Tad said, “I’ll fill you in.” When he had gone, with a wave like a heron’s, Helen stood at the open door. “Benny, you must see it, the full moon.” Her life, and even his, in the little prison of their rooms, had also rounded and ripened, grown luminous.
THREE DAYS LATER, coming from Tokyo, Leith was met by Brian Talbot, who said, “Home again.”
A transient room in a military compound had become his destination. For the time being, he didn’t mind.
There was a heavy, historic-looking box with his printed name, and a strapped suitcase, which the two men heaved aboard the jeep. “My books,” said Leith. “Or what’s left of them.” For there had been losses, thefts; and water had got in. “And some winter gear.” They set off in the mild afternoon. Their route was being patched and threw up black gravel splotched with tar. Talbot told him that a new coast road was planned: “Scenic stuff.” At the port, mines had been conclusively swept. The sunken ships were all raised now, and taken for salvage.
“Getting to be quite a beauty spot,” he said, and squawked a laugh.
Sea and islands had always been beautiful. It was the blunderings of men that made the idea laughable. Leith smiled, though not for that reason.
Brian Talbot followed the direction of his companion’s thoughts, having seen Leith at times with Helen, and being nudged by other soldiers who frequented the common room. There had been nothing to report, except what is invisible and irrefutable.
It would not have troubled Leith if Talbot, who probably wished him well, was aware of that attachment.
Brian told him, “You won’t be seeing me much longer. Marching orders. Back to Aussie in a month or so.”
“Good God. I can’t be glad, but I suppose you are.”
“Yair, oh well. Time to move on. I won’t be sorry to leave the army.”
“Would you like—I don’t know—some document? A letter of recommendation?”
“Thanks, I hadn’t thought about it—but yair, thanks, she’d be good.”
Some friendly word should be ventured. But they were careful with one another, and there was still time.
“I suppose I should’ve done more with my stretch here. Never took you up on your offer, the lessons.”
“Later on, the experience will count, perhaps.”
“When I’m old and grey, eh? Something to tell the grandchildren. Who won’t want to listen.”
The settlement of Occupation families having expanded, a traffic light had been planted at its centre, where the PX created convergence. In that miniature, denatured suburbia, Talbot was an appreciated point of reference, greeted by housewives to whom he raised a cheerful hand: “Ar there, Mrs. Wells”; “Be seeing you, Miss Geary.”
“Quite a following you’ve got, Brian.”
The driver grinned: “You get the whole story, in the end.”
At the compound, they stacked the baggage in the common room. Leith left Brian having beer with a pal, and went out in the last of the light. He had extracted his greatcoat from the unloaded suitcase and had it over his shoulders.
Halfway down the path, in a small clearing where jeeps were allowed to turn, Helen was standing with Tad Hill. It was clear that they were setting out together. Helen was wearing a long greenish coat that Aldred had never seen, and pale stockings; and her shoes, while too summery, were for city use. A purse dangled from her arm. And Tad had a tailored uniform, not khaki but fawn, such as American officers wore for civil occasions, and in which he looked well. Helen had seen Aldred. And Tad, turning in the direction of her expression, came to what might have been attention.
Reaching them, Leith smiled and spoke. Tad, who, on a slight rise, appeared tall, smiled too: “I’m taking this lady to the movies.” He explained about the American shed at the port.
Helen’s immemorial feminine look: regret, accountability, resistance, and a plea for indulgence.
“What are you seeing?”
She told him, “Meet Me in St. Louis.”
Tad said, “It’s Louis, not Louie. In real life, if not in song. Saint Louis, Missouri. Hell, what do I know, I’m from Cincinnati.”
Aldred laughed. “I hope to hear about it.”
“We might get a bite down there. Along with the movie house, they’ve set up a place with hot dogs, Cokes, all amenities of high civilisation.” Tad remarked, “We’d better get going.”
“Ben couldn’t come.” She should have prevented herself from saying this.
