The Great Fire (14 page)

He woke with the early din of Pedder Street. A thin newspaper appeared under the door. In the bathroom mirror he looked unslept, but had his breakfast and read the paper. The crash at Kai Tak was on the front page, outclassed by a headline announcing, from Canton, Soong's arrival as governor of Kwangtung. On an inner page, the
South China Morning Post
carried a column of provincial cast about new visitors to the colony, where his own name was included, along with that of C. V. Starr, a big player in America's China game.

At eight, having bathed and dressed, and left a message for Peter Exley, Leith went out. In civilian clothes, he was a man in white and grey like many another, part of the illusory continuity. Almost everything he saw and smelt was recognisable, yet had been through the great convulsion. The resumption was an exercise in conviction, which has its own reality. Since childhood, Aldred Leith had been suspicious of reality, the word — having seen that every man had his version.

He walked along the Praya in the sun, pleased by his clean body and clean unsoldierly clothes. The port was in early ferment. He was nudged by a pack of beggars, mostly children, one of whom insistently thrust into his face the undulant head of a paper snake. He spoke to them, and gave some money; there was a squabble, and he walked on. To elude pursuit, turned into Chater Road, where a Chinese usher from the bookshop was taking down long shutters. The universal odour of bookshop, closed all night on the mildews of its ranked treasures, brought a past life before him — as is said to happen in drowning. But how, he wondered, entering and taking up a book, and even breathing it in to sustain remembrance, could one ever verify or explode the myth, except by drowning.

Helen Driscoll is in her eighteenth year.

Seeing him shrug, and smile, the young man in charge came forward: 'Help you, sir?' The educated English youth to be found in such an outpost: dark lock of hair, damp dark eyes, pale complexion. We are never quite well, or pleased, in these places. (Yet Aldred Leith did feel well, that morning, and pleased.) The boyish, prewar sensibility, anachronistic, recalled the pensive photograph on the back of
The Centuries' Poetry.
Leith had long since given the entire set of volumes to Helen and Ben; to Helen.

He bought a new novel by a rising author, about wartime love in West Africa. He already had a military map of the island, but found another — better, because more personal, with old villas and monuments marked: of time as well as place. He recalled that Helen needed a chart of the northern heavens — which the bookshop did not have. On his way back to the hotel, he stopped at Watson's for toothpaste and shaving cream. The same staid premises; but shelves abloom with perfumes from France, lacquer for nails, and pretty concoctions of creams and powders — frivolities unseen for years in Britain, which had much need of a spree. Around the world, survivors were dabbing behind their ears and colouring their eyelids and brushing powder from their bosoms, without apology. They did not need to prove themselves. History, implacable, had done that for them.

In scorched cities, girls were twirling and trilling, and giving velvet glances, in spite of all they knew. They were laying roses on the tombs of lovers.

At the hotel, Peter was waiting. As they took the lift, he said, 'Look, Aldred, it's damnable, but I'm duty officer for the afternoon.'

In the room, Leith put down his packages and showed the map. 'I'm thinking of a long walk. I remember the path. You leave from the Magazine Gap Road and wind over these hills, ten miles or so. It comes down somewhere near Repulse Bay.' With a finger, he traced pale dots. 'It has a name, Sir Cecil's Ride. Sir Cec having been an early excellency.'

'You'll be doing it without the horse.' Exley said, 'If we leave now, I can put you on your road. I still have the car.' They would meet in the evening. Peter saw the package from Kelly and Walsh. 'Can I see what you've got? I could have let you have my copy. The best novel since the war.'

Leith had changed his boots and was filling a flask from the bottle of boiled water on the table. 'So we still carry the same books, Peter.'

Exley was touched. It usually fell to him to be the one who remembered.

They got down from the car on the gravel margin. The track was clear enough, leading through a damp socket of the hillside, and marked by reeds. Of these stalks and fronds, Leith said, 'I think it's sedge.'

'I've never known what it looked like. Aldred, if you're carrying money, better give it to me, and your watch. This is a lonely walk.'

The man said, 'I've made a lot of lonely walks,' smiling to extenuate.

Peter was concerned, as at Kai Tak. 'And keep an eye out for grenades, which are peppered through these hills.' He said, 'I wish I were coming along.'

But Leith, he saw, was glad to go alone; and was, with patience, waiting for him to leave. Exley watched him start out, treading among tangles and brambles on a path littered with small stones and shafts of granite. It would not be a good place to break a foot or an ankle.

Leith amused himself thinking that Peter Exley was the only person in the world who knew his whereabouts; who, having cautioned him about grenades and hatchet men, would in the event have to come and find him. To save his life, in fact. Then they would be quits.

He was aware that he had willed Peter's departure, so that he could walk by himself and need not speak further. There was no irritation in this; only a need for perspective.

9

For that afternoon, Peter presided over a set of military offices, largely empty. The personnel had developed, along with the heat, a rash of excuses — errands, illness, emergencies — during those heavy hours, when it might be imagined that little was taking place through all the somnolent East. The room was unusual in having a shelf of novels; and a shortwave radio, screwed in, as a precaution, to a bracket on the wall. It belonged to a Spitfire pilot, rarely present, who perhaps felt that he had already done his bit, and whose phone calls were exclusively from women, often anxious about the evening.

Exley attended to the few matters brought to him. Those who came and went were easy, civil, passingly companionable. They were able to maintain decorum by knowing nothing of one another.

Peter had brought his Chinese lexicon and a textbook of phrases set by his teacher. As the long orange afternoon drew on, he thought, as he often did, about the rest of his life. A particular cause of this was the proximity of Aldred Leith, with whom he was to dine; and who, knowing his past, might help him read his future.

