Authors: Margaret Drabble
Steve watches the work of his hands go up in flames. Faro’s gazebo has surely gone, and probably also the Water House and the Observatory. He seems to be in a trance. Faro leaves him standing there, and goes back to the car. She switches on the car radio, puts in the tape of Grandpa Barron’s
Messiah,
opens the car doors, turns up the volume. The music floods out into the night sky.
And every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, and the crooked places shall be made plain...
The music fills the earth and the heaven. They all listen, the boys, the old man, the firemen, Steve and Faro.
For the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light
... On and on pours the music. There is no stopping it.
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Speak ye comfortably unto Jerusalem
... Tears pour down Faro’s face, streaked with smuts borne on the dying breeze. The music defies hell and soars to heaven, and it seems to Faro that all the caverns of the cliff will open and give up their dead, that the men of the ages of stone and bronze and coal will come forth from their subterranean mansions, and that they will be redeemed. For now is Christ risen, and hell has been harrowed, and those that sleep shall be awakened. The skeletons totter out into the blaze Faro weeps and weeps, as she sits on the low wall, with the car doors wide open like a beetle’s wings.
When the first track of the tape comes to an end, one of the firemen comes over to Faro. She half expects him to tell her to turn the fucking volume down or fuck off back down the Ml back to where she came from, but what he says is ‘Is that the Northam Choral Society singing there?’
Faro nods.
‘I thought it must be,’ says the fireman. ‘I could tell it was. My dad sang in that choir. He sang for that very recording. With Sir Malcolm Sargent, in the City Hall, in 1957. They could sing, in them days. Now, it’s nowt but striptease and karaoke.’
‘My Great-Grandpa Bawtry used to sing with the Breaseborough Chapel Choir,’ says Faro.
He nods, as though this is what one would have expected and, less predictably, stretches out his grimy hand to her. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he says. They shake hands, across the divide. His hand is hot and safe, his grasp is firm.
The pause ends, the tape reverses, and the second side of the tape begins to play.
I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that though worms may corrupt this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.
The trumpets sound, and the ashes stand upright at the latter day. The joyful voices of the dead rise in impassioned and glorious unison. Cotterhall Man hears them, in his glass coffin. Their voices harrow hell and pierce the firmament.
The fire did not burn for forty days and forty nights, nor even for four days and four nights. The offspring of Red Adaire were not flown in to quench it. It burned for three days, and at first attracted national press and TV coverage. Interest waned quickly. The usual clichés were rolled out—‘a miracle nobody was killed’, ‘a disaster waiting to happen’. But even as the valley continued to smoulder, the cameras moved on. There was one small human-interest story—old Mrs Clegg, who had for some years been stubbornly resisting efforts to rescue her from her endangered yet strategically desirable slum, had barricaded herself into her bedroom on that first flaming night, and had refused to move. She said she’d survived two world wars in that house and would prefer to die there. The Germans hadn’t bombed her out, and she wasn’t leaving now. Who’d won the wars? She had. She wasn’t having any firemen giving her a fireman’s lift. Her oaths were impressive. She was talked out at dawn by the only woman on the scene, a young London journalist called Faro Gaulden (or Golden, as some papers understandably misspelled her name). This person had persuaded Mrs Clegg to come forth, and had bullied her into taking shelter with a neighbour. Mrs Clegg was not a grateful or a pleasant survivor. She kept on saying she’d rather die than spend a night under the roof of a stranger. And as the danger passed when the wind changed direction, she was allowed home the next day. Not much of a story.
More was made of the reasons for the disaster. Was it the chicken shit? Was it the methane? Was it the curse of Cotterhall Man? Several column inches were devoted to the technology of energy creation from waste disposal, to the virtues of anaerobic digesters and the dangers of landfill. Faro, who wrote a good deal about the incident herself, became an instant expert in the acronyms of waste management, and her conversation became rich with references to LFG (landfill gas), MSW (municipal solid waste) and NFFO (non-fossil fuel obligation). Rose & Rose with their greendump sites were acquitted of any malpractice: in fact, it emerged that the claims made to Stella Wakefield at Nick Gaulden’s wake, and relayed to Chrissie Sinclair, were not wholly false. Rose
Sc
Rose had considered the environment as well as their own profits. Mistakes had been made, but not mistakes worthy of the description of criminal negligence. It was the ancient poison that had broken out. Rose & Rose had cracked the crust by overeager excavation and let it out, but they could not be blamed for what was down there in the first place. It was not they who had been digging and rooting and undermining Hammervale all the way through the Industrial Revolution. They’d been far away, minding their own business, in a
shtetl
in Poland, in a tailor’s shop in Austria, in the history department of the University of Heidelberg. Not guilty, was the verdict on Rose & Rose.
