The Great Fire

by Shirley Hazzard

  “Decent people?”

  “They’ll help, yes.”

  Shulbred said, “If you can’t face any of this yet, we’ll try something different.”

  Peter started to say, No point in postponing. But surprised himself: “I’d rather hang on here awhile. Get used to things, start the therapy.”

  Shulbred kept his fists on his knees, but smiled. “A rational response to a not necessarily rational situation.”

  Exley didn’t mind being seen through, if it was only once in a while. He saw that Shulbred had often used these words, and with the same kindliness. He lay on his pillows, thinking how a reiterated utterance, even a valid one, mysteriously loses meaning; the repetition echoing down the words. He had noted the phenomenon in himself. He said, “The rational is still worth stating.”

  Shulbred inclined his head. “I remember you’re a lawyer. In that connection—you’ll be able to take up your profession where you left off. More fortunate than some.”

  “Less so than others.”

  “I know.” The doctor got up. “I’ll look in on you again.” The hand on Exley’s shoulder.

  As soon as Shulbred went out, one of the Scots nurses came in with a note. “That Miss Xavier telephoned.”

  It was a message, that Rita would come after five. Exley put it aside: I can always prevent her.

  “Yon fan’s too draughty.”

  “The doctor turned it up.”

  “It’s nae sacred for that reason.” Switched it off. “I’ll bring your tea.” Touching his arm as the doctor had—in the same way, Peter thought, that people take liberties with the old and dying: giving endearments, elevating mere acquaintance to familiarity. Taking charge. A last chance to evince goodwill, to give the world a better name.

  When the nurse came back with a tray, he asked her to ring up Rita: “Tell her, at the usual time, then.” Lay there, holding a hot teacup, without appetite for the dull biscuit.

  Every other day, Rita came to see him after her work. She brought what he needed—shaving cream, blades, a cashed cheque, a book from the Russian bookshop in Ice House Street; his letters. She attended to small matters with the nurses. As his concentration improved, she began to read to him. When he spoke, responded; when he fell silent, was still. She came in the late afternoons, in her green dress or a pleasing print, when the air was heaviest and the straw blind scarcely swayed against the breeze. Sat, without chatter or any arch greeting, in the single chair: never officious, never bringing bogus good cheer, never staying too long. Since she could not soothe the wound, did nothing to inflame it.

  This tact, repose, helpfulness might have comprised the womanly ideal: service crowned with self-effacement. None of it could occur without a sensitivity that Exley made no effort to appreciate. His imagination was exhausted with scurrying to meet the minds of others. He held his own mind steady, like a man who carries his body carefully in pain.

  In that life of few weeks past, he had held many matters simultaneously in mind—as people do. Now consciousness devolved on each event in turn, as if the episodes considered over years were being dismissed, one by one. It was enfeebling to him to think of people throughout the world reconsuming their experience, over and over: memory, regret, ideas, pleasures hurrying like caged mice. What emanates from crowds as a seething.

  His own experience was not great, yet had filled up his thought at the expense of other powers. His consciousness was like half-excavated ancient cities he had seen—incapable of future, expecting only a further accretion of the past.

  There was, for instance, the compulsion to return to the calamity of Liu’s child—to deplore it yet again, or replay it with a happy ending. Getting away with something—the narrow squeak—is, he had always realised, a strong theme of life and art: powerful because it creates suspense. One never quite loses hope that Hamlet will discard the poisoned foil, that Juliet will awake in time, Cavaradossi rise up living, and the royal family escape from Varennes. The world loves long odds—Marathon, Lepanto, the Armada; Dunkirk. As to that, he thought, I’ve had my share of rescues, first by Crindle at Florence, then from Leith in the desert. And done little enough with the reprieve. Good fortune is a prodigy whose occasion one must rise to. Unpractised in such notions, I could not rescue Liu’s child, or save myself.

  There was a sardonic completeness to the very attempt.

  These ideas came round to Rita. There is a kind of well-meaning that is doomed. It was this that Rita had a sense for, an aversion to: “You intend to be kind, but just so far”—and then her chopping gesture. Yet the intention might be better than the vigilant abstention: better than the chopping gesture and a withered heart.

