George
Just as he has decided to close his eyes, to rest a while, he feels himself seized, dragged bodily, into cooler air. His face is drenched in water.
Bill hunkers down above him. ‘I thought you were a dead man. You bloody fool. You and your quinine. I can tell you now, before you look in a mirror, you’ve paid quite a price for it.’
For several minutes he lies, half-insensible, before returning to himself. Then he looks up, sees the blaze. The sight terrifies him. There are six of them against this, and he, getting shakily to his feet, is as weak as a cat.
No: there are a few more, the more able-bodied of the patients are offering their help. And then a strange sight. New figures are emerging. Ten perhaps, in total. Some of them women, wearing veils that catch and snicker in the warm air sent up from the flames. Several men, most of them elderly. A few youths – even a couple of children. All carry receptacles.
A line is formed, stretching from the blaze to the Bosphorus. The containers – saucepans, buckets, even a large coffee pot – travel between them, filled with water. Each individual dousing seems a pitiful effort, doomed to failure. But after the first couple of efforts he does not stop to regard the effect, or even to catch his breath, because the next full bucket is always waiting for him.
He works without thought. Even the agony of his face and lungs is a faintly realised thing. He has become a machine, no, a part of a machine.
At some indiscernible point, the balance shifts. A stemming, a diminishing, has occurred. The fact of it spurs them on. Then comes the moment when he reaches for the bucket, and finds that it isn’t there.
‘Look.’ He turns, finds that it has been Bill beside him all along; he hadn’t even realised. ‘I think we’ve done it.’
He does look. The wing of the house is a blackened, sodden mess, as though a giant hand had scooped a great cavity out of the property. The few timbers that remain, forlornly intact, look like the ribs of some giant, charred animal corpse. A desultory steam rises from it. There is a strange illumination now, and he turns and realises that this is because dawn is now upon them: the sky above them looming pink and gold, as though it, now, is aflame. He looks about, to thank their Turkish helpers. He finds that they have all gone, almost as though they never were.
She stares about her, white-faced, at the wreckage of the ward. When she looks at him she glances quickly away again, but then this is hardly a surprise. Half of his face is covered in white gauze, which does not quite conceal all the ragged edges of the burn. Pure acetic acid, that had been kept in a vial beside the quinine, and used for the treatment of infection. It ate into the soft flesh of the cheek, and he will bear the scar of it forever. He was lucky to keep the eye. Finally, his first war wound.
‘I am sorry,’ he says. ‘I forget what it must be to see it like this, your home.’
For several minutes she is silent. She circles the detritus, as one appalled but unable to look away.
‘I imagine you will want to take the boy home. As I am sure you are aware, the fire impressed itself upon him deeply. I do not think he is quite himself.’
She had gone to the boy, and held him. No words had been exchanged. There had been such tenderness that he had felt he must look away, even leave the room. It had been a tenderness of a very particular, almost sacred nature. He had thought, before, that it could only be found between a mother and her child.
She looks up back at him with the blank eyes of a sleepwalker. Gradually her gaze seems to find focus. ‘All of them survived? Your patients?’
‘Yes.’
She seems to sag a little with relief. Her face contorts. She seems to be working herself up to something.
‘What is it?’
‘The man. The one they found this morning—’
‘The arsonist? Yes. They caught him as he was trying to escape, though of course he will no doubt claim otherwise.’
‘He is my brother.’
‘Your—’ He stops, confused. Because he cannot think of anything else he says, ‘I thought – forgive me – that your brother was thought dead.’
She opens her mouth as though to speak, and closes it again, as though thinking better of it. Finally, she says, ‘We did not know until recently. He was held in a Russian camp. He returned to us several months ago.’
He feels betrayed. All this time, when she has been coming here, she has not trusted him enough to tell him. Then he catches himself. But of course she had not trusted him; how could he have expected more?
Her brother. Thoughts chase themselves around his mind. There is one that is almost too terrible to approach, but it must be said. ‘Did you know that he planned to do this?’
At this she steps forward. For a second he actually thinks she might be about to strike him. ‘You think I would have known,’ she says, caught somewhere between entreaty and outrage, ‘and not tried to stop him, or warn you? With the boy there? How could you even ask such a question of me?’
‘I do not know.’ Everything seems different, now, nothing certain. Because there has been a deception, or at least a concealment. She never spoke of the return of her brother, and suddenly this seems to him like an odd omission.
‘You cannot think that of me. I have been afraid of him. Perhaps I should have seen … but I could not have imagined this. It is … as though
