The Great Fire (20 page)

In the common room, Tad was sitting at table reading a newspaper, with a plastic tumbler in his fist. Made a motion to get up when he saw Aldred Leith — who raised his hand and went to the rusted refrigerator to fetch a tuna sandwich and a wedge of cheese. They were alone there and sat down together, and Tad poured him a glass of quinine water. Neither said what they might have: Get some work done? or How was Judy Garland? Affability must dissolve and be re-created.

Thaddeus Hill said, 'You've never kissed her.' There was no particular emphasis; and when Leith did not at once reply, he went on, 'She doesn't — didn't — know how to kiss.'

'She's sixteen.' Lopping off a year to make his point.

'She's seventeen, and in love.'

Leith had won. Would not have chosen the word, but there was no other, for the moment. He said, 'She'll be eighteen, and nineteen.'

'My guess is, she'll still be in love.'

Since generosity was in the air, Leith said, 'Much more has to happen.'

'Yes. I don't plan to forget her. I'll stay in touch.' Tad said, 'She's somebody. They both are.' Tad might now have added, 'Great kids,' but refrained.

Leith said, 'That's the first thing that will happen.'

'The boy's death.'

'Yes. In Tokyo I went to see the doctor, the American doctor who interests himself in Ben's condition. I was able to do that without showing my hand — to the parents, that is.'

Tad said, 'The Parents.'

'Exactly. The doctor's all right, a bit callous. More attuned to disease than to boy. Hopes to make a discovery. The disease is little understood. But then, so is the quality of this boy.'

'Doctor could use a little humility?'

'Yes. One fears experimentation — Ben to be kept going as a lab case. The assumption is that Benedict will live some months, even a year. But with such deterioration that he could not stay at home.'

'Wherever home is by then.'

'Home is with Helen.' It was his own discovery. 'One can try to be helpful when that happens.'

'We'll all be split up soon. Ends of earth.'

'The doctor has a clinic in mind, in California. Where he would study what they call the progress of the disease. Helen could not go there.' He said, 'The doctor has a grant to write about this. It may help someone in the end, but not Ben.'

Tad thumped his fist a couple of times against the table's edge. 'Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I should tell you a couple of things. I've asked to be relieved of this Slater assignment. I'll soon be going home. They fingered me for it because I knew some Japanese. For me, it was a chance to come here. I didn't know what I was getting into — which is exactly what you think it is, but worse. Dumb, I guess. In any case, I want out of the army now. Go back to college on the G.I. Bill, get my doctorate, see what comes next. Slater'll give me a black mark — a black mark from these guys being better than the Congressional Medal, from my standpoint.' It occurred to him that this was tactless, but Leith laughed.

'Meantime, there's this. You, I take it, are a British subject. Okay. Then you don't have to talk to Slater, he has no jurisdiction, and I say, Don't do it. It's all in bad faith, whatever you say will be misrepresented, they have their knife into you.'

'Why?'

'Oh — because it's you, because it's China, because you short-circuited the bureaucracy, because you were favoured by that gutsy French guy who died in Paris — yeah, that's the name — whom they call E-Feet, their way of saying Queer. Most of all, because you're clever and decent, and go your own way.' Tad examined the rim of the pounded table: 'I guess I broke this a bit. Or maybe I broke my hand. Slater and Driscoll get together, if that means anything to you.'

'You mean, because of Helen.'

'It would be their way to fault you. She's under age. On the other hand, the Driscolls will soon leave here, taking Helen with them. The boy will be shipped out to California. Driscoll has his eye on a post in New Zealand. He was born there, did you know that? — was taken to Australia as an infant. The post is medical but political, you have to be born in the country to deserve it. These are Driscoll's stepping-stones — Bengal, Kure, New Zealand. One day I reckon he'll just step right off the goddamn planet. Come to think of it, there've been worse ideas than that.'

They got up and shook hands. He said, 'I'll see you. Maybe tomorrow.'

'Thanks for all of this. How was the movie?'

'Don't bother. So goddamn cheerful.' Laughed, waved. 'Lotsa luck.'