The discovery, on site, of two 45-gallon drums of depleted uranium was hushed up by the Environmental Agency. This volatile and dangerous substance, which can ignite spontaneously, burns at 1,000°C and vaporizes everything around it. Its presence on the Rose & Rose dump was inexplicable. It had been illegally dumped, but by whom? Investigators are still at work. Mrs Clegg had a lucky escape.
The valley and the Earth Project would recover, in time, and Steve said he would rebuild Faro’s gazebo. Flowers would grow once more from the ashes. Cinders are good for the soil. There was a small sympathy vote from the Lottery distributors, and a little more money trickled back again—not enough, but a little. Hammervale would soon be forgotten again. The ragwort and the hawkweed would blossom in peace.
Dennis Rose’s claims to an environmental conscience had some substance, but Sebastian Jones’s claims to a cancerous pancreas did not. He had been lying to Faro. Faro, returning from the flames, had accused him of lying, and he confessed. He was ill, but not fatally ill. Faro told him he needed to see a psychoanalyst more urgently than a physician and recommended Moira, whom she had just met at a book launch to celebrate a new genetics-based study of mother-daughter relationships called
The Maternal Genie.
Moira, Faro said sharply, would be just the person to sort Seb out. Moira had been through hell and back again, and she would drag Seb out too, if she could. Seb expressed horror at this suggestion, but Faro had lost patience with horror. He had overstepped the mark, and he had lost her. She would not go back. Sebastian Jones had wasted quite enough of her time. She was sick of waste. The crudity of his death wish, she told him sternly, was unworthy of someone of his intelligence. He should think of something more sophisticated next time.
Sebastian Jones, perversely, seemed to enjoy her severity, and he began to perk up once Faro had finally quit him. Or so Raoul and Rona reported to Faro. She should have ditched him long ago, said Raoul and Rona.
A couple of weeks after the Breaseborough disaster, Faro received an e-mail from her distant cousin Peter Cudworth. It started mildly enough, telling her that he had seen her name on the Internet news coverage of the fire, and had read with interest her article on the history of municipal solid waste disposal and recycling techniques in the nineteenth century. Her e-mail address had been attached, so he had taken the liberty. It had been good to see her name, and to be reminded of their meeting in the summer. He felt he had to tell her that he had been through a very bad time. She had told him about her father’s death, and now he had to tell her about his wife’s. Two weeks ago, Anna had committed suicide. She had survived an earlier bout of severe depression, some five or six years ago, but this recent recurrence had proved intractable, and the drugs which had seemed to work reasonably well on a previous occasion had produced an unfortunate reaction.
Faro, reaching this point in the e-mail, decided to print out. She couldn’t read stuff like that on the screen, it didn’t seem right.
The printer clicked on and on, as it spewed out Peter Cudworth’s long, sad story. No wonder the message had taken some time to retrieve.
Peter apologized for unburdening himself to a stranger, but he felt that Faro, because of her own family history, would understand. Anna, he wrote, had become obsessed by the history of the Holocaust, and had taken to reading nothing but Holocaust literature, of which there was now, in these recent years, so much. She had read her way through histories and diaries, through novels and poems, through Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt and Albert Speer and Gitta Sereny. She had read Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s
Hitler’s 'Willing Executioners,
and convinced herself she came from evil stock. ‘There’s no need for me to tell you,’ wrote Peter Cudworth, widower, ‘that she wouldn’t have hurt a fly. She was a good woman.’ He had tried to persuade her that it would be a good idea, next year, for them to go back to the village, to look at her past, for it would prove either innocent or alien. He’d even suggested they should brave a tour of the death camps. ‘She’d see it had nothing to do with her, I told her,’ wrote Peter. ‘But she was beyond reasoning. I hadn’t realized it had got so bad with her.’
