The Great Fire (30 page)

'I'm glad,' he said, 'to be a grand occasion.'

Standing, she said, 'So you've seen Aurora, and now have come to me. I suppose that when a man returns, it is usually to women.'

'Aurora said, So many Penelopes.' He knew that she longed to ask, Is there someone you love? If she did, he could imagine telling her.

She said, with her newly tentative look, that she had prepared his father's room for him. This was a bedroom, adjoining a study, where Oliver Leith had slept after working, as he often did, into the night. The bedroom had a fireplace that, sharing the flue of the fire in the study itself, created a warm apartment. Both rooms had been, of all the house, least congenial to the boy Aldred, and least known.

'You can always change. The house is yours.' Standing close to him, she said, 'When I told you that I'd like to make it a headquarters, I understand that you might have different ideas.'

'Of course not, how can you think that?'

'Things may change. You might want to remarry.'

He said, 'I might. Even so, some things don't change.'

In the cold hall there was a large chrysanthemum in a willow-pattern cachepot: Japanese, with fringed silvery flowers like shooting stars. His mother had taken advice on it from a man at Kew.

'I'm so pleased that you like it. I thought it might remind you of Japan.'

Everything reminds me of Japan.

'Because here we have nothing in the garden, what with the long winter and the terrible storm. And it's too late for my hellebores.'

He smiled. 'At this moment, you seem unchanged.'

'I am changed, and much older.' No coquettish expectation of denial. 'While you, too, Aldred, are gready altered.'

'Aurora said the same.'

'A man of distinction.' Acknowledging, with small smile, the unknown that was his mind and life.

As they went to table, she said, 'Some letters came for you. They're in your room.'

In his father's study, the desk had been cleared of its previous life and there were letters on the blotter. The chagrin at finding nothing from Helen would have been childish had it not been so entirely adult, and he wanted to cry out to her immediately at the unreliable address a world away. He knew that she would have written, and that her letter might arrive — as it did — in the morning. Meantime, for both of them, the different, irreversible events were already crowding between.

The fire was lit in each of the two rooms. He must ask his mother about wood, which must be difficult and expensive, and of which they should lay in a store.

He turned the lamp out in the study, the room becoming kinder by firelight. In the bedroom, there were more books, there were pictures, and a crimson cushion on a seat by the window. He recalled that this segment of the house faced south. He sat on the bed, where a warm dressing gown had been put ready. His battered bag had been unpacked.

The bookcase nearest to his hand was filled with editions and translations of Oliver Leith's own works, the novels that, read by millions, had brought him fame and an aura approaching notoriety; and had made a rich man of this son — who, for ten years now, had scarcely used or needed money. Within reach, there was an early book:
A Light in Troy,
which Aldred must have read long ago. He saw that the whole shelf was given over to his father's most youthful works, some of them published before his own birth. Reading them now might arouse sympathy or propose explanations. He didn't extend his hand to those clues.

When he was ready for bed, he found that the sheets had been warmed with a hot-water bottle. He lay looking around the walls, in this room where he had seldom previously sat, let alone lain down. The two best paintings in the house hung here: a seventeenth-century Italian scene, all greens and blues, and a stark seashore of 1820 by the watercolourist of the region. There was a mirror, French, not large, in a redgold frame. The floor was completely covered by a neutral carpet, which was overlain by two Persian rugs. The room was agreeable, and might be coaxed into intimacy.

His final sight of his father had occurred here, on the eve of his departure for the East. He was leaving before sunrise next morning, and had come to say goodbye. Oliver was lying on his bed, reading. His shins were bare and pale between slippered feet and paisley dressing gown. His son could not remember having seen his father's naked legs before, unless in childhood, at the sea, when they would have been brown, virile, unwithered.

