The Great Fire

by Shirley Hazzard

  “Have you eaten anything?” This was Audrey, watching over him.

  “Well, yes, something. I came last night. Benedict was sleeping. This morning I saw him, but he was scarcely aware. He’s been—he has been distressed and was under sedation. I’m waiting here to be called.” It was noon, he had been at the hospital all morning.

  “There’s a minuscule cafeteria. I was on my way there.”

  “But they might call me, if he wakes.”

  “Tell me the doctor’s name.” He wrote it for her and she said, “Like the sculptor. Easy to remember.” She told him, “I’ll arrange that.” Getting up. “I’m used to hospitals.”

  So they had coffee and glutinous cheese at a counter belowstairs, and Leith asked Audrey about her brother: these damaged brothers, and their faithful sisters. Theo, who was a scientist, had hoped to do research in Japan. “However, too many obstacles have been put in his way, and he’s thought of giving up here.”

  She turned his book, which lay on the table: “Wouldn’t you just be reading that.”

  When they went upstairs, he said, “Audrey, thank you for this. You have your own concerns, but you make me feel better.”

  “It’s the cheeseburger.”

  “That did no harm, either. I should thank Their Excellencies in Hong Kong, who introduced us.”

  She said, “Send them a food parcel, by way of suggestion.”

  They sat again on the bench. There was no message for either of them. That morning Benedict had not been in a bed, but lying flat in a narrow cot with guardrails that emphasised his look of elderly child. The resemblance to Helen was ghastly, as if she lay there dying. Aldred had sat on a low stool by the cot, speaking to Benedict’s ear, looking into his recognising eyes. He had Helen’s note in his hand and showed it. The boy made some effort, but fatigue, illness, drugs overpowered him.

  “They said he should revive, by afternoon or evening. I don’t see how he can travel like this, even with the doctor. The parents are there, apparently, at Yokohama, making arrangements with the shipping company.” Thank God they’re not here.

  “They don’t go with him?”

  “They have quite other plans. It’s a pattern.” The boy and girl had been left in London, with Bertram. He told Audrey, “I must be at Kure tomorrow morning, whatever happens.”

  Audrey said, “Look. Theo and I will be back at Yokohama tonight. Write it all down—ship, names, company—and I can go aboard and send you news, how it goes. Why not? I need to know how to reach you.”

  “It’s too good.”

  “I like to do these things. What else is there for me to do? For two pins I’d fly down to Hong Kong and make calves’-foot jelly for Peter Exley, and get the Gladwyns’ marriage off the Hong Kong rocks. For these things, I’m a warhorse hearing the trumpet.” She told him, “I have a reason to go there, in fact. I’m trying to buy a property near Big Wave Bay. The Gladwyns are acting for me. Mark Gladwyn says there will be a great boom in the colony when China goes Red. And then I rather fancy the place. Build a house, nothing luxurious, but comfy, you know. We’ll see. You and Helen can come to stay on your honeymoon.” Smiling.

  HELEN’S HOUSE had been emptied, except for her little room. The whole establishment would be dismantled and disbanded. Only the original house would remain, the house that Ginger called pure. The Driscolls, man and wife, would not return. As their son sailed from Yokohama with Thorwaldsen, they were back in Tokyo, their plans laid. Helen would be brought from Kure at once, by Dench. There would be a flight, by Dakota, to Manila, thence to Darwin, to Sydney; and within days to New Zealand. Dench, though he did not know it, was to be jettisoned along the way: a good post at Brisbane.

  They were pleased to thwart, also, their daughter’s disturbing dreams; to settle things before they became preposterous.

  At Yokohama, they learned, from Audrey Fellowes, of Leith’s visit to their son. Having spared Helen the drama of Benedict’s departure, they had been second-guessed. Leith’s woman friend, a total stranger, appeared at the ship, prying into their affairs. They would tell Helen about the presence of Audrey Fellowes, who evidently accounted for Leith’s journeys to Tokyo.

