The Great Fire Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Part Two

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  Part Three

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Also by Shinley Hazzard

  Praise for The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  FOR F.S.

  Parce que j’ai voulu te redire Je t’aime

  Et que ce mot fait mal quand il est dit sans toi

  ——LOUIS ARAGON

  Part One

  1

  NOW THEY WERE STARTING. Finality ran through the train, an exhalation. There were thuds, hoots, whistles, and the shrieks of late arrivals. From a megaphone, announcements were incomprehensible in American and Japanese. Before the train had moved at all, the platform faces receded into the expression of those who remain.

  Leith sat by a window, his body submissively chugging as they got under way. He would presently see that rain continued to fall on the charred suburbs of Tokyo, raising, even within the train, a spectral odour of cinders. Meanwhile, he was examining a photograph of his father. Aldred Leith was holding a book in his right hand—not reading, but looking at a likeness of his father on the back cover.

  It was one of those pictures, the author at his desk. In an enactment of momentary interruption, the man was half-turned to the camera, left elbow on blotter, right hand splayed over knee. Features fine and lined, light eyes, one eyelid drooping. A taut mouth. Forehead full, full crop of longish white hair. The torso broad but spare; the clothes unaffected, old and good. As a boy, Leith had wondered how his father could always have good clothes so seldom renewed—a seeming impossibility, like having a perpetual two days’ growth of beard.

  The expression, not calm but contained, was unrevealing. Siding with the man, the furniture supplied few clues: a secretary of dark wood was fitted in its top section with pigeonholes and small closed drawers. This desk had been so much part of the climate of family life, indivisible from his father’s moods—and even appearing, to the child, to generate them—that the son had never until now inspected it with adult eyes. For that measure of detachment, a global conflict had been required, a wartime absence, a voyage across the world, a long walk through Asia; a wet morning and strange train.

  There was no telephone on the desk, no clock or calendar. A bowl of blown roses, implausibly prominent, had perhaps been borrowed, by the photographer, from another room. On the blotter, two handwritten pages were shielded by the tweedy sleeve. Pens and pencils fanned from a holder alongside new books whose titles, just legible, were those of Oliver Leith’s novels in postwar translations. There were bills on a spike, a glass dish of clips, a paperweight in onyx. No imaginable colours, other than those of the foisted flowers; no object that invited, by its form or material, the pressure of a hand. No photograph. Nothing to suggest familiarity or attachment.

  The adult son thought the picture loveless. The father who had famously written about love—love of self, of places, of women and men—was renowned for a private detachment. His life, and that of his wife, his child, was a tale of dislocation: there were novels of love from Manchuria to Madagascar. The book newly to hand, outcome of a grim postwar winter in Greece, could be no exception. And was called Parthenon Freeze.

  If the man had stood up and walked from the picture, the strong torso would have been seen to dwindle into the stockiness of shortish legs. The son’s greater height, not immoderate, came through his mother; his dark eyes also.

  All this time, Leith’s body had been gathering speed. Putting the book aside, he interested himself in the world at the window: wet town giving way to fields, fields soggily surrendering to landscape. The whole truncated from time to time by an abrupt tunnel or the lash of an incoming train. Body went on ahead; thought hung back. The body could give a good account of itself—so many cities, villages, countries; so many encounters, such privation and exertion should, in anyone’s eyes, constitute achievement. Leith’s father had himself flourished the trick of mobility, fretting himself into receptivity and fresh impression. The son was inclined to recall the platform farewells.

  He had the shabby little compartment to himself. It was locked, and he had been given a key. It was clean, and the window had been washed. Other sections of the train were crammed with famished, threadbare Japanese. But the victors travelled at their ease, inviolable in their alien uniforms. Ahead and behind, the vanquished overflowed hard benches and soiled corridors: men, women, infants, in the miasma of endurance. In the steam of humanity and the stench from an appalling latrine. Deploring, Aldred Leith was nevertheless grateful for solitude, and spread his belongings on the opposite seat. Having looked awhile at Asia from his window, he brought out a different, heavier book from his canvas bag.

  IN THAT SPRING OF 1947, Leith was thirty-two years old. He did not consider himself young. Like others of his generation, had perhaps never quite done so, being born into knowledge of the Great War. In the thoughtful child, as in the imaginative and travelled schoolboy, the desire had been for growth: to be up and away. From the university where he did well and made friends, he had strolled forth distinctive. Then came the forced march of resumed war. After that, there was no doubling back to recover one’s youth or take up the slack. In the wake of so much death, the necessity to assemble life became both urgent and oppressive.

  Where traceable, his paternal ancestors had been, while solidly professional, enlivened by oddity. His grandfather, derided by relatives as an impecunious dilettante, had spiked all guns by inventing, at an advanced age, a simple mechanical process that made his fortune. Aldred’s father, starting out as a geologist whose youthful surveys in high places—Bhutan, the Caucasus—produced, first, lucid articles, had soon followed these with lucid harsh short stories. The subsequent novels, astringently romantic, brought him autonomy and fame. Renouncing geology, he had kept a finger, even so, on the pulse of that first profession, introducing it with authority here and there in his varied narratives: the Jurassic rocks of East Greenland, the lavatic strata of far islands; these played their parts in the plot. In Oliver Leith’s house in Norfolk there hung a painting of the youthful geologist prowling the moraines on his shortish legs. A picture consequential yet inept, like a portrait by Benjamin Robert Haydon.

