The Great Fire (18 page)

An explosion of Chinese music brayed out from one or another of the floating taverns. They laughed, and Peter said, 'Even so, there's quiet out here.'

'The illusory quiet of the world.' Small flaring hubbub of humanity, and the encompassing night.

'Aldred, I've been thinking about you and your girl.'

'I thought it was your amatory affairs that we were considering, Peter.' But Leith would be glad, now, to speak of what most concerned him. 'Her age is the devil.'

'And partly the attraction.'

'If she were even a couple of years older, it would simplify'

'But she would be differently lovable.'

'Had this tale been told to me of some other man, I'd have condemned him.'

'There's been nothing to condemn.'

'I wish there were.' Leith said, 'To encourage love, then dismiss it — I don't see that. Or to marry her, over the parents' convulsions, at an age when, whatever else she knows, she doesn't know herself — another wrong. Even reasonable parents might be right to object.'

'To wait a year or two?'

'I think of it a great deal. A time is coming when we'll be at separate ends of earth, unable to meet or speak, with time passing. If it could be arranged for her to come to Britain while I complete this work and publish it, we'd learn to know each other. She could stay with my mother. I could propose this to the parents, who will be fiendish whatever the outcome.'

The Driscolls. Clairvoyant Ginger had spent his last hour of life warning him about the Driscolls. And he had tolerantly smiled: 'What harm could they do to me?'

He told Exley, 'And there is her brother, whom she will not abandon while he lives. Here again, my years are passing.'

'It doesn't appear insuperable. As you say, all things now transform themselves. Exposed as you are to change, circumstances will force the issue.' It was new for Peter to represent, with Leith, the sagacious side of things. 'In the interim, you're in love with this mermaid, for which anyone might envy you. As I do.'

They paid, and were taken to shore, standing in a cockleshell that slid, a living thing, among the junks. On land, a taxi materialised. Exley said that there was a fine walk back from here, over hills to the town. They should do it by daylight, if Aldred returned. Leith thought, more likely that they would soon see each other in Japan.

At that same hour, Audrey Fellowes was spiralling down from the Peak in an official car, reflecting on her evening at the Admiral's. Not resisting its formalities, but finding nothing memorable other than the chocolate soufflé and her own brocade dress, worn for the first time and, she felt, wasted on two stiff men of gold-laced middle age who had been her companions at table. One of these, an expert on ocean currents, had improved late in the dinner, telling her about the Kuro Siwo (she had written it into the little green book extracted from her velvet bag), a blue salt stream to be encountered off Yokohama. He had rather overdone things with an excursus on the North Adantic Oscillation. By then, with the soufflé demolished, the Admiral himself had raised a small gavel and smacked it down trimly on a wooden circlet near his wineglass, saying, 'Gentlemen, you may now smoke' — which was the signal for the ladies to withdraw.

The men got to their feet as the women, trailing long skirts, filed off to the drawing room, where Lady Boyd offered coffee or tisane, and crème de menthe; and, by euphemism, suggested a bathroom — which, from delicacy, all declined. She mentioned that Aldred Leith, such an odd name, had been invited for the evening but could not come.

Miss Fellowes said, 'What a pity.' And meant it.

At MacGregor Road, Peter Exley thought that he might ring up Audrey Fellowes in a day or two.

At midnight, in his hotel room, Leith put down a novel of war in Burma. He understood, not altogether calmly, how serious his dreams had become — and how explicit, when Peter could use those words to him: 'love' and 'envy.' And he himself had said 'Marry.' And what if it is all hallucination?

Nevertheless, he went to bed rather happy, with nothing resolved.

11

'Bit of bad luck, eh?'

Leith smiled, but saw no reason to reply. The ship's purser, expertly rocking with the vessel, stood over him as he read. The islands being all but invisible in rain, a score of other passengers were distributed around the saloon, reading also, or talking in low voices; at one table, playing cards. The ship had entered the strait and would dock within the hour. Talbot would meet him, they would reach the compound by two.

He looked at his watch.

After broaching, with Exley, the story of Helen, he had been revisited by its impossibility. Had revolved the mystery so often, and to no purpose except that it was pleasurable — that he could awaken, on successive mornings, to what he supposed was a sense of proportion. The thing was charming, and might remain so: it could not be allowed to develop.

He didn't much fancy the process of making this plain.

He found himself again consulting his watch, while the ship rose steeply, and fell into a trough where it lay shuddering. This grey exercise was repeated, propellors grinding, while an ashen lady was helped away, groping at a handrail, to be sick.

Within days of arrival at Kure, he should leave again, very briefly, for Tokyo, where part of his lost baggage had been discovered: books and winter clothes. Intermittent absences would help them both — in the end, wherever that was to be.

In the recovered luggage, there were books that Helen might like to have.

His watch was not a new contrivance such as visitors to Japan now acquired but an old one, Swiss and good and gold, from his godmother on his twentieth birthday.

He was not the first man to wonder, Is she the plaything, or am I?

Helen had washed her hair. In order not to disturb her brother, who slept after breakfast, she used Leith's bathroom, which she afterwards set to rights, drawing out from the basin a tangle of her own hair entwined with that of others. Before the rain, she had gathered wintry flowers from the hillside and put them on Leith's table in a vase brought from Kyoto. Helen stood by the table, a comb in her hand.

The little safe was latched but empty. They had kept Leith's papers in a locked box beneath Ben's bed. It did not surprise or scandalise them that these peaceable pages were being safeguarded from the interference of their own father.

It was past noon, but the ship was not expected to dock on time.

