The Great Fire (24 page)

'Could you think? What were you thinking?'

'At first it seemed easiest to go on dying. Then one imagined tetanus, gangrene, amputation. There's a gap I can't fill. After some hours, a German doctor came, a surgeon — another one, old with fatigue, who later became young. Told me I'd been lucky. They'd always told me that, and now I see that it's true.' He said, 'I took his name, he was decent, humane. God knows what became of him.'

'They put you in prison.'

'A prison hospital. Later, the camp. Then the interminable winter, recovering, shivering, hungering, learning German. Waiting for letters and books. Waiting for the war to end, which it showed no mind to. We got news, when other prisoners were brought in. Some of our lot would go out to the wire to greet the arrivals, cracking bitter jokes at them. Once in a while, there would come some chap one knew. One day, Peter Exley turned up, the damnedest thing. It was then, really, that we got close. One talked. There was time for it, God knows.'

'And you escaped.'

'No credit whatever for that. Things were on the move, we were preparing. Bombs fell, and in the pandemonium a few of us got away. Even so, it was slow going, and two weeks before I reached our lines. Where by luck I was taken under an influential wing. They had a job for me, and I was sent to Paris, then to Caen. In Europe, war was ending terribly; in Asia, terribly continuing. We knew nothing of the Bomb. The concentration camps were opened, taking the lid off hell.'

He held her close in her coat, saying, 'I've never had generalised feelings about any of it. One is compelled to act collectively, yet revulsion, compassion will be felt privately, reciprocally. Can you understand me, Helen? In England, in that spring of 1944,1 saw my people, saw my friends — what was left of them — and rode the motorcycle round the track. The first renewal was coming East. China drives all else to a periphery, for a time.'

When they got to their feet, he kissed her, and gave his hand as they walked downhill. He said, 'All that came out of unpacking the box from Branston.'

'It came from your earthy coat.'

'Which has now been exorcised and blessed, and must be cleaned.' The stained coat, once boxed as his shroud.

She had to go to her brother, and it seemed that they might not exchange another word. However, when they reached his door, he said, 'Helen, come in for a moment,' in the most sombre way in the world. She sat on his bed, and he beside her, as they had on the day of the suicide. He was mindful of how she'd seemed to him then, a child, the changeling; mindful of his impulse to embrace her. He held her hands and said, 'I make you old, with telling you grim things. When I should only have said that all my past has been displaced, now, by this love.'

Her expression — considerate, apprehensive — remained unchanged, so that he was nearly moved to specify: our love, yours and mine. As if there could be some mistake. But she, finding nothing incomprehensible, lifted her hands to his face and actually laughed, saying 'Love' in return, before exchanging their grave, preoccupied kiss. She said, 'We are being so serious.'

He said, 'As this has happened to us, we should talk of what's to come. Not just of our difficulties, darling, but of ourselves, our happiness, our adventure.' He could not bring himself, then, to speak of her brother's crisis, but told her, 'If you agree, we should first tell Ben.'

'Who knows already, and is glad.'

'We must think, too, how best to approach your parents.' Who loomed, even in that moment.

When she got up to go, he said that he would come that evening. They parted as at some long separation. She said again, 'We are so solemn.'

'I must get used to joy,' he said.

14

When the cold weather came to Hong Kong, after Christmas, it surprised less by severity than by its effect of clearing the air. Looking across the strait, you now saw, as if from a great height, the interior life of the mainland: grouped habitations, laborious paddies, serpentine paths, and the smoke of small necessary fires. There was the detailed foreground; far off, the forms and colours of other, unsuspected hills; and, to the north, like a signal, the mountain called Tai Mo Shan.

Such a scene must hold experiences, if one had the nerve to elicit them. The island itself was less fictitious now, newly populated, as it seemed, by quilted crowds, newly smelling at dusk of charcoal and wood smoke. You were no longer out from Europe or out from anywhere, but drawn inward to a continent. You approached the immense reality, or your own acceptance of it. One January night, passing under the arcades — where, beside fine shops selling chocolate truffles and crystallised fruits, small families had set braziers on the flagstones — Peter Exley realised that there was nowhere he would prefer to be. And that fact itself was happiness. He was aware that his deeper dreams might be considered exorbitant.

The intense cold lasted little more than a month. With the Chinese New Year, which fell that year on Shrove Tuesday, the days grew longer but less revelatory. Clarity departed like hallucination. And you drew away again, from cold China, cold Russia; away from that interlude of climatic seriousness in which dailiness had seemed a spiritual condition.

Peter Exley said to Rita Xavier, 'Perhaps cold places really are more self-respecting, as one is taught to believe.'

'One is taught to believe that' she said, 'only in cold places.'

'Not in my own case. We looked to the cold north for instruction. North was the place to be.' We were lolling down there at the Antipodes, hurt, hot, unresolved.

Attempts, with Rita Xavier, to deliver something of his soul always miscarried. But he returned to them — because he could not help believing in the sensibility of wounded persons. Or because he could not leave well enough alone.

From the Western world, the talk was all of war: America and Russia would grapple across the prostrate body of Europe. Meanwhile, China was poised in her own colossal concerns. Peter wrote to Aldred Leith:

You will have seen that Shamien burned, in January — the consulate, the trading houses. If it is, as said, a reprisal for imperialism at Hong Kong, surely this is anachronism? By year's end, Hong Kong will be China's only window on the world. They will turn inwards. The United States will seal them off.

He said that his war crimes cases were coming to their end, and he would soon set a date for his journey to Japan. He was writing Audrey Fellowes to the same effect. Meantime: 'We've had bright winter here:
l'hiver lucide.'

