11
“BIT OF BAD LUCK, EH?”
Leith smiled, but saw no reason to reply. The ship’s purser, expertly rocking with the vessel, stood over him as he read. The islands being all but invisible in rain, a score of other passengers were distributed around the saloon, reading also, or talking in low voices; at one table, playing cards. The ship had entered the strait and would dock within the hour. Talbot would meet him, they would reach the compound by two.
He looked at his watch.
After broaching, with Exley, the story of Helen, he had been revisited by its impossibility. Had revolved the mystery so often, and to no purpose—except that it was pleasurable—that he could awaken, on successive mornings, to what he supposed was a sense of proportion. The thing was charming, and might remain so: it could not be allowed to develop.
He didn’t much fancy the process of making this plain.
He found himself again consulting his watch, while the ship rose steeply, and fell into a trough where it lay shuddering. This grey exercise was repeated, propellors grinding, while an ashen lady was helped away, groping at a handrail, to be sick.
Within days of arrival at Kure, he should leave again, very briefly, for Tokyo, where part of his lost baggage had been discovered: books and winter clothes. Intermittent absences would help them both—in the end, wherever that was to be.
In the recovered luggage, there were books that Helen might like to have.
His watch was not a new contrivance such as visitors to Japan now acquired but an old one, Swiss and good and gold, from his godmother on his twentieth birthday.
He was not the first man to wonder, Is she the plaything, or am I?
HELEN HAD WASHED HER HAIR. In order not to disturb her brother, who slept after breakfast, she used Leith’s bathroom, which she afterwards set to rights, drawing out from the basin a tangle of her own hair entwined with that of others. Before the rain, she had gathered wintry flowers from the hillside and put them on Leith’s table in a vase brought from Kyoto. Helen stood by the table, a comb in her hand.
The little safe was latched but empty. They had kept Leith’s papers in a locked box beneath Ben’s bed. It did not surprise or scandalise them that these peaceable pages were being safeguarded from the interference of their own father.
It was past noon, but the ship was not expected to dock on time.
Helen went back to their cottage, where Ben was sleeping in his room. She looked in the mirror, running her fingers through her hair so that it stood out all round her head. With the cool weather, she dressed in a dark skirt that came, in the new way, well below the knee; and today in a blouse of silky colours, the gift of a friend in Bengal. She had left the mirror, when her mother came in with the storm and stood in the open doorway, subduing a tartan umbrella.
Helen shut the door and propped the umbrella on a newspaper. Melba Driscoll had a list of tasks, which her daughter took note of. And Helen should change out of those good shoes, she must be mad. When Melba removed her raincoat, it was to be seen that she, too, was dressed for an occasion.
The girl was always quiet with the mother. Not passive, not sullen. Today, radiant.
The mother said, “You look a sight, I must say.”
If the daughter had spoken, she would have said, “You are cruel.”
“As if you’d been pulled backwards through a hedge.”
Neither would forget.
Helen made a motion for quiet. “Ben’s sleeping.” She agreed that she would come up, soon, to the house for lunch.
When she was alone, Helen dried the floor and went to the room where Ben was stirring. As she stood at the end of his bed, he opened his eyes.
“You are a sight,” he said, “for sore eyes.”
She sat on the bed and took his hand.
“Why are you crying?”
“Not crying, really.”
“Aldred comes today.”
“Yes.”
“We’re glad.” He lifted their joined hands and held them to her cheek. “We love him.”
“Yes.”
Benedict disengaged his hand. “Can I touch your hair? Do you remember, in the bank in Hong Kong, the two men talking about your hair?”
“I’d forgotten. Yes.”
They had been to the shipping office in the bank building, together with a Portuguese assistant deputed to help them arrange their deferred passage to Japan. At that time, with the long voyage out and afternoons at Shek-O, Helen’s hair was tinselled, oceanic. They waited in a little press of people, in front of two young Chinese who evidently discussed the frail boy and his sister; and who, as the line shuffled forward, broke into an exchange, one of them sketching, by cropped circular gesture, the girl’s head and shoulder.
Later, in the street, Helen asked their escort, “They were talking about me?”—having heard Fan Kwei and Kuniang, among the few words known to her and in the tone, unmistakeable, concerned with oneself.
And Miss Prata had laughed and nodded: “They were marvelling, yes, at the Foreign Devil’s hair.”
In Japan, Benedict said, “He’ll find you changed.”
“In what way, changed?”
“With thinking of him.”
LEAVING BRIAN TALBOT to his lunch in the common room, Leith loped across the spongy upward ground into which the weightless house seemed, that day, to be scarcely set. When he came in shrugging the storm from his shoulders like any Westerner, and slapping his cap against his leg, his coat was at once removed by light hands: a gesture seeming to relieve coat as much as owner. But the house itself would not enclose him, or identify. Translucent structures are not welcoming in cold rain.
The day had been unfortunate, all omens adverse; and the man himself at odds with the eagerness that quickened his step.
It was now, however, that his luck—if that’s what it was—turned.
