26

VULCANIC LOVE

Fire, a delinquent guest, more consuming than consummate, loved the little hotel. It toured all the rooms, ran up the walls, blistered the paper, jumped on the beds, cracked the mirrors with one scorching look. It was as wild and torrid as a visiting stage celebrity. It had the melting gaze of a Barrymore, the sultry mien of a Bernhardt. And the temper. It was a sizzling hothead, a hotshot, too hot to hold. Fierce, rampageous, incandescent, it tossed its flaming orange hair and snapped its white-hot fingers. It smoked everywhere. It belched, its manner explosive. It autographed the register, then devoured it, along with rugs, chairs, shoes, a doll (alas!), and a peculiar machine festooned with cranks and reels. Inflamed, it shattered the one bottle of whisky, collapsed the bar, folded the stairs like an accordion, went through the roof, blew out the windows, tossed blazing timbers like swirling cabers down into the street. It drank gallons of lake water supplied by the sweating, scurrying locals. The rest of the town it found simply too banal to kindle even a spark of interest, and it finally checked out with a long, satiated hissss, leaving behind quite the mess, a charred and gutted ruin, proof that a real ball was had.

The antic spirit that enlivens the films of Georges Méliès, the pandemonium let loose in his Montreuil Studios in Paris, was an artful anarchy, precisely choreographed and controlled. Even the imp of unpredictability, the afflatus that breathes life into so much art, danced to his tune. Fenwick Nashe had not anticipated the arrival of that imp on his own set, or the disruption that ensued, but he made the best of it, as he always did. The visitation was, in fact, serendipitous.

When Grif, déshabillé in mind as much as in dress, spotted the smoking, sputtering approach of trouble, the uninvited extra and show-stealer, Fenwick was himself suddenly possessed of an inspired notion. His unerring instinct for talent had been doubly confirmed in his choice of Avice as leading lady, for not only could the woman act, but she had with her own ungloved and cold, unsentimental hand found the perfect instrument of revenge. When the saucy thing seized her man (what divesting work, what rude improvisational rooting!), she had also opened Fenwick’s eyes, sealed and innocent as a newborn’s, to the further potential of this marvellous invention. Surely it was not an idle mistake that photography and pornography were such close etymological cousins, promiscuously entwined if not exactly married in meaning. Give a man a new technology, Fenwick thought cheerfully, conceived with whatever noble, uplifting intention, and that man will instantly use it to plumb the depths of human depravity. It was only human nature. Imagine making moving pictures in which the portrayal of sin was limited only by the imagination itself. Despite the growing heat in the room, the clamour, the cries of dismay, the director of the fracas shivered with delight.

The only matter that gave him pause and caused him to hesitate very briefly was the book still held in his hand. He was tempted to stoke the fire with it, to use this record of Puritan commerce and zeal to fuel the coming conflagration. How fitting it would be . . . but then he recalled an archbishop he knew down in London, an old crony of his, who went in for antiquarian collectibles such as this one. A potential investor in his newest venture, as well. Fenwick slid the journal into his pocket and strode over to the cinematographe. Raewyn, confused and frightened, bolted in front of him, and he grabbed her roughly by the arm and hurled her aside. Self-righteous chit. As Roland surged forwards to help her, Fenwick cracked him in the face with his elbow and the boy whirled into the side of the machine, driving one of the cranks hard into his eye. Grif and Avice were involved in some sort of tussle. Good. Smoke was pouring through the entranceway and Fenwick saw his chance to stage a clean exit by way of it. He grabbed the footage from the day’s shoot and snapped it in a tin, trapping his stars forever: Grif and Avice, wedded in miniature, caught on strips of celluloid like two wriggling insects stuck on a coil of flypaper.

“I’ll save you,” Grif gallantly shouted to Avice.

Unfortunately, his intended heroics were compromised by the trousers wrapped around his ankles. He stumbled, reaching out to her as she turned away from him, and just managed, with all the finesse of a caveman, to grab her by the hair. He sank his yearning fingers into the untidy, upswept knot of it, and then, to his horror, pulled a great hank of it right off. His embrace was too inept, his touch so clumsily destructive, it seemed he couldn’t help but pull her apart. He clutched the soft dark mound in his hand as she tossed him a quick withering look over her shoulder.

“Christ,” she said, lifting the skirt of her dress to cover her face, a protective veil, as she made a dash for the front door. Then, “Shit,” she said, rattling the hot handle, pounding on the door with her fist. “Damn, damn, fuck.” Her language sorely reduced in the mounting heat of the room, everything but profanity boiled away. She reeled around the bar, desperate as a trapped bird. She could feel her life spinning out of the ends of her fingers, uncontrollably. Her bobbed hair stuck out like nerves. She spotted another doorway.

“No,” Grif called after her, stuffing his pockets with his claim of her slithery, drifting self. “Not that way.” He might have forfeited intimacy with his wife, but he knew this hotel, and she was heading not out of danger but for the coffin-sized closet where Roland kept his cash box and his accounts. She didn’t heed him, or refused to out of habit. Flinging the door open, she ran in. He hitched up his pants and followed on her heels, luckless as a trailing shadow.

“Get away,” she spat at him, “don’t touch me.”