  Leith’s mother, by birth a Londoner, was of Scots descent. There were red-cheeked relatives, well connected. A fine tall stone house, freezing away near Inverness, had been a place of cousinly convergence in summers before the Second World War. Aldred had not been an only child: a younger sister had died in childhood from diphtheria. It was then that his mother had begun to accompany, or follow, her husband on his journeys, taking their son with her.

  And on the move ever since, the son thought, looking from his window at the stricken coasts of Japan. Two years ago, as war was ending, he had intended to create for himself a fixed point, some centre from which departures might be made—the decision seeming, at the time, entirely his to make. Instead, at an immense distance from anything resembling home, he wondered with unconcern what circumstance would next transform the story.

  From a habit of self-reliance, he was used to his own moods and did not mind an occasional touch of fatalism. He had, himself, some fame, quite unlike his father’s and quite unsought.

  IT WAS NEAR EVENING when he arrived. The train was very l
ate, but an Australian soldier sent to meet him was waiting on the improvised platform: “Major Leith?”

  “You had a long wait.”

  “That’s all right.” They went down ill-lit wooden stairs. A jeep was parked on gravel. “I had a book.”

  They swung the kit aboard, and climbed in. On an unrepaired road, where pedestrians wheeled bicycles in the dusk, they skirted large craters and dipped prudently into small ones. They were breathing dust and, through it, smells of the sea.

  Leith asked, “What were you reading?”

  The soldier groped with free hand to the floor. “My girl sent it.”

  The same photograph: Oliver Leith at his desk. On the front cover, the white title, cobalt sky, and snowbound Acropolis.

  Leith brought out his own copy from a trenchcoat pocket.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  They laughed, coming alive out of khaki drab. The driver was possibly twenty: staunch body, plain pleasant face. Grey eyes, wide apart, wide awake. “You related?”

  “My father.”

  “I’m damned.”

  They were near the waterfront now, following the bed of some derelict subsidiary railway. The joltings might have smashed a rib cage. You could just see an arc of coastal shapes, far out from ruined docks: hills with rare lights and a black calligraphy of trees fringing the silhouettes of steep islands. The foreground reality, a wartime shambles of a harbour with its capsized shipping, was visible enough, and could, in that year, have been almost anywhere on earth.

  The driver was peering along the track. “Write yourself?”

  “Not in that way.”

  “Never too late.”

  The boy plainly considered his passenger past the stage of revelations. A dozen years apart in age, they were conclusively divided by war. The young soldier, called to arms as guns fell silent, was at peace with this superior—civil and comradely, scarcely saluting or saying Sir, formalities no longer justified. Intuitively, too, they shared the unease of conquerors: the unseemliness of finding themselves few miles from Hiroshima.

  “How do you manage here?” The man had a deep, low voice. If one had to put a colour to it, it would have been dark blue; or what people in costly shops call burgundy.

  “Can’t complain. Not much to do when you knock off, except booze. No girls, not that you’d want. Too many people doing things for us, and then we’re not let out that much. Lot of idleness in this Occupation game.”

  Night fell, crudely splashed along the piers with bright official lights. Reaching a sentry post, they were directed to a wooden jetty. When they got down from the jeep, a sharp wind billowed the officer’s open coat. Now he heard and smelt the sea, glimpsing its black motion beneath splintered planks. Saw, through the doorway of a shed, a metal table and field telephone, and tea in a tin mug: the drear and dented interior that, in military matters, passed for home. Two sailors of the Australian Navy looked at his papers. There was the indifference and slight hostility of indolence disturbed. They glanced at coloured ribbons on his uniform. A small electric generator gave off, in addition to din, a whiff of scorching. Someone said, “Mind the cord.”

  At the end of the jetty, a launch tipped her riding lights in reflecting waves while these men took their time and the water slid about below rough timbers, charged with the oils and tar and detritus of overturned ships, as well as with more recent victorious trash. Beyond this inland—though not landlocked—sea, there was the ocean. In China, throughout two years, Leith had been in boats, ferries, barges, and sampans, on rivers, lakes, canals. The ocean had not much come his way.

  “Yair, well. I suppose you can go over. He’s not there, but, the Brigadier. Gone to Kobe.”

  “And when will he get back?”

  “Yair, well, should be tonight. I reckon he’ll go straight home. Up in the hills, that’s where he lives. Not on the island.”

  “On the island, can they put me up for the night?”

  “All the room in the bloody world. Buckingham Palace on Abdication Day.”

  Leith went out with the driver. “I’ll need you tomorrow. I don’t know your name.”

  “Name’s Talbot. First name Brian. Sir.”

