A Slow Fire Burning Read online

  Irene had been waiting for William the first time she met Laura. The day they found Angela’s body.

  * * *

  It was terribly cold. Irene had been worried, because she’d woken up and William wasn’t there, and she couldn’t understand where he’d got to. Why hadn’t he come home? She took herself downstairs and put on her dressing gown, she went outside and oh, it was freezing, and there was no sign of him. No sign of anyone out in the lane. Where was everyone? Irene turned to go back inside only to find that the door had swung shut, but that was all right because she knew better than to go out without a key in her pocket; she wouldn’t make that mistake again, not after last time. But then—and this was the ridiculous thing—she just couldn’t get the key into the lock. Her hands were frozen into claws, and she just could not do it, she kept dropping the key, and it was so silly, but she found herself in tears. It was so cold, and she was alone, and she’d no idea where William was. She cried out, but nobody came, and then she remembered Angie! Angela would be next door, wouldn’t she? And if she knocked softly, she wouldn’t wake the boy up.

  So she did, she opened the gate and she knocked softly on the front door, calling out, “Angela! It’s me. It’s Irene. I can’t get back in. I can’t open the door. Could you help me?”

  There was no reply, and so she knocked again, and still no reply. She fumbled for her key again, but how her fingers ached! Her breath was white in front of her face, and her feet were numb, and as she turned she stumbled against the gate, banging her hip and crying out, tears coursing down her cheeks.

  “Are you all right? God, you’re not all right, course you’re not. Here, here, it’s okay, let me help you.” There was a girl there. A strange girl wearing strange clothes, trousers with a flowery pattern, a bulky silver jacket. She was small and thin, with white-blond hair and a sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of her nose, and she had the most enormous blue eyes, her pupils like black holes. “Fucking hell, mate, you’re freezing.” She had both of Irene’s hands in her own; she was rubbing them gently. “Oh, you’re so cold, aren’t you? Is this your place? Have you locked yourself out?” Irene could smell alcohol on the girl’s breath; she wasn’t sure she looked old enough to drink, but you never knew these days. “Is there someone in? Oi!” she yelled, banging on Angela’s door. “Oi! Let us in!”

  “Oh, not too loud,” Irene said. “It’s ever so late; I wouldn’t want to wake the little boy.”

  The girl gave her an odd look. “It’s six thirty in the morning,” she said. “If they’ve got kids, they should be awake by now.”

  “Oh . . . no,” Irene said. That couldn’t be right. It couldn’t be six thirty in the morning. That would mean William hadn’t come home at all, that he’d been out all night. “Oh,” she said, her freezing fingers raised to her mouth. “Where is he? Where is William?”

  The girl looked stricken. “I’m sorry, darling, I don’t know,” she said. She took a crumpled Kleenex from her pocket and dabbed at Irene’s face. “We’ll sort it out, all right? We will. But first I’ve got to get you inside; you’re ice cold, you are.”

  The girl let go of Irene’s hands, turned back toward Angela’s front door and banged hard with the side of her fist, then she crouched down, picking up a pebble and hurling it against the window.

  “Oh dear,” Irene said.

  The girl ignored her. She was kneeling now, pressing her fingers against the flap of the letter slot, pushing it open. “Oi!” she yelled, and then all of a sudden she jumped backward, flailing in the air for a second before landing heavily on the flagstones on her bony bottom. “Oh, fucking hell,” she said, looking up at Irene, her eyes impossibly wide. “Jesus Christ, is this your house? How long . . . Jesus Christ. Who is that?” She was scrabbling to her feet, grabbing Irene’s hands again, roughly this time. “Who is that in there?”

  “It’s not my house, it’s Angela’s,” Irene said, quite perturbed by the girl’s odd behavior.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Well, obviously I live next door,” Irene said, and she held out the key.

