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When Mr. Edwards arrived that morning, slightly after ten, his eyes were heavy from exhaustion. Still, he insisted on joining them for a late breakfast in the hotel lobby, though Darcy, entering a couple of minutes behind him, went straight to his room for sleep.
Mr. Edwards explained that it had taken the firefighters a couple of hours to extinguish the outbreak in the library. There wasn’t much they could salvage: a glass vase that had been tucked away into one of the wooden cupboards closest to the door, and a couple of picture frames holding photographs that were only slightly tarnished. Mr. Edwards also muttered something about smoke particles lingering in parts of the house, even though the fire had been contained to the one room.
“Smoke particles?” said Ada. “In the air? What does that mean?”
“It means that we’ll have to spend a few days here until everything is deemed safe for our return.”
Mr. Edwards spent the afternoon answering phone calls from many of the guests who’d been in attendance at the party, who called to say they’d heard what had happened, what a shock itwas! What a shame for the community. Could they do anything to help?
“Did they say what caused it?” Bron asked eventually.
“Yes, did they?” asked Ada.
Darcy was the one to answer the question later that evening—he explained that he’d lit a candle while in the room that night, but was certain he’d extinguished it before leaving. He had shown the firefighters where it had stood, on the chance he’d been too far gone to snuff it, but whatever the case, they insisted the candle wouldn’t have been the cause of the fire. It might have been an electrical short-circuiting, a faulty wire in the antique lamplight that lived on the mahogany desk, which might’ve sparked to set the drapes alight, and the blaze would’ve trailed to the bookcases.“Paper feeds fire.”Though, nonetheless, they couldn’t be certain.
They were given the all-clear a week later. Nobody slept that first night back in the house. Mr. Edwards could be heard pacing around downstairs, frantic and on the phone to anyone who’d answer it. Darcy shut himself away in his bedroom, wanting to be left alone. Little Ada curled up with Bron in her bedroom, the eiderdown pulled up to their chins—a week of sharing the hotel’s connecting suite had brought them all the closer. They drifted in and out of sleep until the alarm went off that morning.
The atmosphere was considerably changed. The library had been gutted, a carcass of a room. The smell of smoke and burnt paper permeated the hall into the week that followed. At breakfast, Darcy flicked through the morning paper. Somehow, it was still being reported in the local, the headline reading:“Grade II listed building, Greenwood Manor Fire: Library engulfed by blaze, family unharmed and set to return, no signs of foul play.”Ada tried to spark conversation, but only Bron acknowledged her. She took to buttering her toast loudly.
From the breakfast room window, he could see the cars that stalled outside the gates, onlookers peeking through to get a glimpse of the wreckage. But Bron didn’t think there was all that much to see. When the doorbell rang, Mr. Edwards stood up from the table and excused himself from the room. Ada scuttled along behind him, leaving Bron and Darcy alone together. He was grateful for this moment. Since the night of the fire, there hadn’t been much of an opportunity for the two of them to speak—about what had happened between them on the dance floor or of whatever it was he’d felt being pulled from the burning room. Had Darcy felt it too?
Darcy didn’t look up at him, but sipped at his orange juice and coffee, took a single bite of jam toast. Sitting upright in his chair, Bron was poised to slice through the silence. Instead, he lingered over his food, and struggling to eat another morsel, placed the silverware onto his plate, knife and fork carefully in the middle, to strike a perfect midnight. He pushed for the words to leave his throat, but before they could, Darcy stood, knocking the table as he did, to shut the curtains.
“Why isn’t there any bloody privacy around here, for God’s sake?” he spat. Bron thought about answering but bypassed that for a statement to acknowledge and simply nod his head to.
Darcy folded up the paper, taking a last sip of drink, and hurried out of the room. Bron felt breathless. Was that all Darcy had to say to him after everything that had happened? The dance, the fire—had he imagined it all, the connection he’d felt between them? No, he couldn’t have. It was real, as real as the tea that burned his tongue as he sipped it.
He heard Madame Clarence’s French before he saw her. She entered the room, speaking loudly into her phone before stopping at his presence. “Excusez-moi,” she said, though it wasn’t clear if this was directed at him or into the phone. “I thought breakfast was over.”
Through the remainder of that week, Mr. Edwards occupied himself by turning off all the lights and power sockets, inspectingevery room for burning candles each night before for bed, and soon there were electricians testing the voltage of every appliance in the house. Ada developed an interest in fire safety and started using words likeoxidationandcombustible material.
