The Great Fire (25 page)

It was his own health he had in mind, his dull convalescence over. While Brenda was complaining to the management, and Rita stood irresolute at the kerb, Peter Exley was acknowledging a simple truth. Or so it seemed to him.

He told the woman what he meant to do. She cried out to him in a dialect he couldn't understand, and he let her speak while he thought about the taxi ride and wondered if Liu's wife had ever ridden in a car. He was pretty sure the driver would take them, since he wore the masterly uniform. These moments passed, and the child lay against him, still animate, valuable, and part of prodigious being.

He thought with relief of the hospital. He had forgotten that there would be people to help him.

'All right, then,' he said in English. 'Time to make a move.'

15

These were Brian Talbot's last days in Japan. With usual human perversity, he began to look about at the colours and outcroppings of his surroundings, and to hanker for a few more weeks to get things straight. Regretted again that he had not taken up the language, or travelled beyond his assigned district. Wished that he'd bought better binoculars or a different camera, or a flat red lacquer box timidly offered to him by an old man one afternoon in the street. He was taking a strand of cultured pearls to his mother, and had another in reserve for his girl, who had not written lately.

His immediate purpose, on return to Melbourne, was to finish with the army. Beyond that, he assumed that something would turn up. He had a decent record, Leith's recommendation, and a couple of vague possibilities at the other end. Sensations of vacancy, of going back on his tracks, were natural: he'd soon shake down again. They'd expect him to be the same as before; or to pretend to be. He hoped that he wouldn't have to pretend sameness for the rest of his life.

Anyway, it was time to go. Everything here was on the turn. They were talking of trouble with China, trouble with Korea. Of world war with Russia. He didn't care to be stuck in the East with that.

He would miss his jaunts with Aldred Leith, in whose company he had never felt the anonymity that oppressed the soldiers. Taunted by his mates, he merely said, 'He's the only grown-up cove I've come across.' Brian Talbot wondered more about Leith's future than about his own. Having so far distinguished himself, Leith could not stop there: he should go on to vindicate Talbot's high opinion. Somebody had to transcend sameness.

He had learned that the little girl at the compound was regarded, in the common room, as Leith's property. On this score, the hero had been labelled 'The Baby Snatcher.' If speculation was muted, that was due to lack of evidence, and to the girl's preoccupation with her brother, which aroused sympathy. Talbot might have said that he had seen Helen holding hands at the pictures with the American; but held his tongue. Some restraint had been absorbed from Leith. And Talbot had observed that Tad Hill stood no chance.

Her attraction was puzzling, except that she was the only girl on hand. She was the least physical woman he'd ever set eyes on. But he knew that such a girl harboured feelings, you had to stay clear. Her value in Leith's eyes influenced them all. Talbot's own leave-taking was forcing new leniency, so that in these final days he no longer held that Leith should, as the saying went, look higher; or, on return to Britain, set his sights on Princess Margaret Rose. He saw that man and girl looked to each other, and faced difficulties. He felt for the two of them in the disastrous parting that was clearly the fate of all who mixed up with this bloody Far East.

Leith, after some days at Nagasaki, came back one afternoon with his canvas bag. His trench coat, which had been cleaned, was unbuttoned over the battle dress, as it was called, that he wore in cold weather. The two men were pleased to see each other in this accustomed way, having wrested at least one habit out of discontinuity: both aware that, after these few days, they would never meet again.

Talbot had one week left. 'Thought it'd never pass, in the beginning. Now it's down to six days.'

'I expect to be gone myself, in a month or two. You have my address, if there's something I can do — my parents' address, in Norfolk, which will always find me.'

Talbot would have liked to imagine a white-haired couple, cosy by the fire; she knitting, perhaps, he nodding off over the newspaper: proud of their boy. But had a hunch that things were different, remembering the parent's veiled ferocity on the back of the book.

'Maybe you'll make it out to Melbourne someday. Never know.' He couldn't, in that instant, see himself strolling by the Yarra, let alone with Aldred Leith.

The man suddenly asked him, 'What else would you like to do?' — meaning, if it weren't the army, if it weren't the Yarra.

And the youth said, 'I wish I knew.' Was quiet awhile, then took it up: 'The choices aren't much, I have to earn a living. Part of me wants change, part of me wants to fit in. I'd like to grow up a bit before I had to choose. But they're not expecting anything like that.'

'Be careful there. When we're indecisive, the wishes of others gain.' What he'd refrained from saying to Peter Exley. He did not like to repeat himself, even if life appeared to demand it.

'I'd like something more, before it all closes in.' He couldn't say, Adventure; having let that possibility slip during his Japanese year. 'Not fun, exactly, though that would do no harm.'

Leith said, 'Romance.'

'Yair.' The boy laughed, not quite easily, giving the word a sole significance while knowing that something more was intended. 'I reckon that's it.'

The man said, out of private happiness, 'Indefensible, indispensable things.'

When they reached the gates, some arrangement was made for the following day. Brian Talbot thought he might drop in at the common room. And Leith started down the path with his bag.

He was fretted by his own assertion that he would soon be gone. For the first time in years, there was an event that he could not face, which was no longer exclusively his own. He had determined to speak with Helen that evening, and with Benedict if the boy was able. If not, he and Helen must talk in his room. He understood that here, too, the other culmination was upon them. Not that, in any of this, he was unhappy. On the contrary, he could scarcely imagine the previous life in which he had existed without such charmed excitement.

Helen was running to him. Not coming from the cottages below, but from the group of offices above. Flying down the trodden, cloddy path, loden wings spread and hair fluttering. Leith dropped his bag and went up to meet her, aware that she was fleeing, rather than arriving, from some emergency. He thought, Benedict is dead.