  “Why the fuck would that be obvious?” the girl said, but she took the key anyway and unlocked the door without a problem. She put her arm around Irene’s shoulders and guided her inside. “Come on then, you go in, I’ll get you a cup of tea in a minute. Wrap yourself up in a blanket or something, yeah? You need to warm up.” Irene went into the living room, she sat down in her usual chair, she waited for the girl to bring her a cup of tea, like she said she would, but it didn’t come. Instead, she could hear sounds from the hall: the girl was making a call from her phone in the hallway.

  “Are you calling William?” Irene asked her.

  “I’m calling the police,” the girl said.

  Irene sat in her favorite armchair, and she heard the girl saying, “Yeah, there’s someone in there,” and “No, no, no chance, it’s way beyond that, definitely, one hundred percent. You can smell it.”

  Then she ran off. Not right away—first, she brought Irene a cup of tea with a couple of sugars in it. She knelt at Irene’s feet, took Irene’s hands in her own, and told her to sit tight until the police came. “When they get here, tell them to go next door, all right? Don’t you go yourself. Okay? And then they can help you find William, all right? Just . . . don’t go outside again, okay, you promise me?” She scrambled back to her feet. “I’ve gotta scarper, I’m sorry, but I’ll come back.” She crouched down again. “My name’s Laura. I’ll come see you later. Okay? You stay golden, yeah?”

  * * *

  • • •

  By the time the police arrived, two young women in uniforms, Irene had forgotten the girl’s name. It didn’t seem to matter, terribly, because the police weren’t interested in her; all they were interested in was whatever was going on next door. Irene watched from her own doorway as they crouched down, calling out as the girl had done, and then starting back, just as she had done. They spoke into their little radios, they coaxed Irene back into her own home, one of them put the kettle on, fetched a blanket from upstairs. A while later, a young man appeared, wearing a brightly colored jacket. He took her temperature and gently pinched her skin, he asked her lots of questions, like when she’d last eaten and what day it was and who was prime minister.

  She knew the last one. “Oh, that awful May woman,” she said tartly. “I’m not a fan. You’re not a fan either are you?” The man smiled, shaking his head. “No, I’d imagine not, what with you being from India.”

  “I’m from Woking,” the young man said.

  “Ah, well.” Irene wasn’t sure what to say to that. She was feeling a bit flustered, and very confused, and it didn’t help that the young man was handsome, very handsome, with dark eyes and the longest lashes, and his hands were soft, and so gentle, and when he touched her wrist, she could feel herself blush. He had a beautiful smile and a kind manner, even when he admonished her gently for not taking care of herself, telling her she was very dehydrated and that she needed to drink lots of water with electrolytes in it, which was exactly what her GP had told her.

  The handsome man left, and Irene did as she was told; she ate a piece of toast with some honey on it and drank two large glasses of water without electrolytes because she didn’t have any of those, and was at last starting to feel a little more like herself when she heard the most terrible crash from outside, a terrifying sound and, heart racing, hurried to the window in the living room. There were men out there, men in uniforms using a sort of metal battering ram to smash Angie’s door down. “Oh dear,” Irene said out loud, thinking—stupidly—that Angela wasn’t going to be pleased about that at all.

  Somehow, still, the penny had not dropped, that Angela would never be pleased by anything ever again, and it wasn’t until another police officer, a different woman, not in uniform, came round and sat her down and explained that Angela was dead, that she’d fallen down the stairs and broken
her neck, that finally Irene understood.

  When the policewoman told Irene that Angela might have been lying there for days, for as much as a whole week, Irene could barely speak for the shame. Poor Angela, lying alone, on the other side of that wall, and Irene—having one of her turns, letting herself slip away into confusion—had not even missed her.

  “She didn’t cry out,” Irene said, when at last she found her voice. “I would have heard her. These walls are paper thin.” The policewoman was kind; she told Irene that it was likely that Angela was killed instantly when she fell. “But surely you can tell when it was that she died?” Irene knew a little about forensics, from her reading. But the woman said that the heating had been on, turned up very high, and that Angela’s body had been lying right up against the radiator at the bottom of the stairs, which made it impossible to ascertain her time of death with any accuracy.