As Helen was the first to realise that he had come, their instantaneous glance was not observed. Her parents had left the table for confabulations elsewhere. Beside her, Benedict’s empty chair was the sole place vacant. As if this were not enough, just as Leith reached her side, a great fireball cracked over the house with such force that one of the fragile women serving fell to her knees, keeping hold of the dish she had been handing; and stayed so, a stunned supplicant, while guests rose from table to help her, unclear whether the explosion itself, or fear of it, had struck her down.
The man therefore walked through detonation and striped darkness, past a kneeling woman and scrambling guests, to the only figure who remained seated. How desolate, had she not been there.
He sat down, took her left hand, which was nearest, and released it. That morning, in a past life, he’d imagined saying, “And how have you been, my dear?”—something of the benevolent and neutral kind. And now did say exactly that; which came forth to them as the most exalted question in all the articulate world.
A new table, of Occidental height and material, was glazed in wipable grey. On this, dishes and implements, and feathery amber flowers, had been placed with such accuracy as to confer, by mere transforming human intention, some opaque beauty. Or it was their own fresh vision of Formica.
They should now say something, for, though thunder persisted, the room was coming out of its swoon. The kneeling woman had been helped away (and where to, in those prismatic spaces?). The diners recomposed themselves. Leith was greeted, he was introduced. The historian Calder, himself back from a journey, came round the table to ask questions about besieged Peiping. And doing this, thoughtlessly propped himself between man and woman, providing tweedy shelter. From happiness, Helen scarcely ate; while Leith went hungrily through a coiled sea creature, fixed in seaweed, that he might otherwise have found inedible.
When they got up, he asked her about Benedict. “I must see to my stuff. Then shall I come round?” Outdoors, in the squelching world, rain had drawn off into purpled sky; green smells were sharp, chilly, wet, delicious.
He collected his belonging
s and the waiting mail—regretting that there could be no envelope now that moved him. In his own room, he stowed things rapidly away, as if overdue in the very place where he had just arrived. When he then stood still, his hands resting on the blotter of his table, he could feel again the motion of the ship in the morning’s storm.
When he reached their little parlour, Benedict was standing near the door, supporting himself with one hand on the lintel and with a cane held in the other. There was the small shock of finding the boy on his feet, and the expected pang at his deterioration.
“Takes you aback, to find me upright. A sense of imposture. If one thing improves, another worsens.” Ben’s speech was growing difficult to understand. He said, “There are so many things to go wrong with the human body. When people are well, it’s a miracle of coordination.”
Leith said, “If men had devised it, it would never have worked at all.”
Ben was wearing, over one of his dark gowns, a grey woollen wrapper.
“You’ve become a sage, Ben.”
“It’s just the shawl.” There was a play of light and shadow, and Helen coming from her room.
“Helen has grown.”
Ben said, “It’s true.”
And Helen, joyful: “I’m five feet three and a half.”
“And I, five ten and a half. Five eleven, if I stand straight.”
“You always stand straight.”
“That comes from having been a sergeant. I never had such power as when I was a sergeant.”
He’d meant something more: her new tension, new dimension.
He produced a book, and she went to fetch a knife to prise apart the coloured paper.
Ben teased him: “What about me?”
“Any book of poems is for both of you.”
“No, no. All is now for Helen.”
They sat, Helen in the low-cushioned chair with a blue book in her lap.
“It’s for your birthday, which I wasn’t aware of Next time, I’ll know better.” By then, it might seem paramount. They felt so kindly for him that he said, “I should go away more often, in order to have such a welcome.” He would be gone a day or two, in Tokyo. “They’ve recovered some of my stuff, which I must identify.”
Happiness spilt from her eyes, like the glance exchanged under the storm. It was fresh and strange to him, that by merely arriving in that obscure place he could create such pleasure, in two others and in himself. In her. What I came back for, to be loved like this.
Aki made tea for them, Helen bringing biscuits. Leith had a folder, which would go in the box beneath Ben’s bed. Along with his notes from China, there was an envelope of photographs, which brother and sister asked to see. The lamp was on, the room was cold.
“How fine they are.” Benedict was turning pearly matte surfaces of Asian scenes: trees inclining from promontories, a great junk spreading her slatted sails, tiled roofs accepting a sandstorm.
“It’s the Yellow Wind. In Italy, there’s the red wind from Africa; in Greece, a brown wind brings mud from the Levant.” The world’s colours, streaming away in the gale.
Huge sculptures stood free from tombs: winged lion, maned horse, gigantic ram.
Ben asked, “Are there any of you?”
“Two or three, there somewhere. One, touristic, on the Great Wall. An old school friend took it, who came with me from Shanghai.”
“What were you like, as a schoolboy?”
“Hellish, I suppose. Well, there was a lot of dreaming.”
“Can we have it—this one?”
“If you give me one in exchange.”
Helen read out, from the envelope, “Hedda M. Morrison, Peiping.”
“I took the negatives there, it’s a serious place. Otherwise, one hears of rolls of film that don’t come back from the developers. You’re told that they didn’t come out. I took few, and didn’t want to lose them to censorship. There are some of Hong Kong.”
Helen held up Peter Exley. “Is this your friend? You didn’t say he was good-looking.”
