10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [44]
“His father will win the seat,” Crystal said.
God bless politics, I thought.
“Paul was out at a meeting,” Isobel said. “He came home to collect me when he heard about the fire, to see if there was anything I could do to help. It always looks better if I’m with him, he says.”
Water plumed out of the huge appliance and sizzled on the flames and ran out of the building again, soaking the cobbles. I and my red blanket dripped and chilled.
Another vast tanker in the car park at the rear raised soaring fountains above the roof so that the two arcs of glittering Niagara met and married and fell together as monstrous rain. Leaflets and junk a fiery furnace; two vulnerable organisms shivering outside.
The yellow-helmets prodigally aimed their hoses at the still-dark buildings next to the blazing shops and, in time, inevitably, the ravaging tongues of fire ran out of fuel and began to diminish, to whisper instead of roar, to give up the struggle and leave the battlefield so that what fell from the sky into the square was no longer sparks but hot, clinging ash, and what assaulted the senses wasn’t heat but the acrid after-smell of burning.
Someone fetched the doctor who had seen to my father’s ankle three days earlier; he peered into my eyes with bright lights and into my ears and felt the bump on my head and bound up blisters in huge padded dressings so that they wouldn’t burst and get infected, and he agreed with my father that all a healthy boy needed was to see him in the morning.
My father solved the interim by enlisting the sympathy of the manager of The Sleeping Dragon, who gave us a bedroom and whose wife found me some clothes.
“You poor dears ... you poor dears ...” She mothered us, kind, but enjoying it, and both she and her husband happily welcomed the reporters from the London dailies who thronged through the doors the next day.
Usher Rudd’s admittedly brilliant photograph of my father in mid-leap with the flaming window behind him made the front pages, not only of the Hoopwestern Gazette and the next edition of the Quindle Diary (“Juliard Jinx”) but of every major paper in the land (“Juliard Jumps”) and hot on the heels of the factual news came endless comment and criticism and picking-to-pieces.
People will always tell you what you should have done. People will tell you what they would have done if they had woken in the night with fire underneath them. People will say that absolutely the first thing to do was call the fire brigade, and no one could be bothered to say how do I call the brigade when the only telephone is downstairs, surrounded by flames? How do you call a fire brigade when the telephone line has melted?
Everyone can think logically afterwards, but in the heat and the smell and the noise and the danger, analytical reasoning is more or less out of the question.
People tend to think that wildly unreasonable behavior in terrifying circumstances can be called “panic,” and forgiven, but it’s not so much panic, a form of ultimate illogical fear, but a lack of time to think things through.
Perhaps my father and I would have done differently if we had been presented with the situation as a theoretical exercise with a correct and an incorrect solution.
Perhaps we should have thrown the mattresses out of the window as a possible way of breaking our fall. Perhaps, if we could have got them through the window. As it was, we both nearly died and, as it was, we both lived, but more by luck than reason.
Don’t waste time with clothes, they’ll tell you. Better go naked into this world than clothed into the next. But they—“they,” whoever they are—haven’t jumped in front of the media’s sharpened lenses.
I thought afterwards that I should at least have dashed into the burning sitting room for my jacket and jockey’s helmet, instead of bothering with the taps. Also I should have wrapped towels around my hands and feet before grasping the window frame.
But I don’t think my father ever regretted the near-to-lethal seconds he spent in putting on his shirt and trousers. He knew in some way even