Sandra Field – Wildfire (страница 3)

Jim drained the fat from the eggs and put them on the plates along with some bacon. ‘When you didn’t answer, I thought you didn’t want anything to do with me.’

‘That’s not true—’

‘After all, who needs a stray brother four thousand miles away?’

‘I never felt that way, Jim,’ Simon said forcefully. ‘I came, didn’t I? I’m here.’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Look, I know I’m not the easiest man in the world to get along with. I spend a lot of time alone—I have to. But I’m glad we’ve met again. Glad we’re getting to know each other. Just give me time, that’s all.’

‘We’ve got all summer. If you want to stay that long.’

Simon put the toast on the table along with a pot of strawberry jam that had also come from the bakery. This was a moment of decision for both him and his brother, he knew, nor did he minimise the importance of that decision. It was not an opportune time for an image of a woman playing naked in a mist-wreathed lake to flicker into his brain. Shoving it back, he said quietly, ‘I’d like to stay, yes. You can always kick me out if you get sick of me.’

‘I’ll do that,’ Jim promised, a smile splitting his pleasant, suntanned face. ‘Let’s eat.’

The eggs were not overdone, and there were huge whole strawberries in the jam. Refilling the coffee-mugs, Simon said, ‘I’ll get fat if I stay all summer.’

Jim shot a derisive glance at his brother’s lean length in the chair. ‘Sure. Anyway, if this dry weather keeps up, there’s a way you can lose weight. If you want to.’

‘What’s that?’ Simon said lazily. ‘Canoe races between here and the bakery.’

‘Fire-fighting.’

About to laugh, Simon saw that Jim was not joking. ‘Where’s the fire?’ he said semi-facetiously.

‘The woods are like tinder right now. We had less snow than normal last winter, and almost no rain all spring. A cigarette dropped in the bracken, a lightning strike—that’s all it would take. I’m on the volunteer fire department here, and we help out the whole county. They’re running a course next week on ground fire-fighting. Want to take it?’

The part of Simon that had felt for months like a lion trapped in a cage said instantly, ‘Yes.’

‘Great. I’ll sign you up.’

‘So you spend your winters teaching junior high school and your summers fighting fires?’ Simon said quizzically. ‘That’s quite a combination.’

‘Fighting fires is a breeze after some of the kids I’ve got. Anyway, I love the woods. If I can save even an acre from burning, that’s worth a lot to me.’

Every window in Jim’s cabin opened into the trees: the drooping boughs of hemlock, the brilliant green of beech, the thin-slivered needles of pine. To think of all these myriad shades of green engulfed in flame and reduced to charred blackness hurt something deep inside Simon. He said with utter conviction, ‘I already love this place.’

‘I was afraid you’d hate it here,’ Jim confessed. ‘I wondered if we should have stayed in my apartment in Halifax all summer—it’s a city, after all, even if it is pretty small beer compared with London.’

‘I came here to get away from cities.’

‘But you haven’t painted anything since you got here.’

Simon’s face closed. Fighting to keep any emotion from his voice, he said, ‘No.’

‘Well, I sure bumped into the glacier there,’ Jim said cheerfully and unrepentantly. ‘I’ve got to go into town this morning and pick up a few supplies...want to come?’

Town was the little village of Somerville, population seven hundred and fifty. ‘Not really. I’ll clean up the dishes, and then I’ll read for a while.’

‘Once I get back, we should go for a swim—it’s going to be another scorcher of a day.’ Jim reached for the shopping list that was taped to the door of the refrigerator.

Would he ever be able to swim again without thinking of a woman’s nude body playing in the water? To his horror Simon heard himself say, ‘I’d thought there wasn’t another cabin further out than this one. But I saw a place on Maynard’s Lake in one of the coves.’

‘Oh, that’s Shea’s cabin.’

‘Shay?’ Simon repeated, puzzled.

‘Spelled S.H.E.A. but pronounced “shay”. She’s a good friend of mine. You’ll meet her sooner or later.’

‘What do you mean by good friend?’ Simon said carefully. Of all the scenarios he had pictured, that the unknown woman might be involved with his brother had not been one of them.

‘Just what I say. When I was fourteen and she was eighteen, I was madly in love with her...after all, who wasn’t? But by the time I’d got my teaching degrees I’d met Sally, and Shea kind of dropped into the background in any romantic sense.’ His voice a touch overly casual, he added, ‘You’d probably like her.’