He had to. There wasn’t much choice. They had stumbled into the secluded and suffocating interior of a fire trap, a private prison within a prison. There was no escape, for the door had slammed shut behind them, and they heard a rat-like scratching and scraping noise as someone outside turned the key in the lock. Before pocketing the key, Fenwick allowed himself one last brief, but pregnant, dramatic pause in which he reflected upon the tidiness of this little scene. Death would marry them finally. It would resolve all their problems, and reunite the impossible warring—and wearying—couple. This consummation was to be their ultimate freedom, and they would even enjoy an afterlife of sorts in his picture. (And, conveniently, not be around to lodge a complaint or demand their share of the profits.) Truly, this was a fairy-tale ending for Punch and Judy. Fenwick liked fairy tales—they were so disturbing, and gory. Not that he wanted one for himself. What he wanted, and would get, was life, a deep, inebriating draft of it, deep as the lake he was shortly going to cruise over on his way to, where, New York . . . or California? Yee-haw! That was the wonderful thing about life: it was not a rigged fantasy, not a dreary melodrama, and in it a villain with talent had a sporting chance. Who said life wasn’t fair? He’d get away with this. Already he could hear the rising tide of voices outside, the honest townsfolk come to the rescue, his anyway, as he was soon to slip like a breath of fresh air through the window they were so helpfully smashing open, the very threshold to his new, lavish existence. Once he was through, no one would ever see him again.

Except, perhaps, at the movies.

No one heard them banging on the walls, the door, shouting themselves out of breath and hope. The hotel had been abandoned to its unruly guest, and outside the whole town was gathered and working furiously to evict it, with water drawn from the lake and from horse troughs, with pails of beer from the Mansion House, and even with a few tears. It’s not that they thought so highly of Roland’s oddball establishment, but they were fighting to contain the disaster, to keep it out of their own homes and businesses.

An elderly man took a moment to crouch over Hugh’s prone body, reaching to take his pulse, then raising himself back up with a hurried sign of the cross.

“First one here to help,” another man said. “Never figured him for a good Samaritan. Poor sap.”

“That barrel sure made a hash of his face.”

“Nah, doesn’t look much different, you shoulda seen ’im before. You want his gun?”

“Might as well take it, eh? Won’t need it where he’s gone.” Wherever Hugh had gone, and whatever the nature of the reward he was about to collect from his heavenly benefactor, Avice, stubbornly digging her heels into this earthly plane, had no intention of following her makeshift partner, or of lining up behind him.

“Can’t you break the door down?” she growled at Grif out of the close, dark and increasingly airless space their marriage had become.

“Too heavy. Roland fixed a good solid one here.” Grif bruised his shoulder trying to budge it but had to concede defeat—yet another manly act the groom had failed to perform. He stooped down and with shaking hands caulked the cracks in the door with her hair. He could at least try to keep out the smoke, try to prolong their lives for a few breaths more, now that for the first time what precious air trickled into his lungs came directly from hers. He was willing to think of it as congress, even if she regarded it as one more indignity.

Crouching, penitent, he had to resist the urge to wrap his arms around her legs, to bury his face in her skirt. He knew he should beg her forgiveness, and that this was his last chance to do so. He didn’t deserve it, nor did he think she would give it. She would withhold her forgiveness from him because it was all she had left of her own. Avice had opened herself up and thrown everything away—family, future, honour, respectability, ease of mind, lightness of heart. If he had his silver pen with him, some source of light and paper, or even a pale, visible stretch of his own arm, he would write the truth on it as Hattie had instructed him to do. The truth was that he was about to die at her feet like a dog and he was not sorry for it. Singed nails and hair, boiled eyes, skin curled back like parchment, cooked organs, charred bone—he was prepared to bequeath himself utterly, if only as ashes, to his lawful wedded wife. He would never leave her now.

Avice wasn’t ready to accept her inheritance—as useless dead as alive, might have been her sentiment—nor was she anxious to etch her own will on her arm. If she had his silver pen, she’d be jiggling it in the keyhole trying to spring the lock. She was intent, listening.

“Did you hear that?” she gasped. “A noise, right outside the door?”

“What?” He rose quickly, facing her, close enough now to catch her tongue, sharp as it was, in his teeth.

“You deserted me,” she said. She had come such a long way to say it.

“I did.” He wanted to crawl through her pores, each a portal to the unknowable depths of her. He could strain himself through her, and leave the dregs of his miserable being behind.

“And you’re sorry.”

“I am.”

“You are that,” she said. “You’re a shit.” He’d heard worse. He was worse.

“But then, so am I.” A surprising enough admission, to which she added, “You could hold me, you know, if you don’t have anything better to do.”

Her words were measured, and ironic, but her body submerged in the darkness seemed to drag beneath them. A dense, compacted grief emanated out of her, out of the blackness of her mouth and eyes, and off her skin. A mortal bitterness. It was unbearable, even repellent. Surely he would not fail her again?

He raised his hands to run them up the length of her arms, to enfold her, but then, by some liberating agency—spiteful or merciful—or simply because of inadequate carpentry, the door blew open and part of the floor gave way. She disappeared out of his tentative embrace as if she were no more substantial than a wraith.