The Great Fire Read online

  The older man, heavyset, said, “Must be.”

  Peter Exley heard himself say “No,” like an obstinate infant.

  The boy of the flag was also saying “No,” brushing iridescent fragments from face and hair with his forearm. “No.” He extended his flag arm, pointing it beyond Exley’s head: “There.”

  Peter could make it out, the painted shape against the mountain: the machine coming in, silver, first descending, then rising abruptly, tilting, circling. Again, an illusory silence before the volume returned in a normal roar, with the red boy saying, “That’s it, there, the Shanghai plane.”

  And the khaki man asking, “What’s the one, then, that bought it?”

  “Morning plane from Canton, second time since May.”

  Leith came from the Shanghai plane with a string of passengers: grave, sunburned, saved. Smiled as he found Exley in a gathering at the gate. When they had shaken hands and were walking to the car, Peter said, “You saw the crash.”

  “Poor devils.”

  “I thought it was you.” Angry, aggrieved. “They told me you were dead.”

  “Heraclitus.”

  “I was furious.” At the event, at his own hysteria, and Leith trying to get him through it with banter.

  They trundled to Nathan Road, heading for the car ferry. He said, “I mean it. You’d run out on me.”

  Kowloon ran out at the end of their road in a display of spars and funnels. Across the strait, the green romantic mountain. Leith was staying at the Gloucester. He told Exley, “I gave your address to one or two people.”

  “Two letters came, I should have brought them. We can stop off at the barracks on our way.”

  Aboard the ferry, they stood on deck, watching the island arrive over the water, above junks, sampans, and lighters, and an American warship called Valley Forge. The villas, repaired, stood out from green declivities; there was the long, low, discoloured litter of the town at the shore. Sunstruck names of old companies could be made out on façades along the Praya: LaPraik, Dodwell, McKinnon Mackenzie; and a forest of Chinese signs. Beyond these, there were the ranked godowns.

  Leith said, “I always liked it.”

  “I like it well enough.” Exley seemed committed, now, to this measure of approval, even as he felt pleasure; even as he felt responsible for the occasion and the scene.

  “I see the cathedral, the club, all the icons. Government House has acquired a Japanese tower.”

  “They decided not to pull it down. In fact, it doesn’t look bad.”

  “The tall building is new since my time. The bank, is it?”

  “I work in there, as it happens. The man-made high point—a primeval fact that ever excites attention.”

  “One of my early memories is being taken to the highest point in London by my godmother, a far from primeval figure in toque, dust coat, and lavender spats. My cousin and I climbed a spiral of three hundred and something steps. The monument to the Great Fire. It was worth it, though, at the top.”

  At the barracks, Leith sat on a trunk while Exley looked out his letters.

  “Thanks.” Glancing, pocketing, pleased.

  The trunk was marked FARELF.

  “Far East Land Forces. It’s what I’m attached to. Not sentimentally, you understand.”

  Leith was looking round the room. “Peter, this is bad. You can’t stay here.” Noting the encroachment of Rysom’s chaos. “Who’s the chap you share with?”

  Exley sketched in Rysom. He agreed: “I’ve let it drag on. They said there was no choice, but I should have kept after them.”

  Rysom irrupted as they were leaving. Exley made introductions. There was the slight tension, on their part, of having just criticised this man—who, with his adverse quickness, picked it up, saying, “Speak of the devil, eh?” And turning to Aldred Leith: “He talks about you all the time.”

  “Mentioned you exactly twice.”

  “Got up at dawn to meet you. Excited as a child.”

  Peter said, “That’s true enough.”

  Dissatisfied, they went their ways.

  At the hotel, Leith had a large corner room with a terrace and an oblique view of the sea. The two men stood out in the breeze, leaning on an iron balustrade, while the world was exclaiming in the street below. In Des Voeux Road, the rattling trams, the new Studebakers, and the bells from pedicabs; in Pedder Street, the rickshaw coolies clearing space for their tawny stride with shouts of Hai-yahh, while a row of their fellows, squatting at the curb under Jardine’s arcade, took their noon meal, the bowl in thick fingers, the other hand rapid with motions of the sticks. The scholars passed, slippered and gowned, the sun-coloured Buddhists, and the French nuns in sky blue under the white and mediaeval headdress. And the tourists, with wallets rashly displayed, filing into the Swatow Lace Company.

