The Great Fire Read online

  Thought made him vulnerable. That was the Australian way: say anything out of the ordinary and there was the laugh—the good laugh, not having much to do with goodness. You had to watch yourself. But you got curious, all the same. And then, Leith was not likely to take advantage.

  “You won’t need war now, Talbot, to see the world—hardship, maybe, but not slaughter. Until this, war has been the way out, for most men.” Soldiering, or seamanship. Young recruits with their dreams of transformation: of conquest, plunder, fornication. Even, in some, the dream of knowledge. Inconceivable, in advance, the red mess and shallow grave.

  Women’s yearnings had scarcely featured, being presumably of mating and giving birth. Their purpose had been supplied to them from the first: their lot. A woman who broke ranks was ostracised by other women. Rocking the boat instead of the cradle.

  The wheels threw up dirt and noisy gravel. Labourers passed them in pairs and foursomes, all moving downhill, all bearing burdens; each falling silent as the car approached, not meeting glances from these invulnerable strangers in their well-fed uniforms. Wrapped in shabby darkness, women came shuffling, one with a great bundle of kindling on her back, another hooped under a strapped child.

  The man thought, Their lot. A brute word.

  He said, “It’s the devil, Talbot.”

  Talbot looked at the roadside. He hadn’t expected this contest, continual, between a decreed strength and the nagging humanity of things. Any show of softness would bring, from his companions, the good laugh—to shut him up, perhaps, they being baffled as he. Yet the man at the wheel felt it, too—who, with his coloured ribbons and great medal, couldn’t be accused. Talbot had been told that this warrior, though wounded and captured, had escaped his prison and fought again in the last winter of the European war. So the story went, anyway, and some of it plainly true. Straightforward matters you could understand.

  “You speak the lingo. Sir.”

  “I’ve made a beginning. My languages are from China, where I was a schoolboy. Here, I need a teacher.” That morning, at Kure, he had called on the tutor recommended by Gardiner.

  Talbot looked at his own hands, which were spread on his knees. Young hands, seemingly unveined, broad, supple, modestly capable, and with decent nails. He compared them with his companion’s, resting on the wheel: brown, definite, broad in the palm, and long-fingered; like the man, experienced. By extension of impressions, Brian would have liked to ask, Do you have a wife, a girl? But refrained.

  Leith said, “The teacher, this morning. You saw him, elderly, respectable. If I were to get up a small class with him—depending on what I find here—would you care to join in? A few hours a week; I’d square it with your outfit, I think I could do that.”

  It was too much like having your bluff called. Brian, hedging, said, “But you—you’re already halfway there. You know a lot of it.”

  “I’ll be seeing him more often, he’ll probably come to me up here. In your case it would be separate, with a few of your chaps if they care to join. That would be down in Kure, near your quarters.” Leith said, “Think it over.”

  The boy’s impulse was to withdraw. It was too outlandish, and too much trouble. You despised Japs, you ridiculed and killed them. They’d behaved like animals. You didn’t learn their lingo. You didn’t study any language, even your own. He’d done a bit of French at school, compulsory: Je m’appelle Brian, donnez-moi a manger, je suis né en Australie. Donnez-moi à boire. Arriving at Kure, he’d been given a Japanese phrase book got up for Occupation forces; but had no use for it. “Well, thanks. Well, yair, I’ll see about it. Let you know.”

  He could imagine the hoots of his mates. Yet knew that, to them, he would defend the idea.

  He asked, “Ar—what would this … ?”

  “I’ll take care of that, it won’t be much.” Leith thought of the teacher, on his beam ends.

  “Your shout, then?”

  “My shout.”

  They drove on, less contented. Another mile or two and they’d arrive.

  BRIGADIER DRISCOLL was coming from the pond. In youth an athlete, Driscoll continued to hold himself in past tension, barrelled against every challenge. Wet and near naked, his body was corded by evidence of past exploits, muscles and sinews pushing up through tissue, as roots of an old tree might displace a pavement—the impression confirmed by a trunkish neck, seared by pale creases. On head, chest, limbs, the curled hair was grey.

