The Great Fire (7 page)

Leith thought that it would be interesting to hear Bertram's view.

He felt himself in some measure to be Bertram's successor. This sequestered pair wanted the history of the world. They also wanted his own story. They asked him, How was this, Where was that. They questioned him about his youth, his travels, his walk through China. But rarely, as he noticed, asked about the war — from shyness, and possibly from a sense that the conflagration must flare forth of its own accord.

It did not displease him, after long silence, to tell them something of his tale.

They asked him about his name, which they had never heard before.

'No one has. When I was a child, I was told that it denoted a sage. Later, I found that it was a venerable sage, an old geezer: the elder. It was my grandfather's name, and seemed right enough for him. But he, too, had borne with it since infancy.' Leith remembered his grandfather, a rangy old chap, very tall, with white hair on top like high cumulus cloud. Once in a while, that elder Aldred had given him, from a box on the mantel, a gold sovereign with the effigy of Queen Victoria. He had told the boy, 'I never cared for the name, but one gets used to it.'

They asked him, 'How did you learn Chinese?'

'I was nine, and it was due to a little girl of five.'

Aldred, in his tenth year and living with his mother in a hotel suite in Shanghai, was attending a school for foreign children from the International Concessions. His father was, at the time, engrossed by Russian exiles in Harbin. In the lobby of the hotel in Shanghai, the boy observed the comings and goings, across marble floors, of taipans from the princely hongs — those merchant princes, British, American, French, Dutch, Danish, with interests along the coasts of China and Siam. Mr Seth, the banker, had once invited him for an ice cream in the café. There was the young Moller, with a fortune in shipping and a string of horses that the boy longed to see; and S. T. Williamson, high and bulky, who had a trading house of his own in Hong Kong — not as grand as Jardine's or Butterfield's, but to be reckoned with. There were wives, pale and ailing, who could not withstand the climate. There were women, European and Eurasian, of a worldly attractiveness. There were the White Russians, with their historic loss. Tourists came off the great liners, strolled the Bund under parasols, and were beset by beggars. From time to time, from Europe, there was Royalty with its entourage. There was the Tiger Heat. There was sharp cold, and the rains. There was, from the interior, the Yellow Wind.

In lobby and lift, Aldred often saw the English child with her amah: a keen little pink-and-white creature whose name was Charlotte.

Charlotte's carroty curls were bound with coloured ribbon. Her pretty frocks were smocked over her diminutive chest. On occasion, she had in tow her demure and distant mother; or was with her parents together — the father being distant, also, and more discreetly auburn. Vitality, withheld in the parents, had been released in the child. Charlotte was to be seen most usually with the black-clad amah, who loved her, and with whom the busy little girl carried on swift conversations in the dialect of Shanghai.

One noon, during a fierce season of typhoons, Aldred was going up in the lift with his mother, while the Chinese operator by rote announced the floors —
sam lau, sei lau —
at each stop drawing back the folding inner gate with his gloved hand so that it would not unsuitably clang. Aboard, too, were Charlotte, her amah, and her father. The child was interpreting some mild dispute between parent and nurse; and doing this so rapidly and efficiently, and quite without bravado, that even the discreet lift boy smiled. Aldred's mother stood, an attentive presence, against the panelling, her green silk dress fluttered by an overhead fan that stirred, also, her hat of woven straw from Bali, fine as gauze. Her name was Iris. Her willowy figure complemented the white-suited column of the British father, pillar of the establishment, and the short, staunch amah in black tunic and trousers with her black hair coiled and varnished and her smooth face the colour of teak.

Aldred noted his mother sizing up, as was her habit, the situation — a process that usually touched on social standing but might take subtler forms.

Turning the key in their door, releasing hat pin and laying hat on sofa, his mother had rung for lemon squash and taken money from a purse to tip the floor boy who would bring the tray. Having done these things, remarked: 'And why, Aldred, should you not also learn Chinese?' To which the boy had, in effect, replied, 'Why not, indeed.'

Leith told them, 'So it was Charlotte who began it. Oh, Charlotte, where are you now? And where did events sweep you away, before I could greet you in the dialect of Shanghai?'

