The Great Fire Read online

  She wanted to ask about the large events of his own life, but could not bring herself to it. However, there might be time, and one day he would tell her of his own accord.

  Benedict understood that his sister had for the moment left him to be with this man. Soon, or at last, their own long pairing would be sundered; but not just today. Being in company was, that morning, a solace to all three of them, in each of whom the thought rose and fell: Had we done differently, the man might be alive.

  Benedict said, “There might have been mass suicides in Japan, with the surrender. Why didn’t it happen? Is it because the Emperor decided not to die?”

  “I wonder. A member of the imperial family did commit seppuku, but it was hushed up. There may have been more suicides than we imagine, in the days of the defeat. Not something that would be explored or divulged.” He said, “I thought I might learn about this, travelling the country. Instead, here, at once, it reveals itself.”

  The boy said, “It comes to us from the war.”

  Leith would not say, The second such death, for me, in a matter of hours. To speak of death with this sick boy, and with the girl, was disturbing. He put down his cup, leant back, and crossed one foot over his knee. He must write up the sworn statement involving the father of these children. There would be an enquiry, however perfunctory. The deceased—Leith had not yet asked his name—had he been brutalised, or in any way provoked to take his life? He had been, not a prisoner, but a recent enemy in custodial care. His degradation had been brought home to him. Leith had seen him for few moments. Had heard him cursed. They had exchanged that last glance of fellowship.

  If he were to write such things, there would be no staying here. But then, had he not already intended to leave?

  His light-coloured socks were flecked with blood. These young people would have noticed. He got up, saying, “You’ll let me come again?”

  Benedict said, “It would be wonderful.”

  When they parted, the death flowed back into each of them. The tray being cleared away, Benedict lay down with his arms over his chest, in isolation. And there was Helen in her chair, separately and equivocally stirred.

  At length she slipped down on her knees by the daybed and clasped her brother closely and laid her head on his folded hands. Except for the movement of his fingers on her hair, it was as if they slept together.

  He said, “You are thinking of what is to come.”

  HE WROTE OUT, with formalities, the statement as already drafted, making an exact copy for Driscoll. (A typewriter, eventual and portable, had been promised, and sheets of carbon paper.) His glance fell on the letter earlier set aside, to his army friend, who, now concerned with war crimes, was sailing East. In his mind, he had framed a reply—“My dear Peter”—but the narrative, of Tokyo, the Inland Sea, the death of Gardiner, had become, and literally was, yesterday. He would have to begin again.

  It was noon. He would walk up the path and leave the copy of his statement for Driscoll, having seen the original safely deposited. He had kept his draft. For the time being, he sat on there, elbow on table, chin on palm, like the poet on the back of the anthology; recalling Benedict’s scant hair, and the girl’s tremulous hand.

  Dear Peter—

  This should greet you at Hong Kong, a place for which I keep affection. In my Shanghai boyhood, Hong Kong played second fiddle as the great port of the China trade, and will now be in the ascendant. My Japanese venture, in its second month, begins to take shape. The role of conqueror remains alien and distasteful. There is something equivocal about having prevailed so completely over one’s fellow man—I don’t speak of systems or regimes, but of individuals. Quite different, to my mind, from the extempore impersonations of victor and vanquished that successively fell to your lot and mine in the war. I’m glad—aren’t you?—that our military lives are ending.

  Needing to work in this region, I’ve established myself in hills overlooking Kure—that is to say, near Hiroshima, where I’ve begun my enquiries. I continue to be, as in China, a franc tireur, assisted not at all by official sources. Secrecy as to the catastrophe and its consequences is controlled here by the American Bomb Survey; and is such, in the case of non-Americans, that I’ve been sending my meagre notes away to safety. Even this far from conspiratorial letter goes by safe hand. A contrast with my China wanderings, where I walked, through chaos, as my own man.

  Up here in the hills, the officer in charge is a medical administrator from the Antipodes. He and his consort make a formidable pair. They have a frail and remarkable young son, and a little girl who is a changeling. Seeing these young people, I am thinking that a child can be born fastidious into cruelty and can hold to reason and a sense of justice. There is, thank God, no explaining this.

