had become part of the chaos. Those of the attic rooms that had been above his head had come down too. The roof, which had looked almost intact from the front, had at the rear been stripped of tiles, the old sturdy rafters standing out against the sky like picked ribs.
My own bedroom had been on one side of Malcolm's bedroom: all that remained of it were some shattered spikes of floorboards, a strip of plaster cornice and a drunken mantle clinging to a cracked wall overlooking a void.
Malcolm began to shake. I took off my jacket and put it round his shoulders.
'We don't have gas,' he said to the policeman. 'My mother had it disconnected sixty years ago because she was afraid of it.'
There was a slight spasmodic wind blowing, enough to lift Malcolm's hair and leave it awry. He looked suddenly frail, as if the swirling air would knock him over.
'He needs a chair,' I said.
The policeman gestured helplessly to the mess. No chairs left.
'I'll get one from the kitchen. You look after him.'
'I'm quite all right,' Malcolm said faintly.
'The outside kitchen door is locked, sir, and we can't allow you to go in through the hall.'
I produced the key, showed it to him, and went along and in through the door before he could stop me. In the kitchen, the shiny yellow walls themselves were still standing, but the door from the hall had blown open, letting in a glacier tongue of bricks and dust. Dust everywhere, like a veil. Lumps of plaster had fallen from the ceiling. Everything glass, everything china in the room had cracked apart. Moira's geraniums, fallen from their shelves, lay in red farewell profusion over her all-electric domain.
I picked up Malcolm's pine armchair, the one thing he had insisted on keeping through all the changes, and carried it out to where I'd left him. He sank into it without seeming to notice it and put his hand over his mouth.
There were firemen and other people tugging at movable parts of the ruins, but the tempo of their work had slowed since they'd seen we were alive. Several of them came over to Malcolm, offering sympathy, but mostly wanting information, such as were we certain there had been no one else in the house? As certain as we could be.
Had we been storing any gas in the house? Bottled gas? Butane? Propane? Ether? No.
Why ether? it could be used for making cocaine. We looked at them blankly. They had already discovered, it seemed, that there had been no mains gas connected. They were asking about other possibilities because it nevertheless looked like a gas explosion. We'd had no gas of any sort. Had we been storing any explosive substances whatsoever?
No. Time seemed disjointed.
Women from the village, as in all disasters, had brought hot tea in thermos flasks for the men working. They gave some to Malcolm and me, and found a red blanket for Malcolm so that I could have my jacket back in the chill gusty air. There was grey sheet cloud overhead – the light was grey, like the dust.
A thick ring of people from the village stood in the garden round the edges of the lawn, with more arriving every minute across the fields and through the garden gate. No one chased them away. Many were taking photographs. Two of the photographers looked like Press.
A police car approached, its siren wailing ever louder as it made slow progress along the crowded road. It wailed right up the drive, and fell silent, and presently a senior-looking man not in uniform came round to the back of the house and took charge.
First, he stopped all work on the rubble. Then he made observations and wrote in a notebook. Then he talked to the chief of the firemen. Finally he came over to Malcolm and me.
Burly and black moustached, he said, as to an old acquaintance, 'Mr Pembroke.'
Malcolm similarly said, 'Superintendent,' and everyone could hear the shake he couldn't keep out of his voice. The wind died away for a while, though Malcolm's shakes continued within the blanket.
'And you, sir?' the superintendent asked me.
'Ian Pembroke.'
He pursed his mouth below the moustache, considering me. He was the man I'd spoken to on the telephone, I thought. 'Where were you last night, sir?'
'With my father in London,' I said. 'We've just… returned.'
I looked at him steadily. There were a great many things to be said, but I wasn't going to rush into them.
He said noncommittally, 'We will have to call in explosive experts as the damage here on preliminary inspection, and in the absence of any gas, seems to have been caused by an explosive device.'
Why didn't he say bomb, I thought irritably. Why shy away from the word? If he'd expected any reaction from Malcolm or me, he probably got none as both of us had come to the same conclusion from the moment we'd walked up the drive.
If the house had merely been burning, Malcolm would have been dashing about, giving instructions, saving what he could, dismayed but full of vigour. It was the implications behind a bomb which had knocked him into shivering lassitude: the implications and the reality that if he'd slept in his own bed, he wouldn't have risen to bath, read the Sporting Life, go to his bank for travellers' cheques and eat breakfast at the Ritz.
And nor, for that matter, would I.
'I can See you're both shocked,' the superintendent said unemotionally. 'It's dearly impossible to talk here, so I suggest you might come to the police station.' He spoke carefully, giving us at least theoretically the freedom of refusing.
'What about the house?' I said. 'It's open to the four winds. Apart from this great hole, all the windows are broken everywhere else. There's a lot of stuff still inside… silver… my father's papers in his office… some of the furniture.'
'We will keep a patrol here,' he said. 'If you'll give the instructions, we'll suggest someone to board up the windows, and we'll contact a construction firm with a tarpaulin large enough for the roof.'
'Send me the bill,' Malcolm said limply.
'The firms concerned will no doubt present their accounts.'
'Thanks anyway,' I said.
The superintendent nodded.
A funeral for Quantum, I thought. Coffin windows, pall roof. Lowering the remains into the ground would probably follow. Even if any of the fabric of the house should prove sound enough, would Malcolm have the stamina to rebuild, and live there, and remember?
He stood up, the blanket clutched around him, looking infinitely older than his Years, a sag of defeat in the cheeks. Slowly, in deference to the shaky state of his legs, Malcolm, the superintendent and I made our way along past the kitchen and out into the front drive. The ambulances had departed, also one of the fire-engines, but the rope across the gateway had been overwhelmed, and the front garden was full of people, one young constable still trying vainly to hold them back. A bunch in front of the rest started running in our direction as soon as we appeared, and with a feeling of unreality I saw they were Ferdinand, Gervase, Alicia, Berenice, Vivien, Donald, Helen… I lost count.
'Malcolm,' Gervase said loudly, coming to a halt in front of us, so that we too had to stop. 'You're alive!'
A tiny flicker of humour appeared in Malcolm's eyes at this most obvious of statements, but he had no chance of answering as the others set up a clamour of questions.
Vivien said, 'I heard from the village that Quantum had blown up and you were both dead.' Her strained voice held a complaint about having been given erroneous news.
'So did I,' Alicia said. 'Three people telephoned… so I came at once, after I'd told Gervase and the others, of course.' She looked deeply shocked, but then they all did, mirroring no doubt what they could see on my own face but also suffering from the double upset of misinformation.
'Then when we all get here,' Vivien said, 'we find you aren't dead.' She sounded as if that too were wrong.
'What did happen?' Ferdinand asked. 'Just look at Quantum!'
Berenice said, 'Where were you both, then, when it exploded?'
'We thought you were dead,' Donald said, looking bewildered.
