The bedroom was still so brutally hot Nigel needed to do something, and quickly. He felt frantic, useless, frantically useless. He stared helplessly at the phone his daughter had fetched for him. He didn’t know the Italian number for emergency services, and there was no one to ask. Maybe Sissy didn’t need an ambulance anyway, he thought – he shouldn’t panic, he just needed to cool her down. What else could he do? An idea came to him and, although it wasn’t a particularly good one, action felt better than inaction. He raced to the walk-in store cupboard where Stephen and Juliette kept everything that there was no other place for: deckchairs and beach toys, a tool kit, a broken barbecue, spare faded cushions for the outdoor furniture, fishing gear, a battered straw picnic basket. Yes. Tucked on a high shelf right at the back was the silver electric fan, still in its box, that he’d remembered seeing. He clambered over the folded-up deckchairs and with his fingertips edged it off the shelf, catching it mid-air as his body bent half backwards into the sun-loungers.
Nigel ran back to the bedroom where his wife was lying with her eyes closed, breathing raggedly, her face obviously badly burned, and he took the fan out of its box and searched ineffectually for a socket, looking everywhere, seeing nothing. The ones for the bedside table lamps were hidden behind the bed, inaccessible. There must be another one somewhere, surely. He scanned along the skirting boards, and then for maybe the fourth time along the length of the frieze of the tastefully naked couple pastel-painted across the back wall, the one against which the bed was butted up – and finally, there in the corner, amongst the tangled twining grapevines, he found the socket. It was quite a way from the bed, but the cord should be just about long enough to reach her.
Nigel plugged in the fan but it refused to work. He checked its settings, made sure it was definitely switched on. He jiggled the plug around. As he wiggled the cord increasingly manically (he still wasn’t sure it would do much good, but he didn’t know what else to do, proving useless in a crisis) the fan leaped into life, and his heart jumped – thank God – and then the whirring stopped, fading out limply, as if it couldn’t be bothered, as the electricity cut again. He cursed it. Maybe he should run next door, try to find someone else who could call a doctor, perhaps send Nell; she was sensible. He couldn’t think straight – his mind had always been so clear in the face of his own impending death, but at the thought of anything happening to Sissy, he was derailed, a mess. Yes, he’d get Nell to go for help. He’d ask her in a minute, once he’d got this sodding fan going.
Nigel jiggled the plug in its socket yet again, and it seemed to move more freely than it should, as though there was merely space behind it, rather than wall. The fan jittered in and out of life, teasing him. The TV ads were deafening from the lounge, and there were some groans he didn’t like the sound of, this was Italy after all, you never knew what they might put on, even in the middle of the day.
‘Turn that TV off now!’ he yelled, but the children ignored him. He shoved in the cord harder and waggled it angrily, furiously, and at long, long last the fan started up its shiny revolutions, rhythmically in synch with the moans from the living room, and at the very same time a blue crack of electricity flew through the air from the socket, and then it flew through Nigel, and the fan stopped again.