Aldred said, “How nice you look.” With her flushed cheeks and a wisp of pink silk at her throat—in the collar of the new coat that something warned him not to mention.
His room, put in order as before, had lost its sense of destiny. He hung his coat near the door, unpacked his small bag. Might have liked hot tea, but settled for whisky. An ineffectual heater had been placed near the table. He switched on the lamp and lay on the bed, turning over his notebook from Tokyo—where he had written about reconstruction, about the vexed question of the Japanese theatres, about the education of Japanese women and the hygienic official brothels for American troops.
Tad would take her hand in the dark. And what would she do? In the overlong coat, she had seemed fully grown—embarking on the years in which men would contend for notice, locking antlers. He would have liked to say this to her, so that they might laugh together. He wished he had never seen her.
He went on writing about Tokyo: about places of worship, and the monks.
It was all absurd. Without the coat, she was a child.
In this way, the evening advanced—he writing on a lined pad, or at times reading in one of the books he’d kept by him. At last, half-asleep, he was aware that Helen had come back with Thaddeus. Heard voices on the path, the opening and closing of a door, and the young steps of a man going up under the trees. A flashlight glimmered past his windows. She would recount the evening to her brother. The three men in her immediate life.
He had not eaten and was hungry. He got up, reaching for his boots, and went out to find his dinner. By now, half an hour had passed since her return. There was no light in her rooms, except for the gleam left on, always, for Benedict.
In the common room, Tad was sitting at table reading a newspaper, with a plastic tumbler in his fist. Made a motion to get up when he saw Aldred Leith—who raised his hand and went to the rusted refrigerator to fetch a tuna sandwich and a wedge of cheese. They were alone there and sat down together, and Tad poured him a glass of quinine water. Neither said what they might have: Get some work done? or How was Judy Garland? Affability must dissolve and be re-created.
Thaddeus Hill said, “You’ve never kissed her.” There was no particular emphasis; and when Leith did not reply, he went on, “She doesn’t—didn’t—know how to kiss.”
“She’s sixteen.” Lopping off a year to make his point.
“She’s seventeen, and in love.”
Leith had won. Would not have chosen the word, but there was no other, for the moment. He said, “She’ll be eighteen, and nineteen.”
“My guess is, she’ll still be in love.”
Since generosity was in the air, Leith said, “Much more has to happen.”
“Yes. I don’t plan to forget her. I’ll stay in touch.” Tad said, “She’s somebody. They both are.” Tad might now have added, “Great kids,” but refrained.
Leith said, “That’s the first thing that will happen.”
“The boy’s death.”
“Yes. In Tokyo I went to see the doctor, the American doctor who interests himself in Ben’s condition. I was able to do that without showing my hand—to the parents, that is.”
Tad said, “The Parents.”
“Exactly. The doctor’s all right, a bit callous. More attuned to disease than to boy. Hopes to make a discovery. The disease is little understood. But then, so is the quality of this boy.”
“Doctor could use a little humility?”
“Yes. One fears experimentation—Ben to be kept going as a lab case. The a
ssumption is that Benedict will live some months, even a year. But with such deterioration that he could not stay at home.”
“Wherever home is by then.”
“Home is with Helen.” It was his own discovery. “One can try to be helpful when that happens.”
“We’ll all be split up soon. Four corners of a square world.”
“The doctor has a clinic in mind, in California. Where he would study what they call the progress of the disease. Helen could not go there.” He said, “The doctor has a grant to write about this. It may help someone in the end, but not Ben.”
Tad thumped his fist three times against the table’s edge. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I should tell you a couple of things. I’ve asked to be relieved of this Slater assignment. I’ll soon be going home. They fingered me for it because I knew some Japanese. For me, it was a chance to come here. I didn’t know what I was getting into—which is exactly what you think it is, but worse. Dumb, I guess. In any case, I want out of the army now. Go back to college on the G.I. Bill, get my doctorate, see what comes next. Slater’ll give me a black mark—a black mark from these guys being better than the Congressional Medal, from my standpoint.” It occurred to him that this was tactless, but Leith laughed.
