The Great Fire (34 page)

I've been with any number of people, some of them lawyers. Dined with Aurora Searle, who has left for Kenya. When I showed her your photograph (by Tad Hill, near the stone garden), she said that no one had the right to be so beautiful. My fear is that others must see your silver eyes and hair, and interfere with my chances. I've discovered something about myself that disturbs me: that I worry a hell of a lot about things that don't happen. Was I like that in Japan, or is it the result of our separation? — that I cannot comfort you or know your days completely.

I beg you to send me other photographs. I'm relieved that they won't be taken by Tad, whose proximity to you, from California, seems on the map to be closer than my own by several thousand miles.

Berkeley is a university, highly regarded, where they have a school of Japanese studies.

Since you and I will probably spend time in Norfolk, I think of incorporating another room into 'my' section of the house there — where at present I occupy what was my father's study, bedroom, bath. I would not bother you with these prosaic matters, except for the happiness it gives to envisage your arrival in a place where I already imagine you, at times, in the next room.

Bertram Perowne has replied, a fine letter from Yorkshire, saying that he'll be in town next month, when we'll meet. This is mildly complicated by the recent irruption of Hugh Calder, the Renaissance scholar whom you'll remember from Japan. (Ben gave him a lecture on Erasmus, on the day of our first meeting, yours and mine.) Calder asked me for a drink at the Ritz. We sat on a recessed platform screened by potted palms — where, by way of swank, I used sometimes to invite a girl in my hot youth, if I was in funds. Calder had his own proposition to make, which I declined.

It emerges that Calder, when not a don, is a government agent — to put it plainly, a spy. He began this in the war, but has continued, less commendably, in peacetime. He offered to enlist me in the same business. Out of the question. This all has to do with my competence in the Wu dialects and with the Allies' desire, after Mao comes to full power, to track China's relations with the Soviets. It would have involved a period of 'briefing,' as they call it, at some clandestine centre in western Canada. I don't intend to live, or die, by such means. The near assumption, as it's becoming, of a new world war is hideous to me.

His second, and harmless, suggestion was that I should shortly go to Germany for three weeks or so to cast an eye on our High Commission there, which is considered ineffectual. There would be nothing surreptitious about this, but it is again the context of Occupation, from which you and I have just been extracted. I don't know what I can contribute to such a survey, but agreed to discuss it. Nothing imminent, and you should continue to address letters to Norfolk. If I do go, the first proofs of my book should be ready for my return.

I told Calder that I intend to leave the army very soon, and that I hope to be married. He congratulated me on both counts, and guessed correctly.

If I make the trip to Germany, I'll speak to my mother about our plans before I go. She has shown me such affection since my return here and will be glad that I shan't now waste my life.

Its been suggested to me that I stand for Parliament. This idea arises from the everlasting medal, as do similar fantasies that I should join boards or sit on committees. All this strikes me as an attempt to lure me back to a future that I long ago discarded. A better use of the medal is that I can make small interventions on behalf of war casualties. An amputee who used to work part-time on our property should get proper attention and a better pension. His nephew, meanwhile, will be given an implausible last chance to go straight.

I fear I make it sound like a little kingdom here — distributing alms, dispensing justice, carving up supposedly ancestral rooms. It's new to me to find a home — or to find myself attached to it, even while I need my absences in London. Perhaps the same will be true for you, Helen, who've also led a wandering life. Not that we regret, how could we, our
années de pèlerinage.

I'm glad to learn of your times with the ladies Fry: secluded authenticity of which you'll tell more. Your brother said that you need affinity. The Frys go deeper, endorsing love. It's good that you have such conversations, as long as they're with elderly ladies.

As Leith finished his letter, Dick Laister rang up to suggest Thursday for the drive with his father. Arranging it, Leith asked, 'Would Edith like to come?'

'She'd be over the moon. We can pick her up as she leaves school.'

Minutes later, Laister called back: 'Madge says she'll come, too.'