  Driscoll cried out, “Dench”—loudly, although the uniformed subordinate was by his side. Dench, a small man, had already registered the approach of Aldred Leith. Mumbling at Driscoll’s ear, Dench let his glance wander on the stones and beaten earth of the path, among clustered azaleas, on a Nissen hut in the trees. Throughout the coming months of their acquaintance, Captain Dench never did look Major Leith in the eye.

  Driscoll stood. The expression “stock-still” might have originated with him. Driscoll said, “Fresh water,” and, as Leith came up, began to towel himself, currying with circular vigour the matted hair of chest and head. “Never drank it. Never thought I’d swim in it.” Blew out his cheeks and spat. Under fizzing brows, the splenetic stare. “Beats their flaming bathhouse, at any rate.” He told Leith, “In Australia, we have the ocean.”

  Leith agreed. “Very lucky.”

  “Too right there.” Buried his face in the rough stripes of the towel, hands pressed to eyes. “Luckiest in the world.” The two men walked on. Dench, a sallow phantom, followed, coughing. “You’re Leith, are you. You just made it for lunch.” He said, “We don’t wait.”

  Leith was looking at a house among trees: the house, clearly, that Gardiner had praised. He had nearly forgotten the Driscolls, to whom Gardiner had attached a sense of struggle and whose impulse to resentment he did not understand. It would be pleasant, now, to see the house and, as he discovered, its enclosed garden, coming into view: a small plane of pebbles, into which a man in black was working concentric patterns with a long-handled brush.

  They stood at the negligible threshold.

  “You’ve seen your quarters.”

  “Yes.”

  “We had those plywood jobs put up right off. Bit of a walk down there, but you’ve got your comforts. We use this place once in a while as a mess. A bit of local colour. We like to be congenial.” Driscoll broke off to shout, “Melb! Over here.”

  In red rayon, his wife was arriving.

  Mrs. Driscoll was of middling height only, an illusory tallness being created by her large forcible head and martial shoulders, and by fluffed white hair that, upswept, made its contribution. Behind spectacles, at the centre of a thick lens, the eye shone, small, animate, and marble. To Leith, who went forward putting out his hand, she said, “I’m sorry for you.” A piping voice, active with falsity. “Arriving on such a humid day. We’re just going to table. We put in a proper table, we don’t eat off the floor. But I suppose you like things to be Japanese.”

  “I have no preference.”

  “I’m a decisive person myself.”

  As yet immune to her, Leith waited to perceive her effect. Driscoll himself, while maintaining drilled belligerence, showed some loss of patina. A partnership, but not an equal one.

  Dench had come back, carrying military clothing on a coat hanger.

  Melba was saying, “We don’t wait. We don’t stand on ceremony here, no matter who. The parliamentary delegation left on Friday, now it’s the university lot. To us, they’re just people.”

  With Dench’s help, Driscoll was struggling into his clothes.

  Leith was weighing the possibility of rooms in the town.

  The woman said, “We don’t go in for conversation here: we like plain talk. We Australians are easygoing.”

  Driscoll put in, “We’re a good-natured lot. Have our faults, like the rest of you. But the old heart’s in the right place.”

  Beyond its partitions, the house opened on the garden of placed rocks and stunted trees. There was no view, or sense, of wo
ods, hills, or far-off sea: distance had been conjured, and enclosed.

  “Their awful gardens.”

  He’d forgotten her.

  There was a small commotion of greeting, and Western men were seating themselves at a table. Finding a place on the long bench, Leith was relieved at the sight of a burly scholar he had met in Nanking, a historian named Calder—who, changing place, came to sit beside him, perhaps with a similar sense of deliverance. A short taste of Driscolls engendered solidarity.

  Calder said, “So you got here.”

  “And just in time, I’m told.”

  Someone murmured, “We don’t wait,” and there was clandestine laughter, like school. At each end of the longish table, a Driscoll kept watch. Barry Driscoll was telling that he preferred dogs to cats any day, read real books rather than novels, and thought opera a joke. As Gardiner had said, the Driscolls were disquieting as a symptom of new power: that Melba and Barry should be in the ascendant was not what one had hoped from peace. It did not even seem a cessation of hostilities.

  They had grasped, eagerly enough, at a future as yet unrevealed to Leith and to what they would have called his kind.

