The Great Fire

by Shirley Hazzard

  Peter was concerned, as at Kai Tak. “And keep an eye out for grenades, which are peppered through these hills.” He said, “I wish I were coming along.”

  But Leith, he saw, was glad to go alone; and was, with patience, waiting for him to leave. Exley watched him start out, treading among tangles and brambles on a path littered with small stones and shafts of granite. It would not be a good place to break a foot or an ankle.

  Leith amused himself thinking that Peter Exley was the only person in the world who knew his whereabouts; who, having cautioned him about grenades and hatchet men, would in the event have to come and find him. To save his life, in fact. Then they would be quits: a relief to both.

  He was aware that he had willed Peter’s departure, so that he could walk by himself and need not speak further. There was no irritation in this; only a need for perspective.

  9

  FOR THAT AFTERNOON, Peter presided over a set of military offices, largely empty. The personnel had developed, along with the heat, a rash of excuses—errands, illness, emergencies—during those heavy hours, when it might be imagined that little was taking place through all the somnolent East. The room was unusual in having a shelf of novels; and a shortwave radio, screwed in, as a precaution, to a bracket on the wall. It belonged to a Spitfire pilot, rarely present, who perhaps felt that he had already done his bit, and whose phone calls were exclusively from women, often anxious about the evening.

  Exley attended to the few matters brought to him. Those who came and went were easy, civil, passingly companionable. They were able to maintain decorum by knowing nothing of one another.

  Peter had brought his Chinese lexicon and a textbook of phrases set by his teacher. As the long orange afternoon drew on, he thought, as he often did, about the rest of his life. A particular cause of this was the proximity of Aldred Leith, with whom he was to dine; and who, knowing his past, might help him read his future.

  Long ago, on an evening in Cairo, Exley had told the story of an only child in the genteel suburb of a remote harbour at whose outer escarpments the Pacific surged and pounded. Of Father at his law office and Mother laying the table for his return. Of the uninspired good school where bully boys and mild ones alike prepared for the same timid adulthood. A well-behaved boy, clever in class, brown at the beach—if lacking, in games, the flair of coordination. A fair assortment of friends, and no convinced enemies. Some early sense, ominous, of strength unexercised.

  Aged eleven, at a friend’s house after school, lolling on a back verandah amid the smells of banked lantana and baked eucalyptus, he flipped pages of the friend’s album of secret pictures turned up in a toolshed trunk. There were coloured plates, full page, torn raggedly from magazines or cut painfully from good books. There were undraped women, reclining, and men with them; and a good deal of pale flesh. Something was wrong: nothing was furtive or complicit. He said, “These are paintings.” He felt they had been presumptuous.

  “Beautiful” had been a housewife’s word, innocuous: his mother’s word for the show of local handiwork at Mosman town hall. Now, in soft countryside, a radiant woman was turned in a dance by a near-naked man, her fine hair and garment all drifting light as air.

  “Can I have this one?”

  The chum, name of Kevin, feared some unauthorised indecency. “You’d better not.”

  Still, a beginning had been made. After that, there were books, alarming to his parents and teachers. He could not pronounce the names, at first, that roused his father’s hilarity and the neighbours’ solemnity: “Something not right there.” As time passed, the derision of his little circle cooled to sceptical awe. There was apprehension that it might all be leading somewhere.

  His parents enlisted a teacher of art, as they might have sought out a neurologist or other specialist in aberration. The man was impressed, but unnerved by the boy’s single-mindedness. He thought it would pass with adolescence.

  Loneliness grew on him with his relegation to the statelessness of art. There was Europe, remote as Paradise and more convincing. There was France, there was Italy. In the lending library at the junction, the two women in charge—a brawny pair, with cropped hair and tailored shirts—had attached a russet poster to the wall: ROMA. Peter’s mother found the atmosphere unwholesome and the spelling affected.

  There was the Law. His father had it out with him. Peter was eighteen, they had come unscathed through the Depression. “I don’t begrudge your schooling. We can afford the Uni. But not for the art stuff, son. We don’t go in for that in Australia, you’d have to leave the country. Break your mother’s heart. I’m counting on you to do Law and join the firm. You can keep the art up, on the side.”

