The Great Fire Page 6

  “My paper on Caen had reached his desk. He had informed himself, and knew about my youth in the East, the languages, the war. He’d grown up in China and Indochina, and knew that these places were evaporating, transforming. The last days of all their centuries should be witnessed and recounted by someone who was not a spy, not a sociologist, beholden to no one.” All this very concise from the young general aslope in his chair, stretching crossed feet to the fire. “He offered me two years in China, and a free hand. I should keep my military rank, which, as he said, would sometimes help me if it did not otherwise provoke my death. A contract would be drawn up protecting my right to publish. Official circles should not be drawn in. I accepted at once. I was younger then. Presumption was immense. I suppose I had been in an arrested state with the war. One aged rapidly enough at the end of it. We shook hands and had a drink on it.”

  “What did you drink?”

  “Champagne nature. A fine lunch was wheeled in.” He had asked to look at paintings, and walked a bit about the room. On the desk, there was an old red folder tooled in gold and a silver box for cigarettes. There was a photograph of a beautiful youth in naval uniform, who was not a son.

  “Did you see him again?”

  “We met repeatedly in the following days. I went to his house, which was grand with books.” Leith said, “He told me he was ill, which I’d perhaps begun to realise.”

  Leith would not speak to Benedict of yet another death. At their parting, the Frenchman had said, “However, I hope to live to read your book.”

  “I’m sure you have better reasons than that for living.”

  “None.”

  WHEN HE GOT UP to leave them, he said, “I’m having this teacher come, you know, an elderly Japanese, three times a week. He could come to you, before or after seeing me, as you’d like.”

  Ben said, “Do you mean it?”

  “Of course.”

  THEY ASKED HIM, Had he crossed the lines of the civil war? Since the Nationalists had removed the capital to Nanking, how had he entered Peiping, the city about which they were most curious? Leith explained that the road to Peiping was cut, and the railway. The city was besieged by the Communists, but one could fly in almost daily. Mao would move, but not quite yet. Mao need only wait. Leith had crossed the lines, at times by accident, but also by finding someone to speak for him in advance. He had regularly deposited his possessions—his notes and books and letters of credit—with friends, at a British or French enclave or consulate.

  “Did you have books, to read on the way?”

  “That was hard. Books are heavy, as is water. I carried one indispensable book, and a couple of Chinese lexicons in tiny print. One becomes starved to see one’s own language—even on a discarded label whirled by a dust storm, or among the detritus of stolen UNRRA supplies.”

  “Did you talk to yourself out loud?”

  “Like Billy-Oh. Recited, too, when alone, and even sang arias.”

  “Did you ever get lost?”

  “Often. Of course, since I had no precise route, everything was grist. But sometimes I’d find that I’d gone in a circle.”

  “Did you ever think that you might—”

  “What?”

  “Stay forever in some place?” Helen meant, Love someone, and remain, and make a Chinese family. She was glad that he had not.

  “Yes. Once, in particular.”

  He was in Yunnan, on foot and leading a mule rented in a village near Chaotung. “I was going from Kunming towards Chungking, where I’d left my tackle with a friend.” It was May, he had slept in the open. After sunrise, came through steep bushy hills into a valley floored with green cultivation—less alluvial than the land preceding it, for now he was moving away from the great river. By a stream, there was a line of low, close houses, each bowed under its scalloped roof. The hill above the tiny town was gravid in the way of that landscape, its grassy garment stretched like soft cloth over an imagined anatomy of ancient, unremembered walls, graves, and ditches: a tumid rise, over which you might mentally pass your hand. On a nearer slope, feebly scattered with ash and poplar, a pair of pale, horned cattle were grazing. A woodpile was deftly stacked; a basket hung from a branch, and there was a small shrine, arched and tended.

  On a third, sharp peak, the stripped remains of a Halifax bomber: the Ark on Mount Ararat, or the ribbed cradle of a stranded quadrireme.

