The Great Fire Read online

  Staff Sergeant Wells, from Ballarat, said, “You never took your key,” handing this over on a string. “We never saw your papers.”

  Documents were examined. “Yair, they told us to look out for you. A room to yourself.” The antipodean note was peevishly struck: None of your Pom airs here.

  “It doesn’t matter, I’m only here overnight.”

  “Ar, the room’s there, you’re in it, aren’t you.” Leafing through credentials, some of which were in Chinese characters. “How’re we supposed to make sense of this?”

  “The translation’s attached.”

  “What is it, Japanese?”

  “No. I’ve been two years in China.”

  “Welcome back to civilisation. You’ve got to sign for the key. You’ve got to turn it in when you leave. The mess is on the second floor, you’ll hear the gong. Meanwhiles, you get a drink in the lounge.”

  Going downstairs, Leith encountered on a landing the smell of hospital—of military hospitals behind the lines, to which regulation antiseptic soups and soaps were common. Field hospitals, by contrast, smelt thickly of mortality: reek of spilt intestines and festered blood, of agony, fear, decay. His own terrible wound, of which a long broad welt, down all his left side, was fading, had come in the last autumn of war, a year after the episode of the medal. On the earlier occasion, in Tunisia, he had been hit on the same side, heart and lung missed by a filament. “You lucky bugger,” said the medical officer who dressed the wound; as if grumbling. The patient said, “Fuck lucky.” And the doctor, saturnine: “You’re alive, aren’t you. You can’t have everything.”

  A war was over, and he had been, he supposed, lucky. Having had much, though not, as yet, everything.

  Long and narrow, the lounge had possibly been a dormitory. Furnished now by a scattering of vermilion chairs in false leather, and by an improvised bar, on trestles at the far end of the room, where a score of servicemen and a dozen nurses stood talking and laughing and flirting under a canopy of tobacco smoke; dropping ash from fingers and spilling drink from paper cups. The table was ranged with bottles and scattered with dropped nuts and flaked potatoes. The men were, in varying degrees, drunk. The younger women had unrolled their regulation hair for the evening. Some of them were pretty, and had exchanged their uniforms for coloured dresses; and wore, on slim wrists, the linked bracelets of gunmetal, black and gilt, improvised by Japanese peddlers from the fallen scraps of war and sold to conquerors on the streets of ruined cities. Two or three of the girls trilled and twirled to imaginary music while a soldier, who knelt at their feet, was setting up a gramophone from a ganglion of wires.

  That was the scene, for those who might later recall it, on a spring night of 1947 on the island of Ita Jima in the Inland Sea of Japan.

  Leith, entering, pausing, was struck again by the presence and voices of young Western women, and by the naturalness of it.

  A lone elderly man in a pale suit, cast adrift in an armchair, had clearly never belonged to anything other than civil life: frail, gaunt, small, he looked civility. A crumpled linen man, a crumbled cast of a man.

  A young officer nearby gave up his seat to Leith. “I’m just off anyway.”

  They thanked him. Gardiner shook Leith’s hand. “I saw you go up the stair this evening. I recognised you from your letters.”

  Words, Leith thought, that a woman might have used. “I was afraid I wouldn’t get here. Been delayed everywhere.”

  “I sail in the morning. We have the evening, the night.” These words, too, incongruously lover-like. They sat, silenced by all they might say.

  Gardiner’s pallor announced the cruel imprisonment of three years and nine months. His handclasp was a bone-china claw. Aquamarine eyes were overbright for his condition. Leith had been told, He can’t last more than a few months, everything’s giving up. Old beyond age, he was only in his sixty-first year.

  Men and girls glanced out at them from the twirling end of the room. Gardiner said, “You’re awaited here with interest.”

  “A curiosity.”

  “A celebrity.” Gardiner used the word indulgently: an expression that had come to power during his absence from the world. “Well, we’ve both weathered it all somehow. I’ve got tuberculosis, it turns out, on top of everything else. They’re giving me a new drug from America, which plays merry hell. Side effects, they say. Side effects, after-effects. Sending me back to Britain like this. Repatriation. In patria. But my territory has always been here.”

