The Great Fire Page 9

  “They were.” He said, “Should I be more alarmed by your curiosity or my own compliance? The idea was that I should sit the Foreign Office exams, a stiff proposition then. Romance languages were required, that was the least of it. There was a villa above Florence where one could study with a teacher but live en famille: the place an enchantment, the owners uniquely lovable, my fellow students few and agreeable. In an hour, one walked into Florence.

  “There was also fascism, rife in city and countryside. At night, young men held the gladiatorial battles of an unequal civil war. Up at the house, the head of that family, a lawyer and well known, had lost his livelihood by declining to enter himself in the fascist listings. That was their reason for taking students as paying guests. No doubt we were watched and reported, but English oddities at Florence were still an old habit, hard to simplify. I went there three times in the course of two years, a strong factor being, yes, the daughters.”

  “How many, and what names?”

  “Two. The elder, Raimonda; the younger, Gigliola. Yes, they were beautiful. Also, three sons, one of them already conscripted for Mussolini’s army in Africa. That was Dario, later to die in Greece.” Leith said, “This story does not end as well as Charlotte’s.”

  “We don’t know how things went with Charlotte.”

  “Benedict, let me keep Charlotte. Let Charlotte be safe and happy.”

  And Helen: “Yes, yes. Charlotte lives happily. Wherever she is. Which of the sisters did you love?”

  “We were all in love with both of them. At first I was mad for Raimonda, the more reflective of the two.” Gentle, good, and tender creature. “Raimonda was, however, spoken for. At weekends, her suitor would arrive, handsome, from Pisa, where he was becoming learned at the university. From Monday to Friday, I was free to yearn after Raimonda.” And to imagine that she, in her maidenly way, felt something in return. “She was my elder by a year. As summer progressed, my case seeming hopeless, I turned my attentions to Gigliola.”

  A laughing, quicksilver girl, with high breasts and sun-streaked hair. “Gigliola played the flute, and played fast and loose with the lot of us. That first year, I was the last of the foreign students to leave and so had some advantage. Nothing spectacular, unfortunately. Still, she came to the station to see me off.” In a white dress and red sandals. And put her brown arms round my neck and her cheek to my shoulder so that I kissed her ear as the train was leaving and her hair came to my mouth. In a desperation of helplessness and desire, he had felt that impulsive pressure all the way to Domodossola; and sporadically on, across frontiers, throughout an autumn and winter in which his studies drew praise and he continued his friendship with Jason Searle, who was very soon to die; he too, in war.

  Having extra money at Easter, Aldred Leith made, with extravagant excuses, an extravagant journey, reaching Florence by train at sunrise. Across from the station, pavements were being hosed, a café was opening up. Workmen were taking their coffee, and coughing and stamping against the cold. At the counter, Leith ordered caffe corretto, not because he needed the fillip of cognac but by way of celebration. Through the miraculous dun-coloured streets, shabby, odorous, malodorous, and rumbling with early carts, he crossed the river and walked out, euphoric, to the Scopeti—where, by an ancient causeway, he turned off for his destination and his dear. The chill watery morning grew fine and mild, a countryside glimmered celestial. Entire hillsides of iris, pergolas of wistaria, overhanging fronds of lilac breathed out drops and petals as he passed. In a stone village, by the high historic house where descendants of Machiavelli were stirring, two yoked white cows lumbered past him drawing an empty tumbril and dropping, in unison, their steaming dung.

  I wear the clothes that are seemly, I take the nourishment for which I was intended and which is mine alone: I converse with the great minds of an ancient world. And from these discussions have distilled a little pamphlet entitled On Princedoms.

  The country people smiled, seeing bliss; aware that his own smile was not exclusively for them on that morning when he loved the world.

  He approached the house by a path through fields. On the last slope, where vines, scarcely budding, were interspersed with olives, he heard the flute. The house, on its rise, was a splendid ship to which he was being piped aboard. On the carriage drive, pebbles spilled under his boots. In the cold waxy hall, he swung down his knapsack, scarcely felt on the walk. Music ceased, and the girl came running down the stairs while her mother from above called a caution: “Adagio. Adagio.”

