The Great Fire Page 4

  If he were minded to feel homesick, it would have been for that.

  Leith’s greatest preoccupation at this time was his work, the medium through which he conceived a future life. He had set himself to render consequences of war within an ancient and vanishing society. That visionary or preposterous undertaking had engrossed him for two years, and would in some degree influence the remainder of his days. His theme—of loss and disruption—was pervasive now throughout the world. With the sombre choice, there had come much happiness in far communities. There had been the singular, transcendent encounters. He had no wish to explicate or control. The collective scramble of soldiering had confirmed a need of solitude—a measure of which could be created at will, even among others. From events of war he had wrested the lonely elements of maturity. He wanted, now, discoveries to which he sensed himself accessible; that would alter him, as one is altered, involuntarily, by a great work of art or an effusion of silent knowledge.

  Aldred Leith had developed stoicism that might have been a temporary condition of his war, of his task and travels. He knew, however, that the capacity for affection must be kept current if it is not to diminish into postcards. And that responsiveness in youth is no guarantee against later dispassion. His father, in this, was something of a caution. In Oliver Leith, an intense, original lode of high feeling had been depleted: he was working, now, from a keen memory of authentic emotion. The son knew himself more resilient and less egotistical than the father—even if possessed, as he had always been given to understand, of less genius.

  WHEN HE HAD REPLIED to everything but the good letter from Bombay, he went out and walked up the path to a shed that had been pointed out as a common room from which mail might be despatched. From that rise, one could look up to the original house on its screened plateau. He saw that it was by no means closed, and that one or two figures moved, in the late light, across its partitions. Aware that persistence would lead to nothing good, Leith nevertheless branched off uphill, sighting, beyond a mass of iris, the little lake, a catchment area, in which the Brigadier had that morning taken the waters. With his back to the raw cottages and unsightly common room, Leith again remembered Ginger, who had said, Quite beautiful. It was true: the place itself, had it been de-Driscolled, was a paradise. But that, of course, applied to all the world.

  At first, he did not connect the voice with the house. Someone was screaming, not for help, but in a paroxysm, a seizure. Not with a woman’s voice, although it might seem so, but in a high keening recognisable from scenes of other violence. A man, hysterical. The man was Barry Driscoll, who was shrieking into the face of the young Japanese who had been described, at table, as his maggiordomo. Though menaced by Driscoll’s body, the youth did not flinch or retreat, except perhaps from a shower of saliva that, visible in a shaft of light, appeared as punctuation. Nor could it be said that he was impassive. The word, rather, would have been “incalculable.”

  Leith, entering, stood at a distance from Driscoll’s back. The youth of course saw him, but made no sign, his eyes remaining fixed on Driscoll’s. Leith began to understand that the young man had taken the key and come back to the locked house at an unauthorised hour. That was his offence. Driscoll’s imprecations were all that the worst could desire; and Leith already looked to a future in which he might forget them.

  He supposed that the young man had come up here with a purpose graver but similar to his own: to be, for an hour, alone and ageless.

  Realisation had taken seconds, before Driscoll whipped round shouting, with no change of tone, “And what in hell are you doing here?”—as if outrage had been compounded. Like a boxer or dancer, he rocked from one foot to another, almost stamping. The disengagement of the two men watching both maddened and cooled him: the presence of a witness generally has this twofold effect. Shrewdness returned, and a heavy sweat, and the instinct for vindication.

  He and Leith stared at and, in that moment, detested one another.

  To gain time, Driscoll repeated, “Why are you here?”

  There was no responding to this, or to anything that Driscoll might later have to say. In his mind’s eye, Leith saw the three of them standing in the slit sunlight, in disparate versions of manliness. After some moments, he stared to where, across the long table, the Japanese youth stood, exactly as before—except that they looked, now, into one another’s eyes.

  Leith turned and left the house. Driscoll had in his fist a bunch of sharp new keys, which would have made a savage weapon if dashed in someone’s face; but he was no longer dangerous in that way, and had set to thinking how to cover the exposure. There might be other incidents, recorded or obscured, beside which the present outbreak would not look well.

  When Leith reached the common room and looked back, he saw that the young Japanese had also come away and was walking in a different direction: a thin figure soon screened by trees and seeking, no doubt, other forms of shelter.

  LEITH WAS AT THE DOOR of his own cottage when it occurred to him that the grassed verge on which he stood must be the rim of the valley of which Gardiner had spoken. (He was getting used to these promptings from Ginger, and found them comforting.) There would be, here below, the temple, the spring, the little cataract; and somewhere nearby, in tangled growth, an access to the path that led to them. Following the scene with Driscoll, he didn’t fancy the excursion, nor did he want to infringe on it for some better occasion. Thinking only that he would scout out the track, he skirted the rim of the descent. Looking into the sunset, he was shading his eyes with his hand.

  He was full of the incident up at the Japanese house, not quite going over it but seeing it, as before, in his mind’s eye: the three men standing in their silent geometry. At this hour, all three of them, dispersed about these hills, were reviewing it also, in some weird and dissimilar communion. He recalled Calder’s words about the ascetic Japanese: “God knows what he thinks of us,” and wondered what he might do for this youth beyond the look exchanged.