  When you’re settled, I would like to come in your direction. T. V Soong is taking over in Kwangtung, bringing his private army with him. Soongs and Chiangs, and credulous Washington, will cost us all dear in the end, which is so soon to come. We’ll see the Deluge: archaic iniquity swept away by the new Juggernaut of the doctrinaire. Meantime, I’ve a mind to see Canton again, and to cast an eye on Soong and his Salt Troops. Or perhaps it’s simply that I miss China. Missing China is my habit of years. I was even homesick for China while I was there, a paradox emblematic of that enigmatic land. At all events, it will be fine to see you again, and in this hemisphere.

  Having signed and folded the letter and sealed it, Leith then wrote, in his notebook:

  I have learned that Benedict Driscoll is twenty. He suffers from a disease called Friedreich’s Ataxia, which disables and will ultimately kill him. This was diagnosed three months ago in London, when he was still relatively mobile. Since then the condition has accelerated, as if released by its identification. The family, coming from Sydney, had been living a year in Bengal, where Driscoll, the father, held some administrative post in hygiene under the governor, Richard Casey, an Australian. In London, these two waifs were left by their mother in the protection of their former tutor, an Englishman who had known them in Australia. They are wonderfully well-read, a poetic pair who live in literature and make free with it. They are right to cling to it: it has delivered them.

  Helen’s age, not yet disclosed. Possibly fourteen? Fifteen? Wanting to be thought older, she doesn’t let on. Within ten years will be dissembling in the opposite direction. Women are soon obliged to appear young beyond their years.

  Since the night of Gardiner’s death, the night of the twirling girls on Ita Jima, I rediscover memories distinct from war. Often of women, of my youthful loves—Aurora, Gigliola. Not so much Moira, perhaps because our story achieved, in London, that nearly ritual fulfillment. It is incompleteness that haunts us.

  Having written this, he put the notebook away, in a small gimcrack safe that he’d acquired, along with other documents and a box of lead pencils called Venus.

  4

  UNFIT FOR SCHOOL LIFE at Sydney, Benedict had been taught at home. The Driscolls had found a tutor: an Englishman impoverished and under a cloud, like many another emigrant to Australia. His name was Bertram Perowne. It was said that Bertram came from a grand family, and in his fine-drawn and diffident way he certainly looked and spoke the part. However, he laid no claim to the connection, and it was plain that the family, grand or not, did nothing for him. He worked in a shop in the morning and came to the Driscolls after lunch. Helen, returning from school at three, had shared her brother’s lessons.

  Getting himself back to England in mid-war, Bertram had purportedly been recruited for some cerebral task to do with coding. This again was hearsay, to which Bertram, in letters, made no allusion.

  Benedict said of him, “For us, he was Adam, naming the world.”

  Helen said, “He is our good angel.”

  Leith thought that Bertram had been both Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday.

  It was Bertram who had cared for them in England, where he now appeared to have some means. Their mother had brought them to Britain from India, as
tonishingly—for the Driscolls in late war had seen something of the world and had spent that unexpected year in Bengal. The post in imperial India had been another of Barry’s stepping-stones, leading to Kure. In order to be on hand for the move to Japan, the mother had left the children in London with Bertram. It was Bertram who had seen Benedict through the medical tests, and had taken the brother and sister as far as Naples for their sailing to the East.

  Leith thought that it would be interesting to hear Bertram’s view.

  He felt himself in some measure to be Bertram’s successor. This sequestered pair wanted the history of the world. They also wanted his own story. They asked him, How was this, Where was that. They questioned him about his youth, his travels, his walk through China. But rarely, as he noticed, asked about the war—from shyness, and possibly from a sense that the conflagration must flare forth of its own accord.

  It did not displease him, after long silence, to tell them something of his tale.

  They asked him about his name, which they had never heard before.

