The Burden

CHAPTER 5

Angela and Arthur Franklin drove away in the car.

Up in the nursery, the new nanny, Gwyneth Jones, was putting the baby to bed.

She was uneasy tonight. There had been certain feelings, portents, lately, and tonight—

‘I’m just imagining it,’ she said to herself. ‘Fancy! That’s all it is.’

Hadn’t the doctor told her that it was quite possible she might never have another fit?

She’d had them as a child, and then never a sign of anything of the kind until that terrible day …

Teething convulsions, her aunt had called those childhood seizures. But the doctor had used another name, had said plainly and without subterfuge what the malady was. And he had said, quite definitely: ‘You mustn’t take a place with a baby or children. It wouldn’t be safe.’

But she’d paid for that expensive training. It was her trade—what she knew how to do—certificates and all—well paid—and she loved looking after babies. A year had gone by, and there had been no recurrence of trouble. It was all nonsense, the doctor frightening her like that.

So she’d written to the bureau—a different bureau, and she’d soon got a place, and she was happy here, and the baby was a little love.

She put the baby into her cot and went downstairs for her supper. She awoke in the night with a sense of uneasiness, almost terror. She thought:

‘I’ll make myself a drop of hot milk. It will calm me down.’

She lit the spirit lamp and carried it to the table near the window.

There was no final warning. She went down like a stone, lying there on the floor, jerking and twisting. The spirit lamp fell to the floor, and the flame from it ran across the carpet and reached the end of the muslin curtains.

Laura woke up suddenly.

She had been dreaming—a bad dream—though she couldn’t remember the details of it. Something chasing her, something—but she was safe now, in her own bed, at home.

She felt for the lamp by her bedside, and turned it on, and looked at her own little clock. Twelve o’clock. Midnight.

She sat up in bed, feeling a curious reluctance to turn out the light again.

She listened. What a queer creaking noise … ‘Burglars perhaps,’ thought Laura, who like most children was perpetually suspecting burglars. She got out of bed and went to the door, opened it a little way, and peered cautiously out. Everything was dark and quiet.

But there was a smell, a funny smoky smell. Laura sniffed experimentally. She went across the landing and opened the door that led to the servants’ quarters. Nothing.

She crossed to the other side of the landing, where a door shut off a short passage leading to the nursery and the nursery bathroom.

Then she shrank back, appalled. Great wreaths of smoke came curling towards her.

‘It’s on fire. The house is on fire!’

Laura screamed, rushed to the servants’ wing, and called:

‘Fire! The house is on fire!’

She could never remember clearly what came after. Cook and Ethel—Ethel running downstairs to telephone, Cook opening that door across the landing and being driven back by the smoke, Cook soothing her with: ‘It’ll be all right.’ Incoherent murmurs: ‘The engine will come—they’ll get them out through the window—don’t you worry, my dear.’

But it would not be all right. Laura knew.

She was shattered by the knowledge that her prayer had been answered. God had acted—acted with promptitude and with indescribable terror. This was His way, His terrible way, of taking baby to Heaven.

Cook pulled Laura down the front stairs with her.

‘Come on now, Miss Laura—don’t wait about—we must all get outside the house.’

But Nannie and baby could not get outside the house. They were up there, in the nursery, trapped!

Cook plunged heavily down the stairs, pulling Laura after her. But as they passed out through the front door to join Ethel on the lawn, and Cook’s grip relaxed, Laura turned back and ran up the stairs again.

Once more she opened the landing door. From somewhere through the smoke she heard a far-off fretful whimpering cry.

And suddenly, something in Laura came alive—warmth, passionate endeavour, that curious incalculable emotion, love.

Her mind was sober and clear. She had read or been told that to rescue people in a fire you dipped a towel in water and put it round your mouth. She ran into her room, soaked the bath towel in the jug, rolled it round her, and crossing the landing plunged into the smoke. There was flame now across the passage, and the timbers were falling. Where an adult would have estimated danger and chances, Laura went bull-headed with the unknowing courage of a child. She must get to baby, she must save baby. Otherwise baby would burn to death. She stumbled over the unconscious body of Gwyneth, not knowing what it was. Choking, gasping, she found her way to the crib; the screen round it had protected it from the worst of the smoke.

Laura grabbed at the baby, clutched her close beneath the sheltering wet towel. She stumbled towards the door, her lungs gasping for air.

But there was no retracing her steps. Flames barred her way.

Laura had her wits still. The door to the tank-room—she felt for it, found it, pushed through it to a rickety stair that led up to the tank-room in the loft. She and Charles had got out that way once on to the roof. If she could crawl across the roof …

As the fire-engines arrived, an incoherent couple of women in night attire rushed to them crying out:

‘The baby—there’s a baby and the nurse in that room up there.’

The fireman whistled and pursed his lips. That end of the house was blazing with flame. ‘Goners,’ he said to himself. ‘Never get them out alive!’

‘Everyone else out?’ he asked.

Cook, looking round, cried out: ‘Where’s Miss Laura? She came out right after me. Wherever can she be?’

It was then that a fireman called out: ‘Hi, Joe, there’s someone on the roof—the other end. Get a ladder up.’

A few moments later, they set their burden down gently on the lawn—an unrecognizable Laura, blackened, her arms scorched, half unconscious, but tight in her grip a small morsel of humanity, whose outraged howls proclaimed her angrily alive.

‘If it hadn’t been for Laura—’ Angela stopped, mastering her emotions.