Oliver, closing his book, had made a motion to get up, which the son prevented. Aldred sat in the chair, of a worn Siena colour, that stood now in its same place by the window. He did not draw chair to bedside, which would have created an invalid atmosphere; but for the first time was conscious of seeming to preside over his father's decline: the warrior son, back from the battle, freshly setting forth on his adventures, saluting the enfeebled parent. All such impressions being reciprocal, Oliver himself would have felt it. And was, that evening, his most astringent self, bitter about the hemisphere his son was electing to leave, sardonic about the East in tumult. Devoid of private reference. When Aldred got up to go, his father rose at once, swinging his feet down vigorously to earth and shaking hands — all the while with a hard glittering stare. Uttering dry unfeeling words: 'Good luck, then . . . Look forward to hearing . . . Let us know if you need . . Out of the question to imagine that testy indifference as a disguise for affection or concern.

The son had gone away with a brief accustomed ache at his heart.

It came to him now that his father's legs, exposed below the knee, had been mottled with an irritation commonly called crackle — a dry peeling usual in old people in harsh winters. And that he'd averted his eyes and mind from this ordinary pathetic detail, which helplessly touched him.

Through his mother, he might gain slow knowledge of this man.

Lying back on the warm pillow, he realised that he'd never been aware of the ceiling of this room, where plaster arabesques were owed to a graceful nineteenth-century redecoration. His father's restless eyes would have travelled times without number over these leisurely loops and cursives. Aldred Leith recalled beams and bamboos under which he himself had slept, and the swollen flaps of wet canvas. There had been, often, the visible constellations; and the dangling lightbulb of some drear hotel, with aureole of insects. Years earlier, abroad, on painted vaults and cupolas, the coloured, humanistic, superhuman scenes. And the coffered rosettes, overhead, of the tiny room where John Keats died.

And, only now, a first sight of this pale paternal roof. Aurora had seen this. It was weird to wonder whether his mother had, even in earlier years, slept here. He could scarcely remember the look of his parents' room, their bed. Who could know how their love had lately appeared to them, which seemed to have languished long ago? One could be wrong about such things; about almost everything.

Helen would sleep here. He would write and tell her.

He put out the lamp. Firelight, dwindling, might have been the only light in the house. The rocking of the long plane flight, returning, did not trouble him. Outdoors, the wind was rising from the North Sea, at times with heaving force, or else with high sounds like a twanging of wires. He knew that in bitter weather men went out in punts at daybreak to gather the reeds and sedges of nearby marshes — for reeds, which could be high as a man and cut cruelly, were plucked more easily from water that was frozen ('frawn,' they said in dialect). Converted to thatch, the reeds provided a living, and immemorial shelter. In youth, he had gone at times in the punts with the men, coming back blue, like them, with cold and, like them, muttering, 'Oi'm frawn.'

These things, too, he would tell her — and was doing so as he fell asleep in his own house; back from the warm side of the world.

His mother was answering letters of sympathy in a small, serious room called the office, which was near the front door. Having kissed her, he went to the kitchen to ask for his breakfast. In a corridor, there hung that portrait of the young geologist who had not yet become Aldred's father: a picture that had aged for the better. The kitchen itself was large and lofty, with a big strong central table. Much as remembered, but in need of painting. An elderly housekeeper was busy at the stove. Turning the heat carefully down, and wiping her hands on a white towel, she came to shake hands: 'It's Mrs Castle, sir.' Her face was familiar, but unduly aged. Seeing him hesitate, she smiled: 'You're perhaps mistaking me for Jessie, who was here in your time.' Jessie, a much younger sister, had joined the Land Army in 1941 and married a Polish exile from the Pioneer Corps.

In my time. My mother had said it also. As if he himself were some returning aged retainer. It was as Aurora had told him, he'd expected to find them all in their places, waiting.

She said, 'I'm just filling in for a while. It's good to see you, sir. Welcome back. I'm sorry about your father, a grand gentleman. Sad for your mother, after all the years. Losing your life's companion, I know what that is.' She asked what he would like for breakfast, and where should she bring the tray, and he said that he would eat here, at table, unless he was in the way.

'What time does the post come?' He hadn't wanted to ask his mother.

'Round about now. The old postie's retired, it's a lad now, brings it on a bike.'

