Page 11 of A Slow Fire Burning

The handsome man left, and Irene did as she was told; she ate a piece of toast with some honey on it and drank two large glasses of water without electrolytes because she didn’t have any of those, and was at last starting to feel a little more like herself when she heard the most terrible crash from outside, a terrifying sound and, heart racing, hurried to the window in the living room. There were men out there, men in uniforms using a sort of metal battering ram to smash Angie’s door down. “Oh dear,” Irene said out loud, thinking—stupidly—that Angela wasn’t going to be pleased about that at all.

Somehow, still, the penny had not dropped, that Angela would never be pleased by anything ever again, and it wasn’t until another police officer, a different woman, not in uniform, came round and sat her down and explained that Angela was dead, that she’d fallen down the stairs and broken her neck, that finally Irene understood.

When the policewoman told Irene that Angela might have been lying there for days, for as much as a wholeweek, Irene could barely speak for the shame. Poor Angela, lying alone, on the other side of that wall, and Irene—having one of herturns, letting herself slip away into confusion—had not even missed her.

“She didn’t cry out,” Irene said, when at last she found her voice. “I would have heard her. These walls are paper thin.” The policewoman was kind; she told Irene that it was likely that Angela was killed instantly when she fell. “But surely you cantellwhen it was that she died?” Irene knew a little about forensics, from her reading. But the woman said that the heating had been on, turned up very high, and that Angela’s body had been lying right up against the radiator at the bottom of the stairs, which made it impossible to ascertain her time of death with any accuracy.

No one would ever know, not really, what had happened. The police said it was an accident, and Irene accepted that, though the whole thing felt wrong to her, too hastily concluded. There was conflict in Angela’s life, plenty of it: she argued with her sister, she argued with her son—or rather, it seemed to Irene, one or the other of them came by to harangue her, leaving her upset, setting her off on a binge. Irene mentioned the arguments—over money, over Daniel—to the police, but they didn’t seem interested. Angela was an alcoholic. She drank too much, she fell, she broke her neck. “It happens more often than you’d think,” the kind policewoman said. “But if you think of anything else, anything that might be relevant,” she said, handing Irene a card with a telephone number on it, “feel free to give me a call.”

“I saw her with a man,” Irene said, suddenly, just as the woman was leaving.

“Okay,” the woman said carefully. “And when was this?”

Irene couldn’t say. She couldn’t remember. Her mind was a blank. No, not a blank, it wasfogged. There were things in there, memories, important ones, only everything was shifting about, hazily; she couldn’t fix on anything. “Two weeks ago, perhaps?” she ventured, hopefully.

The woman pursed her lips. “Okay. Can you remember anything else about this man? Could you describe him, or...”

“They were talking out there, in the lane,” Irene said. “Something was wrong; Angela was crying.”

“She was crying?”

“She was. Although...” Irene paused, caught between resistance to disloyalty and an urge to tell the truth. “She’s quite often tearful when she has a little too much to drink; she gets... melancholic.”

“Right.” The woman nodded, smiled; she was ready for the off. “You don’t remember what this man looked like, do you? Tall, short, fat, thin...”

Irene shook her head. He was just... normal; he wasaverage. “He had a dog!” she said at last. “A little dog. Black and tan. An Airedale, perhaps? No, an Airedale’s bigger, isn’t it? Maybe a fox terrier?”

That was eight weeks ago. First Angela had died, and now her son too. Irene had no idea whether the police had ever inquired about the man she’d seen outside with Angela; if they had, it came to nothing, because her death was recorded as accidental. Accidents do happen, and they especially happen to drunks, but mother and son, eight weeks apart?

In fiction, that would never stand.

SEVEN

Theo’s bedroom window overlooked a small walled garden, and beyond the wall, the canal. On a spring day like this one, the view was a palette of greens: bright new growth on the plane and oaks, the muted olive of weeping willows on the towpath, electric lime duckweed spreading across the surface of the water.

Carla sat on the window seat with her knees pulled up under her chin, Theo’s bathrobe, pilfered from the Belles Rives Hotel in Juan-les-Pins a lifetime ago, gathered loosely around her. It was almost six years since she’d moved out of this house, and yet this was the place she felt most herself. More than the much grander house she’d grown up in on Lonsdale Square, certainly more than her drab little maisonette down the road, this house, Theo’s house, was the one that felt like home.

Theo was lying in bed, the covers thrown back, reading his phone and smoking.

“I thought you said you were cutting down,” Carla said, glancing over at him, teeth grazing lightly over her lower lip.

“I am,” he said, without looking up. “I now smoke onlypostcoitally, postprandially, and with my coffee. So that’s an absolute maximum of five cigarettes a day, assuming I get a shag, which, I regret to say, is no longer by any means a foregone conclusion.”

Carla smiled despite herself. “You need to start looking after yourself,” she said. “Seriously.”

He looked across at her, a lazy grin on his face. “What,” he said, flicking a hand downward over his torso, “you think I’m out of shape?”

Carla rolled her eyes. “Youareout of shape,” she said, jutting her chin out, indicating his gut. “It’s not a matter of opinion. You should get another dog, Theo. You do far more exercise when you have a dog. It gets you out of the house, you know it does; otherwise you just sit around, eating and smoking and listening to music.”

Theo turned back to his phone. “Dixon might turn up,” he said quietly.

“Theo.” Carla got to her feet. She clambered back onto the bed, the dressing gown slipping open as she knelt in front of him. “He went missing six weeks ago. I’m sorry, but the poor chap isn’t coming home.”

Theo looked up at her dolefully. “You don’t know that,” he said, and reached for her, placing his hand gently on her waist.

It was warm enough to eat breakfast outside on the patio. Coffee and toast. Theo smoked another cigarette and complained about his editor. “He’s a philistine,” he said. “About sixteen years old, too. Knows nothing of the world. Wants me to take out all the political stuff, which is, when you think about it, the very heart of the novel. No, no, it’s not the heart, that’s wrong. It’s at the root. Itisthe root. He wants itderacinated. Deracinated and cast into a seaof sentimentality! Did I tell you? He thinks Siobhan needs a romance, tohumanizeher. She is human! She’s the most fully realized human I’ve ever written.”

Carla tipped her chair back, resting her bare feet on the chair in front of her, her eyes closed, only half listening to him. She’d heard this speech, or some variant thereof, before. She’d learned that there wasn’t a great deal of point putting forward her view, because in the end he’d do whatever he wanted to anyway. After a while, he stopped talking, and they sat together in companionable silence, listening to the neighborhood sounds, children shouting in the street, theding-ding-dingof bicycle bells on the towpath, the occasional waterfowl quack. The buzz of a phone on the table. Carla’s. She picked it up, looked at it, and, sighing, put it down again.

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