The Great Fire (11 page)

He would not walk over to Helen and her brother. Aurora's tale was not for them. They were taken up with Carlyle, and had reached the atrocious farewells. He had heard the girl, that day, read out the word '
NEVER
!' They had enough on their hands, and in their future.

He sat thinking of the name: Aurora. First heard when he was seventeen or so.

On a Saturday of the 1930s, he had gone to the ballet with a friend called Jason Searle. They had got to know each other in their last weeks of school, having shed adolescence in advance of their peers and made friends as men rather than boys: Jason was the elder, not only for having turned eighteen, but for having already undergone the metamorphosis. Remaining friends, they would soon go to different universities. On that Saturday afternoon, they had seen, in a suburban hall, a trio of duets from great ballets, well performed. As they walked toward Soho, where they were to dine, Aldred Leith had said that the classical ballets would be more poignant if their stories were less defined: 'That is, no facts or names. Who ever heard, for instance, of anyone called Aurora?'

'My mother's name.'

'I beg your pardon.'

'It suits her, actually.' The youth Jason then said, 'I'm rather in love with my mother.'

Jason was an only child. His mother had been deserted — as it appeared, on expensive terms — by Jason's father, who decamped to Kenya when the boy was four. Jason had been 'out' to Kenya three times, finding animals and landscape revelatory; but oppressed by the colonial life ('Boozing can be a bore, you know') and, it might be guessed, by father and stepmother. Jason thought that he might eventually want to live away from Britain, but not in the colonies. At university he became known as both precocious and mature. There was the brilliance, also, of a temperament that generated expectations. As it was, he left the university without taking a degree and travelled at once to Spain. In 1937, Jason Searle died of wounds suffered at the battle of Guadalajara.

Some months after the event, Aldred Leith received a note signed 'Aurora Searle,' thanking him for a letter of sympathy, informing him that Jason had wished him to have certain books and a picture; and proposing an afternoon on which he might call.

At the agreed hour, on a day of bitter cold, Aldred had gone to the house near Regent's Park. He knew the flat, which occupied a floor in a rather grand building; but had never met Searle's mother. Her brief letter, simple and civil, had offered no clue.

He rang at double doors — expecting to be ushered, by solemn servant, to a darkened person in darkened room. She answered the door herself: Aurora, in palish, pinkish tweed and a silk blouse. Fair hair, falling over shoulders. She said, 'How cold your hand is. You came without gloves.' They went into a room that he had never previously seen, smaller than the living room, where walls were covered in moire and chairs in chintz. There were freesias in a vase, and a fire burning. Above the mantel, on which stood a pair of old china figures of John Bull and Britannia, there was a mossy painting of women by a river.

She said, 'Shall we have a nip of something? What do you like?' Speaking low, with a slight inflection that recalled the voice of Jason. Leith saw, however, that Jason's colouring had come from the father. The mother was blue-eyed, and gold.

She put wood on the fire. Body and gestures were lithe and unaffected. Looking for a bottle in a low cabinet, she did not bend but sank swiftly to her haunches, with straight back. She poured, handed, sat down. 'You wrote a grown-up letter. Something few people can ever do.'

'He helped me grow up. He was adult before I was.'

She held her little glass, looking at the fire. 'Whereas he kept me young. I was eighteen when he was born. My youth was spent with him.'

So she is not yet forty; Aldred Leith, who was twenty, saw the small foot and pretty shoe, the slim calf, the fold of soft material at the knee. Her clothes were loose on her, from loss of weight. On a wrist incredibly slender, a little watch slipped about with her movements. She wore no ring.

He saw that she was too young to have died with her son.

She asked about his plans, his interests; and they spoke of the threatened war. Once or twice she quoted Jason — 'Jason thought,' 'Jason felt' — and appeared to do this naturally enough. But the young man understood that she had schooled herself to it, so that the son should not become a closed subject.

He said, 'Jason once told me that he was in love with you.'

He could not have imagined, beforehand, that he would say this quiet, bold, familiar thing, which put them on sexual ground. Callous in his own ears, the words were involuntary; but an approach. And, had she not then lifted dispassionate eyes, he might have added, 'How beautiful you are.'

She was practised in turning imprudence aside. She said, 'The things he wanted you to have are on the table behind you. Won't you look through them?' When Aldred got up, she went on, 'He left a page, it was in his desk here, asking that books and objects go to friends. There were other requests.' The man, with his back to her, a heavy book in his hand, listened to this new, lowered voice. 'And a letter was brought to me, afterwards.' She had meant to say more, but did not or could not.

There were perhaps thirty books, and a small picture in gouache of the Roman Campagna seen beyond angled roofs: the date, 1780, the painter's name unknown to him.

Aurora said, 'How shall I get them to you?'

It was agreed that he would take some things then and there, and return another day. Aurora fetched a bag of canvas twill. Having packed some of the books and wrapped the picture, Leith remained — hesitant, graceless. Aurora lit a lamp. For an instant, above the glow, her face showed discomposed and tragic, and the strands of hair became a splintering. As he hoisted the bag, the phone rang.

The receiver in her right hand, she held out her left in a gesture of goodbye. She was saying, 'Hello . . . Oh . . . Yes, as you like.' He understood from the tone that she was speaking to a man. Releasing her fingers, he went away disconsolate.

Begun with the New Year, their affair lasted into the spring. It was not Leith's first passion, but his first engagement with lion grief and its transformations. Aurora, in an episode that she never afterwards minimised, pursued this evidence of her continued existence. She had a habit of crying in her sleep, which he could scarcely bear for her. A habit, also, of calling Aldred by her son's name, which he did not mind, seeing it as central to their entire connection.