“Meantime, there’s this. You, I take it, are a British subject. Okay. Then you don’t have to talk to Slater, he has no jurisdiction, and I say, Don’t do it. It’s all in bad faith, whatever you say will be misrepresented, they have their knife into you.”
“Why?”
“Oh—because it’s you, because it’s China, because you short-circuited the bureaucracy, because you were favoured by that gutsy French guy who died in Paris—yeah, that’s the name—whom they call E-Feet, their way of saying Queer. Most of all, because you’re clever and decent, and go your own way.” Tad examined the rim of the pounded table: “I guess I broke this a bit. Or maybe I broke my hand. Slater and Driscoll get together, if that means anything to you.”
“You mean, because of Helen.”
“It would be their way to fault you. She’s under age. On the other hand, the Driscolls will soon leave here, taking Helen with them. The boy will be shipped out to California. Driscoll has his eye on a post in New Zealand. He was born there, did you know that?—was taken to Australia as an infant. The post is medical but political, you have to be born in the country to deserve it. These are Driscoll’s stepping-stones—Bengal, Kure, New Zealand. One day I reckon he’ll just step right off the goddamn planet. Come to think of it, there’ve been worse ideas than that.”
They got up and shook hands. He said, “I’ll see you. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Thanks for all of this. How was the movie?”
“Don’t bother. So goddamn cheerful.” Laughed, waved. “Lotsa luck.”
TAD HAD BROUGHT HER TO HER DOOR: “This is where I kiss you.” Afterwards had held her by the shoulders, as if to shake her, wake her. Amiable, exasperated. When he went away, she heard and pictured him loping uphill with his lean Taddish demeanour: musing, bemused. She did touch her lips with the side of her hand—not disgusted or derisive, but distant.
This, then, was the flourished reality: a brute fact, to which loving-kindness was simply, or not even, a preliminary. There had been a screen between her and this. Reality was a wet thick thing alive in her mouth.
It seemed to her something that dogs might do.
She came indoors. Ben slept. Now there would be unshared thoughts, more and more of them—divined, perhaps, but undefined.
Tad had looked at her with the expression of the man Matheson in the lift in Hong Kong: a secret that he was willing her to share, and which should now be disclosed.
Helen undressed, lay down, and slept.
In the night, she got out of her bed and, without lighting the lamp, fetched her new coat and went and sat on the low step, in the setting of the moon. There were cold planets and a cold quiescence. She put the coat around her shoulders and sat, hands clasped over her knees and her chin resting there. She could smell the Pacific, churned up by the storm. Thought how in childhood she had watched the eight-metres and the smaller boats, even the Vee-Jays, sailing Sydney Harbour—whitely, soundlessly, as if unmanned. Only when the regatta veered near shore and the wind blew from that direction, there came, with swish of hull on water, the shouts and curses, the bellowing and bullying about the boom and the cleat and the sheet, and the billowing jib: all the hysteria of manliness. A rush of copper limbs, a thudding of bare feet; and the whipshot thwack of a slackened jib that should have been taut.
Because of the kiss, she might have liked to consider the evening a turning point, momentous. But, with the ill-timed precision of women in such matters, only felt what was lacking. Something that either of them could have put a name to.
WITHOUT UNDRESSING, Aldred Leith had also slept. He had dreamed of Gigliola, or of a confused Gigliola who was sometimes Raimonda, together with a third woman who was identified but speechless—as the dead are, not always truly, said to be in dreams. Even as he slept, he supposed that he had raised the ghost of Gigliola by telling her story, and as part of his renewed turning to women. From this, he was awakened by desire. The moon was in the room, and he lay contemplating his dream, his body, his intentions: all at that hour unmanageable.