  No one would ever know, not really, what had happened. The police said it was an accident, and Irene accepted that, though the whole thing felt wrong to her, too hastily concluded. There was conflict in Angela’s life, plenty of it: she argued with her sister, she argued with her son—or rather, it seemed to Irene, one or the other of them came by to harangue her, leaving her upset, setting her off on a binge. Irene mentioned the arguments—over money, over Daniel—to the police, but they didn’t seem interested. Angela was an alcoholic. She drank too much, she fell, she broke her neck. “It happens more often than you’d think,” the kind policewoman said. “But if you think of anything else, anything that might be relevant,” she said, handing Irene a card with a telephone number on it, “feel free to give me a call.”

  “I saw her with a man,” Irene said, suddenly, just as the woman was leaving.

  “Okay,” the woman said carefully. “And when was this?”

  Irene couldn’t say. She couldn’t remember. Her mind was a blank. No, not a blank, it was fogged. There were things in there, memories, important ones, only everything was shifting about, hazily; she couldn’t fix on anything. “Two weeks ago, perhaps?” she ventured, hopefully.

  The woman pursed her lips. “Okay. Can you remember anything else about this man? Could you describe him, or . . .”

  “They were talking out there, in the lane,” Irene said. “Something was wrong; Angela was crying.”

  “She was crying?”

  “She was. Although . . .” Irene paused, caught between resistance to disloyalty and an urge to tell the truth. “She’s quite often tearful when she has a little too much to drink; she gets . . . melancholic.”

  “Right.” The woman nodded, smiled; she was ready for the off. “You don’t remember what this man looked like, do you? Tall, short, fat, thin . . .”

  Irene shook her head. He was just . . . normal; he was average. “He had a dog!” she said at last. “A little dog. Black and tan. An Airedale, perhaps? No, an Airedale’s bigger, isn’t it? Maybe a fox terrier?”

  * * *

  That was eight weeks ago. First Angela had died, and now her son too. Irene had no idea whether the police had ever inquired about the man she’d seen outside with Angela; if they had, it came to nothing, because her death was recorded as accidental. Accidents do happen, and they especially happen to drunks, but mother and son, eight weeks apart?

  In fiction, that would never stand.

  SEVEN

  Theo’s bedroom window overlooked a small walled garden, and beyond the wall, the canal. On a spring day like this one, the view was a palette of greens: bright new growth on the plane and oaks, the muted olive of weeping willows on the towpath, electric lime duckweed spreading across the surface of the water.

  Carla sat on the window seat with her knees pulled up under her chin, Theo’s bathrobe, pilfered from the Belles Rives Hotel in Juan-les-Pins a lifetime ago, gathered loosely around her. It was almost six years since she’d moved out of this house, and yet this was the place she felt most herself. More than the much grander house she’d grown up in on Lonsdale Square, certainly more than her drab little maisonette down the road, this house, Theo’s house, was the one that felt like home.

  Theo was lying in bed, the covers thrown back, reading his phone and smoking.

  “I thought you said you were cutting down,” Carla said, glancing over at him, teeth grazing lightly over her lower lip.

  “I am,” he said, without looking up. “I now smoke only postcoitally, postprandially, and with my coffee. So that’s an absolute maximum of five cigarettes a day, assuming I get a shag, which, I regret to say, is no longer by any means a foregone conclusion.”

  Carla smiled despite herself. “You need to start looking after yourself,” she said. “Seriously.”

  He looked across at her, a lazy grin on his face. “What,” he said, flicking a hand downward over his torso, “you think I’m out of shape?”

  Carla rolled her eyes. “You are out of shape,” she said, jutting her chin out, indicating his gut. “It’s not a matter of opinion. You should get another dog, Theo. You do far more exercise when you have a dog. It gets you out of the house, you know it does; otherwise you just sit around, eating and smoking and listening to music.”

  Theo turned back to his phone. “Dixon might turn up,” he said quietly.

  “Theo.” Carla got to her feet. She clambered back onto the bed, the dressing gown slipping open as she knelt in front of him. “He went missing six weeks ago. I’m sorry, but the poor chap isn’t coming home.”