'No. Not Madge. Madge can come another time.' Leith said, 'Tell Madge that my mother will act as chaperone.'

Laister laughed. 'Good for you. I'll tell her it's not Bluebeard's castle.'

As they sat down, Bertram asked, 'What do we call each other?'

'I only know you as Bertram.'

'Better make it Bertie. We could spend a year or two being Leith and Perowne, but circumstances are against.'

They were sitting by a tall window. Cars were passing. Bertram had suggested dinner at his club. Bertram was well but plainly dressed: lean, not tall; fair hair balding. Fine-tuned, fine-featured. All to scale except for his ears, which were large and arched rather high. As expected, his face was compassionate, and had not got that way without suffering for it.

He said, 'Our trouble is, we only know of one another as paragons.'

'In your case,' Leith said, 'I accept the evidence. Benedict said that you were Adam, naming the world.'

'They would have named it without me. At ten, Benedict was a literary man. He was a beautiful boy then, when I first knew him, like some Dickensian angel-child headed for extinction. Fragile, but not yet stricken. His colouring — one sees it in Helen.'

'One does.'

'She too, they read together when she was a tiny tinsel thing. At kindergarten she was taken out of the classroom to read aloud to the upper forms, to show what could be done. Later, she used to laugh about it, to say, "How they must have hated me." I think not, however. She wasn't a competitor or a contemporary. In that country, then, she was a thing apart.'

'A changeling.'

'Yes, like Ben!' Bertram said, 'The older sister had started out clever, too. Got disconnected, turned on herself. A caricature of the mother. Married, by all accounts, an oaf. One can say, obviously — the parents. But they, too, had started vulnerable. Well, so it goes, and one can't keep on tracing it back to, let's say, Adam. There is that sorting out that happens in adolescence — some save themselves, some settle for less, others throw it away. Process as mysterious as art.'

'I'm watching it myself, postwar, the unaccountable exceptions.'

Bertie said, 'Ben. They will never bring him back from California. They've been detaching him for years. His infirmity appals them. Driscoll himself wanted to be a champion, an athlete. His own father had been thwarted of a medical career, in a family without means, and was set on his son becoming a doctor. Driscoll qualified but never practised. The son, Benedict, was appointed to reverse the balance. You see how it was; everything went wrong except that the boy understood it all, and could live in his mind, and had someone to love and comfort him, who was his sister.'

'And they had you.'

'I had to play it very carefully, you know. I was there on sufferance, I'd come out to Australia under a cloud, we won't go into it, a question of preferences. When the war went into high gear, I still had connections, I pulled strings and went back. All that took time. However, they were looking out for me, I'd got a prize in mathematics before my fall from grace, and they had my name to go into the decoding business. When I was on the high seas, the Driscolls got themselves to Bengal. I was determined to keep in touch, and then, last year, they came here.'

'Again, they had you, you did everything. I know the mother left them on your hands.'

'It was a beautiful time for me. They were so excited, so responsive. My circumstances had improved, and I could be helpful. I knew I wouldn't see Benedict again.'

'Nor I, now.'

'I did the medical rounds with him. He was well enough, still, to go about quite normally; and we could travel. He knew what was happening to him, and Helen knew it as well. The parting, when I put them on the ship, that was a drastic day.' Bertie said, 'Ships have been prime centres of everything extreme. I daresay that all will be speeded up now, grief and joy included. The world accelerates. Takes the meaning out of it, rather. Which brings us to Helen, whose circumstances might be speeded up with no loss of meaning.'

Leith said, 'I've just had a reply from the parents, to my letter asking that she be allowed to come here in the care of my mother, or by whatever arrangement they agree to. Absolute refusal, even faintly threatening.'

'To put the law on you, I suppose — alienation, abduction, something of that sort. I know something of the law in these matters, and I can tell you that they won't and can't. They have some hold over her until she's twenty-one, but little that can be exercised in this context. They could make a public rumpus, your name being known — what one would do anything to avoid, for her sake and yours. However, that can be forestalled.'