  To marry Rita would be to give up every illusion, on her side as well as his. And she could have no conception of the loneliness to which he would take her—the life of ostracism, household labour, suburban tedium. The White Australia Policy. Such a venture might be possible with high passion. He and Rita were dealing not in passion or dispassion but with a proposal of shared resignation. If he married her, he would perform an unresisting selfish action without pleasing himself in the least.

  To offer her these excuses was unthinkable: like a private apology for a public wrong.

  He remembered how Hendriks had declared, “Tolerance is still far off: too late for you and me.” There was also Glazebrook telling him, “Miss Xavier is serious”; and Monica with her “tears before bedtime.” Knowing all that, Rita had constructed her defences. And yet sat by him now in the late afternoons, defenceless. He should have been grateful. People expected something convenient to come of it.

  I too am serious, he thought. I do not love her. I do not wish to make use of her, do not want a ministering angel who is indifferent to others. Let her be alive and demanding, and without that look she gave me when she said, “The child may die, whatever you do,” on the last day of my former life. Truthfulness was his last whole good, the thing he had not sheltered or kept small for safety. He had brought it out of the fire, not intact but with appropriate scars. As an abstraction it could not help him, lying inert in the Asian afternoon. Whether it retained any private power remained to be seen.

  Part Three

  17

  WHEN ALDRED LEITH AT LAST CAME HOME from war, another war was in the offing. The European peace celebrated three years earlier had loosed its rapturous hold; and London, in the cold spring of 1948, was as shabby and sombre as in wartime, and greatly scarred—deliverance being marked, by night, in the old honeycomb of lights and, by day, in a cooling of purpose as the populace awaited some suggestion of good times.

  Leith arrived from Asia, making the last stage of his journey in a military plane, which accounted for his being met, once more, by an army driver—an older man who presented himself with a crashing salute (“Sir!”), relieved him of his baggage, took the trenchcoat from Leith’s arm, and pointed out, in a recess of the airfield, an old Humber of metallic sheen.

  The driver, having folded the legendary coat on the front seat, now stood by the Humber’s rear door. Obliged to become official, Leith made no objection—only wishing to rediscover in silence the city where he was born..

  “Not too fast. I want to look.” He asked for a circuitous route near the river. He asked the driver’s name.

  “You’ll hardly believe it. The name’s Carr.” Having made contact, and growing bored with the automaton role that—for effect, or in selfdefence—he sometimes played, Carr settled in for a chat.

  He had an idea that his passenger was foreign: “Ever seen London before?”

  “Not for some years. I was here briefly at the time of the victory.” He could have added, I was arranging a divorce.

  “Those were great days.”

  It was past noon. Configurations of cloud and water were hatched with the roofs and rounds and angles of normal existence. The thin light proposed silence, but the driver was adrift on a stream where his wife and daughter swam companionably with recollections of the Western De
sert, the fall of a doodlebug at Islington early in 1945, a fox terrier named Spiv, the sixpenny meat ration—and the inauguration, in America, of automatic transmission: “Takes the fun out of it.”

  For Christ’s sake, shut up, thought Leith, intent on the cold, silver, shattered scene. Near the Tower, however, he gave by an exclamation further stimulus.

  “Yes, yon’s All Hollows, and a sorry sight.”

  Charred stump above smashed wall.

  Childhood visits to the Tower had usually begun with All Hallows. (“All Hallows Barking,” his grandmother made a point; and the child, knowing nothing of parent abbeys, conjured a ferocious dog.)

  “December 1940, that would have been. A rare rumpus, with only the Christmas truce.” The car was almost idling. “Funny, them and us, the both of us at our Christmas dinner.” The prayers and hymns, the same God-Is-Love. By “funny” he meant “insane.” “Well, they pounded us. And got it back with interest. When we might’ve all lived peaceful.”

  “I agree.”

  The next event, on its rise, was the Monument.

  “And here you’ve got your highest point in London.”