  Theo looked up at her dolefully. “You don’t know that,” he said, and reached for her, placing his hand gently on her waist.

  * * *

  It was warm enough to eat breakfast outside on the patio. Coffee and toast. Theo smoked another cigarette and complained about his editor. “He’s a philistine,” he said. “About sixteen years old, too. Knows nothing of the world. Wants me to take out all the political stuff, which is, when you think about it, the very heart of the novel. No, no, it’s not the heart, that’s wrong. It’s at the root. It is the root. He wants it deracinated. Deracinated and cast into a sea of sentimentality! Did I tell you? He thinks Siobhan needs a romance, to humanize her. She is human! She’s the most fully realized human I’ve ever written.”

  Carla tipped her chair back, resting her bare feet on the chair in front of her, her eyes closed, only half listening to him. She’d heard this speech, or some variant thereof, before. She’d learned that there wasn’t a great deal of point putting forward her view, because in the end he’d do whatever he wanted to anyway. After a while, he stopped talking, and they sat together in companionable silence, listening to the neighborhood sounds, children shouting in the street, the ding-ding-ding of bicycle bells on the towpath, the occasional waterfowl quack. The buzz of a phone on the table. Carla’s. She picked it up, looked at it, and, sighing, put it down again.

  Theo raised an eyebrow. “Unwelcome suitor?”

  She shook her head. “Police.”

  He looked at her for a long moment. “You’re not taking their calls?”

  “I will. Later.” She bit her lip. “I will, I just . . . I don’t want to keep going over it, to keep seeing it. To keep imagining it.”

  Theo placed his hand on top of hers. “It’s all right. You don’t have to talk to them if you don’t want to.”

  Carla smiled. “I think I probably do.” She swung her feet off the chair, slipping them into the too-large slippers she’d borrowed from Theo. She leaned forward and poured herself a half cup of coffee, took a sip, and found that it was cold. She got to her feet, clearing away the breakfast things, placing the silver coffeepot and their mugs onto the tray, carrying them up the stone steps toward the kitchen. She reemerged a moment later, an old Daunt Books tote bag slung over her shoulder. “I’m going to go and get changed,” she said. “I need to get back across to Hayward’s Place.” She bent down, brushing her lips momentarily against his.

  “Aren’t you don
e there yet?” he asked, his hand closing over her wrist, eyes searching her face.

  “Almost,” she said, lowering her lids, turning away from him, disentangling herself. “I’m almost done.

  “Are you going to do it, then?” she called back over her shoulder, as she headed up into the house. “Are you going to humanize Siobhan? You could always give her a dog, I suppose, if you don’t want to give her a lover. A little Staffie, maybe, some pitiful rescue mutt.” Theo laughed. “It’s true, though, isn’t it? You’re supposed to give your character something to care about.”

  “She has plenty of things to care about. She has her work, her art . . .”

  “Ah, but that’s not enough, is it? A woman without a man or a child or a puppy to love, she’s cold, isn’t she? Cold and tragic, in some way dysfunctional.”

  “You’re not,” Theo said.

  Carla was standing in the kitchen doorway; she turned to face him, a sad smile on her lips. “You don’t think so, Theo? You don’t think my life is tragic?”

  He got to his feet, crossed the lawn, and climbed up to meet her, taking her hands in his. “I don’t think that’s all your life is.”

  * * *

  Three years after they married, Theo published a book, a tragicomedy set in a Sicilian town during the Second World War. It was prize nominated (although it didn’t actually win anything), a huge bestseller. A below-par movie adaptation followed. Theo made a great deal of money.

  At the time, Carla wondered whether the book might spell the end of their marriage. Theo was away all the time, touring, going to festivals accompanied by pretty young publicists, mingling with ambitious twentysomethings promoting much-praised debuts, rubbing shoulders at parties with impossibly glamorous Hollywood development executives. Carla worked in the city at the time for a fund manager, in sales. At dinner parties, people’s eyes glazed over when she told them what she did; at cocktail parties, they glanced over her shoulder in search of more stimulating conversational partners.