The Great Fire (17 page)

They reached the hotel. The driver handed her out of the Jaguar, for which she thanked him. And the merchant princeling, having given quiet instructions for the morning, followed her into the arcade.

The lift boy took them up:
sam-lau, sei-lau.
The man, Matheson, who would get out first, stood with his back to the Chinese boy and the exit: an intent, almost suffering face, and his eyes on hers, questioning. When his floor came, he leant forward and took her small breasts tightly in his hands, a moment only, and went away without a word.

In Japan, six months later, Helen lay on Aldred Leith's bed, holding his letter and considering these incidents of the Gloucester Hotel, which she had pondered and never confided to a soul.

She should get up and go. Tad Hill, who was again at Kure, should drop in on them at that hour. Ben should receive his letter, still folded by Leith's envelope. Eventually she would show Ben the letter lying under her hand, anything else being unnatural. Besides, most people might think the letter inconsequential. Not Ben, however; or, for that matter, Tad.

10

At Canton, Leith had been asked to stay in the British Consulate, on the small island of Shamien, which, devised out of reclaimed land, was attached to the city by a causeway. He told Peter Exley, 'However, I feel I've done my imperial bit for a while. I liked seeing the General; and even at Government House there was a pleasant woman at table.' Amused by his own deviousness in preparing the ground for those two. 'But Shamien is in miniature, you've seen it, the foreign life is bottled up there — consulates, banks, merchants. I'll stay in the town, with a scholar from my father's China past who's been teaching at Lingnan.'

Peter, visiting Canton weeks earlier, had seen Lingnan: the university in decay. Students and teachers had shown him the classrooms and dormitories of broken windows and cracked walls, the ransacked library. Like China itself, stricken, fatalistic, with nothing to hope for in the present, and trepidation of what would come.

Peter's trip to Canton belonged to his early weeks at Hong Kong, in the time of his recall from the accretions of the Orient. Canton was his first experience of the land of China. He'd found the city squalid, and indistinct with chaos. The river supplied an alluvial consistency and colour closer to that of flowing land than of water. Before reaching the sea, the Pearl River would pass through a banked channel; but at Canton one might imagine that it had completed its course, so strong was the sense of estuary. On that illusory harbour, suburbs of sampans, aligned, rose and fell with the river — as if, swarming ashore, they had mingled with the dun habitations on dry land. Refugees from the civil war had created teetering settlements even on the groups of logs floated together at the docks of timber yards. The city appeared to sway on its own silt. At its periphery, the disintegrating shrines and statuary, each in isolation, rose up out of sediment damply packed or, in summer, hard-baked. And always, on some rise, the Chinese tombs usurped the soil.

Exley did not tell Leith that he had found Shamien a relief — having felt guilty for it even at the time. Trees, gardens, smooth buildings, an airy cleanliness, and a pink baby in a pram. He realised that the city would be different to him had he gone there, now, with Leith. They would have walked the overwhelming streets; would have traced the ancient walls and pagodas, and the Buddhist temples in the western quarter, of which Peter had discovered only a flickering shadow or derelict crust. But Leith had not suggested it; and in those days, certain of Exley's war crimes cases were about to go to trial.

Mulling this, Peter was stowing his possessions in cool new quarters up at MacGregor Road. This, too — space, privacy, view of sea and hills — was owed to Leith. Inevitably, Roy Rysom had remarked on it: 'So Our Hero fixed you up in style.'

'You yourself get more room this way.' Accounting for himself to the end.

That was on his last day at the barracks. It was evening, and Peter was putting books in a box. Rysom was on his bunk by the window, his arm overhanging the bed with drupes of hairy fingers. Though thick, the fingers were not stumpy but tapered off in oddly arrested tips. As if a potentially good hand had chosen to go no further. When wielding a fork or pencil, Rysom grasped the implement far down the stem.

If we two weren't Australians, this would be Russian literature: I brooding over my books, Rysom by the window singing Lensky's aria. But literary Russia was no place for Australians. Reverie by the open window in the sweet futility of a mild evening was yet to strike the Australian male as a requirement. (There would be the question of fly screens, for one thing.) And Exley felt his existence stirring in its coma — scarcely Destiny, but a tremor of change. He could not take up again where he'd left off. Some things were as well left off. Nevertheless, in a previous life, he had acted: he had boarded a ship and sailed. Had landed in what was, with all difficulties, a chosen life. He might still choose. Life with Rysom had nurtured lassitude — dragging Peter down to the bottom, their joint passivity seen in the absolving perspective of outrageous history.

Rysom was turning pages of macabre photographs. 'Take a dekko at the Graves album, mate? — cheer you up a bit.' He said, 'Bloody peace put me at a loose end, same as you. Then the Graves job turned up. Just shows you should never say die.'

A panic-stricken ribaldry passed off as virility, authenticity. Passed off as truth.

He and Rysom had been raised on the Australian myths of desecration — on tales of fabulous vomiting into glove compartments or punch bowls, of silence ruptured by obscene sound: the legends of forlorn men avenging themselves on an empty continent, which, in its vast removal, did not hear or judge them.

These things Peter Exley knew, who had been born and raised to it all, and endangered by it. Who had released himself into the lavish hospitality of art. Because of his own hairbreadth escape, the condition did not excite his compassion: the attack on whatever withheld itself in mystery — a woman, a culture, a work of art; the sense of private self. All could be exorcised with a beer and a jeer; the mockery, like the drink, being passing assuagement only, of the wound that would not heal.

He thought it an interesting expression: to excite compassion.

Rysom folded his arms under his head. A huge yawn made a grotto of his face, stalactites of stained teeth. 'I heard you were on the town with a mulatto.'

