The Burden

Laura grabbed at the baby, clutched her close beneath the sheltering wet towel. She stumbled towards the door, her lungs gasping for air.

But there was no retracing her steps. Flames barred her way.

Laura had her wits still. The door to the tank-room—she felt for it, found it, pushed through it to a rickety stair that led up to the tank-room in the loft. She and Charles had got out that way once on to the roof. If she could crawl across the roof …

As the fire-engines arrived, an incoherent couple of women in night attire rushed to them crying out:

‘The baby—there’s a baby and the nurse in that room up there.’

The fireman whistled and pursed his lips. That end of the house was blazing with flame. ‘Goners,’ he said to himself. ‘Never get them out alive!’

‘Everyone else out?’ he asked.

Cook, looking round, cried out: ‘Where’s Miss Laura? She came out right after me. Wherever can she be?’

It was then that a fireman called out: ‘Hi, Joe, there’s someone on the roof—the other end. Get a ladder up.’

A few moments later, they set their burden down gently on the lawn—an unrecognizable Laura, blackened, her arms scorched, half unconscious, but tight in her grip a small morsel of humanity, whose outraged howls proclaimed her angrily alive.

‘If it hadn’t been for Laura—’ Angela stopped, mastering her emotions.

‘We’ve found out all about poor Nannie,’ she went on. ‘It seems she was an epileptic. Her doctor warned her not to take a nurse’s post again, but she did. They think she dropped a spirit lamp when she had a fit. I always knew there was something wrong about her—something she didn’t want me to find out.’

‘Poor girl,’ said Franklin, ‘she’s paid for it.’

Angela, ruthless in her mother love, swept on, dismissing the claims of Gwyneth Jones to pity.

‘And baby would have been burned to death if it hadn’t been for Laura.’

‘Is Laura all right again?’ asked Mr Baldock.

‘Yes. Shock, of course, and her arms were burnt, but not too badly. She’ll be quite all right, the doctor says.’

‘Good for Laura,’ said Mr Baldock.

Angela said indignantly: ‘And you pretending to Arthur that Laura was so jealous of the poor mite that she might do her a mischief! Really—you bachelors!’

‘All right, all right,’ said Mr Baldock. ‘I’m not often wrong, but I daresay it’s good for me sometimes.’

‘Just go and take a look at those two.’

Mr Baldock did as he was told. The baby lay on a rug in front of the nursery fire, kicking vaguely and making indeterminate gurgling noises.

Beside her sat Laura. Her arms were bandaged, and she had lost her eyelashes, which gave her face a comical appearance. She was dangling some coloured rings to attract the baby’s attention. She turned her head to look at Mr Baldock.

‘Hallo, young Laura,’ said Mr Baldock. ‘How are you? Quite the heroine, I hear. A gallant rescue.’

Laura gave him a brief glance, and then concentrated once more on her efforts with the rings.

‘How are the arms?’

‘They did hurt rather a lot, but they’ve put some stuff on, and they’re better now.’

‘You’re a funny one,’ said Mr Baldock, sitting down heavily in a chair. ‘One day you’re hoping the cat will smother your baby sister—oh yes, you did—can’t deceive me—and the next day you’re crawling about the roof lugging the child to safety at the risk of your own life.’

‘Anyway, I did save her,’ said Laura. ‘She isn’t hurt a bit—not a bit.’ She bent over the child and spoke passionately. ‘I won’t ever let her be hurt, not ever. I shall look after her all my life.’

Mr Baldock’s eyebrows rose slowly.

‘So it’s love now. You love her, do you?’

‘Oh yes!’ The answer came with the same fervour. ‘I love her better than anything in the world!’

She turned her face to him, and Mr Baldock was startled. It was, he thought, like the breaking open of a cocoon. The child’s face was radiant with feeling. In spite of the grotesque absence of lashes and brows, the face had a quality of emotion that made it suddenly beautiful.

‘I see,’ said Mr Baldock. ‘I see … And where shall we go from here, I wonder?’

Laura looked at him, puzzled, and slightly apprehensive.

‘Isn’t it all right?’ she asked. ‘For me to love her, I mean?’

Mr Baldock looked at her. His face was thoughtful.

‘It’s all right for you, young Laura,’ he said. ‘Oh yes, it’s all right for you …’

He relapsed into abstraction, his hand tapping his chin.

As a historian he had always mainly been concerned with the past, but there were moments when the fact that he could not foresee the future irritated him profoundly. This was one of them.

He looked at Laura and the crowing Shirley, and his brow contracted angrily. ‘Where will they be,’ he thought, ‘in ten years’ time—in twenty years—in twenty-five? Where shall I be?’

The answer to that last question came quickly.

‘Under the turf,’ said Mr Baldock to himself. ‘Under the turf.’

He knew that, but he did not really believe it, any more than any other positive person full of the vitality of living really believes it.

What a dark and mysterious entity the future was! In twenty-odd years what would have happened? Another war, perhaps? (Most unlikely!) New diseases? People fastening mechanical wings on themselves, perhaps, and floating about the streets like sacrilegious angels! Journeys to Mars? Sustaining oneself on horrid little tablets out of bottles, instead of on steaks and succulent green peas!

‘What are you thinking about?’ Laura asked.

‘The future.’

‘Do you mean tomorrow?’

‘Further forward than that. I suppose you’re able to read, young Laura?’

‘Of course,’ said Laura, shocked. ‘I’ve read nearly all the Doctor Dolittles, and the books about Winnie-the-Pooh and—’