The Great Fire

by Shirley Hazzard

  My love ever—

  This, which was signed “Oliver,” was far and away the most feeling letter that the adult Aldred had received from his father. It was written in a sprawling but legible hand that showed no sign of age. Oliver Leith’s letters were usually dictated to a machine. Typed up, on a special size of small stationery, by a secretary with whom he had long since ceased to have an affair, they were signed and despatched each day. Indirection of process favoured the writer’s desire to thwart a posterity seeking evidence, beneath the aloof public figure, of the presumably tormented artist who wrote love into books and dissembled it in private life. Such letters—of set brevity, controlled egotism, and laboured goodwill—were seldom of lasting interest. That a covering of tracks might itself be seized on as revelation, the author naturally foresaw; and, once in a while, signing some particularly innocuous batch, would mutter, “Let them work it out,” as he dropped the pile into a waiting tray. A sense of opposition gave stimulus.

  The son’s impulse, to reply warmly—before scepticism protectively returned—arose from the letter’s portent of death, and even from its seeming acknowledgement of long indifference. A son had not thought to be so easily disarmed.

  Dear Oliver,

  Your letter touched me.

  He sat some minutes with the pen in his hand, before realising that this might be enough.

  Of course, the words might strike his father as merciless.

  The pen rolled away. Having got up to retrieve it, Aldred Leith walked about the room, vaguely setting things to rights and weighing some conversational addition to his reply; treading softly, for his father’s overture was a rare bird that might flap away screeching.

  The word “flesh” characteristically went to the centre of things.

  At last he shook his clothes together and went next door.

  Benedict was alone. Helen had gone to use a sewing machine in the parents’ house. The two men were pleased to be by themselves, knowing she would come.

  “Ben, was there ever a time when you felt close to your father?”

  Benedict put the crumpled frame of his fingers together. “You see, my illness came on me early, but not enough to be convincing. My father thought, wanted to think, that I was malingering. There was threatening and shouting, and dragging; and on my part writhing, resisting, and screaming. He was set on my becoming a champion swimmer, took me to Balmoral Baths at sunrise, all seasons, and plunged me in. Derelict wooden piles slimed with green and cruelly barnacled. Fear, humiliation, agony in an ear. I shrieked, he shouted, once or twice it came to blows. Neighbours complained. Finally, mastoid trouble was discovered; there was an operation, also awful. By then, something was irrefutably wrong with me, and he couldn’t bear our joint failure—my failure and his; we were saddled with it, one way or another.”

  “Your part was involuntary, given the circumstances.”

  “His too, given his nature.”

  “No. We owe ourselves more disbelief than that.”

  “The Australian male is not good at self-doubt. Someone else must always be to blame. Otherwise, Aldred, a nation on its knees.”

  Leith held up a tumbler that stood at the bedside and helped the boy to drink through a straw.

  Benedict went on. “However, to answer your question. Yes. When I was very small, before all that at the baths, he was proud of my alertness. He’d do little tricks for me, and we’d laugh together. He’d sit me at the kitchen table while he peeled me an apple, peeled it with a bone-handled blade, all in one go, and we’d laugh and twirl the spiral of apple skin between us till it snapped. Fun, funny. He seemed like God, naturally, but I also realised that he was wounded, weak, untruthful, and I felt the more tenderly towards him for that. We were a bit in league. Against my mother. Even later, when I was already culpable, a liability, he used to do his tricks for Helen, she’d have been tiny then. There was a brown, shaggy glove, form of a half-monkey, and he would wiggle it for her and swoop it at her, and she would squeal with delight. And we’d laugh, all three of us. But he and I, the males, were for that moment again complicit. I don’t remember where my elder sister was—off somewhere with my mother, or at school. Then I deteriorated. And Bertram mercifully came; Helen and I grew clever and close. And there was war. Meantime, there had been, in my father, some conclusive submission to my mother, embitterment towards me. By the time we went to Bengal, things were fixed, and there was his public ambition, his avarice. Helen and I pretty much went to the wall—she being useful to my uselessness.” He said, “I’m tiring now.”