‘We’ve found out all about poor Nannie,’ she went on. ‘It seems she was an epileptic. Her doctor warned her not to take a nurse’s post again, but she did. They think she dropped a spirit lamp when she had a fit. I always knew there was something wrong about her—something she didn’t want me to find out.’

‘Poor girl,’ said Franklin, ‘she’s paid for it.’

Angela, ruthless in her mother love, swept on, dismissing the claims of Gwyneth Jones to pity.

‘And baby would have been burned to death if it hadn’t been for Laura.’

‘Is Laura all right again?’ asked Mr Baldock.

‘Yes. Shock, of course, and her arms were burnt, but not too badly. She’ll be quite all right, the doctor says.’

‘Good for Laura,’ said Mr Baldock.

Angela said indignantly: ‘And you pretending to Arthur that Laura was so jealous of the poor mite that she might do her a mischief! Really—you bachelors!’

‘All right, all right,’ said Mr Baldock. ‘I’m not often wrong, but I daresay it’s good for me sometimes.’

‘Just go and take a look at those two.’

Mr Baldock did as he was told. The baby lay on a rug in front of the nursery fire, kicking vaguely and making indeterminate gurgling noises.

Beside her sat Laura. Her arms were bandaged, and she had lost her eyelashes, which gave her face a comical appearance. She was dangling some coloured rings to attract the baby’s attention. She turned her head to look at Mr Baldock.

‘Hallo, young Laura,’ said Mr Baldock. ‘How are you? Quite the heroine, I hear. A gallant rescue.’

Laura gave him a brief glance, and then concentrated once more on her efforts with the rings.

‘How are the arms?’

‘They did hurt rather a lot, but they’ve put some stuff on, and they’re better now.’

‘You’re a funny one,’ said Mr Baldock, sitting down heavily in a chair. ‘One day you’re hoping the cat will smother your baby sister—oh yes, you did—can’t deceive me—and the next day you’re crawling about the roof lugging the child to safety at the risk of your own life.’

‘Anyway, I did save her,’ said Laura. ‘She isn’t hurt a bit—not a bit.’ She bent over the child and spoke passionately. ‘I won’t ever let her be hurt, not ever. I shall look after her all my life.’

Mr Baldock’s eyebrows rose slowly.

‘So it’s love now. You love her, do you?’

‘Oh yes!’ The answer came with the same fervour. ‘I love her better than anything in the world!’

She turned her face to him, and Mr Baldock was startled. It was, he thought, like the breaking open of a cocoon. The child’s face was radiant with feeling. In spite of the grotesque absence of lashes and brows, the face had a quality of emotion that made it suddenly beautiful.

‘I see,’ said Mr Baldock. ‘I see … And where shall we go from here, I wonder?’

Laura looked at him, puzzled, and slightly apprehensive.

‘Isn’t it all right?’ she asked. ‘For me to love her, I mean?’

Mr Baldock looked at her. His face was thoughtful.

‘It’s all right for you, young Laura,’ he said. ‘Oh yes, it’s all right for you …’

He relapsed into abstraction, his hand tapping his chin.

As a historian he had always mainly been concerned with the past, but there were moments when the fact that he could not foresee the future irritated him profoundly. This was one of them.

He looked at Laura and the crowing Shirley, and his brow contracted angrily. ‘Where will they be,’ he thought, ‘in ten years’ time—in twenty years—in twenty-five? Where shall I be?’

The answer to that last question came quickly.

‘Under the turf,’ said Mr Baldock to himself. ‘Under the turf.’

He knew that, but he did not really believe it, any more than any other positive person full of the vitality of living really believes it.

What a dark and mysterious entity the future was! In twenty-odd years what would have happened? Another war, perhaps? (Most unlikely!) New diseases? People fastening mechanical wings on themselves, perhaps, and floating about the streets like sacrilegious angels! Journeys to Mars? Sustaining oneself on horrid little tablets out of bottles, instead of on steaks and succulent green peas!

‘What are you thinking about?’ Laura asked.

‘The future.’

‘Do you mean tomorrow?’

‘Further forward than that. I suppose you’re able to read, young Laura?’

‘Of course,’ said Laura, shocked. ‘I’ve read nearly all the Doctor Dolittles, and the books about Winnie-the-Pooh and—’

‘Spare me the horrid details,’ said Mr Baldock. ‘How do you read a book? Begin at the beginning and go right through?’

‘Yes. Don’t you?’

‘No,’ said Mr Baldock. ‘I take a look at the start, get some idea of what it’s all about, then I go on to the end and see where the fellow has got to, and what he’s been trying to prove. And then, then I go back and see how he’s got there and what’s made him land up where he did. Much more interesting.’

Laura looked interested but disapproving.

‘I don’t think that’s the way the author meant his book to be read,’ she said.

‘Of course he didn’t.’

‘I think you should read the book the way the author meant.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Baldock. ‘But you’re forgetting the party of the second part, as the blasted lawyers put it. There’s the reader. The reader’s got his rights, too. The author writes his book the way he likes. Has it all his own way. Messes up the punctuation and fools around with the sense any way he pleases. And the reader reads the book the way he wants to read it, and the author can’t stop him.’

‘You make it sound like a battle,’ said Laura.

‘I like battles,’ said Mr Baldock. ‘The truth is, we’re all slavishly obsessed by time. Chronological sequence has no significance whatever. If you consider Eternity, you can jump about in Time as you please. But no one does consider Eternity.’