IN THE EARLY evening I pulled up outside The Eyrie. The gate was open. I stepped through the space in the creeper-covered fence, expecting to find everything as usual, the kitchen door open, the scent of curry coming from inside and a strain of Coltrane drifting down to the pear orchard. Except that the house was gutted. The smoke I had smelled on the road, that I had put down to sundown cooking in the township, was suddenly strong and pungent. Different kind of smoke.
I stood and stared. My feet would not move, forward or back. The house was still smouldering. It had been reduced to a tangle of charred beams and rubble. The hearth from the living room was the only upright thing that stood among the ashes. It looked bizarre. Books and records lay strewn in the debris. I could see LPs, warped and melted into one another. Some of the books were okay, only blackened around the edges. The cover of Rachel’s precious first edition of A Farewell to Arms fluttered weakly. She had told me once how excited she was to have found it in a second-hand bookshop in Charing Cross Road in London.
The herbs in the garden were singed and the roses were wilted and drooping on their stems. The garden was completely silent. After a minute this struck me as strange. Then I realised: no bird calls. Even the birds had taken off. There was no sign here of any living thing. My legs gave way and I sank to my knees on the short thorny grass.