  “Shall I leave?”

  “No. Wait till she comes. Just this. I used to hope I’d last long enough to see her independent. Not going to happen. Bertram would help her, he loves her, and has come into some means. Affinity, her great necessity. I hoped I’d see her—not safe, exactly, but released. Now, perhaps—”

  “You need not fear for her.”

  Helen arrived in a dark woollen dress, with two pieces—bodice and unshirred skirt—of a basted dress over her arm. Leith got up and found another chair for himself. There was the smell of freshly cut cotton. He asked, “Can I see the dress?” and stood at her side as she spread it on the table. She told him that the material came from a cache of Liberty cotton in Bombay and was sent to her by a friend.

  Benedict looked up: “Frida. Elfrida Ladd.”

  Leith said, “Your adventures. This is the first I hear of Frida Ladd.”

  “I was rather in love with her.”

  And Helen: “And she with you.”

  “No. You say that, but she was only kind.” But he was flushed, and glad.

  Helen told Leith, “She was a war widow. She was Lady Ladd. Her husband was on General Wavell’s staff. Flying back to India from Cairo, his plane was shot down, in mistake for Wavell’s.” Hesitation. “They had already lost a boy, their only child. He was sunk in a ship of evacuees from Britain.” Looking at Leith apologetically, as if to say, There is no end to it. “She had pattern books; and a wicker box, all in order, of shears and scissors and thimbles. Coloured silks, threads, tape measures, and a little cushion full of needles. She taught me to sew.”

  The girl had thus eluded the taste of Melba Driscoll. Leith now knew of Frida Ladd, who was good and brave, and had lost her child in the sinking of the ship called City of Benares.

  “I only got as far as two patterns. I can vary the colours and the prints, but the dresses are what you’ve seen—round neck with long sleeves; scooped neck with short sleeves.” She laughed.

  “And where is she now, Lady Ladd?”

  “Still in India, but in Delhi. She remarried. Now, with Partition, they’re leaving India, going back to England. She sent us a photograph of the wedding. She’d be thirty.”

  Ben said, “Thirty-two.”

  “Is she beautiful?”

  Ben said, “As an angel.”

  They wanted to know, Had he been in India?

  “Once, for just three weeks. Sailing East, I broke the journey at Bombay—to cast a glance, at least, on India before Partition. There was somebody I wanted to meet, whose ideas for India seemed, then, to touch the predicament of China.” Ten improbable days spent on cracked verandahs and in steaming rooms with Acharya Vinoba Bhave, talking of the Land Gift movement. “Whose ideals, I should say. I’d gone to him for ideals, I think, but the saintliness undid me, and I began to talk practicalities out of self-preservation. He dismissed me, and so civilly.” Leith laughed. “What a fool one makes of oneself, and knowing it all the while.”

  Benedict said, “You’re an odd coot, Aldred. A man who actually likes to laugh at himself.”

  “Not enough, I daresay.”

  Helen was making buttonholes—almost businesslike, as she sat narrowing her eyes to the needle. And she also laughed—at herself, and from the thrill of living, which had come without her having to compel or devise it. And in these thin rooms that scarcely admitted light, let alone deliverance.

  He said, “I should get
back to my China puzzle.”

  “Why?” asked Ben. “When nothing will ever be nicer than this.”

  So Aldred Leith sat in the extra chair, and was pleased, like most men, to see a woman sewing—or knitting, or winding wool, shelling peas. Serviceable, soothing, seated. Stilled, for the moment, to little more than an occasional murmur or useful click. Benedict fell into the half-sleep in which he softly twitched or mumbled—much as a domestic animal might do, but without an animal’s health. When he abruptly woke, Helen put down her work.

  “Do you need anything?”

  “Yes. Something to be said, or read.”

  They spoke of the anthology that Leith had brought from China, and Helen asked him if he had read the poems in Chinese.

  “Some of them, yes. Not for a long while now.”

  She asked, “Why did you enlist as a soldier? Knowing many things, you might have been useful differently.”

