Fire Exit

He didn’t remember paying the cabbie, or getting into the cab, and he certainly didn’t remember giving any instruction to take him to an ornate private members’ club in the heart of Chelsea. It was raining when he alighted, however, and he had no choice but to walk hastily and neatly inside, stepping through swinging gold doors and nodding in greeting at the austere doorman stood serene and sentinel, his epaulettes gleaming and his moustache shining almost as much. Barclay touched a hand almost self-consciously to his own – it had taken him months to achieve a satisfactory waxed effect, and he was sure his valet had been sniggering behind his back about the supreme efforts it had necessitated.

“Martini, Sir?”

The bartender’s lips did not move, but his mouth held a curved and welcoming smile, and Barclay slid onto a velvet bar stool with a pleased little smile of his own.

“Certainly, my good man, certainly.” It was a worthy club indeed that knew so effortlessly what one wanted before one even knew he wanted it himself. Glancing around he saw a few occupied booths dotted around the room, and several doors with lights seeping through from slender gaps in the door frame, muffled cheers and glasses clinking from the other side. Sounded like a bloody good party, bloody good night to be sheltering from the rain in this particular little hideaway.

“It’s on the house, Sir.”

“Oh – good show.” The glass was cold under his fingertips, the gin dripping down the side and onto the glossy bar top.

“Travelled far, Sir?”

He glanced towards the door. The wind was whipping up outside, the gold door swinging with a renewed vengeance, but the doorman stood unperturbed and unmoved.

“Perhaps from Hampstead, Sir?”

“Oh, have we met?”

Barclay’s smile broadened, his eyes bright. It was always good when one had met someone before and the other person remembered it. Didn’t happen often in his circles.

“Perhaps, Sir.”

It started to grate, the constant toadying, the Sir at the end of every sentence. He was sure his valet sometimes did it on purpose – did this bartender know Shaw? Was that how he knew he’d come from Hampstead?

“Hampstead, yes,” said Barclay. The gin martini slipped down easily, and, looking down, he saw his fingers were wet and cold. He wiped them on his trousers, but the liquid just kept dripping down, and when he lifted his hand to his mouth, it didn’t taste of anything. Water?

“My aunt…”

He hadn’t thought of Aunt Maeve for years – nobody did, the old coot was dotty and demented and a fearsome recluse. American by birth, she had a forbidding hybrid accent and a penchant for firearms. Little Barclay was her first nephew, however, and so, as a strange and mostly useless birthright, Little Barclay held a special place in the old bat’s fusty old heart, even if her barmy brain hadn’t quite kept up. “Never form bad habits, Little Barclay,” she’d said, her tone imperious and her eye like a gimlet (eye singular, having lost the other in an unspecified accident involving a Spanish Duke). “I can’t stand bad habits. Smoking, Little Barclay, smoking is the worst.” The few shillings here and there, bundled up with a birthday card for which she never managed the correct age, were the only real benefit.

It was sad, nonetheless, when she finally shuffled off the old Mortal C.

“Your aunt, Sir?”

Barclay rummaged in his inside pocket. Where were his damn cigarettes? Had he given his last one to Reggie? Why were his fingers so wet, why were his legs so cold?

“Yes, rum old business. She’d died, you know. Found her body propped up at the dining table. Always had been a stickler for mealtimes, but she sat there for a week before anyone noticed.”

“Indeed, Sir.”

“I was at home, preparing for dinner you know, when her solicitor arrived on my doorstep. Queer fish he was – very grey. Not just the hair, you know – grey skin. Peculiar chap.”

The barman proffered a second martini.

“Oh – jolly decent, thanks.” Barclay took a long sip, and rubbed his hands on his jacket sleeves. The wet seeped through the fabric, through his shirt, his cufflinks gleaming bright in the light of the large chandelier overhead. “Anyway, my man invited him in, showed him into my room. I took a pew on the sofa – he preferred to stand – and offered him a drink.”

“A drink, Sir?”

“Yes. Just the usual.”

“Just the usual drink, Sir.”

“That’s the fellow. He declined – one of those pious sorts, I shouldn’t wonder, if he’s anything like Aunt Maeve. Strictly strait laced.”

“Not a smoker, then, Sir?”

Barclay glanced down. A small puddle was forming beneath his bar stool. He began to shiver ever so slightly, and glanced up in search of a leak in the ceiling.

“No,” he said, distracted, “no cigarettes. I didn’t offer him a cigarette.”

“And what did he say, Sir?”

“Well, he’d brought the damn will with him, hadn’t he.”

“Had he, Sir?”

“He had, I just told you he had. Is there a leak in here?”

“A leak, Sir?”

“Oh, never mind. He brought the will, and he opened it up in front of me. ‘Barclay, my boy,’ he said, ‘Barclay my boy, I have the sombre honour of informing you that your aunt loved you very much.’ Odd way to put it, but like I say – queer fish. ‘How nice,’ I said – one likes to stay on the right side of solicitors, if one can.”

