The Great Fire (28 page)

'Yes, yon's All Hallows, and a sorry sight.'

Charred stump above smashed wall.

Childhood visits to the Tower had usually begun with All Hallows. ('All Hallows
Barking
,' his grandmother made a point; and the child, knowing nothing of parent abbeys, conjured a ferocious dog.)

'December 1940, that would have been. A rare rumpus, with only the Christmas truce.' The car was almost idling. 'Funny, them and us, the both of us at our Christmas dinner.' The prayers and hymns, the same God-is-Love. By 'funny' he meant 'insane.' 'Well, they pounded us. And got it back with interest. When we might've all lived peaceful.'

'I agree.'

The next event, on its rise, was the Monument.

'And here you've got your highest point in London.'

'Can it still be there?' The passenger wound down the window. He had forgotten the dimensions, or discounted boyhood memory. The plinth alone seemed vast as a building. A family was standing back to assess the height of the column; wondering whether to ascend: their loitering a signal of peace. Aldred recalled the climb, the counting of steps. ('Three hundred and
ELEVEN
!' his cousin had shrieked on a last gasp.) Emerging on a parapet topped by gilded flames, to the panorama of all their confident world: towers, domes, temples, and elastic river.

'Had our own Great Fire since then.'

'Indeed.'

They skirted, then, the plateau of grit and grasses around St Paul's. The streets had filled, and vibrated, with buses, lorries, bicycles, and with the shifting crowds no longer dressed for battle: pale scissor legs of pale women; dark, peremptory footsteps of men keeping time to their furled umbrellas. Narrow streets once lightless at midmorning stood bare, now, from the fiery displacements. Rubble and even litter had been cleared away, leaving a poignant neatness.

Leith had been booked in to a hotel in Piccadilly, towards the Park Lane end. And there, with Carr still informative and Green Park in cold glory, his luggage was unloaded.

'No one to meet you?'

'I wanted an hour to myself.'

'Bit of peace and quiet, eh. We all need it.'

'In any case, you've given me a thorough welcome' — entering into the fiction of his foreignness, and nearly believing himself a stranger. And handing a ten-shilling note.

Carr came to attention. 'You'll find we British rather reserved at first. But once you break our ice we're a warmhearted lot.'

Beyond revolving doors, the lobby opened into an atrium where Crown Derby and soft scarves were displayed, for export only, in vitrines. At the desk, he told the receptionist, 'I'll go to the room before lunch.'

'They've finished serving, sir.'

His watch said one-forty.

'They stop serving at one-thirty.' Her eye fell on the red ribbon, and she turned to a cherub in monkey jacket: 'Ask whether an exception might be made.'

As Leith went into the restaurant, small puddings were being distributed, and slivers of a bevelled cake. A solitary water ice, pale pink, was carried past him on a silver tray. An ice so delicately insubstantial, so smoothly chastely pink, so exactly flush with its silver rim, that he recalled it for years as an emblem of re-entry.

Two brittle chops were brought, elaborately frilled. The restaurant, lukewarm, was of good height and size. Overhead, plaster garlands converged on a chandelier. Thick blue carpet and velvet curtains contributed to a hush in which tiny collisions of spoon and china were magnified; as was, scandalously, any high voice, male or female, from the remaining diners — who wore good, serious dark clothes, and, in the case of women, hats. In general, the women were pretty. Giving up on a desiccated chop, Leith looked — his mere glance being taken, here and there, as molestation — thinking of Carr and of the pink and silver concoction. Once you break our ice.

Conduct had kept chaos at bay. He wondered if it might be abandoned now, as inconclusive.

'Unfortunately, sir, the savoury is off. Coffee is now being served in the lounge. Tea will be served between four and five, in the Brummell Room. A buffy lunch is offered on Sundays.'

He collected mail from the desk. Helen not having this address, he couldn't expect the only letter greatly wanted. Yet experienced, as he was taken up in the lift, a sense of dashed hopes.