  He had scarcely gone fifty yards when he again heard voices. They were speaking in English, and he realized that he was near the last cottage and that the speakers were known to him. Moving forward, he could see through shrubbery the crude exterior of this larger house and an undraped window framing brother and sister: the girl, intent, and turned away from his view; the boy’s head and shoulders quite plainly resting on the tall back of an invalid’s chair. Absorbed as lovers, and paired, too, in the attitudes of giving and receiving.

  Having evidently exchanged some words, they both laughed—a subdued, simultaneous laugh, like an audible smile. (Here was Ginger again: “The only laughter in the place.”) All were quiet then: the girl and boy, and the man on the path who feared to disturb them. Within moments, the girl’s voice was heard again—and on a note of resumption, for she was reading: “The funeral of the late emperor was decently performed, the capital was silent and submissive.” She was accustomed to reading aloud, and did so with no faltering or false effects. Recounting the last delusions of Byzantium, she paused. But the brother made no comment, and she completed the ancient story.

  3

  HE WORKED LATE at his notes, and at midnight looked over a Japanese lesson, repeating new sounds in undertones. At this stage, competence appeared an exciting improbability, which he went to sleep pondering.

  He woke at sunrise—from habit, since the little room remained dim—in the wake of an oppressive but irrecoverable dream. From habit, too, knew that the dark sensation would linger through the morning, whose first light he at once let in through door and window. Revisiting the events of yesterday, he thought again that he would look for rooms in the town, though that would involve the American base. He recalled the brother and sister in the window, and the girl with the book, reading.

  In his malodorous small bathroom, he doused water over his face and head, shaking himself dry like a wet animal. Then, without shaving, dressed at once, choosing his boots for the scramble down to the temple.

  The
sun was well up now, drawing humidity out of the valley. (“Damp, I can tell you”—that was Ginger.) Leith walked carefully behind the larger house, not choosing to repeat the adventure of the previous evening, when, thinking back on it, he fancied that Benedict had seen him. The secluded path was a mere trampled indentation of spikes and nettles and harsh stems tufted like thistles.

  He found himself passing by a square window, open but netted with fine wire. Its meagre sill was level with his waist. The room into which he glanced was mostly occupied by a wide bed, leaving space for a chair and tiny table and a chest of brownish drawers. The table, by the bed, held a book, a lamp, and a bottle of pinkish liquid. Underclothes were spilt on top of the chest, and a pair of small shoes aligned below—sparse details filmed over by the fine wire netting that gave them the significance of a composition, a context for the girl on the bed.

  Who lay on her side, sheet pushed back over raised hip, body reaching forward as if to follow her free arm, extended beyond the mattress. A thin shift disclosed her shoulder. Innocence, of youth and sleep, were entire and defenceless, but involuntarily prefigured knowledge. So would she lie, one morning in some imminent year, in the abandon now simulated here.

  The man had not slowed his step. But, striding on, envisioned the tableau more precisely, retrieving the profile nearly effaced in the bunched pillow and the fall of uncombed hair. That the sight had pleased him was natural; natural, perhaps, some sadness also.

  He found the path at once and made the first descent, through low scrub that must lead into a glade, visible below. It surprised him that there was no birdsong. The sun was well up. Fungus shone like blisters on the trunks of trees. His foot slid on toadstools—digital, clothy, yellowed as fingers stained with nicotine. The track appeared to peter out, though one might sense its direction readily enough, into the little valley. The stream, or its cataract, became audible, and there was a suggestion of ancient roofing, tiled, glinting farther down.

  That was his goal, though he would not reach it this day.

  The body lay in the centre of the glade in a welter of blood and innards partly contained by a coloured robe and loosened obi. The slippered feet projected, inviolate. The soldier was familiar with this phenomenon of the unscathed feet, blameless, irrelevant.

  Of course. He probably said it aloud.

  Before dawn, as he slept, there had gushed out this emanation of an extreme. The man understood, now, his presentiment of the morning.

  The head had not been severed: the youth had acted alone.

  Flies and ants were at work, and the hot smell of immediate decay. The blood was beginning to congeal. The body was warm yet, as Leith turned it slightly by its raised left shoulder—the right arm remaining beneath, still involved with the bloodied weapon. The head fell back: the young face ghastly, the eyes in their last distress. Eyes that had exchanged with him, hours since, their pained humanity. Straightening up, Leith realised that from here, through trees, you could see the sea. The site had been chosen, perhaps long considered.

  In Germany, near the end of the war, a woman standing over another such shattering had looked up at him: “Mein Mann.” He had thought her old and bent; then saw that she was no more than twenty.

  He remembered the young people sleeping above, who must not see.

  WHEN HE WALKED UP the slope to report the suicide, he learnt that Driscoll was away, on the island. He found Dench, who brought the men down with their equipment. Leith stayed with them awhile, then went to his own rooms to wash. Dench had been resentful, as if Leith were somehow to blame. Driscoll would find it hateful—that Leith, having witnessed the preliminaries, should have been the one to come upon the consequences. He himself felt secretly culpable—as if, with that look of acknowledgement, he’d conspired in the act.

