The Great Fire (23 page)

When people were spontaneous, Peter Exley was ready to love them.

Monica and Brenda stationed themselves each side of Peter, a brace of female warders. Planning escape, he got a boy to bring gimlets. He knew the women would refer to his afternoon with Rita; and, when they did so, remarked, 'Don't be daft.'

The Colonel came up. 'Who are you daft over now, girls?'

'Peter's potty about Miss Xavier.'

'Miss Xavier. Ah. Miss Xavier is serious. There would be no trifling with Miss Xavier.'

The women howled, as was their way when nothing was funny. As their sputtering subsided, Glazebrook went on: 'And now I must tear myself from you charmers.' As he and Exley drew away, he made a low, sighing sound. 'Poor clots. Can't stand 'em, frankly.'

The room filled up with older officers and their wives, and with the young unwed. There were also the merchants and bankers, the Bishop, the harbourmaster. The Colonial Secretary would look in, on his way to a grand dinner. All the blotched statues, restored to their pedestals. The French consul, known to be the Sûreté man, arrived with pretty daughter, accompanied by the director of the Banque d'Indochine. The actors doubled their parts — villain in one scene, bystander in another. The same few players represented a crowd, the same sparse voices called for Caesar.

After the solemn and joyful toast, Peter took his leave of blonde Hermione: 'That's a pretty dress.'

'Thank God you like it. My husband says it looks like underwear.'

'Then you must have lovely underwear.'

'Famous for it.' Laughing into his eyes.

Exley, at her side, basked in the little flirtation. As he admired the dress, however, it struck him that she might be pregnant; and the idea, with its utter exclusion, drained his good spirits. He had already turned away when Glazebrook himself came to ask his wife if she would like something fetched for her, food or drink. At her refusal, the husband murmured, in the amused undertone of love, 'You're supposed to have cravings. Don't you crave anything?'

And her smiling soft reply: 'Only your indulgence.'

When he left the party, Peter walked along in the night, thinking of Hermione — imagining some Hermione, animated, charming, and quite without pathos, who might be his own. And why, he wondered, should she merely be without pathos? Since she was in any case a figment, let her be downright lucky. He laughed unhappily, sounding drunker than he was.

He thought of Audrey, who needed some gesture from him — which might, in the first instance, be his journey to Japan. He had never been prompt with gestures, one must be born to that. It was long since he had given affection or received it. He seemed to have dribbled away a lot of feeling in a kind of running sensibility, like a bad cold.

He had told Aldred Leith, 'I envy you.' He sometimes had dreams of tenderness in love, as others might dream its eroticism.

He passed through the marble arcade that led to the best hotels, remembering how he had come here with Leith on the morning of the plane crash. There was a fashionable dance floor called the Gripps, up red-carpeted stairs. And there he found a table, ordered a Tom Collins, and sat watching the dancers and tapping his foot abstractedly. It seemed an age since the military scene at the parade ground. He made an effort to recall, now, the huge soldier collapsed among his marching comrades.

In the emotional befuddlement of a third drink, he suddenly spotted Rysom among the dancers. Rysom in civilian clothes — orange jacket, clean white shirt, and a tie forked with emerald lightning — was trundling a stout woman round the floor, while the band played 'La Vie en Rose' and the lights turned pink. It was Rysom all right, even if his expression — earnest to the point of urgency — was unfamiliar. Nothing in Rysom's account of himself had suggested that he might at last be found in this established and expensive place, intently circulating in the dance.

The emergence of Roy Rysom at the centre of the very vortex that Rysom himself derided was disquieting. In taking Rysom more literally, or more sincerely, than Rysom took himself, Peter Exley might have been left behind yet again in the general stampede to safety. Exley had imagined that he knew at least what Rysom was. Now it appeared that Rysom had stolen a march on him by unabashedly having it both ways. He and Rysom had agreed, it had seemed, on one another's debility. Now Rysom had broken faith.

