The Great Fire (6 page)

'We thought you might want this.'

'Come in. That's kind.' He had not eaten, and did not want the brandy, but went into the minuscule kitchen to fetch a glass. They sat side by side on the bed, she in her flowered dress, he, unshod, in the shirt and trousers he had not yet changed. He believed that he did not want her there; but was pleased by her restraint, and her thought of him. He remembered how he had seen her in her bed.

She said, 'Aki is making our breakfast. Ben thought you might like to eat with us.'

Again, he believed that he did not want to do this, but said, 'With pleasure.' He swallowed brandy, to please, but felt better for it. 'I have to clean myself up first. Is half an hour all right?'

She said, 'Oh yes,' and prepared to leave.

He astonished himself with an impulse to take her in his arms, which of course he did not do. Yet some tenderness passed between them, in reaction to the horror of the morning. The entire world, he thought, needs comforting.

When she had gone, he shaved and took a shower in the cramped bathroom, combed his hair before the steaming mirror, and noted the effect of the experience on his face, not simply as an opening of old wounds. He put on civilian clothes — a clean white shirt and the linen jacket he kept for civil occasions. The jacket, long crumpled back to its vegetable origins, had been ironed and rehung. And he registered the fact that presences, helpful or otherwise, could enter his room at will. He put the draft of his statement away.

There was the depression in the bed where he and the girl had sat. He thought how long it was since he had been alone in a room with a girl, and had made himself presentable in consequence: a cat washing itself after a needed meal. Looking for something to take as an offering, he came up with a paper volume, blue and white, of
The Centuries' Poetry: Bridges to the Present Day
; with a photograph on the back cover of the young editor gripping his chin amid thoughts too deep for tears. Work on the bloodied ground might have been completed, since he heard no sound of it. The door to the larger cottage was unlatched.

Below a window, the brother was lying on a daybed, propped by a bolster and striped cushions, his feet slightly raised on a rubber wedge evidently cut for the purpose. He was wearing a plain dark cotton gown like an unbelted kimono, over which his hands were folded. On his belly, over the dark cloth, an upturned book shifted with his breathing. He watched, as it seemed, a facing wall: the flimsy wall of the room in which he might well die.

Leith wondered at all this death pursuing him.

Beside the boy, Helen was sitting in a low chair, level with the divan. The same morning that touched her brother's scanty hair gleamed on her own full head and down her healthy arms. They were aware of Leith instantly, girl quickly rising, boy making a gesture to excuse immobility. They were so pleased to see him, and said so. They did not speak of the tragedy. Helen thanked him for the book, smiling with all her clear eyes. Her enthusiasm shamed him for having chosen the volume he could most easily dispense with.

She set up a collapsible table. He sat in a military-looking chair. Helen held out his cup and saucer with a hand that shook enough to rattle the china — so that Leith, taking it from her, could say, 'This morning makes you tremble.'

'It happens sometimes. Since I was' — she would have said, 'young,' but thought better of it — 'quite small.'

Benedict smiled. 'Two years ago.'

They must wonder if the tremor was a portent of her brother's affliction.

The girl added, 'When I'm excited.'

'We're both excited,' said Benedict, 'at having you here.'

Leith could see that this might be true. But said, also with truth, 'You are kind to me,' and took a twisted bun from a tin. He said, 'You're reading Gibbon.'

'Are we loud, then?'

'No. I loved hearing it. The best thing in a long while.'

They told him that they had read the entire work, on the ship from England, and were now going over favourite passages. They were also reading Carlyle, which he might overhear — 'For that's a loud book, in its way.'

'An excited book, rather.'

Helen said, 'But the excitement is magisterial.'

Leith said, 'I think —'

'What?'

'That about large subjects there can be many kinds of books, playing on our sympathies or alienating them. Truth can be a synthesis, or an impression.'

It was new to him to speak this way with a child. But then, a girl of perhaps fifteen — who knows history and says 'magisterial' — a girl already embarked on her secret biological life, has taken leave of childhood. He had looked discreetly, as men and boys will do with girls, for the slight shape of her breasts in the pretty dress.

She wanted to ask about the large events of his own life, but could not bring herself to it. However, there might be time; and one day he would tell her of his own accord.

Benedict understood that his sister had for the moment left him to be with this man. Soon, or at last, their own long pairing would be sundered; but not just today. Being in company was, that morning, a solace to all three of them, in each of whom the thought rose and fell. Had we done differently, the man might be alive.

Benedict said, 'There might have been mass suicides in Japan, with the surrender. Why didn't it happen? Is it because the Emperor decided not to die?'

'I wonder. A member of the imperial family did commit
seppuku,
but it was hushed up. There may have been more suicides than we imagine, in the days of the defeat. Not something that would be explored or divulged.' He said, 'I thought I might learn about this, travelling the country. Instead, here, at once, it reveals itself.'

The boy said, 'It comes to us from the war.'

Leith would not say, The second such death, for me, in a matter of hours. To speak of death with this sick boy, and with the girl, was disturbing. He put down his cup, leant back, and crossed one foot over his knee. He must write up the sworn statement involving the father of these children. There would be an enquiry, however perfunctory. The deceased — Leith had not yet asked his name — had he been brutalised, or in any way provoked to take his life? He had been, not a prisoner, but a recent enemy in custodial care. His degradation had been brought home to him. Leith had seen him for a few moments. Had heard him cursed. They had exchanged that last glance of fellowship.

If he were to write such things, there would be no staying here. But then, had he not already intended to leave?

His light-coloured socks were flecked with blood. These young people would have noticed. He got up, saying, 'You'll let me come again?'

Benedict said, 'It would be wonderful.'