  As they watched, a Chinese funeral came from Queen’s Road in an outburst of colours and costumes and percussion instruments, the bowed mourners walking behind. Banners, lettered and fringed, proclaimed the virtues of the defunct—or so Peter Exley had been told. Leith said, “What I see is an advertisement for the band.” The procession passed on, in a great collision of cymbals.

  Reverberations of the crash were subsiding. By now, misery would have circulated: the dead would be named, the relatives informed; existences derailed. With the onlookers pursuing what had seemed, for the first grateful hour or so, their own charmed lives.

  Leith unpacked, turned over a pile of mail, and sent for their late breakfast. There were still, of course, the two letters untouched in his pocket. And Peter, going to wash the morning off in the bathroom, thought that Leith would now be free to open these alone.

  In the bathroom mirror, Exley’s face was grimed, his eyes reddish. When he doused his head, flinty grit circled the basin, yellow pellets dissolved. His sweated tunic, pristine that morning and now slung on a peg, was similarly coated. The balustrade had added its own sooty touch at elbows.

  When he came back, the room was full of light, the shutters open, the fan rotating. Breakfast stood on a wheeled tray. It was clear that the two letters had been read, though nowhere to be seen. Leith was sitting back in a familiar attitude, foot cocked on knee, hands clasped behind his head: abstracted, well pleased.

  BENEDICT’S LETTER WAS SHORT, in an irregular hand:

  Dear Aldred,

  The way we miss you. Two American officials came looking for you. One nice, one not. I think they may be spies. They will come back. So will you, and in your case we’ll exult. I am in a better phase just today. Helen will tell you how we speak of you, and love you—

  Ben

  Both envelopes were in Helen’s hand. Also the following:

  Dear Aldred,

  When you were at Harbin, we looked at Harbin on the map; at Shanhaikwan, the same. When you get to Kwangchowwan, think of us with the atlas open. Still—

  Maps are of place, not time, nor can they say

  The surprising height and colour of a building

  Nor where the groups of people bar the way.

  These lines are about Verona, where we went with Bertram and where I put a rose on Juliet’s tomb. Sad Newman, in the Strait of Bonifacio, smuggled a line from Romeo and Juliet into his hymn. Did you realise?

  Looking up Shanhaikwan, I learn that it “is situated” where the Great Wall descends to the sea. Describe this, please, when you come.

  Tomorrow, Ben is being taken to Tokyo, having a place in an ambulance plane, to see the American doctor who keeps track of his condition. He will be away a week. I am not to go. I am always afraid of their keeping him. This must occur to him, too. We don’t speak of it.

  Kyoto and Nara, now a month ago, seem a hallucination. Of this, too, when you come. The nice American, of the pair who came for you, took us out in a launch for my birthday, making all arrangements, miraculous, for Ben. His name is Tad. He is kind. He speaks some Japanese, but is subordinate to the other man, who is civilian. I can’t ask him why they are here, as it might
sound sarcastic.

  We fear to weary you with our high feelings, but they don’t change.

  Helen

  When he was alone, Leith closed off the noise of the street. He took off his boots and jacket. He drew the letters from his pocket and lay down on the sofa to reread them. He might have liked to speak to Peter Exley of these letters, but not to violate the immediate pleasure. In coming days, he might talk about Helen and Ben. About Helen. That release must find its moment.

  You will come back. When you come. It was years since anyone had longed for his return.

  As they sat at breakfast, Peter had said, “You look young, Aldred, for someone who just walked a thousand miles. When you came from the plane, I thought you older. But not now”

  Leith took hotel stationery from a drawer and found his pen.

  Dear Ben,

  I think you will long since be back from Tokyo. What I hope, naturally, is that you’ve been helped by those days. In three weeks, I’ll learn more, and perhaps recount something of these places where my travels appear to me as a farewell.