“We really should have a blanket or extinguisher in every room of the house,” she said, and explained the different types that were available: carbon dioxide, water, foam, and dry powder.
It seemed she was coping the best of them all, though Bron noticed the way she pressed herself against one side of the banister when climbing the stairs, so as to stay as far out of reach from the right wing of the house as she could. Every morning as he emerged from his bedroom, he too was shocked to see the vacancy of the library at the other end of the landing, the rectangular wooden framing and the bare limestone walls scorched black, the remains of ornaments, books, and other miscellanea burnt to a roughage of ash. It was like looking into an alternate reality. The library, once so snug and warm, now dank and lifeless.
Worst of all, Darcy was nowhere to be seen. Over the coming days, Bron couldn’t stop thinking of him, suited and bowing and twirling him around one minute, disheveled and sweating in nothing but a white linen shirt the next. He wished to see his face, to hear his deep, gruff way of talking. When Mr. Edwards casually enquired as to his son’s whereabouts, Clarence explained that Master Edwards had gone out, that there was no message left, only that he would be back later. Bron tried to hide the look of disappointment on his face, but Clarence must have seen something in it, prompting her to continue. “Around eight or nine. That’s usually the time he comes through the door, just as I’m leaving.”
As dusk closed and dawn approached, still he didn’t appear. Bron made the effort to push thoughts of him out of his mind. To pretend nothing had changed between them.
Ada and Mr. Edwards, used to his comings and goings, simply developed a game for it: “Where do you think he’s gone off to this time?”
Situated as the house was in close proximity to three airbases, it was not uncommon to find a plane flying overhead. Whenever they heard as much as a hint of plane traffic, Ada and Mr. Edwards would rush to one of the windows, open the latch, and play their round.
“There, there,” Ada screamed. “Darcy must be on that plane, and he’s on his way to … Germany!”
“No, no, silly,” Mr. Edwards would reply. “That’s not where that plane is going. He’s actually on his way to Guatemala.”
“You’re wrong, Daddy. You’re wrong, he’s on his way to … Greece!” And on and on till they ran out of places beginning withG. When Ada saidGenovia, nobody corrected her.
In the mornings, Bron took to ambling the gardens after breakfast, to breathe in the cool fresh air, reciting again and again to himself that what he was feeling, this eagerness to see and speak to Darcy, was ridiculous.He owes you nothing, why are you thinking of him, he’s older than you, and also such an asshole. Don’t forget that.And afterward, he returned to the house to do some algebra with Ada, go over Pythagoras’s theorem or, more often than not these days, sketch a drawing or two, always demonstrating to Ada how he did it when she asked (and shealwaysasked). With the library gone, they took their lessons in the downstairs living room, where he showed her how to draw a line with a steady hand, how to map out the skeleton and placement of a drawing before going in with any particular features. Ada’s artistic skills ranged from limited to nonexistent, and the stick figures she produced were somehow more accomplished than her attempts at landscape. Keen to offer Ada a distraction from math (for he, quite frankly, hated math), he went back to the basics, purchasing a coloring book to help her color inside the lines, which she didn’t.
He ran a bath in the evenings and watchedHoward’s Endand other such films he could stream at night. This did little to slow his racing mind, but the waft of horse chestnut that seeped from the bubbles into his hair was effective at calming his nerves and distracted him a little.
But waiting as he did, day in and day out, for Darcy to appear, for something to progress, was mind-numbing. He couldn’t just wait for things to happen. Neither Ada nor Mr. Edwards could answer any of his questions. But he knew someone who just might.
He made his way into the city and ambled down the road to Corpus Christi College, bypassing the sign that signaled it was for “Students only,” and followed the arrows therein upon the walls that outlined professors’ names and their office numbers. Hymn song spilled from the chapel ahead into the open square, and he moved slowly through the collapsing archway and into a back garden, where sunflowers and roses crept up the walls and along the black pipes. All the students surrounding him, walking to their dorms, rushing to their classes … could one of them be Harry, living out the life his parents had planned for him? He kept an eye out just in case, then turned into a building to skip up a tight spiral staircase, past an open bathroom currently being cleaned and smelling heavily of lemon disinfectant, and finally reached the landing.
A student was resting against the office’s doorframe and nodding to the voice that spoke from inside the room. The young man was laughing, the books he clutched to his chest bouncing as he did. Bron twisted his head to read one of the spines—Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault. The young man spotted him standing there, and took a step away from the room: “I best be off now—your two o’clock is here.”