  “Can it still be there?” The passenger wound down the window. He had forgotten the dimensions, or discounted boyhood memory. The plinth alone seemed vast as a building. A family was standing back to assess the height of the column, wondering whether to ascend: their loitering a signal of peace. Aldred recalled the climb, the counting of steps. (“Three hundred and ELEVEN!” his cousin had shrieked on a last gasp.) Emerging on a parapet topped by gilded flames, to the panorama of all their confident world: towers, domes, temples, and elastic river.

  “Had our own Great Fire since then.”

  “Indeed.”

  They skirted, then, the plateau of grit and grasses around St. Paul’s. The streets had filled, and vibrated, with buses, lorries, bicycles, and with the shifting crowds no longer dressed for battle: pale scissor legs of pale women; dark, peremptory footsteps of men keeping time to their furled umbrellas. Narrow streets once lightless at midmorning stood bare, now, from the fiery displacements. Rubble and even litter had been cleared away, leaving poignant austerity.

  Leith had been booked in to a hotel in Piccadilly, towards the Park Lane end. And there, with Carr still informative and Green Park in cold glory, his luggage was unloaded.

  “No one to meet you?”

  “I wanted an hour to myself.”

  “Bit of peace and quiet, eh. We all need it.”

  “In any case, you’ve given me a thorough welcome”—entering into the fiction of his foreignness, and nearly believing himself a stranger. And handing a ten-shilling note.

  Carr came to attention. “You’ll find we British rather reserved at first. But once you break our ice we’re a warmhearted lot.”

  Beyond revolving doors, the lobby opened into an atrium where Crown Derby and soft scarves were displayed, for export only, in vitrines. At the desk, he told the receptionist, “I’ll go to the room before lunch.”

  “They’ve finished serving, sir.”

  His watch said one-forty.

  “They stop serving at one-thirty.” Her eye fell on the red ribbon, and she turned to a cherub in monkey jacket: “Ask whether an exception might be made.”

  As Leith went into the restaurant, small puddings were being distributed, and slivers of a bevelled cake. A solitary water ice, pale pink, was carried past him on a silver tray. An ice so delicately insubstantial, so smoothly chastely pink, so exactly flush with its silver rim, that he recalled it for years as an emblem of re-entry.

  Two brittle chops were brought, elaborately frilled. The restaurant, lukewarm, was of good height and size. Overhead, plaster garlands converged on a chandelier. Thick blue carpet and velvet curtains contributed to a hush in which tiny collisions of spoon and china were magnified; as was, scandalously, any high voice, male or female, from the remaining diners—who wore good, serious dark clothes, and, in the case of women, hats. In general, the women were pretty. Giving up on a desiccated chop, Leith looked—his mere glance being taken, here and there, as molestation—thinking of Carr and of the pink and silver concoction. Once you break our ice.

  Conduct had kept chaos at bay. He wondered if it might be abandoned now, as inconclusive.

  “Unfortunately, sir, the savoury is off. Coffee is now being served in the lounge. Tea will be served between four and five, in the Brummell Room. A buffy lunch is offered on Sundays.”

  He collected mail from the desk. Helen not having this address, he couldn’t expect the only letter greatly wanted. Yet experienced, as he was taken up in the lift, a sense of dashed hopes.

  In the room, he began on his correspondence. There were two scrawled pages from Norfolk, from his mother, telling him how best to come. At the end: “That I’ll see you within hours.” There was a note, from Regent’s Park, from Aurora, to whom he had cabled. “I’ll expect you, then, about seven.” There were messages and postcards and books from friends, and a pair of official envelopes concerning his work. He took up the pages in his mother’s writing and put through a call to Norfolk. While he was waiting for the call, the cherub from the desk came to the door—“Flahs f’ew”—with a box of hothouse flowers packed in damp newspaper and sent that morning from the country by his godmother.

  He took the flowers to the bathroom and sprinkled them. He thought he would carry them to Aurora, since they would hardly survive tomorrow’s journey. When the call came from Norfolk, mother and son were both kind, composed. As right as it could be—so he, at least, thought. Spontaneity would begin, if at all, at home. Home was no longer parental: the property had been willed to him, the rooms were, on paper, his own. It would be his mother’s house, of course, forever—unless Helen could, over time, make it hers. If she had managed that with a prefabricated hut in the hills of Japan, she might pull it off with a stone monument by the North Sea.