  She had the flute in her hand. She was not Gigliola, she was Raimonda. Gigliola had gone into Florence to meet the wrong train.

  Impetus was irreducible. He took Raimonda in his arms and gave her the outright kiss intended, all winter, for her sister.

  When Gigliola came, agitated, in a small calèche that she drove herself, he ran down the drive to meet her, scattering more gravel. She flung down the reins and sprang—she too—into his arms. They, also, kissed; again, unchastely—the man registering the same desire experienced, moments past, for Raimonda.

  As he came back to the house leading the girl and the little horse, the mother remarked to her amused husband, “Where expectation is high, ambiguities generally enter.”

  Raimonda, flushed but calm, appeared with coffee on a brass tray. She handed the flute back to her sister.

  Near evening, alone in his room and leaning out to close shutters on scenes where fruit blossom flared in twilight and a walnut tree was leafless, Leith could relive his arrival. The youth, which he as yet was, being proud, elated, undecided. The adult, already present, smiled.

  Years later, he merely recounted, “I arrived.”

  Helen said, “I imagine it.”

  If anyone could, it would be she.

  At the villa, circumstances were restricted. The family was becoming dangerous to know, and would soon be isolated. The affianced scholar from Pisa had withdrawn in tears at his parents’ insistence. A cousin had gone, with the Italian Brigade, to fight for Franco in Spain. Other relatives accused them of putting their kindred at risk, which was true enough. The teacher, Lionello, was distraught in expectation of conscription. Italian lessons were suspended. “He came to see me and wept, poor Lionello.”

  Leith said, “The girls took on my education.”

  Helen imagined it.

  A columned loggia one morning, and Gigliola telling him, “Pátina, not pateena. Cándido, not candeedo. Fáscino, not fasheeno.”

  Gigliola, not Raimonda.

  “Ótranto,” she said, “Not Otránto. Brndisi, not Brindeesi. Arístide, not Aristeedis.” And, sharply, “Smèttila,” pushing away his hand.

  Or it was evening and they were in a garden.

  “La luna calante.”

  “We call it waning, the waning moon.” He laid his palm on her breast. “Gigliola, I—”

  She put her own palm to his lips. “Attenzione.” Laughed.

  There were so few days. There were scruples. Gigliola, despite bravado, was eighteen, and virgin. Gigliola had been handled; but, as yet, with care. When he came back in the summer it would arrange itself. So he thought, when not at her side.

  And there was Raimonda, whose very forbearance galled him. On the other hand, when he saw her, tall and slender, laughing in the kitchen with the rosy cook, he regretted the impossibility, as it was by now, of renewing that particular kiss.

  Kissing them all, he returned to England, in time for his birthday.

  When summer came, all was in ruins. From a fellow student who had come from Florence, he heard that the father, Emilio, had been briefly arrested and beaten. Had been given the choice of receiving fifty lashes in public or being given, privately, a litre of castor oil. Having chosen the latter, he staggered up ten days later from his bed and suffered a stroke. The family had been served with a fine, impossible to pay, and were faced with confiscation of their property and dispersal.

  Having this news, Aldred Leith went from Cambridge to Norfolk, to see
his father.

  “To ask my father. Who only said, ‘It’ll have to be worked out, how to send the money.’ I’d kept calm telling the story, it was the only way with him. When he said that, however, I went to pieces.” Put his head in his hands, while Oliver Leith put through a call to his agent in London. “After childhood, we become prepared for coldness. It’s generosity that disarms us.”

  Helen was in tears, precisely for that reason.

  “Oliver was capable of that. Still is, no doubt. So I went again to Italy. My father had money from translations, deposited with his agent in Milan. The agent, Englishman married to an Italian, warned me against speaking in his office, and we did our transaction in the cathedral, with a show of piety in a back pew. The money I carried to Florence was more than the fine. My father had given me a note for them—one line, typical: ‘I hope to meet you when the war is over.’ The war that had not yet begun.”