“He might come here for a bit. He’d like to meet you.”
Benedict told Helen, “So we’ve been discussed.”
“Don’t grudge me the pleasure—being so far off—of speaking your names.” He got up, saying, “I must tear myself away.” Which was what it felt like.
When he’d gone, they were still: Helen reading her new book, Ben dozing or, as it seemed now, lapsing into a trance. When he next looked for her, she was sitting upright with the book half-closed over her hand—looking, but not at him.
“What is it?”
“The book.” She went on, without focussing. “Oh, the vast distances, forlorn partings, terrible journeys. The loneliness.”
Ben said, “The helplessness, and longing.”
She said, “The Never.”
NEAR EVENING, Aldred walked up to the common room to make his arrangements for Tokyo. In the fuggish room, a man straddled a chair that was turned backwards. He was on the phone, deploring: “You were notified, I fully indicated …” A man in his late forties, just the age of the century, with a fleshed and nearly featureless face that paradoxically represented a type.
Leith was aware that this was the man from Washington, come to find him. When he was not laying down the law, the man’s lips were twitching. Leith thought that men go to pieces differently in peacetime, outside their borders.
An associate stood by, impassive: a loose-limbed young officer in American uniform, with hair so closely cut that colour was indeterminate. He introduced himself: “Thaddeus Hill.”
Who had been kind, and whose good face was not more than twenty-five years old.
“Helen wrote of you. Ben, also. You befriended them.” Leith did not want to seem to stake a prior claim, even while doing so.
“It’s a privilege to be friends with them. Fun, too.” Tad said, “They’re on their own”—meaning in their singularity or their isolation, or both. “Great kids. They think the world of you.”
“And I of them.” Aldred felt that, had Thaddeus Hill been present at table to witness his arrival, no thunderbolt would have deflected his attention.
They would have liked each other entirely, had it not been for the contest.
Tad said, “I’ll look in on them tomorrow. We just got back, Mr. Slater and I, from Formosa. We’re down in Kure.”
Noting their connection, Mr. Slater was fast concluding at the telephone. He could not be everywhere at once.
What Leith could not put together was the role of Thaddeus, with his good manners and face. He supposed it would reveal itself. He said, “I myself am just back, and already making plans for departure.”
Slater said that he would welcome an opportunity. “We think the world of your record.” Possibly had not expected quite this man, or so deep a voice. “We have the greatest interest in your work.”
Which was safe enough under Benedict’s bed.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Slater said, “Well, fix it up with Tad here. I’ll be away a day or two myself. Have to go to Osaka.”
Ósaka, not Osáka.
Leith might have said, My work is of no interest to you, being in its way a meditation. But reflectiveness is hateful to men mobilising grievance.
Something sordid.
Slater was meeting Driscoll and went out, removing Tad also. Leith, having made his phone calls, walked downhill under a tigerish sunset. He did not intend to talk to such a man; but lightness of heart had been shaded. And he did not care to think that, calling on Helen and her brother, he might find Thaddeus Hill there—especially since Tad had proved likeable. “One is nice,” Ben had written. “The other not.”
AFTER DINNER, while she was reading to Benedict, Tad came in, bringing a small heater for their low-wattage room and a bottle of aquavit, of which he accepted a glass. He told them that a box would come from Tokyo. At a store of imported goods, he had bought two loden coats in different shades of olive green.
“I hope the size is right. If not, you’ll grow into them.” He said this, doubting that Ben would ever need the coat, or grow.
They were highly pleased, and said that he should never have done it. (Brother and sister meanwhile having identical presentiment of their mother’s comments.) Helen said that it was an American present: generous, needful, and fun.
“I guess you mean cheeky,” he said—a gift of serious clothes being presumptuous. However, they needed coats. Let the terrible parents take umbrage; they could blame it on American crassness. And—though this was no consolation—he would soon be gone.
She said that, in England, she’d had a warm coat but had outgrown it. “We left for the tropics just in time.”
Tad asked, “Can I look at this?”—the book, which was on their table.
Ben said, “Aldred brought it.”
“I meant to say that I ran into him.” Tad was turning pages. “Impressive,” he remarked. “The man, I mean.” He put down the book. “The book also, as I can see.”
“Helen has been reading it.”
Tad said, “Quite a salon you kids are running here.” Pronouncing it salonne, he was being American for them to the top of his bent. Sprawling a bit, so far as their rickety chair would allow. Laughing, they were grateful for long-limbed, self-deprecating goodness. And childish enough, too, to be excited about their new green coats.
“I’d like to take you two to the movies.” He told them that the American base had set up a picture house that on certain evenings showed, with crackling and lapsing, films that could cause no offence—“to our tender American sensibilities, kids.” At any rate, Occupation families were welcome, and he’d look into it.
Ben said, “Late in the day, I’m not much good. Or early, for that matter.”
Helen suggested that he might sleep in preparation. He said, “We’ll see. I’d like to go”—which was true. It was equally true that he had begun to fear departures from the talismanic routine of his stark survival. Helen saw it, that he dared not break the remnant of a spell.
The Great Fire Page 14