  Please imagine, dear Ben, how pleasant it was for me, coming here this morning from Shanghai, to have your letter and Helen’s safely delivered by my friend. Thank you for this, and for your words, which I hope to deserve. I’m writing now to Helen. You know my affection for you both.

  Aldred

  My dear Helen,

  The letters, yours and Ben’s, were so welcome this morning. Throughout my time in the north, I was busy, and seldom alone. But no one was reading Carlyle in the next room, or bringing me John Clare with tremulous hand. I have a volume of Chinese verse for your birthday—as I think, well translated. I have worked out that you are seventeen.

  I remember the Verona poem, which you will say for me soon.

  I know nothing of the two men who alarmingly “came for me.” It’s in fact quite possible that they are investigators. Washington is busy around the world these days, rooting out subversion. That I am not subversive would not help me in the least. If Thaddeus is kind, as you say, he should not be mingling in that Judas racket.

  Seeing Peter again seems very natural. I think he is lonely here, and glad of my company, as I of his. The arrival this morning was unnerving, coinciding with the cruel crash of a local plane. We both, Peter and I, feel pursued by evocations of wartime violence, unexorcised. In my case, I think these now recede.

  When I think of what has recently been, I’m incredulous that the world is preparing for more war. When I think of Hiroshima, I’m aghast, and helpless.

  I still mean to come by the small ship from Hong Kong to Kure, though it adds three days. I’d like to enter from the west, by the narrow passage. In Japanese, the Inland Sea is called a strait. How do your lessons go?

  May our high feelings never diminish.

  Aldred

  He put his two letters in a single envelope, addressed with both names. Holding this on his palm as if to weigh it, he felt it to be reckless. Reassured himself; but left it unsealed, one letter to be reread before sending.

  He wondered what Tad’s age might be.

  He was to lunch at Government House, and walked along Queen’s Road, then uphill through the park. All as it had been, as if never harrowed. In the vestibule, a fellow guest murmured, “We won’t get a square meal here. It’s iron rations, to show solidarity with Home.” At table, Leith sat on the right of Lady Grantham, whose conversation was dispensed in iron rations. Indoor light was shrouded by elderly curtains. A youngish woman of good breeding sat on his other side, plump and sociable: handsome Miss Fellowes, wearing a hat of white silk flowers. She was unmarried, in her late twenties: a fair face, and kind. Her eyes and hair were indistinct, scarcely hazel. They found that they were staying in the same hotel, she for much longer. However, this mild gauntlet, laid gently down between them, languished along with bottled peas and beetroot and finger bowls. And they spoke of Yokohama, where Audrey Fellowes intended to visit her brother, who had lost an arm in Burma late in the war. A guest, who was her cousin, told him, “Audrey rallies to the afflicted. She is maternal.”

  Before leaving the table, they exchanged addresses in Japan, and in remote Britain, with ironic consciousness that they were not to meet at the Gloucester Hotel. Her good hands had a commonsensical way of bringing pen from handbag, of writing address in green notebook; aligning fork and knife. How women, he thought, develop capability, out of their hundred thousand rehearsals. As yet, Helen’s hold on things was tentative, unless with a book.

  Even so, I want her to grow older, to enter her nineteenth, her twentieth year. It’s only that the circumspection comes in, and the charmless good sense.

  Although he was meeting Exley later at the barracks across the way, he accompanied Miss Fellowes down to Queen’s Road; and there shook hands most cordially. They understood, also cordially, that it was the least he could do.

  That evening, he posted his letters, remembering that he’d considered the content injudicious. Remembering that his word had not been “injudicious” but “reckless.” He wrote up his notes, and attended to the rest of his mail. At midnight, he reflected on the crash. It could easily, as Peter had assumed, have been himself. After wartime escapes, he’d expected better from peace. Putting out the light, he fell asleep a saved man.