'I think,' said Helen, 'that your mother deserves some credit.'

'It's true. I'm often slow to pay tribute to her. But Charlotte was the catalyst.'

Slanting his difficult head, Ben looked round at Helen. 'I grow envious of this red child with powers beyond our own.'

Helen, with satisfaction: 'Who is now a matron of thirty, whereabouts unknown.'

It occurred to Leith for the first time that the red child, then, was the age of his own dead sister, that this had been his mother's thought as she listened that day in the ascending lift, and had moved her to consider the future of her small surviving son — whose life had been, thereafter, shaped by the moment.

Every other day Leith drove down, with Brian Talbot, to Hiroshima. The outskirts of the town were being re-created in thousands of plywood houses, recklessly close, it seemed, to the site of the disaster. Taking his interpreter, and using his own increasing knowledge of the language, he was able to talk to men and women working on the new constructions — people of the region, some of whom spoke openly, most of whom were reticent or refused entirely. In order to speak with injured survivors, or with spokesmen of the community, permission was required from the American Bomb Survey, and the foreign applicant was accompanied by an appointed officer. On several of these occasions, Leith and Talbot had been in the company of the same Lieutenant Carroll — courteous, cautious, impersonal.

One morning, Carroll told them that his term of duty was almost finished: he would be returning Stateside. These were his words, with a slight relaxing of formality. In Talbot's jeep, they had crossed the tramline and were approaching the momentous scene — where the main force of the explosion had been received. These again were Carroll's words, and he never did say The Bomb. To Aldred Leith's questions, he responded with practised and sometimes technical expressions, and with a suggestion of relief, as if more usually accustomed to inanities. Talbot asked one question only, to which Carroll had his prompt and measured reply: Yes, the scientists examining the site and the survivors were inclined to think that there remained some danger in the atmosphere, though not for so brief a visit as our own.

The girders of the dome had been examined for their unaccountable resilience. Why yes, the casualties were estimated at a quarter-million, that being a tentative figure only. Why the explosion had not been directed initially to an uninhabited zone, or why the first exercise had been followed by the raid on Nagasaki, he had no idea, those decisions having been made in the closed and no doubt wise councils of our leaders. However, he did ask Leith if he could suggest a strategic reason. He had never sought an opinion before. Aldred, turning to him from the front seat where he sat beside Talbot, remarked, 'I doubt there was logic, other than that shaped to the predestined act. By then, neither side was interested in sparing anyone, even themselves.'

Carroll said, 'Yes' — for him, a daring intervention. After a hesitation, added, 'I was on Okinawa that year, through June.'

At the American nucleus near the port, they had beers tasting of tin and wrote addresses on unlikely scraps of paper. Driving back to the compound, Talbot mumbled, 'I suppose, a decent bloke.' They left it at that until the driver said, 'He has a different voice, for a Yank.'

'Not a Yank at all. He's from the Deep South. That's their accent. He's from Georgia.'

Talbot laughed. 'Well, I'm from the Deep South myself, as far south as you can go. And with the accent, too, to prove it.'

Benedict asked him, 'What will you do with it all?'

'I'll write it, and it will be published. The account of China, which was proposed to me. Japan has been my own addition.' He said, 'It has all come upon me by chance.'

Late in the war, he had been asked, by persons in power, to write in confidence about the town of Caen, all but destroyed in the first days of June 1944. In those times there was no lingering and his work was completed quickly. But he had spoken with many persons grieved and embittered by ruin, and by the gross ambiguities of their liberation; and related these matters with simplicity and truth. The report, in French and in English, had been presented in good time, and he had never expected to hear of it again.

In Paris, on a cold morning of April 1945, he was sent for. Dark grey, diminished, chipped, and soiled, the city seemed a scale model of its former self; a wintry film in black-and-white. In the offices to which he was directed, dinginess gave place to splendour. Paintings, rugs of stitched roses, fine furniture signed by the
ebeniste
were less of a luxury than the warmth, which even pervaded corridors. Senior officers came and went, apparently without the pinched signs of suffering: immune, as they would have had you believe, not so much to glorious death as to the squalor of chilblains, boils, and empty bellies in the surrounding streets. The man who had sent for him was unexpectedly young, not tall, but with a clever face and elegant limbs. Logs were burning in a marble fireplace, to which they drew up velvet chairs.