Tad brought her to her door: 'This is where I kiss you.' Afterwards he had held her by the shoulders, as if to shake her, wake her. Amiable, exasperated. When he went away, she heard and pictured him loping uphill with his lean Taddish demeanour: musing, bemused. She did touch her lips with the side of her hand — not disgusted or derisive, but distant.

This, then, was the flourished reality: a brute fact, to which loving-kindness was simply, or not even, a preliminary. There had been a screen between her and this. Reality was a wet thick thing alive in her mouth.

It seemed to her something that dogs might do.

She came indoors. Ben slept. Now there would be unshared thoughts, more and more of them — divined, perhaps, but undefined.

Tad had looked at her with the expression of the man Matheson in the lift in Hong Kong: a secret that he was willing her to share, and which should now be disclosed.

Helen undressed, lay down, and slept.

In the night, she got out of her bed and, without lighting the lamp, fetched her new coat and went and sat on the low step, in the setting of the moon. There were planets and cold stars, and the cold quiet. She put the coat around her shoulders and sat, hands clasped over her knees and her chin resting there. She could smell the Pacific, churned up by the storm. Thought how in childhood she had watched the eight-metres and the smaller boats, even the Vee-Jays, sailing Sydney Harbour — whitely, soundlessly, as if unmanned. Only when the regatta veered near shore and the wind blew from that direction, there came, with swish of hull on water, the shouts and curses, the bellowing and bullying about the boom and the cleat and the sheet, and the billowing jib: all the hysteria of manliness. A rush of copper limbs, a thudding of bare feet; and the whipshot thwack of a slackened jib that should have been taut.

Because of the kiss, she might have liked to consider the evening a turning point, momentous. But, with the ill-timed precision of women in such matters, only felt what was lacking. Something that either of them could have put a name to.

Without undressing, Aldred Leith had also slept. He had dreamed of Gigliola, or of a confused Gigliola who was sometimes Raimonda, together with a third woman who was identified but speechless — as the dead are, not always truly, said to be in dreams. Even as he slept, he supposed that he had raised the ghost of Gigliola by telling her story, and as part of his renewed turning to women. From this, he was awakened by desire. The moon was in the room, and he lay contemplating his dream, his body, his intentions: all at that hour unmanageable.

There was Tad's concession, something better than surrender. Tad had kept his possibility in reserve. Aldred himself had said, Much more will happen. Or was it Ginger who'd said that? He remembered how Ginger had said, of his dead wife, 'My poor girl.'

He hadn't told all of Gigliola's story. At the end of the war, he had learnt how she had been shot down in the country road, climbing over a wall in violation of the German curfew: going to meet a boy, younger than she, who'd been shot, also, in consequence. She had dragged herself, dying, to a ditch by the road. At this recollection he exclaimed, and sat bolt upright in his bed.

Raimonda had married a British officer and gone with him to Africa.

In his first days with Helen and Benedict, the girl had started on some verses by the tragic Italian from the Adriatic, loved by Ben. Halfway, her voice had broken. After a pause, she told them, quite collectedly, 'I'll take it up again later. When I've hardened my heart.'

He got up in his crumpled clothes, in which he was used to working at all hours, never understanding why he didn't first undress.

She was standing straightening her spine against the frame of her door.

So nothing need be said, except his name and hers.

'Your second kiss of the day.'

'You saw Tad.'

'He's been our go-between.'

'Why should he tell you?'

'It was in a good spirit. Even sacrificial.' Though not quite.

They arranged themselves on the step. 'There should be words.'

'Say them.'

'We must find them out.' He said, 'If I quoted, you would only finish the line.'

'We need nothing.'

'For my part, untrue.' He passed his arms under her coat, Tad's coat, beneath her upraised arms. 'Does that trouble you?'

'Yes. No. It seems —'

'What?'

'Like the night. I can't explain.' Then she said, 'If the moon came up only once in a hundred years, the whole world would stand watching.'

Leith said,
'La luna calante
,' and fell silent. He withdrew his arms and took her head in his hands.

'Why go?'

'Because you're fourteen and I'm one hundred.'

'Seventeen, and thirty-three.'

'I give you, for the moment, the best answer.' The truth being that you are seventeen and I am not one hundred.

The strain of fatalism had seen him through horrors. In this matter that had from the start depended exclusively on his own judgement, it was new to him that it could not have been otherwise.