  There was beer, and sake in tiny cups. Dishes had been set out, tea was poured, and flowers floated in a bowl. Two women in kimono, possibly mother and daughter, slipped about, providing and removing. The girl was extremely slight, in body nearly a child; her unobtrusiveness so notable that one watched to see how it was done. The older woman’s face was a tissue of wrinkles, expressionless. There was also a young man in dark Japanese dress, who came and went and was seemingly in charge.

  Calder told Leith that the youth had been partly educated in England, son of an ambassador or a minister of legation. Brought here to act as interpreter, he had become a sort of maggiordomo: “God knows what he’s thinking.”

  Opposite, there had arrived a boy of indeterminate youth, a Westerner to whom the serving women gave soft attentions—he in turn addressing them in unpractised words of their language, little beak aloft; then looking around the company with bright dispassionate eyes. Beneath a rick of fair hair, the face was triangular. In sunless skin, the lips, unexpectedly full, made strokes of mobility and colour. There was special food for him, and difficulty in eating it. The boy, hunched and angular, was afflicted by some abnormality. On this theme, too, Leith recalled the words of Gardiner.

  Gardiner who, yesterday at that hour, had been alive, awaiting him. Who was proving indispensable.

  Down the table, a civil engineer from Bradford was recounting an experience at Kagoshima—one of those tales in which the traveller is the clever one, the indigenous inhabitant venal or infantile. He said, “I’m just giving facts,” mistrustful of anything that might be called a story. Leith, half-turned, half-listening, was looking along the reddish flowers and red lacquer, the ceramic cups and Western cutlery. He could see a hand at rest. It was extended on the tabletop, where it lay like silence. He waited for the other hand to appear, as a watcher of birds awaits the arrival of the mate, the pairing. And soon the right hand came, shifting a disc of sauce before settling alongside its fellow, while the soldier looked with pleasure.

  “Mr. Leith.”

  Across the table, the boy, smiling, might have seen it all.

  “Is it true …” Voice neither fully broken nor childish. Except for bright eyes, the lifted face was mask-like: apertures—of eyes and nostrils—so precise and close as to recall the little muzzle of a cat. As with a cat, too, some charm of clairvoyance.

  The boy stretched his hand. Leith had to rise, in order to clasp it.

  “Benedict Driscoll.”

  So this was the son of those.

  “Why did you walk across China?”

  “I wanted to do it, and it was proposed to me.” To answer candidly, with no indulgent smile, was to exorcise the gratuitous suspicion that stood sentinel at either end of the table. “But I can’t say that I walked across. I had to bear south, due to the civil war. I’d hoped to take the northern route of an Italian traveller of long ago, but it wasn’t workable.” What had been possible for the monk Carpini in 1245, in heroic old age, was no go in 1946 for a modern man in prime of life. “And I wasn’t always on foot. In trains, often, or waggons, or carts, or on a mule. Or by river.”

  “It was the large idea, though.” The boy looked down, shy about what moved him.

  “Which is perhaps necessarily formless, except in the traveller’s mind. I mean that it can’t be comprehensive, like a single objective, or done conclusively.”

  Benedict said, “There might be a danger in doing one thing well. People get waylaid into the single segment of knowledge.”

  Calder said, “And why not?” Was a don again, snubbing a cheeky freshman. “If one has given, devoted, a life, one’s energies. Easy to talk of erudition as if it were limiting, pass judgement out of sheer ignorance. I myself would not judge people by their knowledge of Erasmus; but have possibly earned the right to do so.”

  “Erasmus?” The boy’s bright eyes resting on Calder. People were listening. “Erasmus of Rotterdam was born in 1466, not at Rotterdam as one might suppose, but at Gouda. Real name possibly Geert. Studied at Paris, and entered the priesthood with reluctance in the momentous year 1492. In 1499, was welcomed at Oxford. Taught Greek at Cambridge, but wrote mainly in Latin. Died at Basel in 1536, unattended by any priest. Is paradoxically remembered for his translation of the New Testament.”

  Calder grinned. “Fair enough.” Leith was laughing outright. Benedict, satisfied, was fatigued by his little performance. The young manservant came to stoop over him, and helped him away. The table was disbanding.

  Calder said, “Well, I’ll be blowed.” He would have liked a smoke, a chat. But Leith told him, “I’ve been hoping for an hour to look into the garden.”