  His parents, Orientalists, had settled in Japan long since. Born in Bremen, the father had taught at British universities, become a British subject. During the Great War, the name had been Anglicised, from Gaërtner. On the shortest day of the year 1941, the Japanese government had offered this only son the protection of the Axis, proposing that he reclaim his German paternity. He had chosen the prison instead.

  “You call me Ginger. We don’t have time for gradations. Ginger. I had hair once, and it was red.”

  The gramophone broke out:

  A hubba-hubba-hubba, hello, Jack—

  A hubba-hubba-hubba, just got back—

  Well, a hubba-hubba-hubba,

  Let’s shoot some breeze,

  Say whatever happened to the Japanese?

  A hubba-hubba-hubba, ain’t you heard?

  A hubba-hubba-hubba, got the word

  I got it from a guy who’s in the know,

  It was mighty smoky over Tokyo.

  Men and girls were clapping and chanting along with the music.

  A friend of mine in a B-29

  Dropped another load for luck.

  As he flew away he was heard to say,

  A hubba-hubba-hubba, Yuk! yuk!

  Professor Gardiner was making a low humming sound that was not the tune of any song. “We might go down to dinner. One floor. Food’s unappetising. My table manners are bad. I’ve got this tremor—you’ve noticed, no doubt. Had it since the first war, but more pronounced now. Effects, after-effects. You won’t mind if we go at a stately pace, stairs are the devil for me.”

  Leith helped him up, coaxing the bones together.

  A tinned meal was served, by Japanese, at a long table where there was shouting and smoking, like a students’ hall, and beer and hard liquor set out in bottles. Gardiner was greeted by doctors and nurses, and by patients in dressing gowns.

  “Decent people, but the place is laconic. Surprised by peace.”

  “I should see the director tomorrow. I have to move into his establishment—a set of houses, is it, in the hills? I’ve been billetted there.”

  Gardiner was struggling. “My teeth are the devil, these new snappers they gave me. My own were all knocked in or gave out in the prison camp. Try not to mind me. In the hills, yes. The central house is pure, you know, not like this. The place itself, in woods, is quite beautiful. There’s a small valley, deep like a fell, with a falling stream and a temple. The property was a retreat for an admiral when the academy, this building here, was created in the thirties. Now, yes, it’s Driscoll and his crew. They’ve flung up a lot of prefabs, Nissen huts, that sort of thing, you’ll probably get something of the sort.”

  “I need to spread my papers about.”

  But Gardiner was pondering the Japanese house. “Yes, a fine place. It’s under some protection or other. They only use it to dine in. Now it’s Driscoll and his lot. Brigadier Driscoll.”

  “He’s a medical man?”

  “An administrator of hospitals. I believe he qualified as a doctor.”

  “And as a man?”

  Slight gesture. “They’re not liked, Driscoll and his wife. Driscoll’s an angry man. Hurt, you know, unsure. Drinks a good bit, blusters. Offensive. People don’t like it, of course. Visitors are sent there, distinguished visitors, that sort of thing. Not so much Americans, Americans have their base at Kure, and all Japan to play in. British, rather, like yourself, or Australians like the Driscolls—scientists, historians, journalists. It’s Hiroshima that draws them.
They come to inspect the sites, spend a few days, sleep up there in the hills. Damp, I can tell you.”

  A slight Japanese was collecting plates and replacing them with clean ones: pastel plastic plates from the new world, whose very colours—pink, yellow, powder blue—clicked as they were carefully distributed. The man serving was mute, with lowered eyes.

  Leith sighed: “Weeks in such a household.” Now, he thought, they would talk in earnest. And Gardiner himself put on a pair of steel-rimmed glasses, in readiness.

  “You’ll be travelling. Be warned, though. The wife looms. A married daughter has just left for Honolulu—you’ve been lucky there. Two younger children have arrived, a strange little pair—a boy who’s seriously ill, apparently, and a quaint little mermaid of a girl. I saw them laughing together, the only laughter in the place. As for Driscoll himself—such people hold the positions for the time being. In Japan, they have power.”