  “No one has. When I was a child, I was told that it denoted a sage. Later, I found that it was a venerable sage, an old geezer: the elder. It was my grandfather’s name, and seemed right enough for him. But he, too, had borne with it since infancy.” Leith remembered his grandfather, a rangy old chap, very tall, with white hair on top like high cumulous cloud. Once in a while, that elder Aldred had given him, from a box on the mantel, a gold sovereign with the effigy of Queen Victoria. He had told the boy, “I never cared for the name, but one gets used to it.”

  They asked him, “How did you learn Chinese?”

  “I was nine, and it was due to a little girl of five.”

  Aldred, in his tenth year and living with his mother in a hotel suite in Shanghai, was attending a school for foreign children from the International Concessions. His father was, at the time, engrossed by Russian exiles in Harbin. In the lobby of the hotel in Shanghai, the boy observed the comings and goings, across marble floors, of taipans from the princely hongs—those merchant princes, British, American, French, Dutch, Danish, with interests along the coasts of China and Siam. Mr. Seth, the banker, had once invited him for an ice cream in the café. There was the young Moller, with a fortune in shipping and a string of horses that the boy longed to see; and S. T. Williamson, high and bulky, who had a trading house of his own in Hong Kong—not as grand as Jardine’s or Butterfield’s, but to be reckoned with. There were wives, pale and ailing, who could not withstand the climate. There were women, European and Eurasian, of a worldly attractiveness. There were the White Russians, with their historic loss. There were the Kadoories and Sassoons calling on their visitors. Tourists came off the great liners, strolled the Bund under parasols, and were beset by beggars. From time to time, from Europe, there was Royalty with its entourage. There was the Tiger Heat. There was sharp cold, and the rains. There was, from the interior, the Yellow Wind.

  In lobby and lift, Aldred often saw the English child with her amah: a keen little pink-and-white creature whose name was Charlotte.

  Charlotte’s carroty curls were bound with coloured ribbon. Her pretty frocks were smocked over her diminutive chest. On occasion, she had in tow her demure and distant mother; or was with her parents together—the father being distant, also, and more discreetly auburn. Vitality, withheld in the parents, had been released in the child. Charlotte was to be seen most usually with the black-clad amah, who loved her, and with whom the busy little girl carried on swift conversations in the dialect of Shanghai.

  One noon, during a fierce season of typhoons, Aldred was going up in the lift with his mother, while the Chinese operator by rote announced the floors—sam lau, sei lau—at each stop drawing back the folding inner gate with his gloved hand so that it would not unsuitably clang. Aboard, too, were Charlotte, her amah, and her father. The child was interpreting some mild dispute between parent and nurse; and doing this so rapidly and efficiently, and quite without bravado, that even the discreet lift boy smiled. Aldred’s mother stood, an attentive presence, against the panelling, her green silk dress fluttered by an overhead fan that stirred, also, her hat of woven straw from Bali, fine as gauze. Her name was Iris. Her willowy figure complemented the white-suited column of the British father, pillar of the establishment, and the short, staunch amah in black tunic and trousers with her black hair coiled and varnished and her smooth face the colour of teak.

  Aldred noted his mother sizing up, as was her habit, the situation—a process that usually touched on social standing but might take subtler forms.

  Turning the key in their door, releasing hat pin and laying hat on sofa, his mother had rung for lemon squash and taken money from a purse to tip the floor boy who would bring the tray. Having done these things, remarked: “And why, Aldred, should you not also learn Chinese?” To which the boy had, in effect, replied, “Why not, indeed.”

  Leith told them, “So it was Charlotte who began it. Oh, Charlotte, where are you now? And where did events sweep you away, before I could greet you in the dialect of Shanghai?”

  “I think,” said Helen, “that your mother deserves some credit.”

  “It’s true. I’m often slow to pay tribute to her. But Charlotte was the catalyst.”

  Slanting his difficult head, Ben looked round at Helen. “I grow envious of this red child with powers beyond our own.”

  Helen, with satisfaction: “Who is now a matron of thirty, whereabouts unknown.”