One Saturday of returning heat, Peter was walking toward Queen's Road, in the course of afternoon errands. At the corner, he ran into Rita, about to cross. She was going to the King's Theatre. After weeks of Margaret Lockwood, there was a new film — hours long, Chinese.

They stood in the shade under a scaffolding. Everything was in repair now, festooned with straw flaps, framed by bamboo rods. Grey stucco was blotched with white. The air was granulated dust, with plaster smells of some great prosperity astir.

'Would you mind if I joined you?'

She said, 'It doesn't begin till three.'

They stood aside from the crowd, and from all that noisy life they might have liked to join — if they could do so just occasionally and set their terms. Or, Peter thought, if there were someone to draw me in.

Rita said, 'I was going to have something to eat. I've had no lunch.' There was a restaurant in the theatre, one flight up.

'I'm on my way to the tailor.' He pointed out the sign:
OLD
BOND
STREET
. She did not smile, but agreed to meet him in the restaurant fifteen minutes later.

At the entry to a shop that sold materials, shabby stairs led to the tailor's door. This door, usually open, was today closed and locked. Exley rapped on the frosted glass. A Chinese in American clothes, coming from the floor above, smiled in passing and made a gesture to his head.

Exley asked, 'What's wrong?'

The youth, surprised, replied in Cantonese, 'Liu isn't working today.'

'Is he there?'

The tailor lived in the shop with his wife and child. Exley had never seen the woman, although the little girl at times ran out from behind a plywood partition and could often be heard prattling or crying there. He'd been told that the wife was kept in seclusion.

The man on the stairs said, 'Yes. There, but not working.' Another smile, another gesture of seersucker sleeve.

'I only have to collect a package.'

The man passed on down the stairs. Peter thought how puzzling they were, even such small encounters with the unfamiliar. Recalling his arrangement with Rita, he was about to leave, when there was the rasp of a bolt slowly drawn and a shadow blurred the glass. When he tried the door again, it opened.

The tailor's wife was standing immediately inside. She wore the black clothes of an amah, jacket and pantaloons. On the crown of her head, the braids were coiled and lacquered in a formal structure contrasting with a primitive commotion of expression. Exley had never seen a more afflicted face. He crossed the threshold. The windows were covered with rattan blinds, and the room smelt vilely of opium and uncleanness. Liu, lying sideways on a bench where customers usually sat, gave Exley a blinded, anaesthetised smile.

Exley said to the woman, 'Is he ill?' He couldn't understand her grief — as if she wept without sound or tears. He said, 'Tell me.'

Behind the partition, in household clutter, a child was lying on an arrangement of clothes and rags. The bed, improvised from remnants of materials, was all plaids and florals and striped shirtings. He knew that this must be Liu's daughter, but could not recognise the sunken face, or the tiny, diminished body, perfectly still, head turned at an unlikely angle, showing a small gold hoop through the ear. Mouth slackly open, eyes closed. Exley thought, The child is dead.

Seeing his thought, the woman spoke. At the same moment, Peter saw the child draw breath. He said, 'What about a doctor, what about a hospital?' and, squatting, lifted the child a little. The limbs resettled like wayward sticks, and there was an aroused stench of untended illness. He asked, 'How many days?'

The woman now began to weep aloud, kneeling by the child but not touching it, rocking her own head in her hands. Exley saw that she herself was merely adolescent — a daughter, possibly, of the sampan people, traded off at puberty; so small, in her black garments, and yet with a child of her own. The human frame was often, to Peter Exley, incommensurate with all it must evince and bear.

He said, 'I'll get help.' Went out, ran down the stairs.

From the shop alongside there was a loud wrangle of negotiation and the dull thump of bolts of cloth. Exley crossed to the King's Theatre. The bright coloured world resumed, all animation and indifference. In the busy restaurant upstairs, Rita Xavier was delicately eating, with chopsticks, small gobbets from a bowl.

He came up to her: 'Rita.'

She said at once, 'What's wrong?' And he saw that his tunic was marked with the child's sickness.

'Would you help?' He sat on the edge of a chair and explained: a curious moment, in which he knew all that the next few minutes would contain. Even as he was speaking, noted her relaxation of alarm, her recovery of detachment. She feels that I should not mix up in it. He said, 'I can't just let the child die' — to compel her, or justify himself.

'It may die, whatever you do.'

He asked, 'Will the public health people come?'

'One must take the child to them, to the hospital.' She then said, 'Even for you, they would not come' — defining, with that imperial You, the distance between them.

It would have to be the troublesome act of humanity, or nothing. He started to ask, 'Will you help me persuade the mother?' But said instead, 'Will you excuse me, then?' And got up. And started then and there to forget her.

Going out, he was trapped in the exodus from the previous showing of the film. Just below him on the crowded stairs was Brenda Mills.

Peter said, 'Brenda.'

Brenda made a chomping motion with her jaws. 'Don't speak to me.'

He stared.

She said, 'They stole my handbag. When I stood up for the anthem.' Flushed to a colour like claret, quivering near tears. 'One of these swine,' she said. 'During "God Save the King." The vileness. Don't speak to me.'

He pushed his way from the theatre and crossed among the rickshaws and Studebakers without waiting for a change of light. While Brenda was saying, 'Nothing of value, it's not that,' and Rita was silently praying not for pardon but excuse, Exley was already on the dirty stairs that led to Liu's door. He returned to the foul-smelling room, to its certainties, with a sense of familiarity. Hardship is never quite alien.

Sat again on the floor and supported the child on his knees. The head lolled as before, showing the irrelevant earring. He saw that the child's mother, even in her despair, was disturbed — like the rest — by his improbable behaviour. He understood this perfectly. He himself could be mistrustful of any sudden change for the better. He was also aware that his intervention might go wrong, and was pretty sure of being blamed somewhere along the line. All of this seemed a small price to pay for health.