  Together they lowered Leith’s gear into the launch, where a sailor stood silent at the helm. Leith, dropping down beside his kit, called, “Goodbye then,” and Talbot raised his hand. They were cast off, rocking on a swift sea, breeze rising and salt spray; a night sky starry above marching columns of cloud. The harbour lights drew away, and dim lights of the town. On hills and islands there was an ancient darkness, whose few lamps—of kerosene or tallow—were single, tremulous, yellow: frugal and needful.

  “No fishing lights?”

  The helmsman said, “Minesweeping.” He added a comment that blew away, so that the soldier heard only “Weeping.”

  Behind them on the pier, Talbot would be showing the book—“His father”—with a slight sense of betrayal. But it matters to have something to tell. Remarks would be made about the row of ribbons: “The medal.” In the boat, Leith was silent as if alone. Solitude, flowing cold from the sea, fairly streamed, also, from his companion’s back. Ahead, the island grew electrically present in a grid of lights.

  In the pattern of disruption that had been Aldred Leith’s life for years, arrival had kept its interest. Excitement dwindling, curiosity had increased. Occasion revived an illusion of discovery, as if one woke in a strange room to wonder afresh not only where but who one was; to shed assumptions, even certainties. On the sea that evening, such expectation was negligible. Earlier in the day, in the swaying train, Leith had written to a wartime comrade: “Peace forces us to invent our future selves.” Fatuity, he thought now, and in his mind tore the letter up. There was enough introspection to go round, whole systems of inwardness. The deficiency didn’t lie there. To deny the external and unpredictable made self-possession hardly worth the price. Like settling for a future without coincidence or luck.

  He thought, How mood changes all, like an accident.

  Cascades of bitter drops came across the boat. Leith’s coat unfurled like a jib. The little riding lights, rocking emerald and ruby, would have shown the man smiling—as a man may privately smile at almost anything: over the memory of a girl or the prospect of a good dinner; at the discomfiture of an enemy, or a friend. As a woman smiles over a compliment or a new dress. With Leith at that moment it was the shared incident of the book that pleased him, the young soldier turning up at Kure with the same book in hand—a long shot, yet familiar.

  The engine subsided. They were settling into the lee of the island, which was coming to meet them on a branch of white lights. At the mole, a uniformed sailor waited with a boat hook. The launch paused, plunged, sidled, drawing raucous breath. There was a paved quay dashed by foam and stained by tides—a stage from which a grandiose stair mounted to a portico of angled columns: a travesty of Venice, owing much to Musso. The naval academy of the defeated had become a hospital for victors.

  And when, he wondered, saluting the antipodean sailor, shall I mingle at large with the defeated themselves?—what I’ve come for. For that, and Hiroshima.

  He heaved his kit bag out on the flagstones, sprang to the wet ledge, and waved off the boat. Stood a moment on the paved brink, scarcely thinking; only breathing the night and its black lappings.

  Indoors, a foyer whose beams and architraves might bring down the house was floored with gritty terrazzo and seared with light. Another, huger stair resounded with Occidental boots and voices, and with the high speech, soft or yelping, of young Western women, astonishing because unheard in many months. Men and women in uniform, all Westerners, were going up and down: active yet not quite purposeful, unprepared for peace. They glanced at the new arrival climbing among them, and women noted a durable man.

  When he had registered his arrival, he was shown to a high narrow room with an army cot, a blanket, and one infirm chair. The little room had an unconvinced Westernism: dimensions, door, window taken on
faith by untravelled Japanese draughtsmen. The high window looked on a shaft. One lightbulb dangled. Leith’s sole familiar was the heavy canvas bag that, resting by his feet as he sat on the bed, took on, with its worn and weighted fellowship, the speckled contour of an old dog: barrel-bodied, obedient.

  Having flung a few things on the chair and closed a louvre on the cold shaft, Leith went out again. He found, in an office, an Australian woman in her shapeless forties, talkative; good-natured as her brown wool dress. He enquired for Professor Gardiner.

  “He’s gone to rest.” As if Gardiner were a roosting bird, or had died. “He’s been with the doctors, and gone to take a nap. He’s not that young, you know, and then he’s been through the fire.”

  “Can I leave a note?” Leith took a slip, wrote, and folded. Asked, fatally, “Are you with the army, then?”

  “Oh, an army wife, just helping out.” Becoming arch with the heroic male. “Husband’s with the Signal Corps. I only came here last week. We were a hundred wives in a little ship, all the way from Sydney to Kure, five weeks without stopping. Well, we did put in at New Guinea, but just for water, not to go ashore … Oh, wonderful, my first holiday ever. Morning tea in our cabins, the Chinese stewards, the laundry done. Oh the tiny islands, the ocean. No worries, just to stop the kiddies from falling overboard.” She chatted on, five weeks without stopping. “Some of the women hadn’t seen their man in four years. Got married as hubby went to war. On the ship, the officers took to us. There was one lass—”

  Leith handed over his note.

  “So you’re the major, then, Major Leith. He’s been expecting you a couple of days. Been quite on edge.” Her glance went to the red inch of braid. “He’ll be down to dinner. They want you to stop by the main office.” She thought his eyes, well, beautiful.

  A handmade arrow directed him to Administration. In poor light, a khaki soldier of his own age was tapping with index fingers on an antique typewriter and did not soon turn round.