The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [240]
Rob picked his way past the black puddles in the ruts of the drive. The house was set fifty yards back from the road, though its privacy had long been surrendered—on either side new developments looked in over the boundary walls. It was one of those big red-brick villas, of the 1880s perhaps, with gables and a turret, a lot of timber and tile-hanging, and very high ground-floor rooms that would take a fortune to furnish and heat, and so easily (Rob had seen them all over London) turned bleak and barely habitable in their latter-day lives. Now there were holes in the steep slate roof, small bushes seeded in the gutters, stripes of moss and slime down the walls. A JCB was backed up under the trees, and beside it a blue Focus presumably belonging to Debbie.
The front door was boarded up, and Rob made his way round to the side. There was a smell of smoke, cutting and toxic, not the good autumn-leaf smell. The ground sloped down, so that the broken veranda along the side of the house rose up to shoulder height. Then there was the round turret, and then a high brick wall with a door on to a tiny yard, the service entrance, the door here wide open—Rob slipped into the house through a dark scullery with huge tin sinks, a dim kitchen with a gas range, broken chairs, nothing worth salvaging. The floor was gritty underfoot, and there was a penetrating smell of raw damp—then he pushed open a fire-door into what must have been the dining-room and there was the smell of smoke again. He saw the awful wiring and boxing-in—the old house had been too disfigured thirty years before for any real sense of marvelment or discovery. He wrote it off. Into the hall—fire-doors again concealing the stairs, but light through double doors on to a room on the garden side of the house. He heard a child’s voice, the carefree note with its little edge of determination.
“Are you Debbie?” Out on the lawn, a shrubby tangle trampled back, a red-faced woman in jeans and a T-shirt was picking up items around the smouldering bonfire and throwing them on top—some old magazines caught, doubtfully, a moment of flame curling outwards as they slithered back down.
“Don’t get too close, now”—a boy of six or seven, red-faced too in his small anorak, bringing random things forward: a cardboard box, a handful of grass and twigs that fell back over his feet as he tossed it.
Debbie didn’t know who Rob was: he saw the curbing of curiosity, her provisional stance of responsibility for what was going on. “Raymond sent me down, I’m Rob.”
“Oh, yes, right,” said Debbie. “I was just about to call him, we’re nearly done.”
Rob looked into the fire, which seemed dense and half-digested, colour still showing in old floor-mats, were they?—that the fire had given up on, pink edges of a blackened curtain. “How long’s it been burning?”
“What was it, Jack, day before yesterday?”
But the boy ran off at this to find something else to burn. Rob disguised his anxiety, picked up a stick and flipped some loose bits of wood back into the pyre. He had the almost absurd idea that other items might still be lying unconsumed at the bottom of it all; he saw them raking it out with a sense of excitement and purpose greater than that of the burning—already it seemed a story. “Raymond said you’d cleared the strong-room?”
Debbie had a wary eye out for the child. “Yes, that can go on, my love.” Though little Jack had his own caprices and changes of mind.
“I’m saving this one, Mummy.”
“Well, all right …,” Debbie said, with a glance