  Leith wondered at this dwelling on irrelevant Driscolls. “What power, after all, can they have over me?”

  “Yes.” Gardiner smiled. “I expect you can take care of yourself.”

  Leith flushed, afraid of being misunderstood as having alluded to the medal.

  They leaned back, too polite to be caught taking stock of one another. Gardiner saw an experienced man in his thirties, notable as to build, brow, mouth, and hands: all the things that are said to matter. Pride, or reticence, might be due simply to solitude. He saw a man who had been alone too long.

  He continued, “Yes, you’re in the clear. Certified as brave.”

  “Many have been braver. Yourself.”

  With celluloid spoon, the professor probed a slack pudding.

  “You have the certificate to prove it. Though I suppose you get sick of the medal.”

  Leith nodded. “Nevertheless, I think that valour of the kind will lose its spell. Young people are turning away from martial exploits. If we live long enough, such medals may be seen as incrimination.”

  “Don’t deprecate. You’re young yourself.” Gardiner said, “This is disgusting,” indicating the pudding. “Somebody had to fight Hitler. I wanted to go back myself, in 1940, when I saw they would make a fight of it. However, a secret chap from London came to see me, said I’d be more use to them here. Well, you see what came of that. But you, you’re inaugurating your ninth life.”

  “In some countries, cats are allowed only seven.” Leith said, abruptly, “I have so much to ask and am afraid of tiring you. First, I need a tutor.”

  Gardiner fumbled at a linen slit, produced a folded paper. “This seems a possibility. He’s been a librarian, seems sound. He’s licensed by the Americans. One can do nothing without that.”

  “So I’ve found. I hadn’t expected, in Tokyo, to find—”

  “A dictatorship?”

  “And myself among the defeated. At headquarters I was received by a little martinet, hysterical with importance. He told me that the last foreign visitor to cross his path had been sent packing. He said, ‘We lifted his passport.’”

  “For a while there, you were in the court of Haroun-al-Rashid.” Gardiner asked, “Are you married?”

  “Divorced, from a wartime marriage.” After a pause, he went on, “We were married in Cairo. Then I was off in the desert and she was posted to Colombo. Time went by, we could scarcely meet. She found someone else. So, for a while, did I. We assumed we’d grown apart—a usual thing. She wanted to remarry. When we met in London, the spring of’45, to arrange the divorce, it seemed for a moment that we might have managed it after all. Too late then, peace was sweeping us away.” He had scarcely thought of these things in two years. It was vivid, however, that single final day spent in London seeing lawyers, walking away together in the wet park, and at last making love in a hired room. The hotel, small and decent, had made no difficulty: their passports were those, still, of husband and wife. Oh, Moira, he’d said, our sad story. And she had shed silent tears not intended to change things. Her arched throat and spread hair, and the day dying in the wet window. The marriage was dissolved, evaporating along with its memories and meetings, and the partings of war; the letters increasingly laboured, the thoughts, kisses, regrets. The lawyers were paid. The true marriage, indissoluble, was simply the moment when they sat on the rented bed and grieved for a fatality older than love.

  Gardiner said, “You know about my wife?”

  Leith nodded. “I’ve had no such loss as yours.”

  “I didn’t know for a year. Not until they taunted me in the camp.”

  His Japanese wife, having tried to join him in prison, had been declared destitute by the authorities, and renounced by her parents. In 1943, she committed suicide. Gardiner said, “On the day of her death, she tried to send into safekeeping some copies of my early books, from the time when we first knew one another. All she had left, my poor girl.” He said, “You keep returning to these things. You can’t close them down, as one closes down the compartment of a damaged ship, just to keep the vessel going, or at least afloat.” He said, “This difficulty of being.”

  “One reason men go on fighting is that it seems to simplify.”

  “You’ve done that, and know better. And are young yet. Experience will reclaim you through the personal, much more will happen for you. After much death, living may come as a surprise.”