There was Tad’s concession, something better than surrender. Tad had kept his possibility in reserve. Aldred himself had said, Much more will happen. Or was it Ginger who’d said that? He remembered how Ginger had said, of his dead wife, “My poor girl.”
He hadn’t told all of Gigliola’s story. At the end of the war, he had learnt how she had been shot down in the country road, climbing over a wall in violation of the German curfew: going to meet a boy, younger than she, who’d been shot, also, in consequence. She had dragged herself, dying, to a ditch by the road. At this recollection he exclaimed, and sat bolt upright in his bed.
Raimonda had married a British officer and gone with him to Africa.
In his first days with Helen and Benedict, the girl had started on some verses by the tragic Italian from the Adriatic, loved by Ben. Halfway, her voice had broken. After a pause, she told them, quite collectedly, “I’ll take it up again later. When I’ve hardened my heart.”
He got up in his crumpled clothes, in which he was used to working at all hours, never understanding why he didn’t first undress.
She was standing, straightening her spine against the frame of her door.
So nothing need be said, except his name and hers.
“Your second kiss of the day.”
“You saw Tad.”
“He’s been our gobetween.”
“Why should he tell you?”
“It was in a good spirit. Even sacrificial.” Though not quite.
They arranged themselves on the step. “There should be words.”
“Say them.”
“We must find them out.” He said, “If I quoted, you would only finish the line.”
“We need nothing.”
“For my part, untrue.” He passed his arms under her coat, Tad’s coat, beneath her upraised arms. “Does that trouble you?”
“Yes. No. It seems—”
“What?”
“Like the night. I can’t explain.” Then she said, “If the moon came up only once in a hundred years, the whole world would stand watching.”
Leith said, “La luna calante,” and fell silent. He withdrew his arms and took her head in his hands.
“Why go?”
“Because you’re fourteen and I’m one hundred.”
“Seventeen, and thirty-three.”
“I give you, for the moment, the best answer.” The truth being that you are seventeen and I am not one hundred.
The strain of fatalism had seen him through involuntary horrors. In this matter that had from the start depended exclusively on his own judgement, it was new to him that it could not have been otherwise.
The abrupt parting made her childish. They might have stayed all night o
n the cold step together. She wanted to say, You won’t pretend, tomorrow, that it has not been? Abject—but she had observed the cold process of what men call coming to their senses.
ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING, there was a letter from his father.
My dear Aldred,
I was very glad to have your description of Peiping (if that’s how they’re spelling it these days). Although I’ve never been in a city under siege, most cities give that impression now, so hard to get in and out of. Aerial bombardment is putting an end to sieges, as to much else. But in Mao’s case he need only wait. I’m glad that my Athens book reached you. Thank you for your good words. It’s had a fine press, providing an excuse for moralising in the Sunday papers, who warm to their perennial theme of my frigidity. It’s selling well in Greece, where it has been banned. A Greek journalist says that I’m trying to drive their (teutonic) royal family into exile. Well, exile is their country. Greece was in bad shape, strenuous. Every road “kakos dromos,” so one travelled on foot or by donkey; and, at my age, suffering. I’m invited to Belgrade by Broz Tito, and am provisionally accepting for September, if he hasn’t been swallowed by the Soviets by then.
What I should like best would be to come in your direction, alas quite impossible. If any chapter is closed for me, it is that of Asia. I follow your own Eastern adventure keenly, and look forward to its fruits. You do right, I think, to brood on that astounding scene before it is recast—before it gathers planetary momentum and loses arcane fascination. However, the consciousness of a last time, in the sighting of places or persons, can be a sombre business, which pierces even in youth, and multiplies with age.
At risk of growing maudlin, I might add that I look forward to your return. Iris tells me that you should arrive before spring. Meantime, I’m curious as to how you flesh out this new stage of your life, and hope to hear more—as do Iris and Aurora, who by the way have at last, and amicably, met. A curious coming round of things.
The Great Fire Page 15