  “That August, I was staying on a property in the south of England, waiting, as I thought, for the Foreign Office to decide my fate, after I’d sat their examinations. To pass time, I worked on the land there, hard work, and I liked it and liked the men of the place, more or less my age, with whom I reaped and dug ditches and handled muck.” And in the evening cleaned up, and went in the village looking for girls. “The ploughing was done with horses, the countryside was poverty-stricken, we milked by hand and took the milk to a station by horse and cart, so that it could go by rail to London. The older men spoke dialect—‘thee bist’—I suppose, the last of that. The war came with September, and during the autumn most of the young men joined up. Something fresh for them, a different drudgery, chances, change. They wouldn’t believe the reality, though their fathers had fought in the Great War. They weren’t jingoistic, and couldn’t work up a generalised hate—nor for that matter could I. The war had begun tamely, the Blitz was yet to come.”

  He said, “It was the closest I could come to classlessness. There had always been the division—my speech, my means, my education. Enlisting put an end to all that. I felt that any one of them could despise me for doing otherwise. I was young, but not all that young. And perhaps wrong, but not all that wrong.”

  “Too diffident,” said Ben.

  “Or too proud.” His mother had been appalled. “Later, with the Pacific war, I did feel I had a card to play. But by then I’d been commissioned in the field, I’d had special training, they wouldn’t let me go.”

  Helen asked, “Would you sit the examination again now? Or is it too late? I mean, the Foreign Office.”

  “The examination—you see, I passed it. I got the notice of it that October. By then, I was in camp, waiting on the cliffs for the invasion that never came. No, no, those ambitions long since evaporated, I can’t believe I ever had them.”

  THEY WERE CURIOUS ABOUT THE MEDALS. Benedict said, “You can’t wear that rainbow and then not tell.”

  “I’m obliged to wear it, in uniform. You can’t think I wandered through China dressed like this.”

  “This one, for instance.” Helen was pointing at a scrap of blue.

  “That was truly undeserved. The only good hour I had, in the last battle.” In the dark, in the rain and mud. “On the last night, the division got separated, the communications were down. The enemy were shelling the dead ground between our two groups, waiting for daybreak to finish us off. The last chance was to fall back through the wood and get down to the river before the sun came up. We had no means of telling the rest of the men, who were disastrously trying to join us in our trap. The sergeant, Mackie was his name, and I were crouching under bushes in the rain, and the shelling went on, ceasing awhile, then starting up again, and ceasing. I was timing the intervals. We made it regular intervals of fourteen minutes: fourteen of firing, fourteen of silence. I went to the officer in charge, Bates, holed up near the supplies with a straggle of our men—the others being deployed in the wood behind, along with our wounded and dead. Bates was a good chap, young—though he didn’t look it that night. We had to stand close to see and hear one another, the din was terrific. I told him I could carry a line to our people who were cut off downriver. Meanwhile, the barrage was going on. I said I could get through with the line during the next silence.”

  He remembered Bates’s eyeballs, shining in a face ritually blackened for action.

  “I can’t allow that.”

  “I used to be a sprinter.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Would I lie?”

  “Yes. And nobody’s ever broken four minutes on the mile that I know of.”

  “It’s not even half a mile.”

  He said, “Broken ground, wet, dark, and you encumbered.”

  “While we were at it, a chap from the signal corps brought the line in a frame, showed me how they pay it out. While I was gone, they would set it up at this end.”

  All that had taken seconds. Bates was hesitating, seeing the frame: “I don’t believe you can do it.” When it got to twelve minutes, Leith had started out for the edge of the open ground. Bates, quietly: “Good luck.”

  He told them now, “It was more like an hour, all things considered, but went off all right. The men were pleased, too—a fractional victory saved from the fiasco.”

  “They might have changed the timing.”

  “But they didn’t.” He said, “The following day, all went to hell. Much later, in the prison camp, I learned about this.” The ribbon. “It meant that Bates or Mackie or the signalman had survived.” When he got back from his run, the signalman had said, “If I’d laid odds on you, I’d have made me fortune.”