  It occurred to Leith for the first time that the red child, then, was the age of his own dead sister; that this had been his mother’s thought as she listened that day in the ascending lift, and had moved her to consider the future of her small surviving son—whose life had been, thereafter, shaped by the moment.

  EVERY OTHER DAY Leith drove down, with Brian Talbot, to Hiroshima. The outskirts of the town were being re-created in thousands of plywood houses, recklessly close, it seemed, to the site of the disaster. Taking his interpreter, and using his own increasing knowledge of the language, he was able to talk to men and women working on the new constructions—people of the region, some of whom spoke openly, most of whom were reticent or refused entirely. In order to speak with injured survivors, or with spokesmen of the community, permission was required from the American Bomb Survey, and the foreign applicant was accompanied by an appointed officer. On several of these occasions, Leith and Talbot had been in the company of the same Lieutenant Carroll—courteous, cautious, impersonal.

  One morning, Carroll told them that his term of duty was almost finished: he would be returning Stateside. These were his words, with a slight relaxing of formality. In Talbot’s jeep, they had crossed the tram-line and were approaching the momentous scene—where the main force of the explosion had been received. These again were Carroll’s words, and he never did say The Bomb. To Aldred Leith’s questions, he responded with practised and sometimes technical expressions, and with a suggestion of relief, as if more usually accustomed to inanities. Talbot asked one question only, to which Carroll had his prompt and measured reply: Yes, the scientists examining the site and the survivors were inclined to think that there remained some danger in the atmosphere, though not for so brief a visit as our own.

  The girders of the dome had been examined for their unaccountable resilience. Why yes, the casualties were estimated at a quartermillion, that being a tentative figure only. Why the explosion had not been directed initially to an uninhabited zone, or why the first exercise had been followed by the raid on Nagasaki, he had no idea, those decisions having been made in the closed and no doubt wise councils of our leaders. However, he did ask Leith if he could suggest a strategic reason. He had never sought an opinion before. Aldred, turning to him from the front seat where he sat beside Talbot, remarked, “I doubt there was logic, other than that shaped to the predestined act. By then, neither side was interested in sparing anyone, even themselves.”

  Carroll said, “Yes”—for him, a daring intervention. After a
hesitation, added, “I was on Okinawa that year, through June.”

  At the American nucleus near the port, they had beers tasting of tin and wrote addresses on unlikely scraps of paper. Driving back to the compound, Talbot mumbled, “I suppose, a decent bloke.” They left it at that until the driver said, “He has a different voice, for a Yank.”

  “Not a Yank at all. He’s from the Deep South. That’s their accent. He’s from Georgia.”

  Talbot laughed. “Well, I’m from the Deep South myself, as far south as you can go. And with the accent, too, to prove it.”

  BENEDICT ASKED HIM, “What will you do with it all?”

  “I’ll write it, and it will be published. The account of China, which was proposed to me. Japan has been my own addition.” He said, “It has all come upon me by chance.”

  Late in the war, he had been asked, by persons in power, to write in confidence about the town of Caen, all but destroyed in the first days of June 1944. In those times there was no lingering and his work was completed quickly. But he had spoken with many persons grieved and embittered by ruin, and by the gross ambiguities of their liberation; and had related these matters with simplicity and truth. The report, in French and in English, had been presented in good time, and he had never expected to hear of it again.

  In Paris, on a cold morning of April 1945, he was sent for. Dark grey, diminished, chipped, and soiled, the city seemed a scale model of its former self; a wintry film in black-and-white. In the offices to which he was directed, dinginess gave place to splendour. Paintings, rugs of stitched roses, fine furniture signed by the ébéniste were less of a luxury than the warmth, which even pervaded corridors. Senior officers came and went, apparently without the pinched signs of suffering: immune, as they would have had you believe, not so much to glorious death as to the squalor of chilblains, boils, and empty bellies in the surrounding streets. The man who had sent for him was unexpectedly young, not tall, but with a clever face and elegant limbs. Logs were burning in a marble fireplace, to which they drew up velvet chairs.