bacon. Now, they were quite another thing. To begin with, they were twins. Asquith was the one who came into the world a little ahead of his brother and had maintained the advantage ever since. In early life the boys attracted that curiosity which goes with looking exactly like the person standing next to you, but strangers, not to mention bosom acquaintances, soon understood it was wise to curb their interest and keep a respectful distance. Eve survived Asquith and Bacon, more or less, although it must be said it was her job to do so. She was their mother.

    Eve soon forgot the shame of marrying Tom Mudeford on the wrong side of the boys’ birth. Tom was a bastard; the boys were bastards, most distressingly in ways other than the literal. At a stroke which Eve flattered herself was inspirational but may have been no more than happy chance, she both got rid of her pernicious offspring and alleviated her sister Sophie’s burdens by guiding the parties together – Sophie, the toady, the sycophantic bitch, the sole proprietor of a boarding establishment which should have been Eve’s in equal part. The boys left the three-up three-down in town and in the guise of Sophie’s managers were free to plant their own fiefdom of bastardry at the edges of the countryside in a boarding house abandoned by the industry which had once nourished it.

    Disliking nature, except as it could be put to use, Asquith and Bacon hardly ever visited the woods, at least not until the end.

    CHAPTER 3

    ‘It says here: Like the button on a cap! Who wrote this tripe?’

    ‘Steady on, Gloria.’ Joy Truman was no shrinking violet herself. She had claimed possession of the only other available copy of ‘St Columba’s: a Triumphant History,’ printed in brittle black ink by an amateur press at the instigation of ex-verger Norman O’Gorman Smith. As the author, O’Gorman Smith regarded his work highly and could not imagine a future deprived of his scholarship. At the very moment that the members of the Ladies Auxiliary were pondering the aptness of his simile, two hundred and sixty eight copies from the three hundred print-run were sprouting orange mould in the locked cellar of the vicarage. It was just as well no-one could find the key.

    ‘You know as well as I, Gloria,’ said Madeleine, ‘that half a lifetime’s work went into this volume. Mr O’Gorman Smith deserves that great big angel on his grave. Marble too, right through.’

    ‘Almost a saint’ added Hilary Frew. She was seventy-three and hoped that by sticking it out she too might warrant a free piece of statuary. When she was called, of course. God forbid these things should be rushed.

    ‘More like a holly sprig on a Christmas pudding.’

    ‘Who said that?’ snapped Gloria.

    ‘Margaret thinks …’. Her sister was explaining.

    ‘I think,’ said a small voice at Madeleine’s elbow, ‘a Christmas pudding is more the right shape. He should have said the church is a decoration, a holly sprig or maybe a bell, you know, those golden ones, the sort they put on top of Christmas puddings.’

    Gloria pressed her palms together as if to pray but groaned instead. ‘So, we have a cap and a pudding. Any advance? No?’

    ‘A pumpkin. A pimple on a pumpkin.’

    ‘Kindly shut up, Madeleine. We’ve finished? Good. Well, I’ll tell you what I think he should have said, if he’d had the nerve. The word our Norman was dying to use was breast.’

    ‘A nipple on a breast.’ Eve Mudeford had finally come to life and sat forward, struck with loss of inhibition. Gloria was not surprised.

    ‘Precisely! A nipple on a breast.’

    ‘A woman’s?’

    The female shapes at the far end of the table bobbed about in choppy waves of gasps.

    ‘Where have you been the last century or two, Madeleine?’

    ‘I beg your pardon?’

    ‘It’s women who have them. They come with the package. ‘Course, you were short-changed, darling. Your little titties...’

    ‘I have breasts. Joe tells me so again and again.’ Lorna Attwood had stood up, hands on hips, all the better to show her undulating profile.

    ‘Thank you, Lorna. It’s not you I’m worried about. Madeleine here seems to have been AWOL for a vital lesson. What have you been using your eyes for?’

    ‘I don’t know. I’m not the only one who’s missed things.’

    ‘Here we go, ladies. She’s going to tell us something. But not until I’ve asked. You want me to ask.’

    The vestry seemed a smaller place. Frost rose from the flag stones and struck the waiting faces.