  Helen, with clasped hands: “What did you think of, while you were running?”

  “I’ve never felt more free.” It was true, he had often relived it; more than once, had dreamt it. Thudding and slithering in the dark, under the rain, no longer filthy or afraid or doomed. Not cowering under cover, but up and running. For an hour, he disposed of his own life. Had he died then, his ghost might have run on, exultant. Even now he thought, Could have been worse than go like that.

  Ben said, “Helen looks as if she’s had a narrow escape.” He asked, “For the other medal, the great medal, did you go to the palace?”

  “Certainly. That was just before I came East. Yes, yes, the King, Queen, princesses, and a few of their old, old relatives, Guelphs and Ghibellines, whom one had seen in the press in group photographs of grand occasions. The George Cross people were there, too, looking infinitely real in civilian clothes, and including some women. Not a large gathering—a number of potential guests had died qualifying. It went better than one liked to admit. At first we stood around looking sheepish, but after drinks circulated people cheered up and talked. There was a chap from the Irish Guards who’d been in the same action with me, in Tunisia. An adventurer who’d falsified his credentials to join up, and would have been court-martialled if he hadn’t turned out heroic.” Wheelchairs, crutches, false limbs, eye patches, and some shocking disfigurement. The rooms, bleak, grandiose, run-down. The great works of art were not yet retrieved from their wartime caverns in Wales.

  “Did your parents come?”

  “In fact, they did.” It surprised him to remember. It was like prizegiving day at school: his mother and father dressed up, Iris actually shedding tears. His father thought that the palace had watered the wine in order to forestall any heroic drunkenness. In the last half-houragain like a children’s occasion—there was overexcitement, high voices, laughter, petulance: expertly dealt with, for they were all soon dispersing under what seemed to be their own steam.

  TAD WAS LEAVING JAPAN. He came one cold morning to say goodbye, knocking and entering, but finding no one. Aki appeared, to tell him that Benedict was sleeping and Helen would soon return. Tad sat awhile on the rickety chair to wait, taking note of the characterless room that he and others would remember. When Helen did not arrive, he went out to meet her on the path, and immediately saw her coming down, wearing the green coat that was
fetchingly too large for her and too long. Her head was lowered, but she saw him and came up eagerly as if to embrace him. They walked back to the cottage together, he with his arm about her shoulders. From that, she knew that he had come to say goodbye.

  Both, for different reasons, were glad that Aldred was out.

  In the cottage, he sat on Ben’s divan. “Come sit by Tad.”

  Taking off her coat, she did so. She said, “Today you look less like Tad. More like Thaddeus Hill.”

  “And feel more like him, too. Whoever he is.” He said, “Eyes like a huskie.” He could not understand her eyes, except to imagine a future in which she would look appreciatively, regretfully, less and less shyly, at men whom she could not entirely feel for. If things went badly, might at last take one or another of those imperfect possibilities, as women did. In that drab instant, he could almost wish that Aldred Leith should now have her.

  He said, “Perhaps I’ve overdone the hayseed.” He held her kind hand, as he had done at the movies: a hand too polite to say no. “I’ve been unlucky here. The old incurable untimeliness. I learnt that at school. Not that I understood it then. I guess that’s what school’s for, to give you something to fall back on, later, when times get tough.” He pulled out a handkerchief and touched her eyes. “Hey, stop that. If anyone’s going to cry round here, it’ll be Thaddeus Hill.” From another pocket, a scrap of paper. “This is my address, I’ll need your news. Things will happen, you’ll let me know.”

  “Things will happen for you, too.” Girls with white smiles and long legs; girls known as Blondes, and called Baby.

  “For now, this will hold up, one way or another.” He would have been preferred by the parents, welcomed as a relief: a simple American matter, at least as presented: Boy meets Girl. He could not picture Helen in Cincinnati; or, by now, see himself there.

  He released her hand. “Will you kiss me, Helen?”

  She did so. And he thought, with bitterness, that she had learnt her lesson.