The Great Fire (10 page)

'I don't know that it means anything now.'

'Ah — caste remains a useful advantage. To defy it, one still must suffer. Tolerance, the relaxation that is far off. Too late for you and me.'

The revelation had made it impossible to get up and go. Some interlude was required in tribute, there could be no hastening away. Hendriks, having ceased pronouncing, fell into a silence in its own way oracular. Exley hung on half an hour, the ship melting round him. The two men took leave of one another at last, with assurances of a reunion when Hendriks next came to port. It was evident to both that this would not occur.

★

In September there were cooler evenings and, at the barracks, an issue of winter-weight blankets. At a Chinese tailor in Queen's Road, Peter Exley was measured for a suit in grey worsted. The tailor's shop, up stairs, was called Old Bond's Treat. The tailor himself, dreaming with open eyes, continually deferred the fittings.

Rysom said, 'The bugger takes opium.'

At the bank, refrigerated vapours mingled visibly with pipe tobacco. Miss Rita Xavier now draped a linen jacket on her shoulders as she typed and filed, and wore nylon stockings on her slender legs. With autumn, her virginal aspect was on the turn for spinsterhood.

In the adjoining room, hefty Norah thumped her thighs and shouted, 'God, I'm getting porkers.' And shaggy dark Brenda scowled with unplucked brows — as she had scowled one evening at a shipboard dance while returning Peter Exley's tipsy kiss. Rita Xavier's face, by contrast, was very nearly impassive. If Westerners had contributed shades of expression to the human face, Peter wondered, were they to be praised or blamed? Was responsiveness in itself something to be proud of?

In his notebook, Exley wrote: 'Miss Xavier dislikes speaking Chinese in front of us "Europeans." I hear her at it, directing the office cleaners — a pastiche of Mandarin, Cantonese, and even Hakka, learned in childhood from her amahs. She has good French, taught by the nuns. Some Portuguese, presumably. English excellent, cultivated — a better enunciation than my own. A fine vocabulary, curiously unrelated to any literary knowledge whatever: she chooses good words as they do in Latin countries, from having no alternative. Tells me she had an English governess, a young woman married to a non-commissioned officer stationed in Hong Kong between the wars.'

Exley closed his notebook on the governess. Some educated girl of good family, condemned by injudicious love to isolation in the colonial lower ranks. The colony was a backwater then, overshadowed by Shanghai. Shanghai was the place to be. The loneliness of such a life, the unfairness. The wilting pink-and-white, the ailments, the wretched economies. The unforgiving good family: 'She has made her bed and must lie in it.' And the bed itself losing its magic. Some Amanda or Cassandra, fallen between two stools, between two wars.

The everlasting question of women, the absence of women, of pink-and-white women. Even the glowering Brendas were in demand, let alone the pretty Camillas, the English roses. In this respect, the racial lines were quietly and implacably drawn. Hendriks, the oracle in his rusted bathtub, was perfectly right: to flout the agreement, you could not be casual; for you would be made, by both sides, to suffer.

'How terrible,' said Monica or Norah, 'when there are children of mixed race.'

When Monica, Brenda, or Norah said this, Peter Exley was walking with all three of them on a late afternoon to the Helena May Hostel. He had been invited to tea, for his birthday. They had gone up through the park and passed above the barracks. It was cool as they climbed. Simply to cease sweating was an inducement to thought, and Exley had forgotten his companions.

Monica gave him his cue: 'Tragic, don't you think?'

They suspected Exley of harbouring large ideas which he would not have the gumption to assert.

He said, 'Well, it happens.'

Giggles, as if at something audacious. There are women, he thought, who can paralyse a man's best instincts.

He said, 'As I see it, the mixed races seem indispensable here.'

Brenda said, 'Like the Virgin Rita.' The three women laughed, pausing to do so with vehemence.

'That nun.'

'A nun, like her sisters.'

'Sister Rita.'

'Santa Rita.'

'Pretty prickly for a saint.'

'Santa Claws.'

He could not walk ahead or fall behind. An overhang of trees shadowed his face. There was the smell of green decay that he had once mistaken for health.

At the hostel, in the lofty lounge, balancing his cup on the arm of a wicker settee, Peter watched these disputations, thick-bodied women stumping off to fetch cake and a bowl of sugar with silver tongs; plumping down on the chintz roses of plumped-down cushions and fondling with near abandon the shamefaced, slavering Labrador belonging to the maiden directress. The airy room, the light of Asia, and strange red lilies in a vase could do nothing for them.

Brenda sat facing him, hair shoved back from ears, jowl distorted by a bad mosquito bite; flushed from nuzzling the salivating dog. While imploring Exley's advances, plainly summed him up as a poor thing. The low estimate had nothing to do with her yearning to be chosen and thus brought into existence. Judging him a poor thing, she would yet have married him and given him a devoted form of hell. Exley knew it. They had mutely agreed on the elements, if not the outcome.

As ever, his thoughts drawn by paths; his imagination captured, when it might have been fired.

6

Benedict was up, sitting in Helen's chair. An American doctor interested in his case had sent a new medicine from Tokyo, which had brought him better mornings. Leith found the boy finishing his breakfast, a sheaf of crossword puzzles at his side. Puzzles from
The Times
were sent by Bertram.

Helen was up at the house.

Benedict, if his respite lasted, would be interested to see Hiroshima. Leith said, 'Of course we could do that.'

'Helen might come. If I can't manage it, Helen could go without me.' He said, 'She needs to do things on her own.'

'Does she say so?'

'No.' Benedict said, 'This is a new degree of seclusion. Even in India, where we were out of the city, she could go about and see things. She had friends. And I was better then.'

'Hiroshima isn't a joyride. We could take her elsewhere.' Leith doubted that the parents would let him make a habit of that.