  He meant to go out and walk while light lasted and, struggling into his coat, went to the window, where the world was crammed and coloured with buildings and bare branches, posted with flagstaffs and steeples, and animated to the grey horizon by an imagined milling of men, women, and machines. And by those many, like himself, drawn in again, after war and wanderings, by the magnet of a capital. The view of streets made him wish that he had not left the choice of the hotel to others. Not having cared to specify, he now found himself in this citadel—as if, at a party, he had been saddled with the bore. It was long since he’d been in such an upholstered world, where quilted coverlets and damask hangings counted for a great deal; where cretonnes, carpets, kapok were deployed to absorb the shocks of existence—and had possibly, in recent memory, saved lives.

  Leaving the hotel, he walked into the park, turning back to look at the ruins of fine houses ranked along Piccadilly. The Queen’s Walk boundary was formed by a grim palisade, once the dwellings of the wealthy: wreckage on whose boarded window bays placards announced repair or demolition. In small forecourts, masonry was restrained by wire netting. In derelict gardens, green shoots, which should have been touching, were forlorn. Those ravaged houses, which had been, whenever Leith passed them in his youth, engrossed in their own charmed lives, had lost their luck.

  He walked up and down the row, then turned into the arcade and headed for the Strand.

  WHEN HE CAME BACK, at evening, heat was mumbling in the cold radiators. Curtains had been closed, there was the scent of flowers now arranged in vases. The coverlet had been removed from the bed, which had been turned down. As a precaution against power failure, a candle in ceramic holder was on the bureau: yellow candle of the spiralled kind, with the look of very old marzipan. Leith, who was chilled, and for the moment tired, was glad of it all, and forgot that he had disliked the room. He dropped his newspaper on a table, unlatched his luggage, and ran a grey bath. From the bathroom window, which opened with resistant scraping, there was a glimpse, and smell, of terracotta chimney pots grimed by coal fires. The glass steamed, the sill
was filmed with soot. Towels were meanwhile warming on an electric rail, there was lavender soap, the tub was vast, and bright brass taps were large as his hand.

  As he bathed, and dressed in civilian clothes, he was thinking of Aurora, with whom he was to dine, not seen in seven years. His father’s mistress and, long ago, his own. He was glad to be going to her, rather than to anyone else on this side of the world.

  He took the Tube to Baker Street, and walked. The lobby of Aurora’s building was dim, frigid, shabby. Flaps of viscous paint hung loose from the ceiling. Walls signalled a historic shattering. Waiting for the same slow Edwardian lift, which worked, by pressure of water, to a clanking of chains, Leith wondered if Aurora, too, might be transfigured—fat, perhaps; slattern or crone. Which led him to ponder his own alteration—the early arrival of a few grey hairs and a general weathering. Then he was at her door, and had her in his arms, while she, in tears, laughed for joy.

  “Your hands are cold,” she said. “You came without gloves.”

  It was their code of years ago, from his first arrival at her door.

  They sat in the same smaller room, by the fire: “The only room, at present. The entire place is being redone, imagine the hell.” Her same low voice. The same blaze in the grate; the flowers and whisky. On the walls, blue silk had been replaced by a rippled paper. On the mantelpiece, Britannia was reinstalled, beneath the painting where girls glimmered by a stream. The theatrical brightness had departed; or had existed only in the eyes of youth.

  He handed over his damp box of flowers, explaining them. A bottle of red wine was breathing near the hearth. At the opposite side of the room, a gas fire was ineffectual.

  Aurora had on a dress of fine black wool, narrow-waisted and gracefully skirted in the new fashion. She was thinner, older, more delicately beautiful. The man said this last word.

  “Oh …” She pushed back her hair, which was shorter and of a different gold. “We’re all grey now, and undernourished. Or puffy, from scoffing chockies cadged from Yankees.”