There had been other factors—medical, menopausal. But it was history itself that had weighed upon her. He was sorry to burden Faro with this, but it was good to be able to tell somebody. His friends and colleagues in Iowa City had been more than kind, but there were things he could not talk about to them. He signed himself off,
With all good wishes for your health and happiness, your kinsman Peter. Stemmata quid faciunt?
Faro was sympathetic but cautious in her reply. She could not cope with another sick man. She did not want Peter Cudworth to arrive on her doorstep. She would keep him at a safe cyber-distance. She seemed to attract sorrow and sickness like a beacon. She would try to dim her light.
Auntie Dora, the last survivor of the old world of Breaseborough, did not make a good recovery. It was soon clear that she would never be able to go home to Swinton Road and to her cat Minton. She would not be able to live by herself again. The list of registered care homes picked up by Faro at the Wardale Hospital came in handy. At first, Chrissie was surprised by how eager and helpful Faro continued to prove over the timeconsuming and saddening administration of Dora’s illness, but when she learned that Faro was having an affair with a nice Jewish boy up in Northam, she was surprised no longer. No wonder Faro was always ready to drive up and down the Ml. Steve Nieman sounded just the right kind of chap for Faro, and she looked forward to meeting him one day soon.
Auntie Dora was moved from the hospital into a home in Cotterhall, where she had a small room to herself, with fulltime nursing care, and was allowed to keep Minton with her. She did not at first adapt well to institutionalization, and objected strongly to being dispatched all the way from Breaseborough to Cotterhall, but eventually she accepted Faro’s insistence that it was the only nursing home she could find which would take pets. She was able to enjoy pouring good strong Bawtry scorn on the other residents, who seemed to her to be suffering from an exaggerated array of geriatric complaints, such as leglessness, toothlessness and witlessness. She still had most of her teeth, despite or because of the fact that she hadn’t seen a dentist for thirty years: her teeth had protected themselves with a natural coating of tartar and plaque, and could still munch their way through a chop or a pork pie. She refused to do her exercises, but stroking Minton kept her thick and gnarled old fingers moving. Minton, a wily and sociable cat, soon found many other admirers, and was seen to spend much time eyeing Enid Love’s powder-blue budgerigar. But he was polite enough to remain loyal to his old mistress, and always retired to the end of her bed for the night. Faro, secretly, was astonished that this was allowed, in this age of hygiene, but she was so relieved by the lenience of the regime that she kept her astonishment to herself. Minton, in her view, deserved a medal.
Faro got on well with the manager of the home, a fussy old gay called Ronnie, with a penchant for flowery wallpapers and upholstered toilet rolls, and a partner called Len who organized bingo and card games. Ronnie had once been a publican: he told Faro that there was more money in old folk these days than in beer. They were his little gold mine. He was, as far as Faro could see, very kind and gallant to his old ladies and gentlemen. He praised them and petted them and urged them to live on to the next millennium, and he iced cakes for their birthdays with his own hands. Dora, in time, came to like him, though she remained critical of many of her fellow inmates. Faro, watching Dora respond to Ronnie’s flirtatious teasing, wondered, and not for the first time, if Dora herself was gay. Or had been gay. Clearly, by now, she wasn’t anything along those lines. But she did ask, sometimes, after her friend Dorothy in Wath. Could Faro let Dorothy know where Dora was? She hasn’t heard from Dorothy for a long time, not since her last birthday card. Faro promises that she will, but is hampered by the fact that Dora doesn’t seem able to remember Dorothy’s married surname and therefore can’t find her address or phone number in her little address book. She’ll get round to sorting it out one day.
Chrissie and Faro soon became familiar with the tiresome and complex bureaucracy of old age, with benefits and social services and care allowances. It was clear that it would be sensible for Dora to sell Swinton Road as soon as possible and get rid of her small capital, and Faro undertook to investigate the housing market. She was shocked by what she found. Prices were lower than she could have imagined. Whole houses were going for a quarter of the price of a one-room London flat in an undesirable area miles from the nearest Tube. In Breaseborough, you could buy an end-of-terrace for £26,000, and a midterrace for £19,000. Faro has fantasies of buying one, and setting up a little northern home of her own. Dora’s house was valued at £30,000, but Faro thought that was optimistic.