I think Allan felt my parents' loss more; he was old enough to know that he would never see them again whereas I could not really understand this idea, and just kept waiting for them to come back from wherever it was they had gone.  I suppose the nature of the Community itself made the blow less keenly felt than it might have been in Benighted society; Allan and I would have been brought up much the way we were even if our parents had not perished, our care, upbringing and education spread out amongst the many faithful of the Community rather than left solely to one binary nuclear family.

I believe it dawned on me that my parents weren't coming back only as the burned-out mansion house was rebuilt during the following year, as though while the building's shell was still open to the weather and the skies my mother and father could somehow find a way to return… but as the roof was rebuilt and the new beams and rafters hoisted into place, the roof boards laid and the slates nailed down, that possibility was gradually but irrevocably removed, as though the wood and planks and nails and metal fittings that went to complete the house were not making a new place for people to live, but making instead a huge, too-lately-made mausoleum my mysteriously vanished parents ought somehow to inhabit, yet were forever excluded from.

I have a vague, contrary recollection of thinking then that my parents were still there somehow, hanging around in a sort of ghostly, spectral way, snagged there, caught by all those fresh floorboards and shining nails, but even that feeling gradually slipped away over time, and the completed, refurbished house became just another part of the Community.

I suppose, according to the more facile schools of psychology, I ought to have resented the mansion house, and especially the library, which survived undamaged but which for many, many years thereafter had about it the lingering odour of smoke, but if anything the effect was quite to the contrary, and I came to love the library and its books and its old, musty, smoky scent, as though through that faint aroma of the past I soaked up more than just the knowledge contained in the books as I sat there reading and studying, and so was still in touch with my parents and our happy past before the fire.

I think that for my Grandfather the loss of his son was probably the worst thing that ever happened to him.  It was as if there was a God of the sort he did not believe in: a cruel, capricious, closely involved God who did not just speak from some great, passionless distance, but moved people and events around like pieces in a game; a greedy, spiteful, manipulative, hands-on God who took as much as He gave, and - provoked, or simply to prove His power - fell upon the lives and fates of men like an eagle upon a mouse.  If my Grandfather's faith was shaken by his son's death, he gave no sign at the time, but I know that to this day he still grieves for him, and still wakes himself from sleep every few months with nightmares of burning buildings and shouts and screams inside rolling flame-lit billows of black smoke.

Things never were quite the same again; they are still good, and we thrive (or I thought we did), but they are good in a way that must be quite different from the way they would have been good had Alice and Chris survived, and Aasni and Zhobelia grown old together with Salvador.  Instead, three of them died, and Zhobelia at first withdrew within the Community, and then withdrew from it.

My great-aunt mourned prodigiously, extravagantly, epically; she tore her hair out by the roots, which you hear about people doing but I'll bet you never actually saw.  Neither have I, but I have seen the evidence and it was not pretty.

Zhobelia stopped eating, stopped cooking, stopped getting out of bed.  She blamed herself for the fire; she had gone to bed that night instead of staying up with Aasni to carry on with their pressurised pickling experiment, and anyway felt that the accident would not have happened if she had ensured the pressure cooker had been properly cleaned; both she and Aasni knew that some of their earlier experiments had blocked the safety valves and caused dangerous pressure build-ups in the cooker.  Zhobelia had been more concerned than her sister had appeared over the safety implications of this development, and blamed herself for not staying to make sure that Aasni did not put herself in danger.

Zhobelia recovered, slowly.  She started to get up and to eat, though she never again cooked; not even as much as a popadum.  Calli and Astar, Zhobelia's daughters, moved smoothly and quietly into the gap left by their aunt's death and their mother's domestic secession, jointly taking over the mistresship of the kitchen and the stewardship of the Whit family.  Zhobelia entered a kind of self-imposed exile within her own home, having nothing to do with its running and taking little apparent interest in its welfare; she existed there, but she seemed to have little to say to anybody, and nothing that she wanted to do.  A year to the day after the fire she left High Easter Offerance without warning.

We found a note from her saying that she had gone to visit her old family - who were now based in Glasgow - in the hope of effecting a reconciliation.  We later heard that some form of rapprochement had been arrived at, but that Zhobelia had been looking for forgiveness and understanding only, and not a new home; she left there too, and, well, there seems to be some confusion over where she ended up after that.  Astar, Calli and Salvador all seem vaguely sure that she is still alive and being well cared for somewhere, but the two sisters become sadly uncommunicative if pressed on the details, while Grandfather just gets tetchy.

I think the fire changed my Grandfather.  By all accounts the least important aspect of it was that he took to dressing in white, not black, but more importantly he seemed to lose some of his energy and enthusiasm; for a while, I'm told by those who were around at the time, our Faith seemed uncertain of its way, and a mood of despondency settled over the Community.  Morale recovered eventually, and Grandfather rediscovered some of his drive and vitality, but, as I say, things were never the same again, though we have prospered well enough.

I know the fire changed me.  My memories begin with that vision of aching, empty blueness, the smell of dampened smouldering and the sound of my great-aunt's grief; the Gift of Healing came upon me two years later.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I have always had my secret places within and around the policies which form our lands; they are part of that private, internalised landscape every child imposes upon their surroundings, which sometimes survives into adulthood if we stay in the same place and the world does not change too much around us.  Unlike the retreats of many children, mine had been havens almost for the sake of it, as I had had nothing at the Community to wish to escape from, unless it was too much loving attention.

As children both Allan and I were pampered by everybody around us; children have a pretty good life in the Community anyway, revered as the product of two souls' communing and respected for their unblemished new soul, but my brother and I were given a particularly easy ride because of the tragedy of our orphanhood.  Being a Leapyearian and the Elect of God, I suppose I had one increment of indulgence more even than my brother, though such was the obvious determination by all around to recompense us for the sadness of our plight through diligent applications of love and the gratification of all but our most outrageous wishes, that I doubt Allan ever suffered because of my superior rank, unless it was the self-inflicted pain we call jealousy.

I think all this would have applied to any Community children who had lost their parents when they were so young, but certainly it can have done us no harm that we were grandchildren of the Founder, and that he transferred so much of his love for his son and his son's wife onto us, and took such an interest in our upbringing that any kindness extended to us was almost as good as a tribute paid directly to Salvador himself (in one way it was actually better as it did not smack of sycophancy).