  Mother, in weak tears, could feel for him as long as he did not prevail.

  He sent away for fine photographs, financed by menial odd jobs embarrassing to his parents. The packages took four or five months to arrive from London or Florence: the fastest mail by fastest ship was two months on the way. Alinari in particular did not have the habit of prompt reply.

  He had learned some French at school: Je m’appelle Pierre, je suis né en Australie. He bought an Italian grammar. He was studying the Law. Was reading Homer, Hardy, and Tolstoy. He had been for the first time somewhat in love—with minuscule Pattie, who played the viola, and whose fine fairish hair hung, rather than swung, when released, well below her hips. She could sit on it, as the ultimate proof of maidenliness. Pattie had the bones of a sparrow, one might see the heart flutter under feathery clothes. Fragile shoulders scarcely bore the tentative weight of Peter Exley’s arm.

  Peter brought Pattie home to tea, and she arrived smaller than ever, her beige hair in two long plaits. Afterwards, his mother said, “All her strength’s gone into that hair.” His father, on the other hand, favoured the girl—having feared, from art history, abominations.

  Pattie’s birdlike pulsations were reproduced in a self-approving timidity and a voice that barely reached his ear. Like the rest, Pattie assumed that he would outgrow the Great Masters and sought to speed the process with an occasional impertinence, averting unsullied eyes from Titian’s Danae. The viola was to the good, of course, and the reciprocated attachment. And the hair played its part, though that, too, was colourless.

  Pattie, becoming nebulous, evaporated.

  The university gave companionship. There were evening classes in art appreciation. Among fellow students, Peter found some literary feeling, some political curiosity. He earned a little money with weekend tutoring; had a stealthy brief affair with a professor’s wife called Norma, who laughed a lot; and a protracted misunderstanding with a student named Hazel, who often cried.

  His dread now was to be trapped at the Antipodes. War had broken out in Spain, Mussolini had massacred Abyssinia, Hitler had set his sights on Czechoslovakia. Peter was in his twenties. If all Europe was to be dismantled, he must see it first. In a war, if he stayed, he would be called up, shipped out to some marshy ground, and blown to bits. Once abroad, he would at least have seen something beforehand. In the week following his Bar examinations, in which he had done well, he took cabin passage in the ship Strathnaver, leaving for Tilbury in one month’s time.

  His mother cried every night. “We’ll give it a year, then.”

  His father, grim, said, “All right, but let’s call it a day next Christmas. Your mother’s gone out on a limb for you.” Peter could see his mother twittering on the branch, like feathered Pattie.

  The day of sailing was ecstasy no anguish could mar. There were, first, the Australian ports to be got through: Melbourne, Adelaide, and tin-roofed Fremantle, with letters from home at each of them. Only when the Equator had been crossed did he feel safe. There was Colombo now, and Bombay, Aden, Port Said: all the sacred places of pilgrimage, the stations of the Australian cross. Aboard, he learned from a British traveller that an exhibition concerning Giotto would shortly close at Florence. Leaving the ship at Messina, Peter Exley set foot on Italy.

  He reached Florence thre
e weeks later, having passed through whole stages of growth. If he slept, did not recall it; but remembered dawns when he was already active in ancient towns; and an evening when he left the sooty little train at Cisterna in order to enter Rome on foot, sending his luggage ahead. There had been dark walls at Viterbo, blond palisades at Orvieto. And, one evening at dusk, the station in Florence, and a church glimpsed through a steaming glass door.

  He found a room in Borgo Pinti, in a house where students took lodgings. To conserve money, survived on errands performed for an elderly Englishman, elephantine Mr. Crindle, heavy breathing and heavy drinking, veteran of war and wives, who lumbered out each day with the support of Peter Exley and a blackthorn stick, to buy a thing or two and take his coffee in any sun going: who spoke rapid Italian in pure English pronunciation, and had, between wheezes, a fund of anecdotes and an endearing bark of a laugh.