  He must write his account of the morning, and sat at once to the task—which was his way when most reluctant. He had not spoken with the deceased, nor seen him for more than moments on the day of his own arrival. An impression of reserve, possibly vulnerable to conditions of defeat. He might have been unfamiliar with military practice. (This was the closest he could come to suggesting Driscoll—who would pick it up right away.) He knew nothing of the private life of the deceased, or the position of his immediate family, which might enlarge understanding.

  It was there if anyone chose to ask. But nobody would, it would remain obscure. If something of the kind recurred, Driscoll might be in trouble. But things do not recur exactly, and the sole result would be that Driscoll would hate Leith’s guts.

  He sat on the bed and removed his stained shoes. There was a knock at the door, and he got up in his stockinged feet to answer it. It was the girl, Helen, with a pint bottle of brandy in her hand.

  “We thought you might want this.”

  “Come in. That’s kind.” He had not eaten, and did not want the brandy, but went into the minuscule kitchen to fetch a glass. They sat side by side on the bed, she in her flowered dress, he, unshod, in the shirt and trousers he had not yet changed. He believed that he did not want her there; but was pleased by her restraint, and her thought of him. He remembered how he had seen her in her bed.

  She said, “Aki is making our breakfast. Ben thought you might like to eat with us.”

  Again, he believed that he did not want to do this, but said, “With pleasure.” He swallowed brandy, to please, but felt better for it. “I have to clean myself up first. Is half an hour all right?”

  She said, “Oh yes,” and prepared to leave.

  He astonished himself with an impulse to take her in his arms, which of course he did not do. Yet some tenderness passed between them, in reaction to the horror of the morning. The entire world, he thought, needs comforting.

  When she had gone, he shaved and took a shower in the cramped bathroom, combed his hair before the steaming mirror, and noted the effect of the experience on his face, not simply as an opening of old wounds. He put on civilian clothes—a clean white shirt and the linen jacket he kept for civil occasions. The jacket, long crumpled back to its vegetable origins, had been ironed and rehung. And he registered the fact that presences, helpful or otherwise, could enter his room at will. He put the draft of his statement away.

  There was the depression in the bed where he and the girl had sat. He thought how long it was since he had been alone in a room with a girl, and had made himself presentable in consequence: a cat washing itself after a needed meal. Looking for something to take as an offering, he came up with a paper volume, blue and white, of The Centuries’ Poetry: Bridges to the Present Day, with a photograph on the back cover of the young editor gripping his chin amid thoughts too deep for tears. Work on the bloodied ground might have been completed, since he heard no sound of it. The door to the larger cottage was unlatched.

  Below a window, the brother was lying on a daybed, propped by a bolster and striped cushions, his feet slightly raised on a rubber wedge evidently cut for the purpose. He was wearing a plain dark cotton gown like an unbelted kimono, over which his hands were folded. On his belly, over the dark cloth, an upturned book shifted with his breathing. He watched, as it seemed, a facing wall: the flimsy wall of the room in which he might well die.

  Leith wondered at all this death pursuing him.

  Beside the boy, Helen was sitting in a low chair, level with the divan. The same morning that touched her brother’s scanty hair gleamed on her own full head and down her healthy arms. They were aware of Leith instantly, girl quickly rising, boy making a gesture to excuse immobility. They were so pleased to see him, and said so. They did not speak of the tragedy. Helen thanked him for the book, smiling with all her clear eyes. Her enthusiasm shamed him for having chosen the volume he could most easily dispense with.

  She set up a collapsible table. He sat in a military-looking chair. Helen held out his cup and saucer with a hand that shook enough to rattle the china—so that Leith, taking it from her, could say, “This morning makes you tremble.”

  “It happens
sometimes. Since I was”—she would have said, “young,” but thought better of it—“quite small.”

  Benedict smiled. “Two years ago.”

  They must wonder if the tremor was a portent of her brother’s affliction.

  The girl added, “When I’m excited.”

  “We’re both excited,” said Benedict, “at having you here.”

  Leith could see that this might be true. But said, also with truth, “You are kind to me,” and took a twisted bun from a tin. He said, “You’re reading Gibbon.”

  “Are we loud, then?”

  “No. I loved hearing it. The best thing in a long while.”

  They told him that they had read the entire work, on the ship from England, and were now going over favourite passages. They were also reading Carlyle, which he might overhear—“For that’s a loud book, in its way.”

  “An excited book, rather.”

  Helen said, “But the excitement is magisterial.”

  Leith said, “I think—”

  “What?”

  “That about large subjects there can be many kinds of books, playing on our sympathies or alienating them. Truth can be a synthesis, or an impression.”

  It was new to him to speak this way with a child. But then, a girl of perhaps fifteen—who knows history and says “magisterial”—a girl already embarked on her secret biological life, has taken leave of childhood. He had looked discreetly, as men and boys will do with girls, for the slight shape of her breasts in the pretty dress.