The Great Fire (16 page)

'Polite with me, pleasant enough.' They would see him out to the expiring lift, or down the cracked linoleum stairs: 'You must come for a meal, I'll get the wife to ring you.'

If the wife rang, he went. Sat under an awning at Deep Water Bay or Shek O before Sunday lunch: gin again, and the excellent prawns; hot sun, green sea. The indistinguishable small servants coming and going, the expatriate terrier underfoot. The colonial women, limp or hearty, filmed with perspiration. The houseguest out from Britain — some boy like a lily, or the strapping daughter of a retired colonel. Lace mats on mahogany, Georgian silver. Hunting prints, foxed, on humid walls. The starched servant holding the platter. The colonel's daughter remarking, 'They all have those marvellous teeth, it must be the rice.'

These were their days, seamlessly renewed. What their nights were, or their abhorrent dreams, they never did let on. Peter said, 'I wasn't the journalist, or the social worker. Wasn't there to interrogate or pronounce. I needed their experience more than they needed to recount it. These were people who'd had to invent privacy in conditions where there was none. I wasn't there to dismantle that.' He pointed. 'That's where we're headed, towards that bay.' He said, 'One received an impression, that's all. As they would have had their impression of me.'

The wind that shook the car was fierce enough to be blowing islands along a steel horizon, as clouds across rough water.

'With the women, yes, it was different, particularly if they'd had children with them in the camp. Absurdities recalled, and small gestures, and petty feuding, and the nervous inroads of hunger and climate. Grief over separations. Terror of the guards, terror at the deaths, and the hopelessness of years passing. And the grievances that women nurture differently from men. Some dark humour, some contrived pleasures. The few books, read aloud, read and reread. Little concerts were got up, when allowed, and those who had a voice sang — arias, hymns, shanties, Gracie Fields. Poems were remembered, poems were composed. One heard these things from the women.

'The men invented illusions of order, coherence, authority. The senior civil servant among them set up a miniature tribunal to hear complaints, quarrels among the prisoners. This little court would regularly meet to adjudicate, dressed in its rags, showing its sores and scars. When I asked one of the women what penalties were meted out, she laughed. She said, "That was the difficulty — how to punish us, who were so punished already." It was the sense of form, I suppose; of remaining answerable to what had been one's standards.'

He said, 'One is always wondering, how would one have borne up, oneself, in the course of years. I met a couple who were married in the prison. They told me about it, all smiles. Brave.' They had reached the sea. He said, 'Well, here we are,' and turned off the engine.

★

That day, Leith was lunching with the General. Near the barracks, Flagstaff House was white, colonial, comfortable in its own small park on a private road. The wind had dropped, the day had cooled, the lunch was ample. There was no other guest. These two had known one another in war.

With the changing season, both wore the short jacket, with latched canvas belt, called battle dress, and serge trousers rather too warm. The General, with white hair fluffed about his ears and face more florid, had lost some flesh with peace. His benign, enquiring face, well suited to growing older, had been paternal even in the field.

At table, a lobster was prepared to give up its flesh without struggle. The General said, 'We feed you here, not like His Excellency. In the colony they say, "So you lunched at Government House? Where did you go for tiffin?" We're all on a short rein now, but why mortify yourself over an extra mouthful? Britain's bankrupt, an extra round of drinks won't tip the scale. I don't apologise for giving you a good Bordeaux, instead of that dandelion wine or elderberry juice from Kent, served by H.E. Since we've come out of it alive, Aldred, we should value our pleasures.'

Our pleasures. He and I have killed, hand to hand, and have absorbed it. Can recall it, incredulous. Our pleasures were never taken that way, as by some in battle. Once, after a skirmish in the desert, a fellow officer whom he had never considered vicious had remarked, 'A man who hasn't killed is incomplete, analogous to a woman who has never given birth.' Embracing the primitive; even gratified.

If I were to speak of this now, here with the lobster and Bordeaux, facing the portrait of the shy King, this man would respond better than most: no pat answers; appalled by the unexampled horrors — the concentration camps, the Bomb itself. Yet not about to break down either. In the car that morning, Peter had said, 'No one went to pieces.' Well, they did and do, and one has seen it. But it's like the phenomenon of suicide in all our lives — the wonder is that more don't commit it.