When they parted, the death flowed back into each of them. The tray being cleared away, Benedict lay down with his arms over his chest, in isolation. And there was Helen in her chair, separately and equivocally stirred.

At length she slipped down on her knees by the daybed and clasped her brother closely and laid her head on his folded hands. Except for the movement of his fingers on her hair, it was as if they slept together.

He said, 'You are thinking of what is to come.'

He wrote out, with formalities, the statement as already drafted, making an exact copy for Driscoll. (A typewriter, eventual and portable, had been promised, and sheets of carbon paper.) His glance fell on the letter earlier set aside, to his army friend, who, now concerned with war crimes, was sailing East. In his mind, he had framed a reply — 'My dear Peter' — but the narrative, of Tokyo, the Inland Sea, the death of Gardiner, had become, and literally was, yesterday. He would have to begin again.

It was noon. He would walk up the path and leave the copy of his statement for Driscoll, having seen the original safely deposited. He had kept his draft. For the time being, he sat on there, elbow on table, chin on palm, like the poet on the back of the anthology, recalling Benedict's scant hair, and the girl's tremulous hand.

Dear Peter -

This should greet you at Hong Kong, a place for which I keep affection. In my Shanghai boyhood, Hong Kong played second fiddle as the great port of the China trade, and will now be in the ascendant. My Japanese venture, in its second month, begins to take shape. The role of conqueror remains alien and distasteful. There is something equivocal about having prevailed so completely over one's fellow man — I don't speak of systems or regimes, but of individuals. Quite different, to my mind, from the extempore impersonations of victor and vanquished that successively fell to your lot and mine in the war. I'm glad — aren't you? — that our military lives are ending.

Needing to work in this region, I've established myself in hills overlooking Kure — that is to say, near Hiroshima, where I've begun my enquiries. I continue to be, as in China, a
franc tireur
, assisted not at all by official sources. Secrecy as to the catastrophe and its consequences is controlled here by the American Bomb Survey; and is such, in the case of non-Americans, that I've been sending my meagre notes away to safety. Even this far from conspiratorial letter goes by safe hand. A contrast with my China wanderings, where I walked, through chaos, as my own man.

Up here in the hills, the officer in charge is a medical administrator from the Antipodes. He and his consort make a formidable pair. They have a frail and remarkable young son, and a little girl who is a changeling. Seeing these young people, I am thinking that a child can be born fastidious into cruelty and can hold to reason and a sense of justice. There is, thank God, no explaining this.

When you're settled, I would like to come in your direction. T. V. Soong is taking over in Kwangtung, bringing his private army with him. Soongs and Chiangs, and credulous Washington, will cost us all dear in the end, which is so soon to come. We'll see the Deluge: archaic iniquity swept away by the new Juggernaut of the doctrinaire. Meantime, I've a mind to see Canton again, and to cast an eye on Soong and his Salt Troops. Or perhaps it's simply that I miss China. Missing China is my habit of years. I was even homesick for China while I was there, a paradox emblematic of that great and enigmatic land. At all events, it will be fine to see you again, and in this hemisphere.

Having signed and folded the letter and sealed it, Leith then wrote, in his notebook:

I have learned that Benedict Driscoll is twenty. He suffers from a disease called Friedreich's ataxia, which disables and will ultimately kill him. This was diagnosed three months ago in London, when he was still relatively mobile. Since then the condition has accelerated, as if released by its identification. The family, coming from Sydney, had been living a year in Bengal, where Driscoll, the father, held some administrative post in hygiene under the governor, Richard Casey. In London, these two waifs were left by their mother in the protection of their former tutor, an Englishman who had known them in Australia. They are wonderfully well-read, a poetic pair who live in literature and make free with it. They are right to cling to it: it has delivered them.

Helen's age, not yet disclosed. Possibly fourteen? Fifteen? Wanting to be thought older, she doesn't let on. Within ten years will be dissembling in the opposite direction. Women are soon obliged to appear young beyond their years.

Since the night of Gardiner's death, the night of the twirling girls on Ita Jima, I rediscover memories distinct from war. Often of women, of my youthful loves — Aurora, Gigliola. Not so much Moira, perhaps because our story achieved, in London, that nearly ritual fulfillment. It is incompleteness that haunts us.

Having written this, he put the notebook away, in a small gimcrack safe that he'd acquired, along with other documents and a box of lead pencils called Venus.

4

Unfit for school life at Sydney, Benedict had been taught at home. The Driscolls had found a tutor: an Englishman impoverished and under a cloud, like many another emigrant to Australia. His name was Bertram Perowne. It was said that Bertram came from a grand family, and in his finedrawn and diffident way he certainly looked and spoke the part. However, he laid no claim to the connection, and it was plain that the family, grand or not, did nothing for him. He worked in a shop in the morning and came to the Driscolls after lunch. Helen, returning from school at three, had shared her brother's lessons.

Getting himself back to England in mid-war, Bertram had purportedly been recruited for some cerebral task to do with coding. This again was hearsay, to which Bertram, in letters, made no allusion.

Benedict said of him, 'For us, he was Adam, naming the world.'

Helen said, 'He is our good angel.'

Leith thought that Bertram had been both Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday.

It was Bertram who had cared for them in England, where he now appeared to have some means. Their mother had brought them to Britain from India, astonishingly — for the Driscolls in late war had seen something of the world and had spent that unexpected year in Bengal. The post in imperial India had been another of Barry's stepping-stones, leading to Kure. In order to be on hand for the move to Japan, the mother had left the children in London with Bertram. It was Bertram who had seen Benedict through the medical tests, and had taken the brother and sister as far as Naples for their sailing to the East.