The Great Fire (3 page)

A slight Japanese was collecting plates and replacing them with clean ones: pastel plastic plates from the new world, whose very colours — pink, yellow, powder blue — clicked as they were carefully distributed. The man serving was mute, with lowered eyes.

Leith sighed: 'Weeks in such a household.' Now, he thought, they would talk in earnest. And Gardiner himself put on a pair of steel-rimmed glasses, in readiness.

'You'll be travelling. Be warned, though. The wife looms. A married daughter has just left for Honolulu — you've been lucky there. Two younger children have arrived, a strange little pair — a boy who's seriously ill, apparently, and a quaint little mermaid of a girl. I saw them laughing together, the only laughter in the place. As for Driscoll himself — such people hold the positions for the time being. In Japan, they have power.'

Leith wondered at this dwelling on irrelevant Driscolls. 'What power, after all, can they have over me?'

'Yes.' Gardiner smiled. 'I expect you can take care of yourself.'

Leith flushed, afraid of being misunderstood as having alluded to the medal.

They leaned back, too polite to be caught taking stock of one another. Gardiner saw an experienced man in his thirties, notable as to build, brow, mouth, and hands: all the things that are said to matter. Pride, or reticence, might be due simply to solitude. He saw a man who had been alone too long.

He continued, 'Yes, you're in the clear. Certified as brave.'

'Many have been braver. Yourself.'

With celluloid spoon, the professor probed a slack pudding.

'You have the certificate to prove it. Though I suppose you get sick of the medal.'

Leith nodded. 'Nevertheless, I think that valour of the kind will lose its spell. Young people are turning away from martial exploits. If we live long enough, such medals may be seen as incrimination.'

'Don't deprecate. You're young yourself.' Gardiner said, 'This is disgusting,' indicating the pudding. 'Somebody had to fight Hitler. I wanted to go back myself, in 1940, when I saw they would make a fight of it. However, a secret chap from London came to see me, said I'd be more use to them here. Well, you see what came of that. But you, you're inaugurating your ninth life.'

'In some countries, cats are allowed only seven.' Leith said, abruptly, 'I have so much to ask and am afraid of tiring you. First, I need a tutor.'

Gardiner fumbled at a linen slit, produced a folded paper. 'This seems a possibility. He's been a librarian, seems sound. He's licensed by the Americans. One can do nothing without that.'

'So I've found. I hadn't expected, in Tokyo, to find —'

'A dictatorship?'

'And myself among the defeated. At headquarters I was received by a little martinet, hysterical with importance. He told me that the last foreign visitor to cross his path had been sent packing. He said, 'We lifted his passport.'

'For a while there, you were in the court of Haroun-al-Rashid.' Gardiner asked, 'Are you married?'

'Divorced, from a wartime marriage.' After a pause, he went on, 'We were married in Cairo. Then I was off in the desert and she was posted to Colombo. Time went by, we could scarcely meet. She found someone else. So, for a while, did I. We assumed we'd grown apart — a usual thing. She wanted to remarry. When we met in London, the spring of '45, to arrange the divorce, it seemed for a moment that we might have managed it after all. Too late then, peace was sweeping us away.' He had scarcely thought of these things in two years. It was vivid, however, that single final day spent in London seeing lawyers, walking away together in the wet park, and at last making love in a hired room. The hotel, small and decent, had made no difficulty: their passports were those of husband and wife. Oh; Moira, he'd said, our sad story. And she had shed silent tears not intended to change things. Her arched throat and spread hair, and the day dying in the wet window. The marriage was dissolved, evaporating along with its memories and meetings, and the partings of war; the letters increasingly laboured, the thoughts, kisses, regrets. The lawyers were paid. The true marriage, indissoluble, was simply the moment when they sat on the rented bed and grieved for a fatality older than love.

Gardiner said, 'You know about my wife?'

Leith nodded. 'I've had no such loss as yours.'

'I didn't know for a year. Not until they taunted me in the camp.'

