Flames were clearly visible through what was left of my bedroom window. I had literally jumped in the nick of time.
I gasped fresh air into my lungs, coughing wildly. I was cold. I stood shivering on the grass verge, and only then did I realize that I was completely naked.
My neighbor, roused perhaps by my shouts, was outside watching and now walked towards me. She was a small, elderly lady, and I could see by the light of the flames that she was wearing a fluffy pink dressing gown with matching pink slippers, and her white hair was held neatly in place with a hairnet.
I looked for something to cover my embarrassment and ended up just using my hands.
“That’s all right, dear,” she said. “I’ve seen it all before. Three husbands, and a nurse for forty years.” She smiled. “I’m glad you got out all right. I’ll fetch you a coat.” She turned to go. “I’ve called the fire brigade,” she said over her shoulder. She seemed totally unperturbed at finding a naked man on the side of the road in the middle of the night next to a raging inferno no more than fifteen feet from her own bedroom window.
The fire brigade arrived with flashing lights and sirens, but there was little they could do. My cottage was totally engulfed in flames, and the firemen spent most of their time and energy hosing down my neighbor’s house to ensure the searing heat didn’t set that alight as well.
I sat out the rest of the night at my neighbor’s kitchen table wearing one of her ex-husband’s coats and a pair of his slippers. I didn’t ask her if he was ex-by death or ex-by divorce. It didn’t matter. I was grateful anyhow, and also for the cups of tea that she produced for me and the fire brigade at regular intervals until dawn.
“Just like the Blitz,” she said with a broad smile. “I used to help my mother provide refreshments for the police and firemen. You know, WRVS.”
I nodded. I did know. Women’s Royal Volunteer Service.
THE MORNING brought an end to the flames but little other comfort. My home was a shell, with no floors, no windows, no doors and nothing left within, save for ash and the smoldering remains of my life.
“You were lucky to get out alive,” said the chief fireman. I knew. “These old buildings can be death traps. Timber stairs and thin wooden doors and floors. Even the interior walls are flammable, plaster over wooden slats. Death traps,” he repeated while shaking his head.
We watched from the road as his men sprayed more water over the ruin. The stonework of the exterior walls had survived pretty well, but it was no longer whitewashed as it had been yesterday. Great black scars extended upwards above every windowless void, and the remainder was browned by the intense heat and the smoke.
“Can you tell what caused it?” I asked him.
“Not yet,” he said. “Still far too hot to get in there. But electrical, I expect. Most fires are electrical, or else due to cigarettes not being properly put out. Do you smoke?”
“No,” I said.
“Did you leave anything switched on?” he asked.
“Not that I can think of,” I said. “I suppose the TV would have been on standby.”
“Could be that,” he said. “Could be anything. Have to get the investigation team to have a look later. Thankfully, no one was hurt. That’s what really matters.”
“I’ve lost everything,” I said, looking at the black and steaming mess.
“You haven’t lost your life,” he said.
But it had been close.
AT EIGHT O’CLOCK, I used my neighbor’s phone to call Carl.
“It has not been your week,” he said after I told him.
“I wouldn’t say that,” I said. In the past seven days, I had been informed of an intended prosecution, written off my car in a collision with a bus, spent a night in the hospital with a concussion, lost my house and all my personal possessions in a fire and now stood wearing nothing but my neighbor’s ex-husband’s coat and slippers. But look on the bright side, I thought. It was only seven days since I had taken Caroline out to dinner at the Restaurant Gordon Ramsay. I may have lost plenty, but I had gained more.
“Can you come and collect me?” I asked him.
“Where do you want to go?” he said.
“Do you have a shower I could use?” I said. “I smell like a garden bonfire.”
“I’ll be there in five minutes,” he said.
“Oh, Carl,” I said. “Can you bring some clothes?”
“What for?” he asked.
“I escaped with my life,” I said. “But with absolutely nothing else.”
He laughed. “I’ll see what I can find.”
I STOOD for a good ten minutes in Carl’s shower and let the stream of hot water wash the smoke from my hair and the tiredness from my eyes.
The fire brigade had arrived on the scene at three thirty-two a.m. I knew that because the chief had asked me, as the property owner, to sign an agreement that the fire service investigation team had my permission to access the property later that day, when the building had cooled.
“What would you have done if I’d died in the fire?” I’d asked him.
“We wouldn’t need your permission, then,” he’d said. “We have automatic right of entry if there has been serious injury or a death.”
Convenient, I had thought.
“And we can always get a warrant to enter if you won’t sign and we believe that arson is involved.”
“Do you believe it was arson?” I’d asked him, somewhat alarmed.
“That’s for the investigation team to find out,” he’d said. “Looks just like a normal domestic to me, but then they all do.”
I had signed his paper.
After my shower, and dressed in Carl’s tracksuit, I sat at his kitchen table and took stock. I did, in fact, have some personal possessions left to my name, since my overnight bag had been sitting safely all night under my desk at the Hay Net. Carl had fetched it while I showered, and I was able to shave and brush my teeth with my own tools.
Carl lived in a modern, three-bedroom semidetached house in a development in Kentford, just down the road from where my mangled wreck of a car still waited for the insurance assessor to inspect it.
Carl and I had worked side by side in the same kitchen for five years, and, I realized with surprise, this was the first time I had ever been in his house. We were not actually friends, and while we might share a beer together often at the Hay Net bar, we had never socialized together elsewhere. I had felt uneasy about calling to ask for his help, but who else could I ask? My mother would have been useless and would have left me with the lady in the pink slippers for most of the day as she went through her normal morning rituals of bathing at leisure, applying her copious makeup and then dressing, a task that in itself could take a couple of hours as she continuously changed her mind over what went with what. Carl had been my only realistic choice. But I hadn’t really liked it.
“So what are you going to do now?” he asked.
“First, I need to hire a car,” I said. “Then I’m going to book myself into a hotel.”
“You can stay here, if you like,” he said. “I’ve plenty of room.”
“What about Jenny and the kids?” I said, noticing for the first time how quiet it was.
“Jenny went back to her mother nearly a year ago now,” he said. “Took the girls with her.”
“Carl,” I said, “I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you say something to me?”
“Didn’t seem to matter,” he said. “To tell the truth, I was relieved when she went. I couldn’t stand the rows. I’m much happier on my own. We’re not divorced or anything, and she and the girls come over for the weekends and it’s sometimes pretty good.”
What could I say? Restaurant work, with its odd hours, never was highly recommended for happy marriages.