  Miss Fellowes had foreseen this interpretation and mentioned it—Leith responding that for his part he would consider himself honoured by any such misconception. At which Audrey had laughed and waved his gratitude away: “See you both at Big Wave Bay. Keep in touch.” And walked off to collect her brother; murmuring, of herself, “Audrey is everybody’s pal.” Good nature allowed an occasional irony of the kind. She also determined, now, to lose a few pounds. Perhaps as much as a stone.

  WHEN LEITH REACHED THE COMPOUND, at first light, the gates were barred. Brian Talbot said, “I’ll hoist you over. Easy enough, I’ve done it a time or two. There’s no alarm, no pooch.” He wondered if there was to be an elopement. He couldn’t recall what had happened to Romeo and Juliet. “I can come back this arvo, in case you need something. About two, why don’t I do that. After that, it’s no go, I’m off duty for good. Day after tomorrow, I sail.”

  “I know it. Come if you can, at least we can say goodbye. Thanks for all of it, Brian, I won’t forget.” With the difference of a name, these were words he had used to Audrey Fellowes, hours past. What a lot of goodbyes. He said, “What a lot of kindness.”

  “Ar, well. Some blokes deserve a fair go, some not. I can throw your kit over to you, if nothing’s breakable.”

  Leith caught his canvas bag, and a bundle. The deserted air of the place struck at him with a fear he would not entertain. But he found her at once, in his own room: fully dressed and wrapping a cardboard package. The package contained his papers, which slid from her hands as he entered.

  He closed the door and leant against it. Helen came into his arms. He held back her head and asked, “Are these your tears or mine?”

  She told him, “They will come to get me, for the morning plane.” Like a prisoner. Helpless, trapped in her age and his.

  “God,” he said, “if I hadn’t come in time.”

  “I told you. I wouldn’t have gone.”

  “You’re having to be so brave. We both are.”

  “Will it go on like that?”

  “Only for a time.” Which will be terrible. “I must tell you many things.”

  It was fully light now. They lay, dressed, on his bed, her coat over them. She asked, “Is it cold in here?”

  “Not now.”

  “Should we lock the door?”

  “I already have.”

  “Ben. Tell me.”

  Close in their clothes, as if in the one garment.

  He had thought carefully of how to tell her, resolving nothing. The boy would die, remote from her. No amount of tact was going to change it.

  “I saw him twice. He was well cared for. The first time, he was under some drug, but I believe that he knew me and was pleased. The following day, we were together for an hour or more. I couldn’t see the doctor, who was away. They wanted me to leave, but I explained and they let me stay. I had to kneel in order to speak and hear. He held my hand.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Mostly spoke of you. I read him your letter, my darling, and he wept.” We wept. He had never in his life wanted so much to comfort anyone, as now with her. (Her letter—How can we be separate, who will always be in one another? Who’ve shared our years of salvation.) “I’ve left the letter with him. There is a box of his belongings, they let me add the letter, and I told him. Of course, others will read it. But its existence might serve him as proof, as comfort.

  “He wanted Aki to have his coat.” Tad’s coat. All that Benedict had to leave. “I’ve brought it. I’ll help Aki if I can.” He said, “I must leave here, too, as soon as I can arrange it.”

  He told her, “There is more. And then we’ll speak of ourselves. Helen, my father has died.”

  She lay back from him. “Dear Aldred,” she said. “So you have that, too.”

  “I must go hom
e. From Tokyo, I was able to telephone my mother. She was calm, it’s her way. But she’s guarded with me, even in this.” He felt, painfully, that she was rather afraid of him, his mother.

  “Are you upset about your father? Will you miss him?”

  “We were never much together, even when in the same room. Not long ago he wrote me an affectionate letter. I took it for a portent, and wrote him back in the same strain. He would have had my reply. I told him about you—a line or two. He was always pleased when women entered the picture.” Diabolical, too. “I also learnt that Peter Exley is in hospital in Hong Kong. Something serious.”