There had been the ritual death in Japan, and Helen coming to his room.

Leaving table, the General said, 'I see you've recovered from that bad business.' Seeing no effect of his wound.

They went into a larger room, less upholstered, where a detailed map of China, occupying one wall, was studded with the progress of the civil war. Invited to trace the route of his travels, Leith was relieved when attention strayed. When they spoke of the Chinese war, the General flopped down on a striped settee. 'Being handled as badly as possible by our side, you know. We're in the hands of the absolutists now, Aldred, Britain has no say. No influence.' He said, 'I can't quite believe that means no responsibility.'

Later, walking in the garden, he told Leith, 'When the change comes, and the capital returns to Peiping, we'll try to keep some formal tie, even if it's only a
chargé
. We'll get hell from Washington, but they'll be glad in the end. Anything else is infantile, the stakes being so high.'

He asked, 'I suppose you'll be leaving the army now, Aldred.'

'Not for a while. However, yes. I'll want to change things.'

Seeing him smile, the General thought, Some girl, no doubt. And smiled himself. When they parted, he told Leith, 'Come again, while you're here. I like to see you. Keep well, my dear chap.' Returning to the house, he said, 'That's one, at least, who came through it'; and asked that a cup of tea be brought to him. His staff thought him in a good mood — which, to do him justice, was not unusual.

Leith, crossing the road near the barracks, at once ran into Peter Exley.

'Look, Peter, here's the name and number of the bloke you call to get new quarters.'

'God, Aldred, you've never gone and asked the General.'

'Of course not, what do you take me for; I asked the ADC. We'd more or less recognised one another. I didn't mention you, but you can call if you like and say he suggested. If you get new rooms while I'm here, I'll help you move. Protect you from your cellmate.' He said, 'But that would be after I get back from Canton. Tomorrow I start out on that excursion.'

Walking back to the hotel, he thought that by tomorrow Helen might have his letter.

The envelope addressed to both was brought to Helen by Aki, who helped Benedict in the mornings. She carried it, since Ben should now be given breakfast, into Leith's own room, using a key he had given. In the shuttered light and faint clothy smell of the absent male, with the dim books and objects that had enjoyed his company, she fingered the embossed insignia of the Gloucester, and even the plain, rather large handwriting on the envelope: glad that she could picture the very place where she had stayed with her brother during their days of hiatus at Hong Kong.

With a knife from the blotter, she slit the envelope; and lay on the bed to read, pulling out both letters and setting Ben's aside. There was no one to see that she lay there with her life changing, glad to be alone and on his bed. She held the letter up and read it, then let it lie on her body and covered it with her hand. And thought of his comings and goings at the hotel, where the lobby was an arcade of pale green marble.

In the marble, which was repeated on each floor, the afternoon light, touching green, inspired a seeming watermark. On the top floor also; where, with fine view of the strait, there was a bar with small wicker tables, a serious but not solemn restaurant, and a dance floor at which, on weekends, a band from Manila in pastel zoot suits played foxtrots for shuffling couples, and a crooner, also Filipino, delivered Crosby or Sinatra into a cupped microphone:

I love you for sentimental reasons.

I hope you do believe me,

I've given you my heart -

or sang out to the night sky of South China about the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, or the Chattanooga choo choo as if these were human and close to his heart. On the dance floor, the colonial men accelerated and reversed, in lightweight evening clothes. Their women wore silk. The Chinese couples were all slim and young, the girls wearing, without exception, the cheongsam. Eurasians came, worldly, in Western dress. The lights, colours, leisure, the music and food were of peacetime. As was a paucity of uniforms, and the predominance of youth.

One noon in late winter, Helen Driscoll had been sitting by the windows in the bar, lunching with the master of the passenger ship that had brought her and Benedict this far, on their voyage to Japan. As they sat at table, she could see herself in the glass, lunching with this man, with the extraordinary scene spread beyond and below, and wearing a new white dress, from a fine shop, that had been a present. She hadn't been so exotically, ecstatically independent since Aix and the Cours Mirabeau.