'That's right.' This would have been an hour at a teashop with Rita Xavier.

Rysom dragged at his blanket with calloused toes. 'Next time you can tell her about the White Australia Policy.'

Leith came back with the morning plane from Canton. Exley could not go to Kai Tak to meet him. Before he could muster apprehensions, Aldred rang from the hotel, where he had the same room and where they would meet that evening and go to dinner nearby.

Darkness came earlier now. As they left the hotel in the dusk, Audrey Fellowes was arriving. Leith, making the introductions, invited her to join them — aware that Exley might be disappointed, but thinking that he might equally and ultimately be glad. Miss Fellowes accepted with just the right amount of pleasure. Immediately, however, the feminine minutiae came in: she must go first to her room and, as she put it, 'tart myself up a bit,' after a day spent with the Kadoories out on the New Territories. The two men sat down in the lobby to wait.

'Peter, I hope you don't mind. She's a fine girl. I'm pleased to see her again.'

'Not at all. I can see she's nice. Pretty, too.'

She surprised them by reappearing within moments in a fresh dress, with sleek hair and new colour on her fair and smiling face. She had, yes, dabbed scent behind her ears; hoped it wasn't overdone: 'It's called Bond Street. Made by Yardley, the same who make that lavender water that we were allowed to splash around on outings from school.' It was easy to see her as a spirited schoolgirl. Too easy, thought Leith, who divined some controlled shyness.

Dinner went more than well. It was pleasant to the men to have a woman's company. She was observant, intelligent, amusing, and asked questions that were acute without being assertive. As to the colonials, she thought they had a nice life, if they would allow themselves to enjoy it.

'They keep discounting it as artificial. A kind of disclaimer, I suppose. For myself, I don't object to a little artifice for a while, after what we've all been through and with what seems to be in store . . .'

Both men wondered about her war: there was her age, perhaps twenty-seven, twenty-eight. Very probable, the lost fiance, bereavement, anguish. The bombardment, and possibly the women's army. When she mentioned the brother in Japan, she withdrew very slightly into another shade of self. She would certainly visit him at Yokohama, but not quite yet. A second brother was in India.

Relatives were strong in her story. In Hong Kong she had cousins, living in May Road.

Her dress was exactly suited to her age and nature, and for the simple but citified place where they dined. Voice pleasing, manner animate but serene. She was clearly aware that her two companions took stock of these things, as of her soft round arms and bosom: she was used to that experience — although 'resigned,' Leith thought, would not be the word. All the time, she no doubt formed her own impressions. When she goes back to her room and takes off her earrings and shoes, and her dress, and looks in the mirror, what will she recall of these moments and, for worse or better, smile about?

She and Peter were talking of the old Walled City of Kowloon, a remnant of pre-colonial Hong Kong in dispute between the Chinese and Britain. Their encounter had fallen out very well, without show of contrivance.

Having seen Miss Fellowes back to the hotel, the two men turned away for a stroll along the Praya. Peter said, 'I enjoyed being with her. Thank you for that.' He made no attempt, as another man might have done, to hedge his approval with some knowing criticism — only adding, 'Nice woman.'

Now it's up to them. He and Peter would, for a last time, spend the following evening together. Leith was near departure, and engrossed by the fact. Alone in his room, it occurred to him that, in different circumstances, Audrey being in the same hotel, he and she might have spent the night together: such things had happened in his life. This came to him because he had missed Helen crucially all day.

A similar idea, less starkly identified, crossed the mind of Audrey Fellowes as she closed her shutters on a last glimpse of the new moon and climbed into her bed. However, and for some time now, she had not regarded a telephone with high hopes, or expected illumination from the moon.

'Europe won't have me on the old terms.' Peter, considering his future. 'In Australia, it would be the partnership in the law firm, in the cards ever since I can remember.' Momentous childhood excursions to his father's gloomed office in Castlereagh Street — tinkering with a stapling machine, clattering the keys of a mastodontic black Remington Rand: All this will be yours. 'In a few years, my father will retire. Naturally, I feel it for them, too.' They'd been right when they told him, a dozen years ago, You'll break our hearts.

'When I leave here, I'll go and spend time with them. But I'll have to know, by then, what I mean to do. Otherwise, it's putting my head in a noose.'

When we're indecisive, yes, the wishes of others gain. If that had never drastically been the case in Leith's life, he'd felt the lash of it in small things. There can be danger in supplying what people say they want: they may have got used to the inaccessibility of long desires, shaped their lives otherwise, even want the grievance of being thwarted. On the other hand, a gesture might give great happiness. He did not say this to Peter Exley, who was already beset by equivocations. 'Could you practise law in Britain and have your parents visit you?'

'I suppose it will come to that.' Give them the trip: cliffs of Dover, Stratford-upon-Avon, Stonehenge. He still had most of Crindle's legacy, accreting over years of war. He saw himself patient and kind with them, enjoying their pleasures.

He also saw the idea as crude and heartless. If they declined to be bought off so cheaply, he'd admire them.

Wooden boards rose and fell under his feet. He and Leith were on a tilting boat, offshore at Aberdeen, where people now drove out from the town to dine. The fishing port was tiny, picturesque, as yet genuine. An evening liveliness of lights and voices was set against small dark lightless hills. Hygiene was uncertain, electricity often lacking, mosquitoes rife. Even so, candles smoking with insecticide could not blight the taste of deep-sea fish, or the improvised enchantment of the scene — which, seen from surrounding slopes, was a faery place of coloured lanterns etched with spars of the long flat fishing boats; its calm seas stippled with acetylene galaxies.

Leith said, 'The world is transforming. Australia may change.'

'Over years.' It was the answer that Leith himself had given about Helen's advancing age.