  When Emilio was dying, he said, “And I haven’t done it.” Hadn’t signed.

  They were almost isolated. No more fine suitors for the girls. For Leith, the gift of money had placed Gigliola out of bounds: he could not solicit what she might now yield from gratitude or obligation. She herself was intimidated by horrors, and by the charmlessness of existence. The local chief of police, a fox-faced widower with whiskers dyed ginger, sought Gigliola’s hand. The girl was frightened, but pretended to laugh: “Quel vecchio Volpone.” Mother and daughters were much indoors, and together. Two older servants stoically remained, and the gardener.

  From the countryside, there rose the hot smell of crops drying, fruit ripening, old walls discarding their moss. At evening, the scent of petunias. By day, the big kitchen was cooled, through an open trapdoor, by a current of frigid air rising from the cellars. Into the igloo of that cantina, Aldred would descend, bringing up butter for lunch or the veal for dinner, and demijohns of dusty red. In earliest morning, would gather salad and ripe tomatoes from the cutting garden, and flowers that the girls arranged in vases. In an atmosphere of unreality and disaster, he was touched and happy.

  One noon, he sat with Raimonda and her mother, shelling peas. The cook, Agata, was at the stove. He was the man now, in a household of women.

  The mother said, “Aldred has a tender heart.”

  The youth blushed. “Not tender enough, perhaps.”

  Raimonda pushed a fugitive pea in his direction. “Tender enough. But reluctant to show.”

  And this was a girl he had kissed with abandon.

  “One was raised that way. Schools strict. Parents not demonstrative.” He hoped to end the discussion by eating a whole handful of peas.

  Raimonda said, “That was their affair. Now it’s up to you.” The tone in which she said this, without rigour or rancour; almost in reverie.

  He had come as their deliverer, bearing human solidarity. He was aware of a greater, putative rescue: that he could marry one of these girls and carry her to safety, or whatever passed for safety in the year 1938. No one, of course, alluded to this possibility.

  In the year 1947, Leith could speak of it in Japan. “I was too young. Not simply because of my age. I was unformed. Had Gigliola been much older, and less attractive, I might have done it. There would have been the understanding—a marriage of emergency, the prompt separation. But to marry the actual Gigliola, take her away and perhaps cast her adrift—I wasn’t ready for that.”

  Benedict shook his head. “You can’t reproach yourself.”

  Leith stood up. “If I’d done it, she’d be alive.” He said, in a voice they had not heard, “She was shot.” It was as if he himself had not expected this end to the story.

  They could not think what to do—unless to embrace him, which as yet they did not dare.

  Helen brought green tea, her hand inevitably trembling. She and her brother were quiet, but excited by the story and by his having confided it. They talked a little between themselves. Seeing him moved, they did not want to stare. The girl thought, How close we are, this instant.

  Helen looks at me as no one has for years. Perhaps, no one ever. I am telling these things for her. Not just to cut a figure, but to share my life. It’s she who rouses Aurora, Gigliola; the death of Gigliola precipitating realisation. And if I know it, so must she.

  He joined in their talk. He was calm as before—and greatly disturbed by what was indubitable and unreasonable, and would not give ground.

  He told them that he had been, several times, to the temple. The custodian was always there, not readily visible: “He materialises.” He had also climbed to a hilltop beyond the Japanese house, from which there was, to be seen, a world of bays and islands.

  He told Helen, “We’ll do these things some day.”

  When he went away, he knew that there was no possibility of it. If he brought her into the valley, or to the far hill, he would take her in his arms. His very happiness distressed him. He wrote to Peter Exley and set a date for his Chinese journey, which would remove him, for some weeks, to a great distance.

  LEITH ARRANGED TO TRAVEL, first, in northern Japan, and from there to Harbin and Shanghai. He would then fly south and visit his friend in Hong Kong—from there sailing back to Kure; for he had a fancy to enter the Inland Sea from the west and see the islands. He expected to be away two months.

  At the compound in the hills, no one could imagine his absence; even those who wished him away. He had brought substance to that counterfeit place. Of those who loved him, Ben feared to die before his return. As did also Helen, if differently.