He walked back to his rooms, which took him half an hour, and scrounged a late dinner from the mess boy. It occurred to him that the
President Polk
would by now have reached Yokohama, and he wrote, before turning in, a brief letter to Audrey Fellowes at her brother's address. As he hadn't intended to write so soon, and the tone was a little warmer than required, he might look the letter over in the morning. Yet it was a means of conversing — of which, on that soft night, he felt the need.

13

On New Year's Day, they walked into the valley. After a wet night, a brilliant morning. Aldred had by then been repeatedly to the temple, always finding the custodian — shadowy, grave, nearly wordless; but never meeting worshippers or other visitors. The shrine was possibly off limits. The custodian might have returned unbidden, like the gardener at the house uphill who had reappeared with peace to resume his raking of the pale
koichi
into whorls.

However that might be, it was the first day of the year 1948, quite mild, and the first time that Helen had come with him, passing through the small clearing where a man had died. He handed her down over a last wet carpet of slithered leaves into the brief ground near the entrance, at which they removed their shoes. The guardian was not visible, though possibly nearby — perhaps deterred by the presence of a Western woman or by this show of implicit weakness in the hitherto solitary male.

Or he might have been indoors, indistinguishable among the effigies in burnished rows. Drier leaves had scuttled through the entrance; and shifted in a patch of sunlight. The smells of camphor, incense, sandalwood, enclosure were not churchly. He and she did not speak or talk about, or otherwise lord it over the unresisting place. In the formal effect of silence, the waterfall played, without paradox, its part.

Returning, they separated to climb the path in single file, he reaching back to take her hand. In the fair weather, they were without coats. In those days, their bodies were taking reciprocal shape, tentative, delectable. He had never yet said Love: the Rubicon word, with its transforming powers.

Helen was to go alone to her parents' rooms, where Benedict would also be brought and lunch would be prepared. The Driscolls, man and wife, were leaving for some commemorative occasion — there was often an event of the kind, which they unfailingly attended, leaving Dench in charge. Thus, at the top of the path, Helen walked on by herself, straight into that other existence where she had less and less place. As she walked, she put her hand to her mouth to hold his kiss, and to her breast to enclose his touch.

The man, instead, went to his own room and to his table — to those papers where the ruined continents and cultures and existences that had consumed his mind and body for years had given place to her story and his. He could not consider this a reduction — the one theme having embroiled the century and the world, and the other recasting his single fleeting miraculous life. Having expected, repeatedly, to die from the great fires into which his times had pitched him, he had recovered a great desire to live completely; by which he meant, with her.

Benedict now had someone to care for him in the night, an older Japanese with medical training. Aki himself stayed longer hours, even when Helen was present, for she did not have the strength to move her brother or help him rise, and such things were increasingly required. At Ben's request, she still read to him, although more and more he drifted into half-sleep, looking for her as he woke; at once recalling, even so, what they had read and where they'd left off. His speech was indistinct, except to her, who understood and interpreted. Benedict continued to do the British puzzles sent to him by Bertram, but now she told him the questions and inscribed his answers, his hand being ineffectual.

Aldred, coming in one morning and finding them laughing — Helen with the crossword puzzle in her hand — was told of their new method: 'His idea was that I should read out the number of letters, and then the clue. But he's taken to giving me the answers before he hears the question.

'I told him: three-three-three-two-three-three. And he said, "The Old Man of the Sea. What's the question?'" Leith sat beside her, and they were, all three, for the moment, amused and healed. Benedict said, 'Like old times' — meaning, a matter of weeks ago. Pleasures did not exhaust him. He said, suddenly and distinctly, 'You will manage it, somehow.'

In the short daylight he and she would walk on the farther slopes, from which you saw the sea. It was January, but they invented warmth outdoors in secluded places. He knew that if they were to meet in his room, he would take her to his bed. He knew that, however many times they walked about the hills and dales, this would ultimately occur.