  In Cairo, in 1943, Exley had told Leith: “I learned from Crindle. It was from him that I first heard of tolerance, and where tolerance ends. He was good at sorting things out. I’d grown up in a country where sameness was a central virtue. Crindle made variety legitimate.” He said, “That spring, in Tuscany, was my first in a deciduous land. The first spring in the world, as far as I was concerned.” Then there were women, who all seemed to have lived before: their graces, innate as dreaming.

  Then there was fascism, at Florence in vilest forms. “Again, it was from Crindle that I learned about that.”

  Crindle told him, “Mussolini is as bad as Hitler, and has taught Hitler a lot. You’re just in time, here, for the onset of the Racial Laws.”

  “We’ve had racial laws in Australia for generations.”

  Crindle looked astonished; but said, “By now, nothing surprises me.

  Exley, in the Cairo night, went on: “In his offhand way, Crindle knew a great deal. One of the British students told me that Crindle was said to be sending information to London. When I spoke to him about this, he laughed.” Archie Crindle, majestically slumped in his wicker chair at the Giubbe Rosse, brownish tweed drawn back from striped shirtfront like the shed skin of an overfed reptile—an effect intensified by the texture of threadbare tweed and by Crindle’s heavy eyelids.

  Crindle saying, “Demmed elusive, what?”

  “On the face of it, a preposterous choice for a spy. But after his death I thought it might be true. He liked to winkle out hidden things.”

  “So he died.”

  “Died in the new year of’39, in a spell of bitter cold.” Exley said, “He left me two thousand pounds.” His unlooked-for sorrow over Crindle’s death; and the astounding two thousand. Peter, then studying at the Accademia, was earning little more than his bread by giving English lessons and translating the correspondence of a small importer of jams, teas, and shortbread. The letter from Crindle’s solicitors brought his gratitude, and a long reprieve. And quelled his parents, impressing them for the first time with the merits of great art.

  “The money was in England. In any case, I knew that I’d have to leave Italy, even if war was delayed. I mean that the game was up, for me as well as for the world. I would never be an art historian. In Australia, I’d had no basis for comparison. When I got to Europe, I wasn’t even at the beginning, among those younger than I who’d spent their lives in full awareness. Isolation had made me arrogant, too. I wasn’t prepared for the quality of thought in others. Spiritually, the Law had taught me nothing. Most painful of all was to recognise, once in a while, a passion greater than my own. The excuse of war enabled me to withdraw.”

  He said, “I’ve always given in easily.”

  “That’s waffle. You’d done a lot.”

  “I’d come from the land of the single hope attained. One thing didn’t lead to another, but was the sole consummation. People longed for a house and garden, or they pitched it all on a sight of the cliffs of Dover. The women longed to be married, come what might. The evidence achieved, you could die happy. In my childhood there were many such walking about, who had died happy and could leave it at that. And they were the enterprising ones. The effort of my exotic interest, of getting myself abroad and discovering ten thousand paintings, learning a language—all that my fellow students took for granted as preliminary, that was the immense feat on which I’d expended my energies. When the train took me out of Florence that summer, I was escaping under cover of war.” He said, “All the same, I cried.”

  THE HONG KONG EVENING, with air like broth, was charged with Asia’s unapologetic smells. Leith walked with Exley to a low-roofed tavern on the docks. Peter had discovered the place on his wanderings: the entry, open to the street, gave on the waterfront. There was the hot, stark electric bulb, supplemented by spirit lamps whose mild reek was agreeable. The plain front room just held the two men, the couple who served them, and the furnishings—quite as if it had been composed around them. They sat at a low square table, on bamboo stools. There was a frequent passage of Chinese patrons into a back room, evidently larger, from which fast emphatic talk was heard, and high laughter, and some heroic clearing of lungs.

  Hot wine was brought, and small delicacies. Having sketched in their separate afternoons, these two might attempt to touch other experience.

  “Aldred. If I can ask, has your divorce gone through?”

  “Yes. Contrived after the barbaric laws of my country and yours. The decree was issued some months past. I learnt of it at Chungking. Moira has remarried.”

  “Anyone we know?”