In the room, he began on his correspondence. There were two scrawled pages from Norfolk, from his mother, telling him how best to come. At the end: 'That I'll see you within hours.' There was a note, from Regent's Park, from Aurora, to whom he had cabled. 'I'll expect you, then, about seven.' There were messages and postcards and books from friends, and a pair of official envelopes concerning his work. He took up the pages in his mother's writing and put through a call to Norfolk. While he was waiting for the call, the cherub from the desk came to the door — 'Flahs f'ew' — with a box of hothouse flowers packed in damp newspaper and sent that morning from the country by his godmother.

He took the flowers to the bathroom and sprinkled them. He thought he would carry them to Aurora, since they would hardly survive tomorrow's journey. When the call came from Norfolk, mother and son were both kind, composed. As right as it could be — so he, at least, thought. Spontaneity would begin, if at all, at home. Home was no longer parental: the property had been willed to him, the rooms were, on paper, his own. It would be his mother's house, of course, forever — unless Helen could, over time, make it hers. If she had managed that with a prefabricated hut in the hills of Japan, she might pull it off with a stone monument by the North Sea.

He meant to go out and walk while light lasted and, struggling into his coat, went to the window, where the world was crammed and coloured with buildings and bare branches, posted with flagstaffs and steeples, and animated to the grey horizon by an imagined milling of men, women, and machines. And by those many, like himself, drawn in again, after war and wanderings, by the magnet of a capital. The view of streets made him wish that he had not left the choice of the hotel to others. Not having cared to specify, he now found himself in this citadel — as if, at a party, he had been saddled with the bore. It was long since he'd been in such an upholstered world, where quilted coverlets and damask hangings counted for a great deal; where cretonnes, carpets, kapok were deployed to absorb the shocks of existence — and had possibly, in recent memory, saved lives.

Leaving the hotel, he walked into the park, turning back to look at the ruins of fine houses ranked along Piccadilly. The Queen's Walk boundary was formed by a grim palisade, once the dwellings of the wealthy: wreckage on whose boarded window bays placards announced repair or demolition. In small forecourts, masonry was restrained by wire netting. In derelict gardens, green shoots, which should have been touching, were forlorn. Those ravaged houses, which had been, whenever Leith passed them in his youth, engrossed in their own charmed lives, had lost their luck.

He walked up and down the row, then turned into the arcade and headed for the Strand.

When he came back, at evening, heat was mumbling in the cold radiators. Curtains had been closed, there was the scent of flowers now arranged in vases. The coverlet had been removed from the bed, which had been turned down. As a precaution against power failure, a candle in ceramic holder was on the bureau: yellow candle of the spiralled kind, with the look of very old marzipan. Leith, who was chilled, and for the moment tired, was glad of it all, and forgot that he had disliked the room. He dropped his newspaper on a table, unlatched his luggage, and ran a grey bath. From the bathroom window, which opened with resistant scraping, there was a glimpse, and smell, of terracotta chimney pots grimed by coal fires. The glass steamed, the sill was filmed with soot. Towels were meanwhile warming on an electric rail, there was lavender soap, the tub was vast, and bright brass taps were large as his hand.

As he bathed, and dressed in civilian clothes, he was thinking of the woman with whom he was to dine, not seen in seven years. His father's mistress and, long ago, his own. He was glad to be going to her, rather than to anyone else on this side of the world.

He took the Tube to Baker Street, and walked. The lobby of Aurora's building was dim, frigid, shabby. Flaps of viscous paint hung loose from the ceiling. Walls signalled a historic shattering. Waiting for the same slow Edwardian lift, which worked, by pressure of water, to a clanking of chains, Leith wondered if Aurora, too, might be transfigured — fat, perhaps; slattern or crone. Which led him to ponder his own alteration — the early arrival of a few grey hairs and a general weathering. Then he was at her door, and had her in his arms, while she, in tears, laughed for joy.

'Your hands are cold,' she said. 'You came without gloves.'

It was their code of years ago, from his first arrival at her door.

They sat in the same smaller room, by the fire: 'The only room, at present. The entire place is being redone, imagine the hell.' Her same low voice. The same blaze in the grate; the flowers and whisky. On the walls, blue silk had been replaced by a rippled paper. On the mantelpiece, Britannia was reinstalled, beneath the painting where girls glimmered by a stream. The theatrical brightness had departed; or had existed only in the eyes of youth.

He handed over his damp box of flowers, explaining them. A bottle of red wine was breathing near the hearth. At the opposite side of the room, a gas fire was ineffectual.

