第9章 The Fire in the Laundry

The fire began in the flue above the coppers, where soot had been gathering since the autumn, and Redvers Yarrell smelled it before he saw it, because he had kept the gate for twenty years and had learned what every part of the building was supposed to smell like. He was fifty-eight that winter and had the night lodge to himself, as he had had it for years. At two in the morning the yard was black and the only light was the lamp over the gate and the glow that came up through the boiler-house window, where Wisley banked the fire at the end of his shift. Yarrell sat with his back to the stove and the log open on the shelf and heard the wind in the chimney, and then he smelled the thing that was not coal and was not the wind: a dry, sharp smell, like a hot iron left face-down on cloth. He went out into the yard with a lamp. The laundry door was shut and the window above it was red. Not the red of a fire seen from far off but the red of a fire seen through a pane, moving, and behind the red the shape of the drying racks and the long lines of sheets. He did not stop to think about what he was going to do, because a gatekeeper's whole training is against thinking first. He ran to the boiler house and hammered on the door and shouted Wisley's name, and then he ran back and rang the alarm bell in the yard, which had been rung in earnest perhaps twice in the building's life, and then he went to the gate and swung it open and propped it back, because he had known for twenty years that the first thing a fire engine needs is a hole to come through. What followed was done in an hour and remembered for twenty years. Wisley put the boiler at full pressure and held it there, and the hydrant in the yard ran off the building's own water, so that the fire was fought with the same hot water that the laundry had boiled, which the men found afterwards to be either a joke or a kind of justice, depending on the man. The fire began in the flue and had got into the roof timbers above the drying yard, and the brigade came up the slope with two engines and a hose that reached three floors, and the nurses carried the children of Bellcairn down the back stairs in blankets while the smoke came into the corridor like a slow tide, and the men of Dunmarch were walked out into the yard in their nightshirts and given coats and stood in the cold, and an old man from Craddon who had been on his back for three months was carried down in his bed by two porters and a probationer and set under the arch of the gate where Yarrell could keep an eye on him. Yarrell kept his eye on everyone. That was his post. He stood at the open gate in his boots and his coat with the lamp in his hand and turned away the crowd that gathered in the lane and the man from the newspaper who wanted to come in and the carters who wanted their job known, and he let in the brigade and the water and the stretcher-bearers, and he wrote nothing in the log until five in the morning, when the fire was out and he sat down in the smoky lodge and found his hands would not stop shaking and wrote the whole thing in six lines with the times and the brigade's officer and the shut of the gate. The laundry was half ruined. The coppers survived and the mangle survived and the flue was rebuilt with a door at the bottom that could be swept, which the steward had been asked for three times and had not bought, and in the spring the board met and considered the report and resolved that the flue was to be swept quarterly in future and that the question of the laundry roof would be considered at a later meeting. The steward left the service that year, not dismissed but tired, and his place was taken by a younger man who counted the same bottles and bought the same coal and did not buy the flue door either. By half past three the fire was out of the roof and the brigade was damping down, and the yard was a lake of black water with the hoses lying in it like drowned snakes, and the patients were back in their wards and the wards stank of smoke, and the children of Bellcairn would not go back to sleep. Dr. Fenmore came down at four with his coat over his nightshirt and walked the building with the matron and the brigade's officer and counted the living, and found that the count was right, and stood in the yard for a minute with his hands on his knees, not because he was old but because he had been afraid in a way he had not been afraid since the war. One probationer had a hand burned through to the bone where she had caught a falling rack of sheets and held it until someone could drag her clear, and she was in her own hospital by five o'clock, and she went back to duty in six weeks, and she never spoke of it, and the building made a note of it in the annual report, under accidents. Yarrell was given a sovereign by the chairman and a paragraph in the newspaper and a letter from a man he had never met who had read the paragraph and wanted to thank the porter who had opened the gate. He kept the sovereign in the box under the shelf, with the boot and the ring and the comb, because it seemed to him, by that age, that the box was where the building kept the things that had been given and lost, and he did not trust the world outside the gate to look after a good turn any better than it had looked after the boot. ---