Bertie, dreamily, to the window: 'Does the name of Lillian Geary mean anything to you?'

'Nothing whatever.'

'She's a nice, plain, placid woman who has been the mistress of Brigadier Driscoll for the past twelve years, having travelled from Sydney separately to their various ports of call, Bengal or Kure, and being currently installed in a suburb of Wellington, New Zealand. Driscoll, on whom she oddly dotes, lives in terror of discovery — so far averted, though some hint was the cause of Melba's scuttling back to Bengal from London last year. In the straitlaced society to which he adheres, such a revelation would put an end to Driscoll's expanding career. I think that Helen knows nothing of this. Ben, I'm pretty sure, had twigged it. So there you have it, my dear chap. Middling situation, but not desperate.'

Tad would have known of it: had kept silent from scruples of his own, or to spare Helen. Or not to pave the way entirely for the fellow contender. Or all of those reasons. Leith said, 'I can't think of anything I'd less like to do than challenge Driscoll — blackmail him, in fact — and on such a matter.'

'Naturally. However, I've been, in the past, called upon by Driscoll to get him out of tight corners on this theme. Lillian continues to be in touch with me. It will do no harm for him to learn that you are aware. Lillian is a dear, affectionate, deluded woman, much put upon, who would speak up for Helen. She's seen you in Japan.'

'Not that I know of.'

'Yes, a driver of yours used to bring Driscoll to see her. He didn't visit her in the official car. Then she'd spot you once in a while in Kure with the same driver.'

Brian Talbot. Another one who knew how to hold his tongue.

Bertie said, 'Helen should be sprung from all that. Young people like to be rescued. When she comes here, she can stay with me if she likes. I'm fixing up an old family place in Philbeach Gardens that got shaken by the buzz bombs. Plenty of room. I've also got this place in Yorkshire that needs a new roof.' Bertie was pleased with his evening. He said, 'The thing is, I've succeeded.'

Driscoll had once said of him, A pervert and a failure.

'I had two older brothers, not that we were close. One died in the war, unmarried. The other, who had four daughters, has now also died.'

'Is a title involved in this?'

'Oh yes. I could have refused it, but my sister is keen that I keep it. My sister stood by me when I was shipped out to Australia, smuggled funds to me when she could. It was her money, and mine, but her husband was a brute and I was in no position to complain. If you're concerned about the family you're marrying into, think of mine. However, I'd like you to know my sister.'

When they parted, Bertie told him, 'You know, they're making Helen take a typing course. That's a life sentence. Perhaps you can put a stop to it. I don't see her in an office."

Leith thought of Aurora at the Ministry. It had not occurred to him, as they had so much before them, that Helen might need more from the world than their shared habitation of it. She might learn as she had already done. He could not envisage her intent on biology at Aberystwyth. But he said, simply and truly, 'She will choose, when she comes. For now, she only told me that she was seeing a French teacher.'

'I rather think that's to counter the blacking factory. Her French is good, I taught it to her. She needs to keep it up. One of those old pussycats she sees, the one who does needlework, found her a teacher. She's made a friend there, in the French class.'

'A girl called Barbara. The new friends all seem to be women, for which I'm grateful.'

'She'll still need rescuing.'

'I'll see to that. My great preoccupation.' His mother had said, Obsession — not unkindly, unless such a word is always unkind. Had said, indulgently, that she would write to Helen. Said also, 'When you are forty-four, Aldred, she will be only twenty-eight.' Meaning, The romance will wear away, she may look for it elsewhere.

He told Bertie, 'I'm going to Germany for a couple of weeks, as part of a supposed survey. I seem to be getting a name for looking things over. When I get back, let's see each other.' As they waited to cross St James's Street, he said, 'As to rescue, I need not tell you that Helen has already rescued me.'

'From what, precisely?'

'From becoming formidable.'

'As yet, not entirely.'

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