Helen went back to their cottage, where Ben was sleeping in his room. She looked in the mirror, running her fingers through her hair so that it stood out all round her head. With the cool weather, she dressed in a dark skirt that came, in the new way, well below the knee; and today in a blouse of silky colours, the gift of a friend in Bengal. She had left the mirror, when her mother came in with the storm and stood in the open doorway, subduing a tartan umbrella.

Helen shut the door and propped the umbrella on a newspaper. Melba Driscoll had a list of tasks, which her daughter took note of. And Helen should change out of those good shoes, she must be mad. When Melba removed her raincoat, it was to be seen that she, too, was dressed for an occasion.

The girl was always quiet with, the mother. Not passive, not sullen. Today, radiant.

The mother said, 'You look a sight.'

If the daughter had spoken, she would have said, 'You are cruel.'

'As if you'd been pulled backwards through a hedge.'

Neither would forget.

Helen made a motion for quiet. 'Ben's sleeping.' She agreed that she would come up, soon, to the house for lunch.

When she was alone, Helen dried the floor and went to the room where Ben was stirring. As she stood at the end of his bed, he opened his eyes.

'You are a sight,' he said, 'for sore eyes.'

She sat on the bed and took his hand.

'Why are you crying?'

'Not crying, really.'

'Aldred comes today.'

'Yes.'

'We're glad.' He lifted their joined hands and held them to her cheek. 'We love him.'

'Yes.'

Benedict disengaged his hand. 'Can I touch your hair? Do you remember, in the bank in Hong Kong, the two men talking about your hair?'

'I'd forgotten. Yes.'

They had been to the shipping office in the bank building, together with a Portuguese assistant deputed to help them arrange their deferred passage to Japan. At that time, with the long voyage out and afternoons at Shek O, Helen's hair was tinselled, oceanic. They waited in a little press of people, in front of two young Chinese who evidently discussed the frail boy and his sister; and who, as the line shuffled forward, broke into an exchange, one of them sketching, by cropped circular gesture, the girl's head and shoulder.

Later, in the street, Helen asked their escort, 'They were talking about me?' — having heard
Fan Kwei
and
Kuniang.

And Miss Prata had laughed and nodded: 'They were marvelling, yes, at the Foreign Devil's hair.'

In Japan, Benedict said, 'He'll find you changed.'

'In what way, changed?'

'With thinking of him.'

Leaving Brian Talbot to his lunch in the common room, Leith loped across the spongy upward ground into which the weightless house seemed, that day, to be scarcely set. When he came in shrugging the storm from his shoulders like any Westerner, and slapping his cap against his leg, his coat was at once removed by light hands: a gesture seeming to relieve coat as much as owner. But the house itself would not enclose him, or identify. Translucent structures are not welcoming in cold rain.

The day had been unfortunate, all omens adverse; and the man himself at odds with the eagerness that quickened his step.

It was now, however, that his luck — if that's what it was — turned.

As Helen was the first to realise that he had come, their instantaneous glance was not observed. Her parents had left the table for confabulations elsewhere. Beside her, Benedict's empty chair was the sole place vacant. As if this were not enough, just as Leith reached her side, a great fireball cracked over the house with such force that one of the fragile women serving fell to her knees, keeping hold of the dish she had been handing; and stayed so, a stunned supplicant, while guests rose from table to help her, unclear whether the explosion itself, or fear of it, had struck her down.

The man therefore walked through detonation and striped darkness, past a kneeling woman and scrambling guests, to the only figure who remained seated. How desolate, had she not been there.

He sat down, took her left hand, which was nearest, and released it. That morning, in a past life, he'd imagined saying, 'And how have you been, my dear?' — something of the benevolent and neutral kind. And now did say exactly that; which came forth to them as the most exalted question in all the articulate world.

A new table, of Occidental height and material, was glazed in wipable grey. On this, dishes and implements, and feathery amber flowers, had been placed with such accuracy as to confer, by mere transforming human intention, some opaque beauty.

They should now say something, for, though thunder persisted, the room was coming out of its swoon. The kneeling woman had been helped away (and where to, in those prismatic spaces?). The diners recomposed themselves. Leith was greeted, he was introduced. The historian Calder, himself back from a journey, came round the table to ask questions about besieged Peiping. And doing this, thoughtlessly propped himself between man and woman, providing tweedy shelter. From happiness, Helen scarcely ate; while Leith went hungrily through a coiled sea creature, fixed in seaweed, that he might otherwise have found inedible.

When they got up, he asked her about Benedict. 'I must see to my stuff. Then shall I come round?' Outdoors, in the squelching world, rain had drawn off into purpled sky; green smells were sharp, chilly, wet, delicious.

He collected his belongings and the waiting mail — regretting that there could be no envelope now that moved him. In his own room, he stowed things rapidly away, as if overdue in the very place where he had now arrived. When he then stood still, his hands resting on the blotter of his table, he could feel again the motion of the ship in the morning's storm.

When he reached their little parlour, Benedict was standing near the door, supporting himself with one hand on the lintel and with a cane held in the other. There was the small shock of finding the boy on his feet, and the expected pang at his deterioration.

'Takes you aback, to find me upright. A sense of imposture. If one thing improves, another worsens.' Ben's speech was growing difficult to understand. He said, 'There are so many things to go wrong with the human body. When people are well, it's a miracle of coordination.'

Leith said, 'If men had devised it, it would never have worked at all.'

Ben was wearing, over one of his dark gowns, a grey woollen wrapper.

'You've become a sage, Ben.'

'It's just the shawl.' There was a play of light and shadow, and Helen coming from her room.