The abrupt parting made her childish. They might have stayed all night on the cold step together. She wanted to say, You won't pretend, tomorrow, that it has not been? Abject — but she had observed the cold process men call coming to their senses.

On the following morning, there was a letter from his father.

My dear Aldred,

I was very glad to have your description of Peiping (if that's how they're spelling it these days). Although I've never been in a city under siege, most cities give that impression now, so hard to get in and out of. Aerial bombardment is putting an end to sieges, as to much else. But in Mao's case he need only wait. I'm glad that my Athens book reached you. Thank you for your good words. It's had a fine press, providing an excuse for moralising in the Sunday papers, who warm to their perennial theme of my frigidity. It's selling well in Greece, where it has been banned. A Greek journalist says that I'm trying to drive their (teutonic) royal family into exile. Well, exile is their country. Greece was in bad shape, strenuous. Every road 'kakos dromos,' so one travelled on foot or by donkey; and, at my age, suffering. I'm invited to Belgrade by Broz Tito, and am provisionally accepting for September, if he hasn't been swallowed by the Soviets by then.

What I should like best would be to come in your direction, alas quite impossible. If any chapter is closed for me, it is that of Asia. I follow your own Eastern adventure keenly and look forward to its fruits. You do right, I think, to brood on that astounding scene before it is recast — before it gathers planetary momentum and loses arcane fascination. However, the consciousness of a last time, in the sighting of places or persons, can be a sombre business, which pierces even in youth, and multiplies with age.

At risk of growing maudlin, I might add that I look forward to your return. Iris tells me that you should arrive before spring. Meantime, I'm curious as to how you flesh out this new stage of your life, and hope to hear more — as do Iris and Aurora, who by the way have at last, and amicably, met. A curious coming round of things.

My love ever —

This, which was signed 'Oliver,' was far and away the most feeling letter that the adult Aldred had received from his father. It was written in a sprawling but legible hand that showed no sign of age. Oliver Leith's letters were usually dictated to a machine. Typed up, on a special size of small stationery, by a secretary with whom he had long since ceased to have an affair, they were signed and despatched each day.

Indirection of process favoured the writer's desire to thwart a posterity seeking evidence, beneath the aloof public figure, of the presumably tormented artist who wrote love into books and dissembled it in private life. Such letters — of set brevity, controlled egotism, and laboured goodwill — were seldom of lasting interest. That a covering of tracks might itself be seized on as revelation, the author naturally foresaw; and, once in a while, signing some particularly innocuous batch, would mutter, 'Let them work it out,' as he dropped the pile into a waiting tray. A sense of opposition gave stimulus.

The son's impulse, to reply warmly — before scepticism protectively returned — arose from the letter's portent of death, and even from its seeming acknowledgement of long indifference. A son had not thought to be so easily disarmed.

Dear Oliver,

Your letter touched me.

He sat some minutes with the pen in his hand, before realising that this might be enough.

Of course, the words might strike his father as merciless.

The pen rolled away. Having got up to retrieve it, Aldred Leith walked about the room, vaguely setting things to rights and weighing some conversational addition to his reply; treading softly, for his father's overture was a rare bird that might flap away screeching.

The word 'flesh' characteristically went to the centre of things.

At last he shook his clothes together and went next door.

Benedict was alone. Helen had gone to use a sewing machine in the parents' house. The two men were pleased to be by themselves, knowing she would come.

'Ben, was there ever a time when you felt close to your father?'

Benedict put the crumpled frame of his fingers together. 'You see, my illness came on me early, but not enough to be convincing. My father thought, wanted to think, that I was malingering. There was threatening and shouting, and dragging; and on my part writhing, resisting, and screaming. He was set on my becoming a champion swimmer, took me to Balmoral Baths at sunrise, all seasons, and plunged me in. Derelict wooden piles slimed with green and cruelly barnacled. Fear, humiliation, agony in an ear. I shrieked, he shouted, once or twice it came to blows. Neighbours complained. Finally, mastoid trouble was discovered; there was an operation, also awful. By then, something was irrefutably with me, and he couldn't bear our joint failure — my failure and his; we were saddled with it, one way or another.'