‘Matchmaking?’ Simon asked, a little too sharply for his own liking.

Jim gave a snort of laughter. ‘You don’t know Shea! She’s not into being matchmade. If there is such a word.’

Simon did a quick calculation. ‘So at twenty-nine she’s still unattached.’

‘Yeah. Just like you at thirty-five.’

‘Anyone ever tell you that you can be decidedly aggravating, James Hanrahan?’

‘Sally does. Frequently.’ Restlessly Jim got up from his chair. ‘I’ll be glad when she gets home. It seems like an age since I’ve seen her.’

Sally, like Jim, was a teacher; they had met in university and had taught together in an isolated outpost on Baffin Island. But Sally had stayed on there when Jim had got his present job in Halifax, and was only now transferring to a school just outside the city. She was presently visiting her parents in Montreal, and then her sisters in New Brunswick, and would not arrive in Nova Scotia for another month. Jim, plainly, was finding the delay hard to take. ‘Do you want to marry her?’ Simon asked bluntly.

Jim nodded. ‘If she’ll have me. Isolation postings do kind of throw people together, and she thinks we should take the winter to get reacquainted.’

‘Makes sense.’

‘Sense doesn’t have much to do with the way I feel around Sally. You ever feel that way about a woman, Simon?’

Yes, Simon thought. This morning, when I saw a woman called Shea playing in the lake. ‘I’ve never married,’ he said evasively. ‘Too busy getting to the top. The women I go out with are the decorative, sophisticated ones that a man in my position is supposed to be seen with. You know, the kind that get photographed in the glossy fashion magazines. Wouldn’t be caught dead without at least a quarter of an inch of make-up on. Wouldn’t be caught dead without an escort who wasn’t at the top, either,’ he finished cynically.

‘Doesn’t sound as though you like any of them very much,’ Jim observed.

‘Liking is not what it’s about.’ Simon pushed back from the table. ‘Hell, I didn’t even like myself very much. And that is the last remark of a personal nature that you’re getting out of me today.’

‘OK, OK,’ Jim said, slapping the back pocket of his jeans to see if he had his wallet. ‘Although if you’re into that kind of woman, Shea is definitely not the one for you... Want anything at the store?’

‘No, thanks.’

Simon started stacking the plates, and a few moments later heard Jim’s truck drive away down the dirt lane that linked them to the highway. So the lissom swimmer in Maynard’s Lake was called Shea. She was twenty-nine years old, unattached, and, if he could trust the intonation in Jim’s voice, a very independent lady. Apparently he was going to meet her, sooner or later.

In his brother’s opinion she was not the right woman for him.

Or else he was the wrong man.

CHAPTER TWO

AT FIRST glimpse the scene in front of him was one of utter confusion. Simon stood beside Jim’s truck in his jeans and T-shirt and new steel-toed boots, taking everything in, and gradually the various components began to make sense. The weather-beaten building on the far side of the road appeared to be functioning as dormitory, kitchen, and command post; two men with sleeping rolls disappeared inside it, and from it wafted the smell of chicken soup. Heaps of gear stood around in the dust: pumps, shovels, chainsaws, and big yellow bags of hose. He remembered those long lines of hose from the course he had so light-heartedly agreed to take. Filled with water, they were astoundingly heavy.

From behind the building he heard the decelerating whine of a helicopter engine. Helicopters, he now knew, were used for water-bombing and for transporting ground crew to fires unreachable by road. The truck parked near Jim’s had a shiny aluminium water tank, and the volunteer fire truck behind it carried a portable tank. Two bulldozers were lined up further down the track.

His gaze shifted, almost unwillingly, to the west. There, on the horizon, was the reason he was here.

The smoke was yellow more than blue, a thick, ominous cloud over gently rolling hills. He had somehow expected the smoke to be lying still, crouched like a predator over its prey. Instead it was full of roiling movement, billowing high into the sky. Although he was too far away to see flames, the surging smoke alone was enough to make his heart beat faster.

Jim was jogging back towards the truck. ‘I checked in with the fire boss,’ he said as soon as he was in earshot. ‘Four of us are going to do mop-up on the flank that’s furthest from the road—you want to take a run down to the helicopter and find out from the pilot how soon we can go? I’ll grab a couple of bunks in the meantime.’