Aurora had on a dress of fine black wool, narrow-waisted and gracefully skirted in the new fashion. She was thinner, older, more delicately beautiful. The man said this last word.

'Oh . . .' She pushed back her hair, which was shorter and of a different gold. 'We're all grey now, and undernourished. Or puffy, from scoffing chockies cadged from Yankees.'

'I find you neither grey nor puffy. Undernourished, perhaps. Aurora, how are you managing this?' His father's death.

She looked at him quite a while, and then away. They both thought that she might cry, but she did not. 'There are such fluctuations, you know. Grief, grievance, disbelief. Tenderness. Remorse.'

'I think you have little reason to feel guilty in this, Aurora.'

'Not guilt. Remorse. Rightful regret. Responsibility. Don't try to take that from me, Aldred — one of the ways we come to know ourselves. As I discover. People tell you that time will help — they have to say something. They don't realise that one dreads time, the diminution. One doesn't want to get over it.' She said, 'He and I — we saw each other less these last years. He didn't come to town very often, and naturally I could not go there. I resented, more than before, the marginal aspect of my life — his centre having become, more and more, the house in Norfolk, the odd bleak place, your mother.'

'I don't know if you ever saw the house.'

'Yes. Three times. Your mother was away. Once, in fact, and this is shameful, she was in hospital. He wanted me to see it, where he lived and wrote. And I was curious, although not happy about it. It added, obviously, to the sense of exclusion.' She said, 'When he came back from Greece two years ago, he was not just older, but aged. I should have been more attentive to that. I felt that he was always the difficult one, we were all anxious for him — whereas I would have liked, by now, to have his concern. The last time — it's five weeks ago — he was kinder, more loving to me. He came here as usual, and then we went out to lunch — he liked to do that, a little celebration.'

Came here as usual, and then we went out. They had lain down together, unknowing, for a last time.

'I went to the train with him, I didn't usually do that. Small, silly thing to be glad about. But one doesn't always know what one will be glad about, later on. Or sorry for, or misremember. She said, 'In a minute or two, I'll get dinner.' Took his hand, and released it. 'It seems very natural, to have you here.'

He had brought a package for her, of Eastern spices and rices. 'You used to like these things?'

She set them in a row, fingering their glossy reds and yellows. 'Even the jars are fiery. From the warm side of the world. At the Ministry, we used to play the game of what we'd eat after the war: I said, freshly ground pepper.' In an unlikely episode, Aurora had spent a year at the Ministry of Aircraft Production. 'Oh, the Ministry. Oh, the deathliness, the pettiness, the squalor.' She smiled, as one could now smile, at the bare idea. 'Others being worse off, you weren't supposed to complain.' With satisfaction, she added, 'I did, though.' She put the spice jars back in their wrapping and blew them a kiss. 'It was in the term of Stafford Cripps, at the Ministry. Cripps had been pushed out from higher political ground and was bearing up nobly. And that set the tone of endurance.' She said, 'Endurance, our national god, may be running out of steam at last.'

Leith had also brought her a circlet of carved jade, in the colour called kingfisher. Aurora gave him a small wrapped book. He said, 'I walked to St Paul's this afternoon.' He got up and, going to the fire, looked into the lovely picture. 'What happened to John Bull?'

'We forgot to pack him, and he got blitzed.' Aurora said, 'So you've seen the town. The clearing away has made it starker. Put it in the past. When you were here, in '45, rubble still provided a sort of immediacy.'

'Or I was too sunk in my own rubble to take things in. The churches, every one of them a ruin.'

'Yes. Poor God.'

From Fleet Street he had turned off into the passage for St Bride's and sat awhile in the broken churchyard.

She said, 'I suppose it means the end of monuments. Hard to imagine fresh triumphal arches, war memorials, new equestrian statues.'

'For one thing, we might be backing the wrong horse.'

She suddenly said, 'I hated missing you, when you were here that May.'

'A weird time all round.'

'It was when I was at Truro, staying with poor Mummy.' She said, 'I never met your wife.'

'Perhaps you will, one day.'

She noted but did not take up the ambiguity. She was looking up at him. 'You've become a bit formidable.'