  On the morning of his farewell, Helen herself departed. There was a cultural expedition, to Kyoto and Nara, for dependents from Commonwealth forces. Helen had been asked, but could not be spared. She expressed no resentment, though Benedict wept in the night on her behalf and for his helplessness. There had then come a casual remark to their father from some person of standing. (“Dignitary,” Ben believed, “is a one-word oxymoron.”) A general whose own womenfolk had left by a repaired bus route had wondered, “Why didn’t your girl go?” And Helen, hastily equipped, would now travel alone, by train. Her mother would see her aboard, she would be met on arrival.

  “They are taking no chances,” said Benedict, “of a second Marseilles.” When Ben conjured up Marseilles, it was as if Napoleon invoked Toulon, or Montgomery El Alamein.

  In the echoing shed used as common room, Aldred Leith sat to breakfast with the sister and brother. His own imminent departure deepened the mood of separation and change. He had left so many places in recent years, but partings had rarely counted: he had forgotten that partings could create this involuntary pathos. When the others came, he was sitting at a round table in the empty hangar, considering the distances that he, and she, must travel.

  Benedict had been driven up the path for the occasion. Aki, who cared for him, helped him to table. Then Helen came, in her dress of small flowers; bright hair brushed back behind black ribbon; thin hands turned, by nervousness, to starfish. Feet hasty in pale shoes. Aldred got up. Seeing her agitation, Ben croaked, “Come on, it’s only for five days,” and she, smiling, walked her fingers over the top of his head as she passed. It was the larger parting, naturally, that weighed.

  The men had left a place for her between them at the Formica table; but she, not realising, seated herself opposite, where teabags and powdered coffee, and cardboard novelties, had been set out with a thermos of boiling water. She made coffee and took a bleak Nordic biscuit. She said, “I wish you were coming.”

  Ben asked, “Which of us?”

  “broth.”

  Leith pushed back his chair and crossed his foot on his knee. Watched her bite the penitential biscuit and wipe her mouth with a flap of coloured paper. A child, excited. A woman, and beautiful.

  He said, “I envy whoever sits opposite you today in that train.”

  She held her cup steady. A couple of pinecones rattled onto the tin roof.

  To his reproving self, the man acknowledged: I know. But could not help it. It was th
e alacrity of her saying “Both.” Her freedom, and his own thrift. How prodigal, in these matters, are many women. And the occasion was producing some transparency. It was the man in the train whom he envied, the man who next year, if not today, would sit opposite and reach out for her, and take her.

  He was right to be going, but not glad.

  8

  ON THE MORNING OF LEITH’S ARRIVAL at Hong Kong, Exley went to Kai Tak to meet the flight from Shanghai. The makeshift airfield—a scarred runway and provisional buildings on reclaimed land—resembled other settings in which these men had known each other, even to the overhang of scraped hills and dry mountains in whose shadow life was being improvised anew, if not afresh. Exley was thinking that he would say this to Leith. The sun was barely up, the sea breeze clean. It was the first day of autumn.

  He parked his borrowed car between a pair of Quonset huts in the military segment of the field. From those wings walked onto a stage where all activity was in that instant precipitated, as by magnetic force, far off at the water’s edge—concentrated there in a black swirl seared by flame and in a frantic convergence of vehicles and men. Havoc first broke loose in silence and slow motion. But then the sound came in, of sirens, motors, and the low explosive roar. And a pandemonium of men running and shouting. And Exley himself started to shout and run, and heard the same cries, of “God Almighty” and “Jesus Christ,” from his own throat; until waved back by an airman in overalls, painfully sunburned, with an antiquated red flag in his hand.

  “Enough trouble without you.”

  An older man was halted beside him, in RAF khaki. “Came in too low, hit the pile of rubble. The usual. The field’s a death trap.” The smashed plane was blazing into a cloud of particles, the black reek, and the ash, now reaching them. They all streamed with sweat.

  Peter Exley asked, “Is it the plane from Shanghai?”