The Great Fire Read online

  He said, “As I see it, the mixed races seem indispensable here.”

  Brenda said, “Like the Virgin Rita.” The three women laughed, pausing to do so with vehemence.

  “That nun.”

  “A nun, like her sisters.”

  “Sister Rita.”

  “Santa Rita.”

  “Pretty prickly for a saint.”

  “Santa Claws.”

  He could not walk ahead or fall behind. An overhang of trees shadowed his face. There was the smell of green decay that he had once mistaken for health.

  At the hostel, in the lofty lounge, balancing his cup on the arm of a wicker settee, Peter watched these disputations, thick-bodied women stumping off to fetch cake and a bowl of sugar with silver tongs; plumping down on the chintz roses of plumped down cushions and fondling with near abandon the shamefaced, slavering Labrador belonging to the maiden directress. The airy room, the light of Asia, and strange red lilies in a vase could do nothing for them.

  Brenda sat facing him, hair shoved back from ears, jowl distorted by a bad mosquito bite; flushed from nuzzling the salivating dog. While imploring Exley’s advances, plainly summed him up as a poor thing. The low estimate had nothing to do with her yearning to be chosen and thus brought into existence. Judging him a poor thing, she would yet have married him and given him a devoted form of hell. Exley knew it. They had mutely agreed on the elements, if not the outcome.

  As ever, his thoughts drawn by pathos; his imagination captured, when it might have been fired.

  6

  BENEDICT WAS UP, sitting in Helen’s chair. An American doctor interested in his case had sent a new medicine from Tokyo, which had brought him better mornings. Leith found the boy finishing his breakfast, a sheaf of crossword puzzles at his side. Puzzles from The Times were sent by Bertram.

  Helen was up at the house.

  Benedict, if his respite lasted, would be interested to see Hiroshima. Leith said, “Of course we could do that.”

  “Helen might come. If I can’t manage it, Helen could go without me.” He said, “She needs to do things on her own.”

  “Does she say so?”

  “No.” Benedict said, “This is a new degree of seclusion. Even in India, where we were out of the city, she could go about and see things. She had friends. And I was better then.”

  “Hiroshima isn’t a joyride. We could take her elsewhere.” Leith doubted that the parents would let him make a habit of that.

  “We had that grand journey, halfway round the world. Even then, she was expected to stay close.” Benedict said, “I will tell you about Marseilles.

  “At Marseilles, we set foot on Europe. We’d sailed from Bombay and called at Aden, did the Red Sea, surfaced at Port Said. My mother, along with the two of us. Helen and I sat up on deck all night in moonlight to see the coast of Crete, to pass Messina, sight Stromboli at dawn. The ship’s engines went on the blink, and we lolled awhile in the Strait of Bonifacio, within ecstatic sight of Corsica and Sardinia. Helen remembered that John Henry Newman had composed his hymn there in similar circumstances, and she and I furtively sang ‘Lead, Kindly Light,’ and cried.

  “At Marseilles, the port had been destroyed in the war. We walked from the dock straight into the heart of the city.”

  “Along the Canebière.”

  “You know everything. There was a market that day—serious stalls of tools and farm implements. Then, tables of much rubbish. My mother wanted a comb, and gave her change purse to Helen, who went and bought the thing. We had bitter coffee standing at a tiny café on wheels. My mother said, Undrinkable. We’d never seen espaliered trees, and thought they must be blitzed or dead. At the end of the avenue there was a tiered monument to the dead of all wars. We thought it looked very fine. People were kind. We were two creatures from the colonies. At least, however, and thanks to Bertram, speaking French.

  “My sister wanted to walk to the monument. But I was tiring, and from the look of it, climbing would have been involved. Then she and I would have liked to lunch at one of the little restaurants around the market. But my mother wouldn’t hear of it: we should return to the ship for lunch.”

  “Why?”