She came into his arms. On both sides, there was such readiness that the man realised: I'm here to do this for her.

Controlling herself: 'They've taken him away.'

They went to Aldred's room and sat down together. She put her green arm to her face and cried. She said, 'To greet you like this.' But sat up and dried her eyes, and made her gesture of touching his face, to verify existence. 'Thank God you're here.'

'I say the same of you. Tell me.'

Benedict had been taken, by his parents, to Tokyo. Helen, driven by Dench on a fictitious errand in the town, had come back to find him gone. This was supposed to have spared her their parting. Within days he would leave Japan for the United States, accompanied by the doctor, whose name was Thorwaldsen, who was returning to his clinic in California. It was an abduction.

Dench had told her that it was temporary: they would assess his condition and recommend treatment. He would be cared for better than before, while the parents considered an imminent departure for New Zealand. They would make a home for him there.

She was trembling. 'He will never see us again, any of us. I will never see him. He'll die with none of us near him. Without me. In some unimaginable place.'

Leith, who held her, could not deny.

'We couldn't say goodbye. He may think that I took part in it.'

'He doesn't. He knows.'

She put her arm again to her face. 'I wanted to rush, to take the train. I have no money.' Distraught. 'I don't have a pass.'

He drew her arm away. 'But I do.' He said, 'Helen, I can't get him back, but I can see him. And you'll write him some words for me to carry.' There was a late plane from Kure now, if he could reach it in time. Otherwise, the last train. 'Stay here while I try to catch Talbot before he goes. Write to Ben now, the letter. I'll come back at once.' At the door, he turned: 'Helen, my papers?' The package stowed beneath Ben's bed.

'I have them here.' She went to him, took his hand and kissed it. 'How good you are. Better than anybody.'

Talbot was getting into the jeep, but jumped down; reckoned that they could make it to the plane. 'Better make tracks, though.' He said there were messages and letters for Leith in the common room and went to get them.

Helen had his bag ready in her hand — like a wife, he thought. 'My darling girl, I'll try to get back tomorrow. If not, then early on Thursday.' He took the folded page from her. 'I'll tell him.' He said, 'Helen, whatever happens, don't let. . . Be here when I get back.'

'I'd have to be kidnapped.' Or dead.

When he had gone, she went to the rooms she had shared with her brother. The boy Aki was there, sweeping, wiping, creating vacancy. In her own tiny room, she sat on the bed, shuddering, still wearing Tad's coat; her legs drawn up beneath her, her mind shuttling among the day's impressions, two of which dominated. What she knew now to be the last sight of her brother, watching her from his bed as she prepared to leave with Dench for their errand in the town. And her lover saying, But I can go — with his immediacy, his composure.

When the young Japanese had finished his work, he came to her door, putting down his paraphernalia and bowing low, and shedding soundless, creaseless tears.

Dench came in to see her that evening. He had been to the island about some task, and brought his pursy air of having information not to be divulged. For her part she divulged nothing of Leith's visit, of which he remained ignorant. And that was her sole satisfaction. He told her that she should think of packing and sorting, as there would soon be changes. She said that she had little to pack and nothing to sort: she and her brother had only their clothes and their books; and some letters, she said, in a folder. She added this to annoy him. When he left her, she locked the door; and would have shot the bolt, had there been one.

In the angle of a corridor, against a distempered wall, there was a hard bench that made a trio with two steel chairs. No table, nothing to read. Aldred had brought a book, but was using it to balance the pad on which he was writing. A couple of envelopes and two or three written pages lay loose on the bench, at his side. No one else was waiting. The trappings of hospital passed him by: wheeled trays and wheeled chairs, gowned patients with starched attendants, hushed and incurious. And all the smells, rigorous or palliative, of such places.

Footsteps came up quietly and detached themselves from the stream.

'Major Leith.'

He got up, scrambling a bit with his book and the lined pad: 'Miss Fellowes.' Distracted, he tried to remember how she could be there. They shook hands. 'Won't you sit down.' He set his papers aside, plainly meaning to resume them at first opportunity.

She thought that if anyone ever looked gaunt, it was he; and so attractive. She had come in from Yokohama with her brother, who was having a new prosthesis fitted to his arm.

Leith, now recalling everything, supposed that new devices of the kind could be had from America.

'Perhaps so. But this model comes from Britain.' She said, 'Apparently we had a lot of practice in these matters as a result of the Great War.'

There was a hiatus, in which each seemed to have something to tell.

When she began again, 'Major Leith —' he said, 'Please. Aldred.' To which she responded, 'Audrey.'

'Aldred. I suppose you know what's happened to Peter.' She showed some hesitant distress before saying that Peter Exley had been very ill.

'This must be recent — I had a letter last week.'

'Yes, it's ten days now. He's recovering. It's been serious. He's had infantile paralysis. Poliomyelitis, they call it now. The Gladwyns — if you remember my cousins in Hong Kong — wrote to me. Both legs apparently affected, one quite badly.' She said, with kindness, 'I'm sorry to be giving you bad news. You may — perhaps you have anxieties of your own.'

'You're very good,' he said, meaning it. And told her briefly about Benedict. Now that they were engrossed, there was relief in talking. He made a gesture to the papers he had put by. 'A lot is happening at once.' He said, 'As I was leaving Kure yesterday, I had a cable from my mother. My father has died.'

'I'm extremely sorry.'

'Thank you.' He passed his hand through his hair. 'How much can suddenly go wrong. I must get myself to England. I was going soon in any case, but it's become urgent.'

'Were you close — to your father?'

'I suppose I'll find that out now. We'd seen little of one another in recent years. Lately, perhaps, some feeling deepened.' He added, 'And there are other things to be thought of, before I leave.' Unable to forgo allusion to his love.