The Great Fire (27 page)

The room was a slot, ending in a window. The foot of the bed, formed by a metal tube, was parallel to the windowsill. Outside the window, fumbling it, filling it, a mass of tropical vegetation: on which the rain, audible at times, at times soundless, was falling and falling.

Blank walls, painted grey. On the bed, a grey blanket wrapped the form of a man.

Peter Exley was waiting for the doctor. His feet were grey hillocks in the bed, the book lay like a brick by his hand. This wing of the hospital was clinically quiet — no garrulous families, querulous outbursts, rampaging children brought corridors to sporadic life. The Chinese aides and British nursing sisters passed his door with soft squeak of foot to floor. The spongy pressure, hush-hush.

The doctor entered with significant calm. Shook hands, pulled forward the only chair: 'Mind if I sit down?' With the white coat, white face and hair, and the stethoscope shiny round his neck, he was a bellwether. He was carrying a thin folder, which he placed on the bed. He was called Major Shulbred.

'This is bad luck.' He reached out to switch the fan to a higher speed. Lined face, mottled hands; some thoughtfulness not merely professional.

'Yes.'

'Not the most severe case we've had. Nor quite the lightest either.'

'No.'

'What the layman calls infantile paralysis. Medically, poliomyelitis. From the Greek — polio, grey. Grey matter of the spinal cord. You've heard all this from my colleagues.'

'Yes.' Exley said, 'What is the plan for me?'

'Let me first explain the condition.' Major Shulbred placed the dossier upside down on the bed and drew on the back of it with a pencil. 'Here is the spinal cord. Here, your right leg. Here is what we call the tibial nerve. Here, the fibula. This is the femur. And here is the tendon reaching to the metatarsal bones.' Politely shifting the sketch in Peter Exley's direction. 'Following me?'

Exley held back mad laughter. Rysom's machine pounded in his head:

The foot bone's connected to the leg bone,

The leg bone connected to the knee bone -

'What has happened to you, Captain Exley, is that —' Shulbred was speaking of atrophy, the body's failures. Making a second sketch, he filled it briskly with flecks of grey. 'When the circulation is interrupted, these muscles can wither —'

The knee bone connected to the thigh bone,

The thigh bone -

Fate had no sense of timing, or good taste.

The doctor went on with his flecks and swoops, his bristly picture: mounting the illusion that comprehension would alleviate fact. To understand all is to forgive all. In a few moments, however, he put his pencil aside and said, 'Cruel stroke of misfortune.'

'Yes.'

'Europeans here aren't aware of such things. If they think of disease in this place, they think tuberculosis. Fair enough — with TB we're talking of one quarter, one third, even, of the local population. But there are serious diseases here more promptly contracted.' He said, 'It's not even certain that you got it from contact with that child.'

He hopes to palliate the irony. Peter said, 'I have no doubt, myself.'

'The child died, I believe?'

'The same day.' Exley said, 'What is the plan for me?'

'Well now. Personally, I think you will make a good recovery. Even a very good recovery. You may eventually be able to walk without the brace, possibly with a stick. We're talking of a couple of years from now. Depending on response to the therapy. You'll always have to count on some weakness.'

'Yes.' Always have.

'Some effects come later, from damage to the peripheral nervous system. With age, the nerve cells diminish. For the time being, at any rate, you're not really ambulatory. We're trying to arrange direct sea passage. There's an Australian ship, the
Taiping,
returning to Sydney from here in three weeks' time, out of Kobe. Small but comfortable, I've been aboard her. I'll signal the captain myself — good chap, fine old Scot, name of Tulloch.' He dropped the dossier beside his chair. 'We'd arrange special care for you — may have to find someone to send along. Everything depends on the extent of their facilities on board.'

The doctor placed his closed fists on his knees, preparing to rise. 'In one thing, I think, we've been lucky. There's a chap going back in the same ship, says he knows you. He can help a bit.'

Exley said, 'Who's that?' — and at once realised: 'Rysom.'

'That's the name. He's leaving the army, been offered some educational post in the government, apparently. At all events, there you are.'

'In the same boat.'

'Yes. The appropriate medical people would be alerted at the other end. What about family?'

Exley said, 'It's been played down to them. I didn't want them turning up here. I can write them now.'

'Decent people?'

'They'll help, yes.'

Shulbred said, 'If you can't face any of this yet, we'll try something different.'

Peter started to say, No point in postponing. But surprised himself: 'I'd rather hang on here awhile. Get used to things, start the therapy.'

Shulbred kept his fists on his knees, but smiled. 'A rational response to a not necessarily rational situation.'

Exley didn't mind being seen through, if it was only once in a while. He saw that Shulbred had often used these words, and with the same kindliness. He lay on his pillows, thinking how a reiterated utterance, even a valid one, mysteriously loses meaning; the repetition echoing down the words. He had noted the phenomenon in himself. He said, 'The rational is still worth stating.'

Shulbred inclined his head. 'I remember you're a lawyer. In that connection — you'll be able to take up your profession where you left off. More fortunate than some.'

'Less so than others.'

'I know.' The doctor got up. 'I'll look in on you again.' The hand on Exley's shoulder.

As soon as Shulbred went out, one of the Scots nurses came in with a note. 'That Miss Xavier telephoned.'

It was a message, that Rita would come after five. Exley put it aside: I can always prevent her.

'Yon fan's too draughty.'

'The doctor turned it up.'

'It's nae sacred for that reason.' Switched it off. 'I'll bring your tea.' Touching his arm as the doctor had — in the same way, Peter thought, that people take liberties with the old and dying: giving endearments, elevating mere acquaintance to familiarity. Taking charge. A last chance to evince goodwill, to give the world a better name.