  “Such a journey, Aldred.” She would have liked to repair, for his sake, all sorrows of the world. “Was there nothing comforting?”

  “Yes. At the hospital I ran into Audrey Fellowes from Hong Kong. It was she who told me about Peter, they have a connection. She might visit him in Hong Kong, or so I hope. Her kindness mattered, it got me through that day.” He stroked Helen’s head. “She knew about you, and felt for us.”

  He got up and left her, and came back with the wrapped bundle and an envelope.

  “Here is the coat, which you or I will give to Aki. And this is a letter of credit for a thousand pounds. Who knows what may happen, you might need to come to me in some emergency.”

  She said, “There will never be more emergency than today.”

  He put the envelope on the table. “In order to use it, you need only let me know. You can have as much more as you want.”

  She sat up on the bed and pulled her dress over her head. “Come back to me.” She smiled. “I don’t have a penny, and now I have a thousand pounds.”

  He had taken off his jacket. Their shoes were jumbled by the bed.

  “Do you want me?” Words she’d read somewhere, with their outworn sacrificial context.

  “It would not be like that, it would be shared.” They lay down together, and he said, “I’ve wanted it so much, and dreamed it. And now there is no time. They will be here at any minute. How could I leave you, after that? We should be alone, and safe and beautiful, with time. Not hiding, which I’ve hated, and fearful of the minutes.” She would be alone at that far place, untouchable, perhaps pregnant with his child. Afraid of himself, he got up and sat by her. “As soon as you send me their address, I will write to your parents—that we need to see and know one another, and not be parted. That you should come to Britain, where you can stay with my mother, or independently, as you choose. What I’d have asked of them had it not been for this accursed departure. Helen, we should marry at once, if it were up to me.”

  They had now begun on anguish.

  “Write to me immediately, in England, and send me the later address. I’ll be here for days only now. You’ll send me news of Ben.”

  She said, “I will never see him again.”

  So they began to dress.

  When they were done, and sat again on the bed in one another’s arms, she burst into a flood of tears. “It’s impossible.”

  “It’s the worst thing that will ever happen to us.”

  “Let us not wait for them. We can walk out and see them coming down.” She said, “I love you more than all the world.”

  When they went out on the path, they saw, almost at once, Dench and one of the drivers at some distance, not yet descending. Helen said, “My beloved. Let me go up to them alone. How can we say goodbye in that presence? When they start down the path, I’ll leave you.” She said again, “How can we say goodbye,” and again wept.

  They stared. Meeting their own eyes.

  “We’ll think so closely in these hours.” He said, “My darling girl.”

  She had determined not to look back, but did so, not raising her hand but standing still under trees. He watched her turn and go up to them alone.

  Brian, coming at two, was struck by the alteration. He had not expected such vulnerability from his grown-up cove. Leith, grateful for his arrival, shared a last drink with him, and was austere at his departure.

  Brian told him, “Don’t forget. If ever you stop off in Melbourne.” Leith thought, On my way to New Zealand.

  My dear, I have your little letter from Tokyo, unhoped for. It touched me so, and the thought of you going out to post it at the last hour of the day of our parting, of which I relive the moments and words, the cruel beauty. It was unbearable to see you go up like that, alone—or, I marvel more than ever at what one does manage to bear. That we can need each other as much as I do you at this moment, yet continue to go through motions of daily life. I am writing immediately to your hotel at Sydney, from which you’ll send me what I shall not call your permanent address—that being in my future care. Write me now to England, where I should arrive within twelve days—the series of flights consuming most of a week. Think how I’ll look for your letter.

  I say your name in this flimsy room so strangely become immemorial. I love you.

  16

  THE ROOM WAS A SLOT, ending in a window. The foot of the bed, formed by a metal tube, was parallel to the windowsill. Outside the window, fumbling it, filling it, a mass of tropical vegetation: on which the rain, audible at times, at times soundless, was falling and falling.

  Blank walls, painted grey. On the bed, a grey blanket wrapped the form of a man.