  Mrs. Driscoll, materialising, said, “We lock up here now. The staff has to clear away.”

  “Closing time in the gardens of the East,” said Calder.

  LEITH STARTED ON THE PATH that led down to his quarters, a walk overhung by low, knotty pines angled by weather—for this slope was ultimately exposed, beyond some undulations, to the sea. He saw that Benedict was being helped along ahead of him, and hung back in order not to interfere.

  Melba Driscoll had come after him. “You’ve seen our tragedy.”

  Leith said, “You have a remarkable son.”

  “It’s been diagnosed. We’ve never been sure, but now a specialist in London …” She said, “We’ve been through so much.”

  He said, “A cruel disease.” He could not hold out against her, but felt disloyal to the boy. Aware of it, the mother nevertheless led with the trump card of her son’s affliction.

  “People have no idea. And so hard on his father, who was a champion.” She came close to him, lowering her voice. “A mother can stand it better. Women are given special strength. We are very strong, Aldred.”

  He disliked, of course, his name on her lips; and she knew it.

  Driscoll came to her side. “We have to take our medicine. He’s seen the best bloke. No stone unturned.” Solemnity was directed at Leith, as people will speak to foreigners with affected formality. “No expense spared.”

  Conscious of another presence, Leith turned his head in hope of release.

  Melba said, “Our little girl. Helen, say how-do.” She told Leith, “You’ve missed our eldest.”

  Ginger had mentioned, You’ve been lucky there.

  The girl was quiet, shaking hands.

  He said, “I was wondering to whom it belonged, this hand.”

  Withdrawing it, and smiling, she touched her bodice.

  Melba would not stand for it. “You see the likeness. Everyone does.” She meant, To herself.

  “I do, yes. Remarkable.” It might be less surprising that this youngest Driscoll should so resemble her brother than that she should share his unlikeness to the parents. Most striking was the girl’s wellbeing. It was as if, in this child, Benedict had been re
-created in radiant health, the hair made glossy, the skin vital, the form sound. With a second try, Nature had pulled it off. The eyes were of the same uncommon clarity, and rounder.

  She fingered the blue buttons.

  He said, “Like a caricature of a beautiful hand.”

  She might have liked, now, to look at her hand, in order to see it in that light. But the pleasure would keep, and was best enjoyed alone.

  She said, “I should go. Ben and I are going to read.”

  Barry deplored. “When I was her age, try to keep me indoors.”

  “Thank you,” she said. The words must have been for Leith. Her voice had that lightness, not quite of childhood, that precedes female experience. Since love, like influenza, leaves a huskiness. She walked off composedly enough, but, as the man saw, ran the last steps to her brother’s side.

  Melba said, “They’re never apart. Not since Helen could crawl.”

  “Not a good life for a kiddie.” This was Barry, with complacency.

  “But they’re company for one another. There’s nothing here for young people.” With a gesture, Melba implicated the entire archipelago as far as the Kuriles. “Even if my poor boy was able.”

  Brother and sister had been abroad since Christmas, in the custody of a British friend. A diagnosis had been made. There had then been the long voyage out. Their apprehension of the imminent landfall might be imagined: reunion, curtailment. Leith saw that the Driscolls used the daughter for the care of their son. And saw also that this abuse was as yet her sole salvation.

  In his room, he found letters on the table and sat on the bed to read them. He forgot the Driscolls, in favour of other discoveries of the day: the ascent coiled around green-combed terraces, and the last white sight of Ginger’s ship; and his good, pleasant, irresolute driver.

  There was a brief letter from his father, which he put aside for reply. A notice from his bank was on excellent paper, ivory-coloured and headed by raised lettering in coal-black cursives: the first fine stationery he had handled in years. A scattering of postcards was a signal of dwindling correspondence—he had, for some people, been away too long. A good letter had been posted from Bombay by an army friend now sailing towards Hong Kong. A single sheet, from a woman who would soon join the postcard category, enclosed photographs: “I was in Szechuan at the beginning of spring.” The snows blotched above, the blossoming below, and the steep village stepping to the river’s edge. The quilted men and women at their work, smiling at the photographer with resigned surprise.