“Quite, Sir.”

“She left me the whole bally fortune, you know. $20,000. I had no idea.”

“Oh, really, Sir?”

“Really! Really! ’And I’m sure it’s just a formality,’ he said, peering at me over his spectacles – very grey man, did I mention how grey he was? – ‘but there’s one condition.’”

A wet, fat drop of cold found its way down the inside of Barclay’s collar, and he flinched slightly. One would think a place like this, a place so plush and opulent and so obviously catering to a better sort of clientele, could afford to keep the damp out.

“How so, Sir?”

He patted at his trouser pockets, shifting on his seat.

“What? What? Oh, nothing major.”

“Sir?”

“’Your aunt was most particular,’ he said, ‘most particular indeed. She said you could only inherit if she could trust you not to spend it on vices.’”

“Vices, Sir?”

“Yes, damn you, vices!” He startled himself with his sudden raised voice, and sipped with birdlike rapidity at the remainder of his second martini, a small tremor creeping into his hand. “A token gesture more than anything – she knew the young man of today is raised in folly and vice, one can’t keep one’s nose clean of all the joys of London living.”

“Quite, Sir.”

“Cigarettes,” said Barclay, more to himself than to the bartender. He reached once more with hopeless optimism into his jacket pocket, scrabbling for cardboard among the sodden fibres. “Where are my bloody cigarettes.”

“Are you a smoker, Sir?”

“That’s what he said, that is exactly what he said – have I told you this before? Are you sure we haven’t met?”

“Quite sure, Sir.”

Barclay let out a dissatisfied harrumph, and rubbed his moustache with agitated fingertips.

“And what did you say, Sir?”

“Well, that’s the damn thing, isn’t it – I said no. Dropped my cigarette down the back of the settee to preserve the old illusion of piousness in front of the Aged Grey, and off we went into the study to read through the will. He didn’t even question me, just accepted it, face value, very trusting for a legal sort.”

“You lied to him, Sir?”

Or perhaps – “you lied to him, Sir”. Barclay couldn’t tell anymore, couldn’t quite hear it to discern the subtleties of tone and pitch. His head felt fuzzy, his ears plugged and burbling as if underwater. So bloody cold, so bloody wet.

“No, I – “

“Yes, Sir, you lied to him. And what happened next, Sir?”

“I don’t know, I don’t – we went into the study, I closed the door behind us to keep the smell of the smoke in the other room, and we went to the desk – Shaw was out in the kitchen, I believe – that boy always manages to be in the most inconvenient place at the most inconvenient time.”

“How unfortunate, Sir.”

Yes, it was unfortunate, wasn’t it? Barclay shook his head, scrabbling through his own mind for the pieces of the puzzle. What was he doing here? What had happened, where was the solicitor, where were his cigarettes, why was it so wet and cold?

“Unfortunate,” he echoed, and his voice sounded like it bubbled up from the bottom of Aunt Maeve’s goldfish pond.

“Unfortunate that the cigarette caught alight,” said the bartender, conversationally. “Even more unfortunate that it took the house with it. Do you know how long the blaze raged, Sir?”

Barclay said nothing.

“I believe it took an hour to get the flames under control, Sir – they evacuated the whole street, two other houses were damaged in the fire.”

“But I didn’t – “

“No, you didn’t, did you, Sir?” He was pouring a third Martini, but then began to drink it himself, insouciant and stony across the glossy wooden bar. “You didn’t tell the truth, you didn’t think to put the cigarette out, you didn’t think of anything but your aunt’s inheritance.” He took a long sip, and smacked his lips thoughtfully. “And you didn’t survive, either.”

“I – “

The barman drained the glass and wiped a handkerchief briskly across his chin.

“I think you ought to leave, Sir.”

“I – “

“I really think it’s time to go, Sir.”

The hand on his shoulder was icy cold, and he turned with a start and a jerk and a sense of deep unease to find two dark figures behind him, one on either side.

“I don’t want –“

“It’s time to go, Sir.” He gave an almost imperceptible nod to the two gentlemen. “Take him out via the fire exit.”

Barclay’s feet dragged on the floor and his body felt limp, the weight of his wet clothes doing nothing to alleviate the heaviness, and he kicked out twice, but it was like moving his legs through a swimming pool, and made little difference. The glowing around the edges of the doors grew brighter now, the glasses clinking turning to something altogether more metallic, the laughter turning to a different kind of hysteria.

Across the city in Melrose Row, Hampstead, the policeman took off his helmet and wiped the sweat from his brow. The fireman heaved out a weary sigh and shook his hand, the air wet and smoky with the aftermath.

“It’s always the toffs, isn’t it, Geoff?” he said.

“Too right, Nige,” said the policeman, and flipped open the well-worn pages of his small black notebook. He licked the end of his pencil and began his laboured scrawl across the page. “Too ruddy right.”