  Benedict laughed. “Why, because on board we need not pay. In such matters, as in much else, we are helpless. Like Royalty, I carry no money. Unlike them, I have none. In any case, there was also the impulse to resist our pleasures. So we trailed back to the ship, Helen lagging behind. Near the dock there were ramshackle blue buses—for regional people, I daresay, going home from the market. One was marked CASSIS and another AIX, on cardboard signs stuck in the window. To think that such names were within our reach. As we boarded the ship, one of the buses could be heard starting up. A fellow passenger from the ship came to us breathless to say that Helen wanted us to know that she’d gone to Aix-en-Provence by bus and would be back for dinner.

  “My mother was, as Australians say, ropable. And I—I was dumbfounded with admiration and love.”

  The man was picturing the girl in outgrown coat, setting off alone for Cythera in the blue rattletrap.

  Ben said, “You will understand it. Not just that she’d thrown our mother over, in full knowledge of the fearful consequences—the Mad Scene in which our mother would play Ophelia, Gertrude, and Claudius all together. What was marvellous was that she had also thrown me over, breached our agreement, acted entirely for herself. Saved her soul. I even enjoyed my own pang of resentment, which showed the necessity for her gesture.”

  Less enjoyable had been the long afternoon. The mother shrieking: “Anything can happen to her. ANYTHING.”

  Ben, from a deck chair, had disbelieved that the white slave trade was centred on Aix.

  “She knows nothing, can’t you understand, she knows NOTHING.”

  “And whose fault is that?”

  Helen had come back punctually for dinner. “I had felt for her as the day declined, but she was beyond our reach. There is no arguing with exultation. My mother tried everything in her arsenal, but Helen was immune for the evening. She was beautiful. The last straw was that she had brought back a packet of some sweets they make at Aix, further violating the matriarchal purse. Having had something over from the bus fare and after a café crème outdoors in the Cours Mirabeau, and the purchase of a postcard. An English couple for whom she translated the menu had ordered her a croque monsieur, possibly sizing up the situation. Hallowed be their names. She was hungry on return and had a hearty dinner, our mother all the while declaring that she herself could touch nothing.”

  Ben said, “Later, in the first-class lounge, she ate them, though. My mother. I mean, the Calissons d’Aix.”

  Sunday, grisaille. Suspension. Even the cataract in the gully below hangs in midair, awaiting Monday. This afternoon I finished a draft of my first section on China, and have been reading it over. It strikes me that, in the interest of coherence, an infinity of impressions have been sacrificed and, along with them, some experienced truth. So it must be reworked. In the meantime, the thing emerges as worth doing.

  Damp English day, in which I’ve thought persistently of Aurora. My recurrent images of women appear less like memories than a means of restoring life to what has mattered and was passingly eclipsed by war. It is ten years now since she and I first met and were lovers; six years since I last saw her. I realise, too, that I now have a substantial past—which means that I am no longer young but have become more interesting to myself. I used to think that our story, hers and mine, was far fetched, even freakish; but see now that the experiment of love is itself aberrant, more often than not, and doesn’t lend itself to classification. A letter this week from Aurora, funny and charming, put me in mind of all that, and prompted a dream of her, with predictable result.

  Recollection is also aroused by questions put to me by my two young people, with whom I indulge myself in orgies of answering. Retrievals not free of pain. For two such cloistered beings, their own adventures are bizarre enough. I learn that on the last
leg of their voyage to Japan they were obliged to spend time in Hong Kong, due to the seizure of the cruise ship Van Heutz, boarded by Chinese pirates at Mirs Bay two months past. Helen and Ben were to have taken the ship from Hong Kong to Kobe, and had to wait in a Hong Kong hotel while the shipping company sorted out their case. They seem to have enjoyed it as another reprieve. Helen thought it would have been exciting to be aboard when the ship was commandeered. Ben and I said nothing.

  The parents have allowed these children, one of them mortally ill, to wander the world alone. Given the context, I return to the conclusion that worse might have happened.

  Leith thought that, if he replied at once to Aurora, he would write a love letter, which was out of the question. All the same, it would have pleased him, that Sunday evening, to write such a letter; even if not to her.