  He means love, thought Leith forbearingly. He sometimes thought the same thing himself, and with the same forbearance. The evening was seeping away, Gardiner was dwindling. The proposed discussions of the night, the shared accident of Asia, receded, and he could not revive the importance he had given them.

  Gardiner said, “My room’s got two chairs. We’d be private there.” When they had climbed back to the lounge, however, he said, “Better sit a moment.”

  It was the long room again, and the gramophone bawling. The remaining drinkers sprawled, morose, on red chairs; and one floral woman continued to twirl, slowly, alone, a top winding down.

  Sweetheart, if you should stray

  A million miles away

  I’ll always be in love with you …

  Leith drew up a bamboo divan and helped Gardiner into it. Gardiner said, “It was the stairs.”

  “I’ll get you a shot of something.”

  He came back with brandy. The professor was listing in his bamboo chair: an old pallid man who said, “Be right in a minute,” whose fingers could not hold the paper cup. Whose colour and texture were that of old bread. Aldred Leith took his hand, saying “Ginger.”

  Ginger said, “Sorry. Regrets, many …” and “Thanks for all.”

  Leith was crouching by the sofa. An officer wearing red tabs came up and knelt, too. Someone lifted the needle off the raucous record, making it squeal.

  2

  IN THE CRYSTAL MORNING, Leith was driving with Talbot into green hills: discarding the exploded dockland, winding around ledges of emerald rice. They stopped the jeep on a spur, jumping down among tough grasses to look out at sea and islands and to watch, some moments, the small white departing ship, elderly, simple, and shapely, that would have carried Gardiner to Hong Kong on the first leg of his deleted journey. Men and women are said to grow young again in death, but Gardiner, his snappers removed, his slack jaw bound up forever, had appeared immeasurably withered on the night of his death. The little ship, sailing to its appointments, passed among islands all glorious with morning, on a blue course channelled by minesweepers. The man watching was aware of Japanese grasses beneath his boots—of earth and gravel and of stunted shrubbery trembling nearby. There were tufted wildflowers and specks of red and purple that might be speedwell or some odder saxifrage. He was aware of the reprieve.

  From a distance, on an outer ledge of terraced rice, his fellow man looked back at him: a single figure wearing a hat of conical straw and a red shift that came to his knees.

  The young driver, profiting from the hiatus, had meanwhile peed behind bushes. When they resumed the ride, with Leith at the wheel, Talbot remarked, “I don�
�t suppose you got much sleep.”

  “A couple of hours. Not that there was much to do for him, poor chap.”

  “Rough on you, starting out with that.”

  “With a death, you mean—a bad augury? Well, one was there. No one else really knew who he was. It was another war death, deferred.” Side effects, after-effects. This time yesterday I hadn’t met him. Today he’s dead, and I’m his only mourner.

  They had churned into wooded country.

  “Pines, are they?” asked the boy, indifferent.

  “These are cedars, these tall ones. Pines are up there, on the right.”

  “We weren’t taught about trees. At Sydney it was gum trees and Moreton Bays.” Bushes of wattle, bottlebrush. “Soil’s sandy.” Then, “We heard more about British trees, from the songs and books: Hearts of Oak, beeches, birches. How green and wet they are, and how they play for dead in winter. Seemed more spectacular than the gums and the Bush.”

  Leith said, “My home, if I have one, is near the North Sea. Bleak country in winter, the wind sweeping over, and the sleet. Bitter, solitary. Where I am, it’s not forested, although there are stands of trees, nurtured. It has its beauty.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Oh—changing lights and skies, and the low land. Sense of separation, almost from terra firma.” He laughed. “Away from it, as I’ve mostly been, I can become sentimental.” He noticed how often he qualified the reference to home: If I have one; I’m mostly away.

  Brian Talbot said, “I’d like to see places before I settle down.” The settling taken for granted. Down, down. The wife and kiddies, the house and mortgage, the lawn and lawnmower, the car. “I suppose being here is a start.” He was not really convinced that these uncongenial scenes, and these impenetrable people—tireless, humorless, reclusive—could meet the case.