His Japanese wife, having tried to join him in prison, had been declared destitute by the authorities, and renounced by her parents. In 1943, she committed suicide. Gardiner said, 'On the day of her death, she tried to send into safekeeping some copies of my early books, from the time when we first knew one another. All she had left, my poor girl.' He said, 'You keep returning to these things. You can't close them down, as one closes down the compartment of a damaged ship, just to keep the vessel going, or at least afloat.' He said, 'this difficulty of being.'

'One reason men go on fighting is that it seems to simplify —'

'You've done that, and know better. And are young yet. Experience will reclaim you through the personal, much more will happen for you. After much death, living may come as a surprise.'

He means love, thought Leith forbearingly. He sometimes thought the same thing himself, and with the same forbearance. The evening was seeping away, Gardiner was dwindling. The proposed discussions of the night, the shared accident of Asia, receded, and he could not revive the importance he had given them.

Gardiner said, 'My room's got two chairs. We'd be private there.' When they had climbed back to the lounge, however, he said, 'Better sit a moment.'

It was the long room again, and the gramophone bawling. The remaining drinkers sprawled, morose, on red chairs; and one floral woman continued to twirl, slowly, alone, a top winding down.

Sweetheart, if you should stray

A million miles away

I'll always be in love with you . . .

Leith drew up a bamboo divan and helped Gardiner into it. Gardiner said, 'It was the stairs.'

'I'll get you a shot of something.'

He came back with brandy. The professor was listing in his bamboo chair: an old pallid man who said, 'Be right in a minute,' whose fingers could not hold the paper cup. Whose colour and texture were that of old bread. Aldred Leith took his hand, saying 'Ginger.'

Ginger said, 'Sorry. Regrets, many . . .' and 'Thanks for all.'

Leith was crouching by the sofa. An officer wearing red tabs came up and knelt, too. Someone lifted the needle off the raucous record, making it squeal.

2

In the crystal morning, Leith was driving with Talbot into green hills: discarding the exploded dockland, winding around ledges of emerald rice. They stopped the jeep on a spur, jumping down among tough grasses to look out at sea and islands and to watch, some moments, the small white departing ship, elderly, simple, and shapely, that would have carried Gardiner to Hong Kong on the first leg of his deleted journey. Men and women are said to grow young again in death, but Gardiner, his snappers removed, his slack jaw bound up forever, had appeared immeasurably withered on the night of his death. The little ship, sailing to its appointments, passed among islands all glorious with morning, on a blue course channelled by minesweepers. The man watching was aware of Japanese grasses beneath his boots — of earth and gravel and of stunted shubbery trembling nearby. There were tufted wildflowers and specks of red and purple that might be speedwell or some odder saxifrage. He was aware of the reprieve.

From a distance, on an outer ledge of terraced rice, his fellow man looked back at him: a single figure wearing a hat of conical straw and a red shift that came to his knees.

The young driver, profiting from the hiatus, had meanwhile peed behind bushes. When they resumed the ride, with Leith at the wheel, Talbot remarked, 'I don't suppose you got much sleep.'

'A couple of hours. Not that there was much to do for him, poor chap.'

'Rough on you, starting out with that.'

'With a death, you mean — a bad augury? Well, one was there. No one else really knew who he was. It was another war death, deferred.' Side effects, aftereffects. This time yesterday I hadn't met him. Today he's dead, and I'm his only mourner.

They had churned into wooded country.

'Pines, are they?' asked the boy, indifferent.

'These are cedars, these tall ones. Pines are up there, on the right.'

'We weren't taught about trees. At Sydney it was gum trees and Moreton Bays.' Bushes of wattle, bottlebrush. 'Soil's sandy.' Then, 'We heard more about British trees, from the songs and books: Hearts of Oak, beeches, birches. How green and wet they are, and how they play for dead in winter. Seemed more spectacular than the gums and the Bush.'

