The Great Fire (33 page)

'I made the trip here alone, my dear, soon after I was widowed. That was early in 1914. The year having become an epoch, and dreadful, one forgets that it was largely passed in peace. Elinor was in the south of France. She had fallen in love with a Frenchman, a landowner from the Var, and his parents said, "Stay." So she remained. The idea was that they should come to know one another. The delay, in which I myself was instrumental, proved fatal. A decrepit old house they had: the
mas,
as they call it — handsome but not comfortable, like the man himself. Who was killed that October, at the Ypres salient. And Elinor stayed on in the Var.'

Elinor Fry came back, impassive, with a large teak tray.

'How good, Elinor, the smell of that tea. It must be a new caddy.'

Miss Fry, seated, told Helen, 'There's an importer —'

'The only one,' put in her mother.

'— on Customhouse Quay, upstairs, in a room without windows.'

'He is quite concealed. Elinor found him through those people who rent out the fruit and flowers.'

'The Briggses.'

They all smiled.

'This man has pâté and interesting preserves. Such small pleasures must diffuse themselves by stealth at Wellington. The Scots heritage is strong: mortification of flesh and spirit.'

'Mother, surely an exaggeration.'

'I am half Scots myself, and may say so. My mother was a MacPherson, from Fife. How good these patties are, Elinor.'

Helen said, 'Everything's good — a feast. High tea.'

'My dear, not quite. High tea, to be correct, must include meat — pressed tongue, at the very least, or smoked fish. It should include, we used to say, that which has drawn breath. A piquant expression. Ham sandwiches can scarcely qualify, still less sardines. Our present cakes, too, are of a somewhat frivolous kind for a genuine high tea. All are made by Elinor, with the exception of the frothy one, concocted by our Italian maid and called
zuppa inglese.
Said to be modelled on trifle — if one blob may serve as model for another. Elinor, now we need hot water.'

When her daughter had departed, Mrs Fry resumed, 'To have been on earth, merely, during the First World War is to have experienced Hades. Afterwards, everywhere, the climate of mourning. In France, where I would visit Elinor in her slavery down in the Var, it was a world in tears. It was that, I daresay, set me to thinking of coming home — not to this country, which was itself grieving, but to this house, which in memory had remained a shelter. I am saying, Elinor, that I put it to you, in 1927, would you come with me?'

'It was a venture,' said Elinor, returning. 'I was ready for something of the kind.'

'Of the kind! A removal to New Zealand has no kindred.' She said, 'Elinor, however, had nothing to lose but the drudgery of staying where she was.'

'I had learned to be of use.' Elinor, in her composure. Not difficult, however, in her case, to imagine youth and wild weeping.

'She had remade that house in France: rugs, furniture, the very pictures, retrieved from ancient neglect. Garden, orchard — even pigpen — became beautiful. There was an
allée,
of indescribable romance, where peacocks walked at evening, going up at dusk to roost in the cedars.'

'I had nothing to do with that. There were peacocks long before my time.' The daughter reached again for her work, extending the smooth arm that had carried swill to pigs. 'I never changed the growth of that path, which was sublime. As to the rest, the work was a satisfaction.'

'She had learned to care for things.' Some emphasis on the word.

'For their own sake,' said Elinor. 'Not from acquisitiveness.'

The mother gestured grandly, in the first such movement of her hands. 'Everything here is of her creation. Repair especially is her genius.'

'I enjoy, simply, what is well made.'

The mother said, 'It is the need to love. Balked of love, women will turn to religion, to nursing, to pets and plants, to things inanimate. My daughter's generation was cut off from loving by the Great War. "Thy sword hath made women childless," says the Bible.'

Miss Fry had the sewing box on her lap.

'In the dreadful aftermath, one found those women teaching in the schools, working in the hospital wards. For some, perhaps, life even gained in meaning, they were spared certain other cruelties. But that is hypothesis, whereas the denial of love is fact.'

'But the men,' said Helen. 'It was the men who died.' Her man, who might have died.

'They were deluded,' said Elinor Fry, 'by the craving for action. These outermost lands, in particular, promised no other experience, offered no other escape. They did not call it death, they called it action. Killed in action. Killed escaping.'

The girl put her cup down, with trembling hand. 'It's in Thucydides. That the young men longed to see far places and couldn't believe that they might die.' Helen, who had been indistinct, was recovering line and colour; her hair, having dried, fell loose and fair. She looked herself — the self that had been, and was yet to be. 'All the youth of Athens was drawing the map of Sicily on the ground. In imagination, they were already conquerors.'

And Mrs Fry, but languidly: 'In their thoughts, most men are conquerors.'

Mother and daughter were thinking, with quiet sighs, The Sicilian expedition, the Dardanelles, the Ypres salient, the Somme. While the girl wondered, When shall I sail? — and in her mind sketched the map of the world.

The mother, with a second gesture, appeared to indicate the heavens.

Elinor Fry said, 'A tremor.'

Overhead, the lamp swung lightly on its three brass chains. In the grate, the white-hot eggs collapsed in ash.

The vibration, infinitesimal but absolute, passed through the room, and on, on through all the decorous suburbs: shivering some plaster, fracturing an ornament or two; and bringing down, in a parlour in Thompson Street, a dim painting of Mount Egmont.

'I should like something more,' said Mrs Fry, 'but cannot think what it might be.' As dishes were assembled, she went on, 'We might read the passage this evening, Elinor, in Thucydides.' Having closed her eyes as if to doze, suddenly said, 'They are more frequent this year,' in reference to the earthquake.