  He would not walk over to Helen and her brother. Aurora’s tale was not for them. They were taken up with Carlyle, and had reached the atrocious farewells. He had heard the girl, that day, read out the word “NEVER!” They had enough on their hands, and in their future.

  He sat thinking of the name: Aurora. First heard when he was seventeen or so.

  On a Saturday of the 1930s, he had gone to the ballet with a friend called Jason Searle. They had got to know each other in their last weeks of school, having shed adolescence in advance of their peers and made friends as men rather than boys: Jason was the elder, not only for having turned eighteen, but for having already undergone the metamorphosis. Remaining friends, they would soon go to different universities. On that Saturday afternoon, they had seen, in a suburban hall, a trio of duets from great ballets, well performed. As they walked towards Soho, where they were to dine, Aldred Leith had said that the classical ballets would be more poignant if their stories were less defined: “That is, no facts or names. Who ever heard, for instance, of anyone called Aurora?”

  “My mother’s name.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “It suits her, actually.” The youth Jason then said, “I’m rather in love with my mother.”

  Jason was an only child. His mother had been deserted—as it appeared, on expensive terms—by Jason’s father, who decamped to Kenya when the boy was four. Jason had been “out” to Kenya three times, finding animals and landscape revelatory; but oppressed by the colonial life (“Boozing can be a bore, you know”) and, it might be guessed, by father and stepmother. Jason thought that he might eventually want to live away from Britain, but not in the colonies. At university he became known as both precocious and mature. There was the brilliance, also, of a temperament that generated expectations. As it was, he left the university without taking a degree and travelled at once to Spain, where he died of wounds fighting for the Loyalists in a minor skirmish of the Civil War.

  Some months after the event, Aldred Leith received a note signed “Aurora Searle,” thanking him for a letter of sympathy, informing him that Jason had wished him to have certain books and a picture; and proposing an afternoon on which he might call.

  At the agreed hour, on a day of bitter cold, Aldred had gone to the house near Regent’s Park. He knew the flat, which occupied a floor in a rather grand building; but had never met Searle’s mother. Her brief letter, simple and civil, had offered no clue.

  He rang at double doors—expecting to be ushered, by solemn servant, to a darkened person in darkened room. She answered the door herself: Aurora, in palish, pinkish tweed and a silk blouse. Fair hair, falling over shoulders. She said, “How cold your hand is. You came without gloves.” They went into a room that he had never previously seen, smaller than the living room, where walls were covered in moire and chairs in chintz. There were freesias in a vase, and a fire burning. Above the mantel, on which stood a pair of old china figures of John Bull and Britannia, there was a mossy painting of women by a river.

  She said, “Shall we have a nip of something? What do you like?” Speaking low, with a slight inflection that recalled the voice of Jason. Leith saw, however, that Jason’s colouring had come from the father. The mother was blue-eyed, and gold.

  She put wood on the fire. Body and gestures were lithe and unaffected. Looking for a bottle in a low cabinet, she did not bend but sank swiftly to her haunches, with straight back. She poured, handed, sat down. “You wrote a grown-up letter. Something few people can ever do.”

  “He helped me grow up. He was adult before I was.”

  She held her little glass, looking at the fire. “Whereas he kept me young. I was eighteen when he was born. My youth was spent with him.”

  So she is forty. Aldred Leith, who had turned twenty, saw the small foot and pretty shoe, the slim calf, the fold of soft material at the knee. Her clothes were loose on her, from loss of weight. On a wrist incredibly slender, a little watch slipped about with her movements. She wore no ring.

  He saw that she was too young to have died with her son.

  She asked about his plans, his interests; and they spoke of the threatened war. Once or twice she quoted Jason—“Jason thought,” “Jason felt”—and appeared to do this naturally enough. But the young man understood that she had schooled herself to it, so that the son should not become a closed subject.

  He said, “Jason once told me that he was in love with you.”