They ordered cheese omelettes and disinfected salads, which came with brittle, noisy triangles of toast. The skipper had a fine Scots profile: sharp nose and firm jaw. His eyes, blue, not old at all. Meeting her by chance in Chater Road, and inviting her, he had asked about Benedict, who was feverish, and about their departure for Japan. Now, as they sat at table, he spoke of the death, in the previous year, of his wife, and the unsettled state of his young daughter. When Helen asked about his war service in the Merchant Marine, he smiled: 'Better not to speak of it, my dear.' His manner with her was compassionate, and tacitly indignant on her behalf — something she had experienced once in a while with Bertram Perowne, but which came from this older man unexpectedly and with enigmatic shading.

He was sailing almost at once, for the Conradian ports. She asked if he might one day come to Kure; and he, still smiling, said, 'If you are there.' When they left, she went down with him to the lobby to say goodbye. Standing over her, he put back her hair with his sunburnt hands. So close, he smelt of starch and tobacco, and of the whiteness of his uniform touched with gold. When he left her, she watched him cross to Watson's corner and disappear, forever, towards the waterfront. Having had a fine morning, and wearing her new dress from Pâquerette, she was surprised by desolation.

There was another thing. An English family, generational landowners at Hong Kong, had been enlisted to entertain the stranded boy and girl; and liberally did so. The introduction had come about through Bertram, who, putting them aboard the ship at Naples, had been hailed by the owner of the shipping line, with whom he had gone to school: 'Hullo there, Bertie. Long time.' If this fortyish lord, himself sailing to the East, recalled that Bertie had shipped out to Australia, before the war, to avoid an indecency charge, indecencies since then had apparently cast Bertie's version in the shade. The shipowner and his wife were solicitous with the young people on the voyage and, reaching port, saw to it that they were befriended.

In this way, Helen and Ben had been invited to a villa at Shek O, on a promontory overlooking the water. There was Sunday lunch, you swam in the sea, tennis was played, and after supper, the fishing fleet shone with acetylene stars. Benedict — still, then, in intermittently fair health — was appreciated, tended. The family had tall, clever sons. There were young people who all seemed lightheartedly in love — with whom, after dinner, one drove back into town, squeezed together in an open car, singing to the night about the Foggy Dew, and the Nut-Brown Maiden. For brother and sister, it was as if, as a treat, they visited the natural condition of youth.

On the third such occasion, Benedict was not able to come. At evening, the young people proving too many for their one returning car, a grave and rather separate man — perhaps near forty — offered Helen a lift in his car, which waited with a Chinese driver. This man, too, was staying at the Gloucester.

Ben and Helen had already noticed him in the hotel: lean, tall, reserved. A thoughtful face, and a schoolboy head of flopped hair, prematurely grey. Grey eyes. He wore easy poplin suits in tones of sand or pearl, and immaculate shirts striped blue; but was not dandified. All told, a distinctive addition to the teeming streets. He was an heir to one of the grand merchant houses of the East, whose name he bore, and had come out from Britain, avoiding the winter, to learn the postwar ropes. A young wife had stayed at home with their newborn child. After two months in the colony, he was at the eve of departure; and in the car told Helen that he was flying to Singapore the following morning on the first leg of his journey home.

At first they spoke about the lights of fisherfolk out past Ly-ee-mun — nor was this banal, since he told her about the Tankas, who had traditionally fished these waters and had a language of their own. By now, it was completely dark. The girl, in her corner, renewed her sense of the far, dramatic place; the adult, mannerly companion; and the circumstances, always congenial because interesting.

The car, powerful and new from England, climbed the unlit Shek O hill and swung down for the city. There was no high-hearted singing about the Foggy Dew, or the Nut-Brown Maid, or Ye Banks and Braes — only the gentlemanly gravity of her companion, who asked with circumspection about herself and her brother, and how they passed their days. He did not condescend. Her low responses were matched to his mood.

When they came into the hot lights and smells and clamour of Wanchai — the driver navigating children, chickens, and chow dogs — the two passengers fell silent, Helen conscious of some constraint, now, between them and wondering, as one does, whether it had arisen from anything she'd said.