She brought tea and toast, which he ate near an old coke stove that was opaquely, pinkly burning. He sat in a cane-bottomed chair that had come, he thought, from Italy. From time to time, the heavy door, which led into a grassed yard, swung back on a draught of cold, damp, delicious early air, letting in some younger person whom he did not recognise, but who nodded to him with curiosity before going about business elsewhere. There was a hiss of broth and onion from the stove, an odour of smouldering coke, and an age-old drift of humidity from worn flagstones, wrung-out dishcloths, and a rack of tea towels drying overhead. There were his mingled sensations of estrangement and belonging, which for the time being conferred exemption.

Mrs Castle brought him a rasher of ham and an egg. He wondered what sacrifices were being incurred for his sake. Perhaps this was the last of someone's ration — last bag of coke, last onion. He had brought excellent teas with him, and other exotic supplies.

He waited for her letter. He'd shown her the ruined streets, she'd come with him to see Aurora, had been on the train, in the lorry, at his mother's side; in his bed. Would have been in this kitchen: her flushed cheeks and bright strange eyes. Ah God, how far she is, how far we inseparably are.

The yard door was flung open by a boy of about twenty, who was not the postie, but who, fair and muscular in a blue windjacket, let down from his shoulder a ragged hessian sack bulging with chopped wood. Mrs Castle, saying, 'Wait a bit,' dragged out a scarred canvas sheet, which the youth took from her and spread on the flagstones.

Aldred got up and shook hands. 'I know you.'

'It's Dick Laister, Mr Leith. He was a little lad when you left for the war.'

Laister, unlacing the bag, began drawing out split logs. All this had happened before — yet the boy was not of an age for it.

'Your father, wasn't it? — used to bring us the wood.'

'That's it, yes.' The wood was being methodically brushed off, aligned. There was an enclosed room, disused pantry, where it was stacked, trimmed, made presentable for the drawing room. 'Dad got a wound in the war.'

Quietly, Mrs Castle: 'Dick's father lost his feet.'

'Was it a mine, then?'

'No, frostbite. He joined the merchant navy. Did the convoys to Russia, Archangel. They were sunk in the Arctic, he was in the lifeboat. Four survivors, out of eight ships.' Kneeling, glancing up from the logs. 'He's at home, same place, near Norwich. But my mother died. He's got demoralised.'

'Would he see me?'

'I think he'd be glad.'

'I remember him as quite a young man, when I was a child. When I was grown, you'd come along with him, a little chap.' Towheaded, wordless, watchful.

'When I was a nipper. For the moment, I'm just helping out.'

Temporary people, visiting from their changed world. Extra help called in for his return, or for his mother's mourning: civil, easy, independent.

Mrs Castle said, 'Dick's finished his military service.'

'What's next, then?'

'I got a grant, through the army, to study biology. I'm only home for a couple of weeks. Then I'll be at Aberystwyth.'

'Can you make out, with the grant?'

'Just about. It's not like the old days; the government helps us, since Labour got in.' Scarcely any belligerence in this: Laister knew that he was speaking to an enlisted man.

Aldred shifted his chair to look at the logs. These were among earliest memories: the heavy loads dragged in out of evening air, or out of rain, to dry in the warm kitchen. The tarpaulin spread, and the pieces brushed off roughly, one by one. Loose bark, wood dust. The kindling struck off and set aside. The child, who was himself, squatting silent on the periphery, peering into shapes, textures, colours; the mottlings and dapplings. The scrubby bark, coruscated, or the smooth angular pieces like bones. Forms arched and grooved like a lobster, or humped like a whale. Dark joints, to which foliage adhered like bay leaves in a stew. Pinecones, and a frond of pine needles still flourishing on the hacked branch. And the creatures that inched or sped or wriggled out, knowing the game was up: slugs, pale worms, tiny white grubs scurrying busily off as if to a destination. An undulant caterpillar, and an inexorable thing with pincers. Or the slow slide of an unhoused snail — the hodmedod, as they called him here — revisiting the lichens and pigmentations and fungoid flakes that had clung to his only home — freckled growths dusted, seemingly, with cocoa; red berries, globules of white wax. Wet earthy smell, forest smell. The implements set aside; the elder Laister stern with him: 'Dawn't tooch the axe. I'm warning you.' There had been an older man from elsewhere, who tipped him a wink: 'Mind out, now, me little loover.' Dick Laister's grandfather.