Gabriel's Moon

PROLOGUE

Oxfordshire
1936

Gabriel watched closely as his mother lit the night light beside his bed. This ritual was important to him, signifying order and calm. The wick of the stubby candle ignited and she carefully placed the glass globe over it and blew out the match she had used. The moon – his night light was a glass moon-globe – shone with a lambent, shifting pulse from the candle flame that slowly settled. Etched mountain ranges, lunar deserts and meteor-craters glowed in the small moonscape. Gabriel couldn’t sleep unless his night light was burning on the table beside his bed: ash-grey and gold, a world as familiar to him as the garden outside.

‘There you are, my darling,’ his mother said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. ‘Gabriel’s moon, all’s well with the world.’

‘Why isn’t there a full moon every night?’ he asked. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Neither do I. There must be a reason. An astronomical reason, I suppose. We’ll look it up in the encyclopaedia tomorrow.’

Gabriel had asked this question before and had received similar unsatisfactory answers.

‘Is Daddy on the moon?’ he asked.

‘No. Daddy is in heaven. It’s not the same.’

‘Maybe the moon is heaven,’ he said.

‘Well, if it is, then one day we’ll all be together on the moon with him.’ She replied in her brisk, no-nonsense way, as if everything in the world was comprehensible, somehow, if you just made the effort. Then she leant over him to kiss his cheek. He smelt her scent, the lavender water she used that just failed to mask the odour of cigarette smoke that clung to her. She was always smoking, his mother.

‘Sefton says there is no heaven,’ Gabriel said. His older brother, who was away at boarding school, had newly and zealously embraced atheism, aged fourteen. ‘And he says that there is no God.’

‘Well, that’s just Sefton’s opinion. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion but Sefton can sometimes be very foolish, not to say extremely silly, as we all know.’

‘Is there no God?’ Gabriel asked, vaguely troubled by the idea.

‘Don’t you give it a thought, Master Gabriel Dax,’ his mother said firmly. ‘You’ve school tomorrow. More important things to think of.’

She stood up and fussily adjusted the blanket around him.

‘You go to sleep, my sweet boy. We’ll all be with Daddy on the moon before you know it.’

She switched off the lamp on the bedside table and the room took on its familiar blurry moon-glow. She blew him a kiss and quietly closed the door on him. Gabriel turned in his bed and stared at his radiant night light. One day, he would go to the moon and find his father, he told himself. Yes, he would . . .

It was the smell of smoke that woke him, some time later, and it wasn’t cigarette smoke. It was like smoke from a fire and it made his eyes smart. What was wrong? The room was fogged with the smoke and his moon had a flocculent wavering halo. He slipped out of bed and opened the door – and recoiled. Orange flame-light, dancing gleefully everywhere. Great turbulent clouds of smoke rising up the stairway from the ground floor; thick grey quilts of smoke held by the ceiling. He covered his nose, pulling his pyjama jacket over his face, and set off down the stairs in a panic. Everything downstairs was on fire, it seemed to him – where was his mother?

He ran into the big drawing room and saw her lying face down in front of the drinks cabinet. The Persian rugs around her were ablaze with small identical fires feeding on their thick nap.

‘Mummy!’ he screamed. But she didn’t respond.

Then a part of the ceiling fell with a great thump and the hot air rushed up through the ragged hole, feeding new fires on the floor above. He winced at the heat-blast on his forehead, felt his hair dry and thicken, tasted the hot, ashy smoke-curdle in his throat.

He knelt beside his mother’s body and shook her arm. Nothing. He grabbed her shoulder and heaved her over.

When he saw that her eyes were half-open he knew she was dead.

How did he know? He touched her beautiful face.

‘Mummy!’ he screamed again. ‘Mummy, don’t leave me!’

Then one of the big beams in the drawing room collapsed and he was knocked back by the wave of furnace-heat that engulfed him.

He smelt his hair and eyebrows singeing, sour and acrid. He sensed his cheeks and forehead burn and crackle, toasting in the firestorm.

He became an animal. Flight was the only survival option. He ran to the side door in the kitchen but it was locked. Where was the key? Where did they keep the key? He felt the broiling heat embrace his back, enfolding, clutching, parching his pyjamas. He tried to open the latch on the leaded window by the kitchen door but it was stuck. He pulled the table with the telephone on it closer, knelt on it, picked up the phone and used its receiver as a hammer, smashing it against the handle of the latch. It gave, and opened. Wonderful cold night air fanned his hot face. He flung the phone out of the window and clambered up and out after it, squirming through, unheeding – he didn’t want to be burnt alive. He fell into the border, rolled with pleasure on the damp leaves and earth, picked himself up and stumbled out on to the back lawn.

He ran and crouched behind the fish pond, as if the turbid water would somehow protect him, and looked back at the house, the Dax family home, Yeomanswood Farm. The conflagration had taken full hold, the thatched roof blazing meatily with flame, as if there were bombs going off inside, rich and roaring. Only seconds later, it seemed, he saw the whole of the roof collapse with a dull whoomph, and their two-storeyed house became a huge one-storeyed bonfire, as if some rare fuel was feeding the flames, leaping high, warming him even at this distance, turning the fish pond orange.

Then he heard the trilling toytown bells of the fire engines, saw their flashing lights as they sped down the lane from Witney. Sefton was safe at school – maybe they could save Mummy, he thought, futilely, but he knew – beyond doubt – that his mother was already dead, consumed by the fire, gone to join his father on the moon.

He looked up at the sky, utterly miserable and afraid, searching for the moon, but the night was cloudy and it was hidden. Where was Gabriel’s moon? His howl of grief and sorrow erupted in his small hot lungs, incomprehension vying with bitter comprehension. How had this happened? What would become of him now? How was he ever going to meet his Mummy and his Daddy on the moon?