  He could not have imagined, beforehand, that he would say this quiet, bold, familiar thing, which put them on sexual ground. Callous in his own ears, the words were involuntary; but an approach. And, had she not then lifted dispassionate eyes, he might have added, “How beautiful you are.”

  She was practised in turning imprudence aside. She said, “The things he wanted you to have are on the table behind you. Won’t you look through them?” When Aldred got up, she went on, “He left a page, it was in his desk here, asking that books and objects go to friends. There were other requests.” The man, with his back to her, a heavy book in his hand, listened to this new, lowered voice. “And a letter was brought to me, afterwards.” She had meant to say more, but did not or could not.

  There were perhaps thirty books, and a small picture in gouache of the Roman Campagna seen beyond angled roofs: the date, 1780, the painter’s name French and unknown to him.

  Aurora said, “How shall I get them to you?”

  It was agreed that he would take some things then and there, and return another day. Aurora fetched a bag of canvas twill. Having packed some of the books and wrapped the picture, Leith remained—hesitant, graceless. Aurora lit a lamp. For an instant, above the glow, her face showed discomposed and tragic, and the strands of hair became a splintering. As he hoisted the bag, the phone rang.

  The receiver in her right hand, she held out her left in a gesture of goodbye. She was saying, “Hello … Oh … Yes, as you like.” He understood from the tone that she was speaking to a man. Releasing her fingers, he went away disconsolate.

  BEGUN THAT WINTER, their affair lasted through the spring. It was not Leith’s first passion, but his first engagement with lion grief and its transformations. Aurora, in an episode that she never afterwards minimised, pursued this evidence of her continued existence. She had a habit of crying in her sleep, which he could scarcely bear for her. A habit, also, of calling Aldred by her son’s name, which he did not mind, seeing it as central to their entire connection.

  Love could never be, for her, a calculated act. But she observed and understood herself, and soon withdrew. Leith was to study, that summer, in Italy; and she said, “Italy will soften the blow.” She told him, “We will see each other always.” But these two were no longer lovers when, the following September, they ran into Aldred’s father lunching in a restaurant near Covent Garden.

  The son remembered the charming restaurant, charming father; the discreet liveliness around them, some red velveteen luxury, and their own soft talk. How his father, coming up, joining them, was at his best—the elder Leith having only a polarised best or worst, with no intervening tropic of moderation. Rising to the occasion, all three assumed their parts. Aldred
was the son; but, sitting slightly back from the other two, perceived what was happening and what would ensue. In those moments, he possessed the event, while his father, with all his seasoned subtlety, was trapped in it, predestined.

  Oliver Leith could be, and that day was, most amusing. And then he was handsome, and well known. (They were hardly seated when another diner, unknown to them, came to their table: “I think you’re Oliver Leith? Just want to say, I love your books.”) His long face did sometimes, even then, show unkindness. But it was unkindness of the suffering, needful, consequential sort, avid for women’s love. He did not so much want a safe haven as the stimulus, rather, of disturbing another’s peace. And then, Aurora’s femininity was of the kind that seeks, ultimately, to devote itself: in her, as in many women of her time, there was something of the victim. Reading all this, the father drew her on, suspending the ritual show of disbelief that, as far as his son was concerned, had all but annihilated communion.

  This, with Aurora, was the most enduring of Oliver Leith’s liaisons. And of hers.

  Aldred, in Japan, thought judiciously of his father, who had never cheaply courted fame, yet could not live without it; who, despising sycophancy, exacted submission from those about him. Not a great man, but interesting and singular. Not loving, but seized, even grandly, with the phenomenon of love.

  7

  “I WATCH MY SISTER learning Japanese. Our old roles are reversed: I now sit in on her lessons. Concentration fails me. I take in something, but I tire. Meantime, I love to listen. You perhaps foresaw this.” If I had lived, I should have liked to learn all languages, read all books. And be the sensualist I might have been.

  Such were the speculations, desolate, voluptuous, that Benedict Driscoll could not forgo.

  Helen asked Aldred Leith, “When you learned Italian, were girls involved there, too?” From diffidence, she rarely used his name.