'My paper on Caen had reached his desk. He had informed himself, and knew about my youth in the East, the languages, the war. He'd grown up in China and Indochina, and knew that these places were evaporating, transforming. The last days of all their centuries should be witnessed and recounted by someone who was not a spy, not a sociologist, beholden to no one.' All this very concise from the young general aslope in his chair, stretching crossed feet to the fire. 'He offered me two years in China, and a free hand. I should keep my military rank, which, as he said, would sometimes help me if it did not otherwise provoke my death. A contract would be drawn up protecting my right to publish. Official circles should not be drawn in. I accepted at once. I was younger then. Presumption was immense. I suppose I had been in an arrested state with the war. One aged rapidly enough at the end of it. We shook hands and had a drink on it.'

'What did you drink?'

'Champagne nature.
A fine lunch was wheeled in.' He had asked to look at paintings, and walked a bit about the room. On the desk, there was an old red folder tooled in gold and a silver box for cigarettes. There was a photograph of a beautiful youth in naval uniform, who was not a son.

'Did you see him again?'

'We met repeatedly in the following days. I went to his house, which was grand with books.' Leith said, 'He told me he was ill, which I'd perhaps begun to realise.'

Leith would not speak to Benedict of yet another death. At their parting, the Frenchman had said, 'However, I hope to live to read your book.'

'I'm sure you have better reasons than that for living.'

'None.'

When he got up to leave them, he said, 'I'm having this teacher come, you know, an elderly Japanese, three times a week. He could come to you, before or after seeing me, as you'd like.'

Ben said, 'Do you mean it?'

'Of course.'

They asked him, Had he crossed the lines of the civil war? Since the Nationalists had removed the capital to Nanking, how had he entered Peking, the city about which they were most curious? Leith explained that the road to Peking was cut, and the railway. The city was besieged by the Communists, but one could fly in almost daily. Mao would move, but not quite yet. Mao need only wait. Leith had crossed the lines, at times by accident, but also by finding someone to speak for him in advance. He had regularly deposited his possessions — his notes and books and letters of credit — with friends, at a British or French enclave or consulate.

'Did you have books, to read on the way?'

'That was hard. Books are heavy, as is water. I carried one indispensable book, and a couple of Chinese lexicons in tiny print. One becomes starved to see one's own language — even on a discarded label whirled by a dust storm, or among the detritus of stolen UNRRA supplies.'

'Did you talk to yourself out loud?'

'Like Billy-Oh. Recited, too, when alone, and even sang arias.'

'Did you ever get lost?'

'Often. Of course, since I had no precise route, everything was grist. But sometimes I'd find that I'd gone in a circle.'

'Did you ever think that you might —'

'What?'

'Stay forever in some place?' Helen meant, Love someone, and remain, and make a Chinese family. She was glad that he had not.

'Yes. Once, in particular.'

He was in Yunnan, on foot and leading a mule rented in a village near Chaotung. 'I was going from Kunming towards Chungking, where I'd left my tackle with a friend.' It was May, he had slept in the open. After sunrise, came through steep bushy hills into a valley floored with green cultivation — less alluvial than the land preceding it, for now he was moving away from the great river. By a stream, there was a line of low, close houses, each bowed under its scalloped roof. The hill above the tiny town was gravid in the way of that landscape, its grassy garment stretched like soft cloth over an imagined anatomy of ancient, unremembered walls, graves, and ditches: a tumid rise, over which you might mentally pass your hand. On a nearer slope, feebly scattered with ash and poplar, a pair of pale, horned cattle were grazing. A woodpile was deftly stacked; a basket hung from a branch, and there was a small shrine, arched and tended.

On a third, sharp peak, the stripped remains of a Halifax bomber: the Ark on Mount Ararat, or the ribbed cradle of a stranded quadrireme.