  HE WOKE with the early din of Pedder Street. A thin newspaper appeared under the door. In the bathroom mirror he looked unslept, but had his breakfast and read the paper. The crash at Kai Tak was on the front page, outclassed by a headline announcing, from Canton, Soong’s arrival as governor of Kwangtung. On an inner page, the South China Morning Post carried a column of provincial cast about new visitors to the colony, where his own name was included, along with that of C. V Starr, a big player in America’s China game.

  At eight, having bathed and dressed, and left a message for Peter Exley, Leith went out. In civilian clothes, he was a man in white and grey like many another, part of the illusory continuity. Almost everything he saw and smelt was recognisable, yet had been through the great convulsion. The resumption was an exercise in conviction, which has its own reality. Since childhood, Aldred Leith had been suspicious of reality, the word—having seen that every man had his version.

  He walked along the Praya in the sun, pleased by his clean body and clean unsoldierly clothes. The port was in early ferment. He was nudged by a pack of beggars, mostly children, one of whom insistently thrust into his face the undulant head of a paper snake. He spoke to them, and gave some money; there was a squabble, and he walked on. To elude pursuit, turned into Chater Road, where a Chinese usher from the bookshop was taking down long shutters. The universal odour of bookshop, closed all night on the mildews of its ranked treasures, brought a past life before him—as is said to happen in drowning. But how, he wondered, entering and taking up a book, and even breathing it in to sustain remembrance, could one ever verify or explode the myth, except by drowning.

  Helen Driscoll is in her eighteenth year.

  Seeing him shrug, and smile, the young man in charge came forward: “Help you, sir?” The educated English youth to be found in such an outpost: dark lock of hair, damp dark eyes, pale complexion. We are never quite well, or pleased, in these places. (Yet Aldred Leith did feel well, that morning, and pleased.) The boyish, prewar sensibility, anachronistic, recalled the pensive photograph on the back of The Centuries’ Poetry. Leith had long since given the entire set of volumes to Helen and Ben; to Helen.

  He bought a new novel by a rising author, about wartime love in West Africa. He already had a military map of the island, but found another—better, because more personal, with old villas and monuments marked: of time as well as place. He recalled that Helen needed a chart of the northern heavens—which the bookshop did not have. On his way back to the hotel, he stopped at Watson’s for toothpaste and shaving cream. The same staid premises; but shelves abloom with perfumes from France, lacquer for nails, and pretty concoctions of creams and powders—frivolities unseen for
years in Britain, which had much need of a spree. Around the world, survivors were dabbing behind their ears and colouring their eyelids and brushing powder from their bosoms, without apology. They did not need to prove themselves. History, implacable, had done that for them.

  In scorched cities, girls were twirling and trilling, and giving velvet glances, in spite of all they knew. They were laying roses on the tombs of lovers.

  At the hotel, Peter was waiting. As they took the lift, he said, “Look, Aldred, it’s damnable, but I’m duty officer for the afternoon.”

  In the room, Leith put down his packages and showed the map. “I’m thinking of a long walk. I remember the path. You leave from the Magazine Gap Road and wind over these hills, ten miles or so. It comes down somewhere near Repulse Bay.” With a finger, he traced pale dots. “It has a name, Sir Cecil’s Ride. Sir Cec having been an early excellency, I suppose.”

  “You’ll be doing it without the horse.” Exley said, “If we leave now, I can put you on your road. I still have the car.” They would meet in the evening. Peter saw the package from Kelly and Walsh. “Can I see what you’ve got? I could have let you have my copy. The best novel since the war.”

  Leith had changed his boots and was filling a flask from the bottle of boiled water on the table. “So we still carry the same books, Peter.”

  Exley was touched. It usually fell to him to be the one who remembered.

  THEY GOT DOWN FROM THE CAR on the gravel margin. The track was clear enough, leading through a damp socket of the hillside, and marked by reeds. Of these stalks and fronds, Leith said, “I think it’s sedge.”

  “I’ve never known what it looked like. Aldred, if you’re carrying money, better give it to me, and your watch. This is a lonely walk.”

  The man said, “I’ve made a lot of lonely walks,” smiling to extenuate.