    ‘I want you to stop being so rude,’ said Madeleine. ‘You could listen for a change, instead of always dealing it out. And about my titties, they’re nice and anyone can see they’re little and since when did a woman need melons to be judged female?’

    Gloria could feel others nodding. ‘All right. What?’

    ‘Funny you should ask. If you’d kept your eyes open, Gloria, you might have noticed that Lawrence Babbington has breasts.’

    Lorna sat down with a fleshy thud. ‘Joe didn’t say anything about a man having breasts.’

    ‘Madeleine, he’s a funeral director. For business he’ll do anything.’

    ‘That’s not the point. I mean, it’s a good point, but that’s not what I’m saying as you very well know.’

    ‘He’s fat, that’s all.’

    ‘Fat or otherwise, he’s got breasts, and there you are giving me the rounds of the kitchen for raising a question.’

    ‘For seeming just a little bit thick.’

    ‘She’s right.’ This time it was Connie. She’d married that oaf Arthur Cornwell the butcher, a great big chesty, breasty side of beef himself, and she was giggling. ‘Lawrence could do with a brassiere.’

    ‘Well how’s this. I have the breasts for it, Maddy. Lie me down and follow the slopes. The contours on women like me are just right. A steepish descent, but even, towards the midriff, like this.’ Gloria had plunged a finger into her bosom and was doing her best to drag it against generous resistance in the direction of her tummy.

    ‘Really, Gloria,’ said Miss Frew, as she made a show of capturing wild loops of hair and refastening them onto her neat, grey head, ‘is this absolutely necessary?’

    ‘Don’t worry, Hilary, we’re all women here.’ It was a voice from the bottom of the table.

    ‘Ladies, Eve, we are ladies. What kind though?’

    ‘The kind who keep this church alive. And a little fun won’t hurt us. Go on, Gloria.’

    ‘Yes, down to the midriff as I was saying. That would be westerly, towards town, wouldn’t you say, with a path zig-zagging downhill more or less from here.’ She stuck the finger into an area which was bound to contain her nipple. Several members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary fought to suppress a snigger. There was a snap as the point on Beryl Truman’s HB pencil broke. She’d been pushing it through the tabletop.

    ‘Now follow what I’m doing. Even a simpleton can see that this is how it is with real women. Take a line to the breastbone, from my left breast you understand, and that’s to the North, not abrupt but far from flat. That’s where the road climbs up the terraces to the level of the church. Agreed? Good. In an easterly direction, heading for my chin, there’s a gentle slope descending to the merest of valleys before the forest rises gradually to those far-off ridges. And then …’

    ‘I’m not a fool, Gloria. It’s cruel to make out that I am.’

    ‘Later, Maddy, I’ve nearly finished. There’s just the South to go, which I was about to say is the place we find the down-curve through the wood before a fall to the canal and railway, just like the swoop from my nipple here right the way to my left side. Right down here, sort of under my arm. So you’re right, Eve. Our church sits on top of its hill like a nipple standing on a breast. A proper one. The kind found on a woman like me, not a pudgy man. Of course, a skinny person couldn’t pull it off. What do they see when they look down their front? Bugger all. Pardon my French. Our church isn’t like a lump on a plain, is it? That’s what we’d get if we relied on normal men looking down their fronts. And flat-chested women too, wouldn’t you say, Madeleine?’

    It was too much. Madeleine shrank, defeated. Being one of the few who knew Gloria well, she could not decide whether her sister’s outbursts stemmed from genuine belief or were merely a method of being noticed. Probably the latter, unless there was some malicious reason that didn’t bear thinking about. As to Gloria’s wider band of surface friends, the matter of her motivation didn’t come into it. They saw the authority in her strapping physical presence and duly fell under the spell of any and all of her utterances.

    CHAPTER 4

    The meeting was over. A coterie of ladies who mistakenly believed they might entertain views contrary to Gloria’s loitered about in the vestibule of St Columba’s. Holding their ground there for a few minutes made them feel better about playing second fiddle. Gloria, in company with her flattened sister and the case-hardened Joy Truman, marched off across the graveyard taking shortcuts over the resting place of paupers who could afford nothing but a covering of turf. At the wall the sisters took the track to the boarding house, leaving Joy to bustle through the tree cover on her way to town.