  Peter Exley was waiting for the doctor. His feet were grey hillocks in the bed, the book lay like a brick by his hand. This wing of the hospital was clinically quiet—no garrulous families, querulous outbursts, rampaging children brought corridors to sporadic life. The Chinese aides and British nursing sisters passed his door with soft squeak of foot to floor. The spongy pressure, hush-hush.

  The doctor entered with significant calm. Shook hands, pulled forward the only chair: “Mind if I sit down?” With the white coat, white face and hair, and the stethoscope shiny round his neck, he was a bellwether. He was carrying a thin folder, which he placed on the bed. He was called Major Shulbred.

  “This is bad luck.” He reached out to switch the fan to a higher speed. Lined face, mottled hands; some thoughtfulness not merely professional.

  “Yes.”

  “Not the most severe case we’ve had. Nor quite the lightest either.”

  “No.”

  “What the layman calls infantile paralysis. Medically, poliomyelitis. From the Greek—polio, grey. Grey matter of the spinal cord. You’ve heard all this from my colleagues.”

  “Yes.” Exley said, “What is the plan for me?”

  “Let me first explain the condition.” Major Shulbred placed the dossier upside down on the bed and drew on the back of it with a pencil. “Here is the spinal cord. Here, your right leg. Here is what we call the tibial nerve. Here, the fibula. This is the femur. And here is the tendon reaching to the metatarsal bones.” Politely shifting the sketch in Peter Exley’s direction. “Following me?”

  Exley held back mad laughter. Rysom’s machine pounded in his head:

  The foot bone’s connected to the leg bone,

  The leg bone’s connected to the knee bone—

  “What has happened to you, Captain Exley, is that—” Shulbred was speaking of atrophy, the body’s failures. Making a second sketch, he filled it briskly with flecks of grey. “When the circulation is interrupted, these muscles can wither—”

  The knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone,

  The thigh bone—

  Fate had no sense of timing, or good taste.

  The doctor went on with his flecks and swoops, his bristly picture: mounting the illusion that comprehension would alleviate fact. To understand all is to forgive all. In a few moments, however, he put his pencil aside and said, “Cruel stroke of misfortune.”

  “Yes.”

  “Europeans here aren’t aware of such things. If they think of disease in this place, they think tuberculosis. Fair enough—with TB we’re talking of one quarter, one third, even, of the local population. But there are serious diseases here more promptly contracted.” He said, “It’s not even certain t
hat you got it from contact with that child.”

  He hopes to palliate the irony. Peter said, “I have no doubt, myself.”

  “The child died, I believe?”

  “The same day.” Exley said, “What is the plan for me?”

  “Well now. Personally, I think you will make a good recovery. Even a very good recovery. You may eventually be able to walk without the brace, possibly with a stick. We’re talking of a couple of years from now. Depending on response to the therapy. You’ll always have to count on some weakness.”

  “Yes.” Always have.

  “Some effects come later, from damage to the peripheral nervous system. With age, the nerve cells diminish. For the time being, at any rate, you’re not really ambulatory. We’re trying to arrange direct sea passage. There’s an Australian ship, the Taiping, returning to Sydney from here in three weeks’ time, out of Kobe. Small but comfortable, I’ve been aboard her. I’ll signal the captain myself—good chap, fine old Scot, name of Tulloch.” He dropped the dossier beside his chair. “We’d arrange special care for you—may have to find someone to send along. Everything depends on the extent of their facilities on board.”

  The doctor placed his closed fists on his knees, preparing to rise. “In one thing, I think, we’ve been lucky. There’s a chap going back in the same ship, says he knows you. He can help a bit.”

  Exley said, “Who’s that?”—and at once realised: “Rysom.”

  “That’s the name. He’s leaving the army, been offered some educational post in the government, apparently. At all events, there you are.”

  “In the same boat.”

  “Yes. The appropriate medical people would be alerted at the other end. What about family?”

  Exley said, “It’s been played down to them. I didn’t want them turning up here. I can write them now.”