  Leith shook his head. “I never saw him. A decent chap, I gather, who handles high-flown insurance, connected with Lloyd’s. I can’t—God help me, I can’t remember his name.” He said, “I saw Moira before I left London. We met to sign papers.”

  “And how was that?”

  “It was quite affecting.” Revelations that need not be shared. “Quite all right.” Curious, in this place, to think that Peter had memories of Moira. He thought that Peter would soon say, I liked Moira.

  Exley said, “She was a darling.”

  A fish—garoupa, as it was called—was brought to them, cooked in a sweet crust. Peter went on, “I recall her as capable, even efficient, but suddenly funny and lively. Principled. Pretty. I’m saying this badly.”

  “No, exactly right.” Moira is now near thirty, and perhaps with child. Charlotte also.

  “I have a photograph of your wedding.”

  “I too.” Everyone in uniform, the hectic handsome faces, the buxom matron of honour with shining eyes. Gardenias. The commanding officer gave away the bride. Aldred recalled Peter at the wedding, rather drunk. Peter had not been best man.

  “Dick Summers was best man.”

  “Yes. Who was killed a couple of months later.”

  Peter said, “You too will remarry.” Plucked a bone from his mouth. “I would like to marry.”

  “A good thing that would be, Peter, if I may say. Someone in mind?”

  “No one. However, the idea—or ideal, at any rate—attracts me these days. Obviously, in practice, more difficult. But then, so is the single life difficult—drinking, lusting, languishing. Vacancy, loneliness.”

  They agreed that the fish was excellent. A young woman came from the back room, in shift and trousers, smiling. Received compliments, bowed, and withdrew. Down her dark blue spine, the thick, glossy, lacquered pigtail flopped heavily in a life of its own; evoking, in Exley, by vigorous contrast, the inanition of far-off Pattie’s pusillanimous plait. Well out of that beige existence, at any rate.

  He said, “Even if there were the choice, one needs the time. In these places, we are always facing some date of departure. And who knows if a desirable woman would want me.”

  “I should think it likely, you know.”

  They smiled—at the dismantled fish, it could have been, and the discarded chopsticks. People came and went, bringing hot scented napkins, hot scented tea. Peter said, “Earlier, one was careful not to commit oneself, lose one’s head. I’ll soon be thirty-six. There seems to have been a p
enalty on all that caution.”

  “The price of vigilance is eternal liberty.” Leith did not consider that he himself had been vigilant with women. In the case of Gigliola, there had been immaturity but no calculation. It was only now that the necessity came home to him that he must weigh his words with a woman—weigh them, as he had done last evening, the envelope balanced on his hand.

  Impossibility, which had appeared a safeguard, now seemed illusory.

  His scruples. Scruple was a tiny measure, used perhaps by a jeweller or chemist. He had never dealt, in love or otherwise, in such minute quantities.

  Along Sir Cecil’s Ride, he had dwelt on the letters received, which had given him pleasure so simple and apparently pure that he could not feel some die had been fatefully cast. What struck him, on the contrary, was just the rarity of such charm in his days. The adventure of China, his engrossment in his drafted book, were not in question. But the context of his travels had been, as he had written to Benedict, a sustained farewell. All had occurred in an inward solitude, without intimacy, without the exposures of tenderness.

  Following his marriage and its wartime dispersal, women had intersected his life in episodes unexamined, never entirely casual. The commitment to prodigious months of nomadic existence had itself been an engagement for near-celibacy. A need of women, even for their mere congenial presence, was for the most part ironically subdued. War, and peace, had separated him from closest friends, male and female. There had been the maleness, and boredom, of comradeship, the solidarity of combat; the relief—as it sometimes was, despite all the talk—of being free of the provocations and perplexities of women.

  There was the word he had summoned for his father’s photograph: “loveless.” His mother’s letters were attentively framed to avoid any late offering that her son might find, by now, an infringement. His father had, at most, tinkered with the parental role, taking it up sporadically like a neglected hobby and allowing it to lapse. Meanwhile, the son had cultivated independence—and valued it highly, observing the wrangles of his contemporaries with their parents. Exasperated by unsolicited emotion, as yesterday, when Peter’s distress at the airfield had threatened him with undisguised affection.