Love could never be, for her, a calculated act. But she observed and understood herself, and soon withdrew. Leith was to study, that summer, in Italy; and she said, 'Italy will soften the blow.' She told him, 'We will see each other always.' But these two were no longer lovers when, the following September, they ran into Aldred's father lunching in a restaurant near Covent Garden.

Ten years later, the son remembered the charming restaurant, charming father; the discreet liveliness around them, some red velveteen luxury, and their own soft talk. How his father, coming up, joining them, was at his best — the elder Leith having only a polarised best or worst, with no intervening tropic of moderation. Rising to the occasion, all three assumed their parts. Aldred was the son; but, sitting slightly back from the other two, perceived what was happening and what would ensue. In those moments, he possessed the event, while his father, with all his seasoned subtlety, was trapped in it, predestined.

Oliver Leith could be, and that day was, most amusing. And then he was handsome, and well known. (They were hardly seated when another diner, unknown to them, came to their table: 'I think you're Oliver Leith? Just want to say, I love your books.') His long face did sometimes, even then, show unkindness. But it was unkindness of the suffering, needful, consequential sort, avid for women's love. He did not so much want a safe haven as the stimulus, rather, of disturbing another's peace. And then, Aurora's femininity was of the kind that seeks, ultimately, to devote itself: in her, as in many women of her time, there was something of the victim. Reading all this, the father drew her on, suspending the ritual show of disbelief that, as far as his son was concerned, had all but annihilated communion.

This, with Aurora, was the most enduring of Oliver Leith's liaisons.

And of hers.

Aldred, in Japan, thought judiciously of his father, who had never cheaply courted fame, yet could not live without it; who, despising sycophancy, exacted submission from those about him. Not a great man, but interesting and singular. Not loving, but seized, even grandly, with the phenomenon of love.

7

'I watch my sister learning Japanese. Our old roles are reversed: I now sit in on her lessons. Concentration fails me. I take in something, but I tire. Meantime, I love to listen. You perhaps foresaw this.' If I had lived, I should have liked to learn all languages, read all books. And be the sensualist I might have been.

Such were the speculations, desolate, voluptuous, that Benedict Driscoll could not forgo.

Helen asked Aldred Leith, 'When you learned Italian, were girls involved there, too?' From shyness, she rarely used his name.

'They were.' He said, 'Should I be more alarmed by your curiosity or my own compliance? The idea was that I should sit the Foreign Office exams, a stiff proposition then. Romance languages were required, that was the least of it. There was a villa above Florence where one could study with a teacher but live
en famille:
the place an enchantment, the owners uniquely lovable, my fellow students few and agreeable. In an hour, one walked into Florence.

'There was also fascism, rife in city and countryside. At night, young men held the gladiatorial battles of an unequal civil war. Up at the house, the head of that family, a lawyer and well known, had lost his livelihood by declining to enter himself in the fascist listings. That was their reason for taking students as paying guests. No. doubt we were watched and reported, but English oddities at Florence were still an old habit, hard to simplify. I went there three times in the course of two years, a strong factor being, yes, the daughters.'

'How many, and what names?'

'Two. The elder, Raimonda; the younger, Gigliola. Yes, they were beautiful. Also, three sons, one of them already conscripted for Mussolini's army in Africa. That was Dario, later to die in Greece.' Leith said, 'This story does not end as well as Charlotte's.'

'We don't know how things went with Charlotte.'

'Benedict, let me keep Charlotte. Let Charlotte be safe and happy.'

And Helen: 'Yes, yes. Charlotte lives happily. Wherever she is. Which of the sisters did you love?'

'We were all in love with both of them. At first I was mad for Raimonda, the more reflective of the two.' Gentle, good, and tender creature. 'Raimonda was, however, spoken for. At weekends, her suitor would arrive, handsome, from Pisa, where he was becoming learned at the university. From Monday to Friday, I was free to yearn after Raimonda.' And to imagine that she, in her maidenly way, felt something in return. 'She was my elder by a year. As summer progressed, my case seeming hopeless, I turned my attentions to Gigliola.'

A laughing, quicksilver girl, with high breasts and sun-streaked hair. 'Gigliola played the flute, and played fast and loose with the lot of us. That first year, I was the last of the foreign students to leave and so had some advantage. Nothing spectacular, unfortunately. Still, she came to the station to see me off.' In a white dress and red sandals. And put her brown arms round my neck and her cheek to my shoulder so that I kissed her ear as the train was leaving and her hair came to my mouth. In a desperation of helplessness and desire, he had felt that impulsive pressure all the way to Domodossola; and sporadically on, across frontiers, throughout an autumn and winter in which his studies drew praise and he continued his friendship with Jason Searle, who was very soon to die; he too, in war.

Having extra money at Easter, Aldred Leith made, with extravagant excuses, an extravagant journey, reaching Florence by train at sunrise. Across from the station, pavements were being hosed, a café was opening up. Workmen were taking their coffee, and coughing and stamping against the cold. At the counter, Leith ordered
caffè corretto,
not because he needed the fillip of cognac but by way of celebration. Through the miraculous dun-coloured streets, shabby, odorous, malodorous, and rumbling with early carts, he crossed the river and walked out, euphoric, to the Scopeti — where, by an ancient causeway, he turned off for his destination and his dear. The chill watery morning grew fine and mild, a countryside glimmered celestial. Entire hillsides of iris, pergolas of wisteria, overhanging fronds of lilac breathed out drops and petals as he passed. In a stone village, by the high historic house where descendants of Machiavelli were stirring, two yoked white cows lumbered past him drawing an empty tumbril and dropping, in unison, their steaming dung.