  Leith tethered the mule under a tree. Two men in the valley had already left their work and were climbing up to him as he came down. A third man followed slowly. A woman in black tunic and trousers came from a doorway and shouted, voice ringing harshly out in that still place, which was differently awhirr with the murmurous season.

  He explained himself. The third man, who came on slowly and was deferred to, was the village elder, and spoke some careful Chinese, while the others used dialect. This older man, lightly built, had possibly been tall until reduced by toil and time. Good face, hairless; slight smile, courteous and unsurprised. A blue cotton gown—faded to a chalky mauve and draped from a latch at one shoulder—cleared his ankles. The high soft circular collar was unfastened. A darker cloth had been wound about his head in a flat turban. Wide sleeves almost covered the clasped fingers. A saffron face with the Tibetan look common in that region, and the clear light eyes.

  Summoning this figure, one year later, Leith was aware of the convex brow with its traceries of experience that had infinitesimally evoked the veined hill above them, and only now found its place in his mind.

  Helen asked, “What was the one book?”

  And Benedict: “The book comes later. What next?”

  “The bomber had been there since 1942, off course in torrential rain. That is Yunnan, it is named for that: the low clouds and fog, the cloudy south. There was an explosion after the crash, then a great fire that, despite the rains, smouldered on overnight. The villagers struggled up in the wet, but explosions kept them off.” He did not tell that they could hear cries throughout the night. Later, they had stripped the wreck of whatever had not burned. “They took away some salvage and what they found in the cockpit. There were fifteen bodies, and they buried them farther down, under a cairn of stones.”

  These had to be disinterred. Dismantling the cairn was rough work in the sun, but that was not the trouble. The remains had to be extracted and handled. The men worked in the sun, nearly naked, with cloths over their mouths. All were sick. They urged Leith to leave them: “We’re more accustomed.” He said, “I may be more used to it than you.” There were identity discs, and scraps of writing like scorched papyrus. They sluiced water on their hands, bundles of camphor leaves were brought. When the work was done, they reburied the bodies and closed the cairn. He went downstream to bathe and wash his clothes. The smell would be weeks in his nostrils. The men came up as he was climbing from the water. When they pointed to the purple scar down all his side, he said, “It was the war.” The war among his own people that had waited, even here, on its perch.

  In one of the dark houses, the elder showed him a heap of scraps: part of the flight manual intact in an asbestos box, some instruments of mangled metal. Leith wrote out the names, as far as he could decipher, and directions for finding the valley. He added underneath: “Halifax bomber with complement of 15 RAF crash-landed in low cloud on flight from Calcutta to Kunming, June 1942. Thirteen RAF noncommissioned officers and two pilots, one of them acting navigator. Graves of all fifteen at this spot, recovered by villagers from wreckage farther up the mountain.”

  He told the elder, “When I reach Chungking, I can send a message. After a time, people will come, Englishmen. The bodies will be taken away.”

  “To their families?”

  “Yes.”

  “To their tombs?”

  “Yes.”

  THERE WAS THE MATTER OF PETER EXLEY, whom Leith might visit at Hong Kong.

  “Is he your best friend?”

  Leith considered the schooldays question. “Of surviving friends, he’s one of
those who’ve stayed in touch and write regularly. Inevitably, the intervals lengthen. We share a sort of bond. He believes that I saved his life.”

  Benedict’s whisper: “And did you?”

  “Not impossible. The event rushes at you, you act without reflecting.” He said, “The Chinese hold that if you save a man’s life you become responsible for him. Something of the kind has come about between Exley and me. He’s impressionable, a dreamer for whom, yes, one’s inclined to feel responsible.”

  Ben said, “We like the sound of that.”

  “But then—he isn’t lucky.” Unsuitability of saying this to that unlucky boy. “Of all my friends from the war, Peter has least impetus to remake his life. We all hang back, one way or another, but he more than most.

  “We had odd, early connections. Found that we’d been students in Florence at the same time, before the war. Must have passed each other often in those streets. And then, when we first met, in Cairo in 1942, each of us was carrying the same book.” He laughed. “It was in the dark, a room in a seedy hotel where we’d been billetted. The lights had failed, as they often did. Coming into the room, I could just make him out, by the window. At sunrise, we found that we had the same book.”