It appeared to him that, in his scruples and forebodings, he was assuming the role of apprehensive maiden; while the girl became the embodiment of generous impulse. She was on a dangerous margin where she would do whatever he asked, because he asked it. Meantime, among the groves and saplings and angled trees, he had touched and seen her body.

He must speak to her as he had not yet spoken. He would talk to her parents. Concealment galled them. Unready for scenes and accusations, he and she might end by precipitating these in order to be open.

One morning, among the hills, Leith said, 'Discovery by Dench would be too bad.'

'We'd hear his cough beforehand.' She had thought it out.

'I think he fancies you.'

She nodded.

It is hard to surprise women in these matters.

'Has he bothered you?'

'No. Just creepy.'

'Everything underhand. The new power in the world. Like that man Slater.'

'Who came with Tad.' She said, 'Tad is halfway round the world.' Tad had sent a card from Cairo. Helen said, 'This raincoat smells like the earth' — because they were lying on his old coat from the war.

'Yes. And, like the earth, old and dirty. I got it back in a box of "effects," as they call it, when I was in England in '45. They'd been stored in Lincolnshire, in a barn near Branston where we spent the nights before the battle.' He said, 'Getting the box, opening it, I myself as next of kin receiving the pitiful leavings of the deceased. Living the experience that my mother would have otherwise endured. This coat was the first thing, folded on top: like a body. A book, a few letters, socks, handkerchiefs, my good watch, a shaving kit — irrelevant overnight stuff. Through an oversight, I was alive to take charge of these relics, only lacking the letter from the colonel commending my valour. The colonel, who in fact had died alongside me in the action.
Things
, Helen, the sad silly evidence of things.' He said, 'We're told that possessions are ephemeral, yet my God how they outlast us — the clock on the bedside table, the cough drops, the diary with appointments for that very day.' And the meaning ebbing out of them, visibly.

'I'd expected to die in that expedition. I suppose I thought of that when I bundled those things into the box and tied it up and wrote my name and number on it and got a receipt. I've no memory of that. When the box came back to me, the owner of those oddments was dead, I was my own survivor.

It's only lately that I'm reunited with the young man who lived before. During those postwar weeks in England, I rode a motorcycle, raced it round a track in all weathers — wearing this coat, I suppose. Exorcising immobility — the wound, the prison, the waiting.'

'The war itself.'

'Yes. The impotence of the defeat, that September. Battling in the mire, more like 1915 than 1944. More like Agincourt: rain, mud, the freezing cold. The enemy's proximity, their faces, the shared intimacy with fear and death. Explosions, slaughter. With the wound, I was captured on the last day. I'd been all night in the forest, dying.'

She was lying in his arms. He could see her adult tears.

'In a lull, we had tried to get down to the river, but they got wise to us, we came under their fire, there was no going back or forward. They'd got close and were throwing grenades.' There was a splash, and the colonel's head had been blown away. Himself, spattered with that bloody matter — thinking at first, unsurprised, that it was his. Then came his own wound, blowing off clothes and flesh, ribs to ankle.

'Near dawn they came through the trees and captured me. The battle was over. There were stretchers, lorries full of their own wounded, other trucks for their dead and ours. Screaming, moaning, delirium, carnage.'

He asked, 'Why do I tell you this?'

'You're telling yourself.'

'They stacked us, the wounded prisoners, into a disused barracks behind the lines. The bunks were in tiers, three tiers or four. Our medical officers were few and exhausted. The German doctors took care of their own people first, thousands of wounded on both sides. Our walking wounded did what they could. Before the battle we'd been issued with little packets of morphine, sulfanilamide; ominous supplies. Our medical men had crawled around among the dead, retrieving this stuff where possible, and we were glad of it. The wounded who'd been heaved into the upper bunks were hard to reach. They couldn't get down to relieve themselves. Shambles.'