    With the coast clear, the ladies shuffled off in twos and threes. Trailing them was Eve Mudeford. She let the distance open up. Why rush home? Home. What a farce. When had the house she lived in been a home? Any house, even the big place near her parents’ factory when she was girl? It should have been, she reflected. It stood in its grounds as sound, they said, as the age of steam itself. Both had seemed immutable. Solid, regular, reliable. Empires were built on it.

    The family turned fat and dull and smug under the clan roof. Then came the shock of the fire – more of an earthquake, considering its tremors down the years, and Eve felt it still. Father stood there stunned. He stared for a minute, unwilling to believe, then started off in bursts of realisation. A dart from the terrace, across the lower lawn and onto the footbridge over the canal. Pausing, leaning on the iron handrail, he did not feel the bite of flaking rust. Off again, between the screen of trees, oblivious of the path, he zig-zagged deep in grass bent under dew as urgencies clamoured in his brain afresh. Another stop as he sagged back against the big lime shading the main gate. His head twitched, eyes aimed at one hot spot and on to another. Then resolute, decision made, he strode fast across the yard.

    When they hauled Eve’s father, gasping, down the access stairs to the second floor, the top office was an orange wreck. His face streamed red, his eyebrows smoked, suit singed and tattered, hands swollen bloodied blobs. It must have been the last explosion in the furnace hall. The still night gazed awestruck at the blaze that gutted Imperial Bearings and nearly claimed its founding father, my old man, and admitted Eve, Sophie’s too I guess. She couldn’t rub out the nightmare dancing behind her leaden eyes.

    *

    Below the boarding house on the garden wall now crumbling as it pleased into the canal, the fingerprints of that far-off fire remained. Blooms of blackened brick leapfrogged along its face at points of furious spot-fires. On the ledge of land between the wall and the canal, debris rained like hail when the boiler house blew up. Once a wilderness of bush and stunted trees, the strip became good fuel and the red hot shrapnel made the most of it, but as riveting as this conflagration was, after the spectacle of a total inferno in the factory, a boiler landing crump! slap-bang atop the garden wall merely seemed to Eve like the last firework in an exhausting show. Smoke and the gauze of burning had always infected the house. When the boiler touched down, folk had been amazed but it was not so remarkable when you thought about it.

    Even without the creep of sheds, the sawtooth factory block was less than three hundred yards from the window bay of her childhood bedroom. It was such a lovely room. Why in God’s name had she and Sophie had to share it, what with a multitude of rooms upstairs and down throughout the house? Perhaps it was a punishment for unforgiven sins kept nurtured tight within the parental breast. Stoically, she and Sophie endured their fate along with the poor room, all three condemned to stare across a space of green to belching chimneys, sad flat walls, steam shunters alive with grime. A pot of dirty wealth.

    Years of grit and flaky soot bore silently and sightlessly upon the house. Steeped in the infusion, the warm stone sickened to grey. Streaks of black hung like garlands of gangrenous seaweed from gutter heads and mouldings. Not that the house was singled out for treatment - their father’s factory did not discriminate. All things built by men that were within reach of a light breeze cowered under the detritus from the place. In many ways it was a blessing when it burnt down. The inexorable fusillade of filth stopped dead. Then, with rain and sun and time but mostly lack of incremental dirt, the neighbourhood softened. Even the stain of smoke on the railway overbridge from the to-and-fro of countless mindless steam engines was no more than a smudge. Pity about the bank accounts though. They’d gone pretty soft as well.

    *

    Yes, thought Eve, as she dawdled on the hill’s last high ground before the decline into town, one way or another the fire had changed everything. The servants were the first to go. Seemed they’d become used to being paid and were very clear that the new economies were for others to bear. Then Father, well, what could you expect? He recovered physically from the ordeal only to go to pieces inside his head. In perfect health, he lost the will to even brush his teeth. Day after day he sat. Through a lifetime of practice and familiarity, his body offered gestures and expressions which seemed to indicate an intelligent connection to life around him but all the while he simply wasn’t there. Alright, it’s cruel, but I’ll say it anyway. Ever since the big factory bonfire father had clocked off.

    No factory, no income. There was the insurance, of course, when it finally came. That young assistant, good-looking fellow, heir to something or other, George … whatever, he nearly took Sophie off with him. Then there was his companion, his boss,

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