  Helen, almost shouting, “What was the book?”

  But he interrupted her: “My God, something of the kind happened here, when I got off the Tokyo train. But then it was my father’s new novel.” A lesser matter. “Peter’s a bit older than I. Seems younger, without seeming young. In any case, a dear man. Knows he’s unfortunate, but doesn’t see it as a card to play.”

  “He can’t,” said Helen, “be so very unlucky. If you saved his life.”

  Part Two

  5

  IN HARBOUR ON THE FIRST MORNING, Exley saw the pastel villas on the mountainside, here and there among vegetation: looted, unroofed, their marzipan interiors lined with rot; some of them rebuilding under bamboo scaffolding. Looking out from shipboard, he realised that from those airy slopes there would be a grand view over the straits to the mainland. Obviously, the place to be.

  That same noon he stood by windows up at MacGregor Road, in the officers’ quarters, while a sceptical soldier searched through papers for his name. While the soldier riffled coloured pages, Peter Exley looked down the green mountain to the town scribbled along the shore: noting the cathedral, the post office, the governor’s villa; and the bank, which was higher than all these. It was much as he had supposed. Beyond the narrow harbour and the shipping there were small bleached mountains at the verge of Asia.

  He was aware of some consequential element that he had not identified. And with indifference realised it was beauty.

  There was no place for him at MacGregor Road, no record of his request. It would have been quiet up there and relatively cool; just below the fog line—damp, of course, with the green smell that Exley at first mistook for freshness and soon recognised as decay. But there had been a mistake and every room was taken.

  Redirected to the barracks, he went down unsurprised on the cable car in the afternoon heat. The July air was a blanket, summer weight. The barracks looked like Scutari. Presenting himself, he was led along a creaking verandah and up a soiled stair. Everywhere, the breath of mould.

  A corporal unlocked the door. There was a second, inner door, slatted and latched. Pledges of another presence were distributed about the room. At the centre of things, marooned on wooden floor, a tin box was stencilled with name and number. The better bed, by the window, was heaped with dirty laundry and overhung by a dingy clump of mosquito net. There was the quiescent menace of a gramophone.

  “Can’t I get a room to myself, at least?”

  “Put you down, sir, soons we got one. Bit of a wait, I’d say” There was a fair-sized garrison in the colony—Buns, Inniskillings, Ghurkas. In any event, no one would offer preference to Exley, who had no flair for attracting favours.

  The corporal told him the mess hours. Exley asked, “Is there something like a library here?”

  “Any books get left, they put em on a shelf near the stairs. Mostly duds, I’d say.”

  It was 1947, mid-July. His pocket diary said “Saint Swithin.” Exley took off his tunic and sat on the inferior bunk. His shirt stuck like a khaki skin. Overhead, there was the croak of a slow, ineffectual fan. Rails of light, red as electric elements, striped the shutters. Walls were distempered sallow. There were marks where heads had greasily rested, where furniture and kit had been stored, where hands had sweated around knobs and switches. There were smudges of squashed insects, with adhering particles. Damp had got at the quicksilver of a long mirror on a mahogany stand. On the wall by the other bed, pinups were pinkly askew and lettered signs carried insults, facetiously obscene.

  Gloom without coolness. The mirror, unreflecting, was like the draped pelt of some desiccated leopard.

  There was a century here of obscure imperial dejection: a room of listless fevers. Of cafard, ennui, and other French diseases. The encrusted underside of glory.

  Exley, later, had no clear memory of seeing Roy Rysom for the first time—though sharply recalling that first sight of Rysom’s dented tin box, its stencilled legend WAR GRAVES COMMISSION suggestive of the decomposing contents. He remembered that he was reading when Rysom came in and set the jazz belting, dragged off his boots, flopped on his bed, and began twitching to the music. Rysom’s foot in its dank sock stuck out from the military blanket, toes curling and uncurling erotically to the music; his fingers convulsively beat on his chest, like hands of the dying. Peter Exley had watched men clutch themselves and die, and be covered up by regulation blankets. Men shot to bits in the desert, blown in half by land mines, festered with infected wounds: the whole scarlet mess covered by the military blanket.