Walking home in rain, Helen Driscoll thought, I didn't enliven them: it was all the other way. Their world of women, the pure room, and how the calm daughter held her own with the swift mother. Although the bishop had been commended, husband and father had gone undescribed. Women's lives, suspended in the monstrous summer of 1914. But Mrs Fry had laughed with the laugh of a merry girl, and Elinor had used the word 'sublime.' And the earthquake, discounted.

She would write of it to him, that same evening. There was also something of her own: she had not expected to become curious at the end of the world, within her own suspension. She wished there were somewhere else to go instead of home.

She would be questioned as to the event, the house, the eccentric mother. To all of which she would reply, 'Beautiful' — or with some other ostentatious evasion.

When Elinor Fry put away the dishes, she sat again in her chair. She knew — Mrs Driscoll being vocal on the subject — of the girl's infatuation with some public man on the far side of the world. She had spent some time considering what small alleviation might be made. The two women agreed that Helen, who had glimmered into life at the last, should come again, preferably on another Sunday — 'A day,' in Mrs Fry's view, 'when all need rescue.'

If her daughter felt that rescue might be welcome on any day of the week, such concepts had long since become impersonal, unless in the case of others. When her mother said, 'Let us not read tonight, after all, about the Sicilian expedition,' she agreed, and took up her crimson work again from habit. Later, however, she sat with idle hands and thought of matters, noble or terrible, that were known to her alone. And of how, at evening, the peacocks parading in the
allée
were led by the eldest, the doyen, who would one day be supplanted, by a young challenger, in a ritual duel to the death.

When they roused themselves to go upstairs, as they had done at that hour for more than twenty years, Mrs Fry remarked, 'Perhaps, at this moment, little Helen is writing her love letter.'

'I do hope so,' said Elinor Fry.

20

Aurora had a close-fitting black hat with a turned-back veil that touched the nape of her neck and cleared her brow. She was squinting at the menu, not having liked to put on glasses.

Aldred said, 'So pretty, Aurora. The men of Kenya will run wild.'

'I'll report.' She said, 'On that subject, and since we won't see each other for three months, I might ask you —' But she faltered.

'Whether there is a woman in my life?'

'Just that.'

'There is, yes.'

'Will the wedding keep till I get back?'

'It must. There are difficulties. I've wanted to tell you.'

'She's either married or very young.'

'She's not quite eighteen. And lives, for the moment, in New Zealand.'

'No one lives in New Zealand for a moment. Parents averse?'

'Very.'

'Do you have a photo?'

Leith, bringing out his wallet, handed a small picture taken by Tad Hill.

Aurora said, 'No one has a right to look like that.'

They smiled, touched hands. Ordered food and wine. He put the picture away.

She said, 'Will you go and get her?'

'I think of it every day. Time is supposed to pass, then she should come here.' He said, 'I also seem to have developed a conscience.'

'You always had that.'

For a while they spoke of her own departure. Her flat would be fixed while she was gone: a friend would camp there to oversee things.

She said, 'Look, Aldred, I was seventeen when I married. It's true that Jason was on the way, but we'd have married anyway, Geoffrey and I. Also true that it didn't work, and that Geoff was a drunk. However that may be, one is surrounded by unhappy couples — divorced, separated, shackled together by children — who had the appropriate ages and were sober as judges. Brides who were photographed in
Country Life
flashing their radiance and their rings, and in their right minds. There is no greater lottery.'

Other than war.

She said, 'I can't urge anything, what do I know. Only that you'll regret it always if you don't, and that she'll have to die and reinvent her existence. How long since you last saw her?'

'Two months. She left Japan just as I did. We were together on her last day.'

Aurora asked, 'Will she have a baby?'

He ought to have been shocked, but was not. 'No. We haven't done that.'

'My God.' Then: 'It might have been a solution.'

'I told you I'd developed a conscience. Aurora, she'd have been alone with that, ten thousand miles away.'

He was extremely glad of her company. They were so kind with one another. He was remembering what he had never, of course, forgotten: that during their months as lovers they had spoken of having a child. He would have fathered Jason's successor. Aurora would not consider marrying: 'Derail your life,' she'd said. She was near forty, it was held to be dangerous.

She too, as he knew, was recalling these things. Which led her to say, 'Oliver would not hear of having a child.'

Oliver's son experienced, from labyrinthine love, indignation at the selfish father.

'It makes me feel old,' Aurora said, 'that we can talk this way. As if historic.'

'No. Right and good. No one else can shed this light on us.' He could not bear it that her hand trembled as she stirred her coffee, and he took the spoon from her. 'Can I ask you this — if my father ever knew that you and I had been together?'

'No. You came with impeccable credentials, as Jason's friend.' She said, 'I remember, that day at lunch, when I met Oliver the first time, how you sat back a bit, realising. That was our real parting, yours and mine. I thought I would let you keep —' Hesitated.

'That advantage?' The only one I ever had over him, but mighty.

When they left, he put her in a taxi. They would speak by phone, she was sailing in two days' time. They kissed, and she waved to him, smiling through tears. He was going in the same direction; but, had he got into the taxi, would have gone back with her. There would have been finality — the ritual consummation, as with Moira. Aurora, too, had known this.

When he called her that evening, she said, 'You didn't tell me her name.'

He said, 'Helen.'

Helen. The pleasure of writing this name — and yet how glad I'll be when I can write it less and say it often.

That's the most important of several things I have to tell you. The second is that I've finished my work on China and am busy with the section on Japan. All this will soon be sent for typing, and subsequently to the publisher — the whole being blessed by having ripened under Benedict's bed. The large part, on China, is as good, I think, as I can make it; but seems to have happened in another life — an effect due to your appearance on my scene, and to the terminal stage, which the world now witnesses, of the Chinese war.