Leith said, 'My home, if I have one, is near the North Sea. Bleak country in winter, the wind sweeping over, and the sleet. Bitter, solitary. Where I am not forested, although there are stands of trees, nurtured. It has its beauty.'

'How's that?'

'Oh — changing lights and skies, and the low land. Sense of separation, almost from terra firma.' He laughed. 'Away from it, as I've mostly been, I can become sentimental.' He noticed how often he qualified the reference to home: If I have one: I'm mostly away.

Brian Talbot said, 'I'd like to see places before I settle down.' The settling taken for granted. Down, down. The wife and kiddies, the mortgage, the lawn and lawnmower, the car. 'I suppose being here is a start.' He was not really convinced that these uncongenial scenes, and these impenetrable people — tireless, humorless, reclusive — could meet the case.

Thought made him vulnerable. That was the Australian way: say anything out of the ordinary and there was the laugh — the good laugh, not having much to do with goodness. You had to watch yourself. But you got curious, all the same. And then, Leith was not likely to take advantage.

'You won't need war now, Talbot, to see the world — hardship, maybe, but not slaughter. Until this, war has been the way out, for most men.' Soldiering, or seamanship. Young recruits with their dreams of transformation: of conquest, plunder, fornication. Even, in some, the dream of knowledge. Inconceivable, in advance, the red mess and shallow grave.

Women's yearnings had scarcely featured, being presumably of mating and giving birth. Their purpose had been supplied to them from the first:
their lot.
A woman who broke ranks was ostracised by other women. Rocking the boat instead of the cradle.

The wheels threw up dirt and noisy gravel. Labourers passed them in pairs and foursomes, all moving downhill, all bearing burdens; each falling silent as the car approached, not meeting glances from these invulnerable strangers in their well-fed uniforms. Wrapped in shabby darkness, women came shuffling, one with a great bundle of kindling on her back, another hooped under a strapped child.

The man thought, Their
lot.
A brute word.

He said, 'It's the devil, Talbot.'

Talbot looked at the roadside. He hadn't expected this contest, continual, between a decreed strength and the nagging humanity of things. Any show of softness would bring, from his companions, the good laugh — to shut him up, perhaps, they being baffled as he. Yet the man at the wheel felt it, too — who, with his coloured ribbons and great medal, couldn't be accused. Talbot had been told that this warrior, though wounded and captured, had escaped his prison and fought again in the last winter of the European war. So the story went, anyway, and some of it plainly true. Straightforward matters you could understand.

'You speak the lingo. Sir.'

'I've made a beginning. My languages are from China, where I was a schoolboy. Here, I need a teacher.' That morning, at Kure, he had called on the tutor recommended by Gardiner.

Talbot looked at his own hands, which were spread on his knees. Young hands, seemingly unveined, broad, supple, modestly capable, and with decent nails. He compared them with his companion's, resting on the wheel: brown, definite, broad in the palm, and long-fingered; like the man, experienced. By extension of impressions, Brian would have liked to ask, Do you have a wife, a girl? But refrained.

Leith said, 'The teacher, this morning. You saw him, elderly, respectable. If I were to get up a small class with him — depending on what I find here — would you care to join in? A few hours a week; I'd square it with your outfit, I think I could do that.'

It was too much like having your bluff called. Brian, hedging, said, 'But you — you're already halfway there. You know a lot of it.'

'I'll be seeing him more often, he'll probably come to me up here. In your case it would be separate, with a few of your chaps if they care to join. That would be down in Kure, near your quarters.' Leith said, 'Think it over.'

The boy's impulse was to withdraw. It was too outlandish, and too much trouble. You despised Japs, you ridiculed and killed them. They'd behaved like animals. You didn't learn their lingo. You didn't study any language, even your own. He'd done a bit of French at school, compulsory:
Je m'appelle Brian, donnez-moi à manger; je suis né en Australie. Donnez-moi à boire.
Arriving at Kure, he'd been given a Japanese phrase book got up for Occupation forces; but had no use for it. 'Well, thanks. Well, yair, I'll see about it. Let you know.'