'We had that grand journey, halfway round the world. Even then, she was expected to stay close.' Benedict said, 'I will tell you about Marseilles.

'At Marseilles, we set foot on Europe. We'd sailed from Bombay and called at Aden, did the Red Sea, surfaced at Port Said. My mother, along with the two of us. Helen and I sat up on deck all night in moonlight to see the coast of Crete, to pass Messina, sight Stromboli at dawn. The ship's engines went on the blink, and we lolled awhile in the Strait of Bonifacio, within ecstatic sight of Corsica and Sardinia. Helen remembered that John Henry Newman had composed his hymn there in similar circumstances, and she and I furtively sang "O Lead, Kindly Light" and cried.

'At Marseilles, the port had been destroyed in the war. We walked from the dock straight into the heart of the city.'

'Along the Canabière.'

'You know everything. There was a market that day — serious stalls of tools and farm implements. Then, tables of much rubbish. My mother wanted a comb, and gave her change purse to Helen, who went and bought the thing. We had bitter coffee standing at a tiny café on wheels. My mother said, Undrinkable. We'd never seen espaliered trees, and thought they must be blitzed or dead. At the end of the avenue there was a tiered monument to the dead of all wars. We thought it looked very fine. People were kind. We were two creatures from the colonies. At least, however, and thanks to Bertram, speaking French.

'My sister wanted to walk to the monument. But I was tiring, and from the look of it, climbing would have been involved. Then she and I would have liked to lunch at one of the little restaurants around the market. But my mother wouldn't hear of it: we should return to the ship for lunch.'

'Why?'

Benedict laughed. 'Why, because on board we need not pay. In such matters, as in much else, we are helpless. Like Royalty, I carry no money. Unlike them, I have none. In any case, there was also the impulse to resist our pleasures. So we trailed back to the ship, Helen lagging behind. Near the dock there were ramshackle blue buses — for regional people, I daresay, going home from the market. One was marked
CASSIS
and another
AIX
, on cardboard signs stuck in the window. To think that such names were within our reach. As we boarded the ship, one of the buses could be heard starting up. A fellow passenger from the ship came to us breathless to say that Helen wanted us to know that she'd gone to Aix-en-Provence by bus and would be back for dinner.

'My mother was, as Australians say, ropable. And I — I was dumbfounded with admiration and love.'

The man was picturing the girl in outgrown coat, setting off alone for Cythera in the blue rattletrap.

Ben said, 'You will understand it. Not just that she'd thrown our mother over, in full knowledge of the fearful consequences — the Mad Scene in which our mother would play Ophelia, Gertrude, and Claudius all together. What was marvellous was that she had also thrown
me
over, breached our agreement, acted entirely for herself. Saved her soul. I even enjoyed my own pang of resentment, which showed the necessity for her gesture.'

Less enjoyable had been the long afternoon. The mother shrieking: 'Anything can happen to her,
ANYTHING
.'

Ben, from a deck chair, had disbelieved that the white slave trade was centred on Aix.

'She knows nothing, can't you understand, she knows
NOTHING
.'

'And whose fault is that?'

Helen had come back punctually for dinner. 'I had felt for her as the day declined, but she was beyond our reach. There is no arguing with exultation. My mother tried everything in her arsenal, but Helen was immune for the evening. She was beautiful. The last straw was that she had brought back a packet of some sweets they make at Aix, further violating the matriarchal purse. Having had something over from the bus fare and after a
café crème
outdoors in the Cours Mirabeau, and the purchase of a postcard. An English couple for whom she translated the menu had ordered her a
croque monsieur,
possibly sizing up the situation. Hallowed be their names. She was hungry on return and had a hearty dinner, our mother all the while declaring that she herself could touch nothing.'

Ben said, 'Later, in the first-class lounge, she ate them, though. My mother. I mean, the Calissons d'Aix.'

Sunday
; grisaille.
Suspension. Even the cataract in the gully below hangs in midair, awaiting Monday. This afternoon I finished a draft of my first section on China, and have been reading it over. It strikes me that, in the interest of coherence, an infinity of impressions have been sacrificed and, along with them, some experienced truth. So it must be reworked. In the meantime, the thing emerges as worth doing.

Damp English day, in which I've thought persistently of Aurora. My recurrent images of women appear less like memories than a means of restoring life to what has mattered and was passingly eclipsed by war. It is ten years now since she and I first met and were lovers; six years since I last saw her. I realise, too, that I now have a substantial past — which means that I am no longer young but have become more interesting to myself I used to think that our story, hers and mine, was farfetched, even freakish; but see now that the experiment of love is itself aberrant, more often than not, and doesn't lend itself to classification. A letter this week from Aurora, funny and charming, put me in mind of all that, and prompted a dream of her, with predictable result.

Recollection is also aroused by questions put to me by my two young people, with whom I indulge myself in orgies of answering. Retrievals not free of pain. For two such cloistered beings, their own adventures are bizarre enough. I learn that on the last leg of their voyage to Japan they were obliged to spend time in Hong Kong, due to the seizure of the cruise ship
Van Heutz,
boarded by Chinese pirates at Mirs Bay two months past. Helen and Ben were to have taken the ship from Hong Kong to Kobe, and had to wait in a Hong Kong hotel while the shipping company sorted out their case. They seem to have enjoyed it as another reprieve. Helen thought it would have been exciting to be aboard when the ship was commandeered. Ben and I said nothing.

The parents have allowed these children, one of them mortally ill, to wander the world alone. Given the context, I return to the conclusion that worse might have happened.

Leith thought that, if he replied at once to Aurora, he would write a love letter, which was out of the question. All the same, it would have pleased him, that Sunday evening, to write such a letter; even if not to her.