When the nurse came back with a tray, he asked her to ring up Rita: 'Tell her, at the usual time, then.' Lay there, holding a hot teacup, without appetite for the dull biscuit.

Every other day, Rita came to see him after her work. She brought what he needed — shaving cream, blades, a cashed cheque, a book from the Russian bookshop in Ice House Street; his letters. She attended to small matters with the nurses. As his concentration improved, she began to read to him. When he spoke, responded; when he fell silent, was still. She came in the late afternoons, in her green dress or a pleasing print, when the air was heaviest and the straw blind scarcely swayed against the breeze. Sat, without chatter or any arch greeting, in the single chair: never officious, never bringing bogus good cheer, never staying too long. Since she could not soothe the wound, did nothing to inflame it.

This tact, repose, helpfulness might have comprised the womanly ideal: service crowned with self-effacement. None of it could occur without a sensitivity that Exley made no effort to appreciate. His imagination was exhausted with scurrying to meet the minds of others. He held his own mind steady, like a man who carries his body carefully in pain.

In that life of few weeks past, he had held many matters simultaneously in mind — as people do. Now consciousness devolved on each event in turn, as if the episodes considered over years were being dismissed, one by one. It was enfeebling to him to think of people throughout the world reconsuming their experience, over and over: memory, regret, ideas, pleasures hurrying like caged mice. What emanates from crowds as a seething.

His own experience was not great, yet had filled up his thought at the expense of other powers. His consciousness was like half-excavated ancient cities he had seen — incapable of future, expecting only a further accretion of the past.

There was, for instance, the compulsion to return to the calamity of his child — to deplore it yet again, or replay it with a happy ending. Getting away with something — the narrow squeak — is, he had always realised, a strong theme of life and art: powerful because it creates suspense. One never quite loses hope that Hamlet will discard the poisoned foil, that Juliet will awake in time, Cavaradossi rise up living, and the royal family escape from Varennes. The world loves long odds — Marathon, Lepanto, the Armada; Dunkirk. As to that, he thought, I've had my share of rescues, first by Crindle at Florence, then from Leith in the desert. And done little enough with the reprieve. Good fortune is a prodigy whose occasion one must rise to. Unpractised in such notions, I could not rescue Liu's child, or save myself.

There was a sardonic completeness to the very attempt.

These ideas came round to Rita. There is a kind of well-meaning that is doomed. It was this that Rita had a sense for, an aversion to: 'You intend to be kind, but just so far' — and then her chopping gesture. Yet the intention might be better than the vigilant abstention: better than the chopping gesture and a withered heart.

To marry Rita would be to give up every illusion, on her side as well as his. And she could have no conception of the loneliness to which he would take her — the life of ostracism, household labour, suburban tedium. The White Australia Policy. Such a venture might be possible with high passion. He and Rita were dealing not in passion or dispassion but with a proposal of shared resignation. If he married her, he would perform an unresisting selfish action without pleasing himself in the least.

To offer her these excuses was unthinkable: like a private apology for a public wrong.

He remembered how Hendriks had declared, 'Tolerance is still far off: too late for you and me.' There was also Glazebrook telling him, 'Miss Xavier is serious'; and Monica with her 'tears before bedtime.' Knowing all that, Rita had constructed her defences. And yet sat by him now in the late afternoons, defenceless. He should have been gratefull. People expected something convenient to come of it.

I too am serious, he thought. I do not love her. I do not wish to make use of her, do not want a ministering angel who is indifferent to others. Let her be alive and demanding, and without that look she gave me when she said, 'The child may die, whatever you do,' on the last day of my former life. Truthfullness was his last whole good, the thing he had not sheltered or kept small for safety. He had brought it out of the fire, not intact but with appropriate scars. As an abstraction it could not help him, lying inert in the Asian afternoon. Whether it retained its private power remained to be seen.

Part Three

17

When Aldred Leith came home from war, another war was in the offing. The European peace celebrated three years earlier had loosed its rapturous hold; and London, in the late winter of 1948, was as shabby and sombre as in wartime, and greatly scarred — deliverance being marked, by night, in the old honeycomb of lights and, by day, in a cooling of purpose as the populace awaited some suggestion of good times.

Leith arrived from Asia, making the last stage of his journey in a military plane, which accounted for his being met, once more, by an army driver — an older man who presented himself with a crashing salute ('Sir!'), relieved him of his baggage, took the trenchcoat from Leith's arm, and pointed out, in a recess of the airfield, an old Humber of metallic sheen.

The driver, having folded the legendary coat on the front seat, now stood by the Humber's rear door. Obliged to become official, Leith made no objection — only wishing to rediscover in silence the city where he was born.

'Not too fast. I want to look.' He asked for a circuitous route near the river. He asked the driver's name.

'You'll hardly believe it. The name's Carr.' Having made contact, and growing bored with the automaton role that — for effect, or in self-defence — he sometimes played, Carr settled in for a chat.

He had an idea that his passenger was foreign: 'Ever seen London before?'

'Not for some years. I was here briefly at the time of the victory.' He could have added, I was arranging a divorce.

'Those were great days.'

It was past noon. Configurations of cloud and water were hatched with the roofs and rounds and angles of normal existence. The thin light proposed silence, but the driver was adrift on a stream where his wife and daughter swam companionably with recollections of the Western Desert, the fall of a doodlebug at Islington early in 1945, a fox terrier named Spiv, the sixpenny meat ration — and the inauguration, in America, of automatic transmission: 'Takes the fun out of it.'

For Christ's sake, shut up, thought Leith, intent on the cold, silver, shattered scene. Near the Tower, however, he gave by an exclamation further stimulus.