a policeman guarding it. In front of the house, there were ambulances, police cars, fire-engines… swarms of people in uniform moving purposefully about.
Malcolm swayed with shock, and I felt unreal, disconnected from my feet. Our eyes told us: our brains couldn’t believe.
There was an immense jagged gaping hole in the centre of Quantum.
People standing near us in the gateway, round-eyed, said, ‘They say it was the gas.’
Ten
We were in front of the house, talking to policemen. I couldn’t remember walking up the drive.
Our appearance on the scene had been a shock to the assembled forces, but a welcome one. They had been searching for our remains in the rubble.
They told us that the explosion had happened at four-thirty in the morning, the wumph and reverberation of it waking half the village, the Shockwaves breaking windows and setting dogs howling. Several people had called the police, but when the force had reached the village, everything had seemed quiet. No one knew where the explosion had occurred. The police drove round the extended neighbourhood until daylight, and it was only then that anyone saw what had happened to Quantum.
The front wall of the hall, the antique front door with it, had been blown out flat onto the drive, and the centre part of the upper storey had collapsed into the hall. The glass in all the windows had disappeared.
‘I’m afraid it’s worse at the back,’ a policeman said phlegmatically. ‘Perhaps you’d come round there, sir. We can at least tell everyone there are no bodies.’
Malcolm nodded mechanically and we followed the policeman round to the left, between the kitchen and garage, through to the garden and along past the dining-room wall. The shock when we rounded onto the terrace was, for all the warning, horrific and sickening.
Where the sitting-room had been, there was a mountain of jumbled dusty bricks, plaster, beams and smashed furniture spilling outwards onto the grass. Malcolm’s suite, which had been above the sitting-room, had vanished, had become part of the chaos. Those of the attic rooms that had been above his head had come down too. The roof, which had looked almost intact from the front, had at therear been stripped of tiles, the old sturdy rafters standing out against the sky like picked ribs.
My own bedroom had been on one side of Malcolm’s bedroom: all that remained of it were some shattered spikes of floorboards, a strip of plaster cornice and a drunken mantle clinging to a cracked wall overlooking a void.
Malcolm began to shake. I took off my jacket and put it round his shoulders.
‘We don’t have gas,’ he said to the policeman. ‘My mother had it disconnected sixty years ago because she was afraid of it.’
There was a slight spasmodic wind blowing, enough to lift Malcolm’s hair and leave it awry. He looked suddenly frail, as if the swirling air would knock him over.
‘He needs a chair,’ I said.
The policeman gestured helplessly to the mess. No chairs left.
‘I’ll get one from the kitchen. You look after him.’
‘I’m quite all right,’ Malcolm said faintly.
‘The outside kitchen door is locked, sir, and we can’t allow you to go in through the hall.’
I produced the key, showed it to him, and went along and in through the door before he could stop me. In the kitchen, the shiny yellow walls themselves were still standing, but the door from the hall had blown open, letting in a glacier tongue of bricks and dust. Dust everywhere, like a veil. Lumps of plaster had fallen from the ceiling. Everything glass, everything china in the room had cracked apart. Moira’s geraniums, fallen from their shelves, lay in red farewell profusion over her all-electric domain.
I picked up Malcolm’s pine armchair, the one thing he had insisted on keeping through all the changes, and carried it out to where I’d left him. He sank into it without seeming to notice it and put his hand over his mouth.
There were firemen and other people tugging at movable parts of the ruins, but the tempo of their work had slowed since they’d seen we were alive. Several of them came over to Malcolm, offering sympathy, but mostly wanting information, such as were we certain there had been no one else in the house?
As certain as we could be.
Had we been storing any gas in the house? Bottled gas? Butane? Propane? Ether?
No.
Why ether?
It couid be used for making cocaine.
We looked at them blankly.
They had already discovered, it seemed, that there had been no mains gas connected. They