Long ago, on an evening in Cairo, Exley had told the story of an only child in the genteel suburb of a remote harbour at whose outer escarpments the Pacific surged and pounded. Of Father at his law office and Mother laying the table for his return. Of the uninspired good school where bully boys and mild ones alike prepared for the same timid adulthood. A well-behaved boy, clever in class, brown at the beach — if lacking, in games, the flair of coordination. A fair assortment of friends, and no convinced enemies. Some early sense, ominous, of strength unexercised.

Aged eleven, at a friend's house after school, lolling on a back verandah amid the smells of banked lantana and baked eucalyptus, he flipped pages of the friend's album of secret pictures turned up in a toolshed trunk. There were coloured plates, full page, torn raggedly from magazines or cut painfully from good books. There were undraped women, reclining, and men with them; and a good deal of pale flesh. Something was wrong: nothing was furtive or complicit. He said, 'These are paintings.' He felt they had been presumptuous.

'Beautiful' had been a housewife's word, innocuous: his mother's word for the show of local handiwork at Mosman town hall. Now, in soft countryside, a radiant woman was turned in a dance by a near-naked man, her fine hair and garment, all drifting light as air.

'Can I have this one?'

The chum, name of Kevin, feared some unauthorised indecency. 'You'd better not.'

Still, a beginning had been made. After that, there were books, alarming to his parents and teachers. He could not pronounce the names, at first, that roused his father's hilarity and the neighbours' solemnity: 'Something not right there.' As time passed, the derision of his little circle cooled to sceptical awe. There was apprehension that it might all be leading somewhere.

His parents enlisted a teacher of art, as they might have sought out a neurologist or other specialist in aberration. The man was impressed, but unnerved by the boy's single-mindedness. He thought it would pass with adolescence.

Loneliness grew on him with his relegation to the statelessness of art. There was Europe, remote as Paradise and more convincing. There was France, there was Italy. In the lending library at the junction, the two women in charge — a brawny pair, with cropped hair and tailored shirts — had attached a russet poster to the wall:
ROMA
.
Peter's mother found the atmosphere unwholesome and the spelling affected.

There was the Law. His father had it out with him. Peter was eighteen, they had come unscathed through the Depression. 'I don't begrudge your schooling. We can afford the Uni. But not for the art stuff, son. We don't go in for that in Australia, you'd have to leave the country. Break your mother's heart. I'm counting on you to do Law and join the firm. You can keep the art up, on the side.'

Mother, in weak tears, could feel for him as long as he did not prevail.

He sent away for fine photographs, financed by menial odd jobs embarrassing to his parents. The packages took four or five months to arrive from London or Florence: the fastest mail by fastest ship was two months on the way. Alinari in particular did not have the habit of prompt reply.

He had learned some French at school:
Je m'appelle Pierre, je suis né en Australie
. He bought an Italian grammar. He was studying the Law. Was reading Homer, Hardy, and Tolstoy. He had been for the first time somewhat in love — with minuscule Pattie, who played the viola, and whose fine fairish hair hung, rather than swung, when released, well below her hips. She could sit on it, as the ultimate proof of maidenli-ness. Pattie had the bones of a sparrow, one might see the heart flutter under feathery clothes. Fragile shoulders scarcely bore the tentative weight of Peter Exley's arm.

Peter brought Pattie home to tea, and she arrived smaller than ever, her beige hair in two long plaits. Afterwards, his mother said, 'All her strength's gone into that hair.' His father, on the other hand, favoured the girl having feared, from art history, abominations.

Pattie's birdlike pulsations were reproduced in a self-approving timidity and a voice that barely reached his ear. Like the rest, Pattie assumed that he would outgrow the Great Masters and sought to speed the process with an occasional impertinence, averting unsullied eyes from Titian's
Danae.
The viola was to the good, of course, and the reciprocated attachment. And the hair played its part, though that, too, was colourless.

Pattie, becoming nebulous, evaporated.

The university gave companionship. There were evening classes in art appreciation. Among fellow students, Peter found some literary feeling, some political curiosity. He earned a little money with weekend tutoring; had a stealthy brief affair with a professor's a wife called Norma, who laughed a lot; and a protracted misunderstanding with a student named Hazel, who often cried.

His dread now was to be trapped at the Antipodes. War had broken out in Spain, Mussolini had massacred Abyssinia, Hitler had set his sights on Czechoslovakia. Peter was in his twenties. If all Europe was to be dismantled, he must see it first. In a war, if he stayed, he would be called up, shipped out to some marshy ground, and blown to bits. Once abroad, he would at least have seen something beforehand. In the week following his Bar examinations, in which he had done well, he took cabin passage in the ship
Strathnaver
; leaving for Tilbury in one month's time.

His mother cried every night. 'We'll give it a year, then.'

His father, grim, said, 'All right, but let's call it a day next Christmas. Your mother's gone out on a limb for you.' Peter could see his mother twittering on the branch, like feathered Pattie.

The day of sailing was ecstasy no anguish could mar. There were, first, the Australian ports to be got through: Melbourne, Adelaide, and tin-roofed Fremantle, with letters from home at each of them. Only when the Equator had been crossed did he feel safe. There was Colombo now, and Bombay, Aden, Port Said: all the sacred places of pilgrimage, the stations of the Australian cross. Aboard, he learned from a British traveller that an exhibition concerning Giotto would shortly close at Florence. Leaving the ship at Messina, Peter Exley set foot on Italy.

He reached Florence three weeks later, having passed through whole stages of growth. If he slept, did not recall it; but remembered dawns when he was already active in ancient towns; and an evening when he left the sooty little train at Cisterna in order to enter Rome on foot, sending his luggage ahead. There had been dark walls at Viterbo, blond palisades at Orvieto. And, one evening at dusk, the station in Florence, and a church glimpsed through a steaming glass door.