  Your feets too big.

  Don’t wantcha cause your feets too big.

  Mad at you, cause your feets too big.

  Hate you, cause your feets too big.

  Rysom’s records were mostly jazz. Life with Rysom was suffused with noise: the mess boy calling him to the telephone—“Mistah Rai-sam, Captain Rai-sam.” Rysom yelling for cold beer, as trams rattled in the road below and the dockyard siren hooted or the gun boomed noon. Rysom said it was funny they should both be Australians, he and Exley, and on loan to the British Army. He said, “You War Crimes lot,” and hooted like the siren. Rysom could introduce disbelief into anything, unmasking was his vocation. With suspicion he turned over Exley’s Chinese and Japanese textbooks, his volumes on international law: “A beaut racket.” Spreading a double page of Japanese characters, he uttered a stream of mad, paralaliac sounds, his comic rendering of Japanese.

  Rysom was forever doing imitations: of a language, an accent, a personality; a man.

  Rysom had dreams from which he woke shouting: dreams, like Exley’s own, of men dismembered and sheets of flame. Each, in the night, now fought alone the war that neither could survive.

  On his cot at the barracks Exley realised how much of his soldiering had been spent flat on his back, waiting for war. War had provided a semblance of purpose, reinforced by danger. Danger had been switched off like a stage light, leaving the drab scenery. And there they were at the barracks, he and Rysom, two years into peace and bored to death by it. Each must scratch around now for some kind of compromise and call it destiny.

  ON HIS FIRST MORNINGS in the colony, Exley set out early. The short walk to his office led past the cricket ground, the club, the blotched statue of Queen and Empress restored to its pedestal: a decorous few hundred yards where Europeans were walking to their work in the trading companies and government offices—the sun-dried men, sometimes accompanied by pale seemly wife or daughter in starched flowers or well-pressed pleats. At that hour, too, the tourists were coming ashore from the President Lines, headed for tablecloths, carved ivory, and cloudy jade. A surge of early purpose seemed to be leading to something more than the chronic anticlimax of nightfall.

  The harbour was an old photograph, a resumption: gr
ey ships of war, shabby freighters, and the stout passenger ships with banded funnels. And the swarming sampans and lighters, the junks with tan sails boned like fans and the tan-coloured bony man at the stern working the yuloh; the greater junks, like galleons; and the coastal steamers off the Praya, arriving from Amoy or Swatow, or from green Saigon.

  The office was in the bank building, the best building, the white block formed like a cenotaph that had been pointed out to Exley at the time of his arrival: the highest building, and the only one air-conditioned. The bank had thrown over the historic slow rotations of the ceiling fan in favour of the new climate, man-made. This building of thirteen storeys was, one was told, the tallest between San Francisco and Cairo. Exley, however, had a cubicle on a low floor, in a set of rooms occupied by fellow officers. A group of translators in an inner room were local staff. There was an Admiralty clerk, on loan, who did the legal drafting, and a naval messenger had a chair near the door.

  Three servicewomen worked in a room next to Exley’s own: none of them pretty, none really young. One of them, Miss Brenda Mills, showed signs of ill nature. Of the other two, Exley could not be sure which was Monica and which Norah, and left it too long to ask. All three lived at the Helena May Hostel above the town. Each had been taken out in turn by the British officers on the floor, who had nothing favourable to report. One other woman in the office was Eurasian, of Portuguese descent. This was the typist, Miss Rita Xavier. There were, also, two Cantonese amahs, who brought tea thickened with condensed milk, cleaned the rooms, and in their tiny antechamber laughed with gold teeth at the pidgin jokes of the Admiralty clerk, who puffed his pipe at them in passing.