The Great Fire Read Online Free

need a tutor.'
    Gardiner fumbled at a linen slit, produced a folded paper. 'This seems a possibility. He's been a librarian, seems sound. He's licensed by the Americans. One can do nothing without that.'
    'So I've found. I hadn't expected, in Tokyo, to find —'
    'A dictatorship?'
    'And myself among the defeated. At headquarters I was received by a little martinet, hysterical with importance. He told me that the last foreign visitor to cross his path had been sent packing. He said, 'We lifted his passport.'
    'For a while there, you were in the court of Haroun-al-Rashid.' Gardiner asked, 'Are you married?'
    'Divorced, from a wartime marriage.' After a pause, he went on, 'We were married in Cairo. Then I was off in the desert and she was posted to Colombo. Time went by, we could scarcely meet. She found someone else. So, for a while, did I. We assumed we'd grown apart — a usual thing. She wanted to remarry. When we met in London, the spring of '45, to arrange the divorce, it seemed for a moment that we might have managed it after all. Too late then, peace was sweeping us away.' He had scarcely thought of these things in two years. It was vivid, however, that single final day spent in London seeing lawyers, walking away together in the wet park, and at last making love in a hired room. The hotel, small and decent, had made no difficulty: their passports were those of husband and wife. Oh; Moira, he'd said, our sad story. And she had shed silent tears not intended to change things. Her arched throat and spread hair, and the day dying in the wet window. The marriage was dissolved, evaporating along with its memories and meetings, and the partings of war; the letters increasingly laboured, the thoughts, kisses, regrets. The lawyers were paid. The true marriage, indissoluble, was simply the moment when they sat on the rented bed and grieved for a fatality older than love.
    Gardiner said, 'You know about my wife?'
    Leith nodded. 'I've had no such loss as yours.'
    'I didn't know for a year. Not until they taunted me in the camp.'
    His Japanese wife, having tried to join him in prison, had been declared destitute by the authorities, and renounced by her parents. In 1943, she committed suicide. Gardiner said, 'On the day of her death, she tried to send into safekeeping some copies of my early books, from the time when we first knew one another. All she had left, my poor girl.' He said, 'You keep returning to these things. You can't close them down, as one closes down the compartment of a damaged ship, just to keep the vessel going, or at least afloat.' He said, 'this difficulty of being.'
    'One reason men go on fighting is that it seems to simplify —'
    'You've done that, and know better. And are young yet. Experience will reclaim you through the personal, much more will happen for you. After much death, living may come as a surprise.'
    He means love, thought Leith forbearingly. He sometimes thought the same thing himself, and with the same forbearance. The evening was seeping away, Gardiner was dwindling. The proposed discussions of the night, the shared accident of Asia, receded, and he could not revive the importance he had given them.
    Gardiner said, 'My room's got two chairs. We'd be private there.' When they had climbed back to the lounge, however, he said, 'Better sit a moment.'
    It was the long room again, and the gramophone bawling. The remaining drinkers sprawled, morose, on red chairs; and one floral woman continued to twirl, slowly, alone, a top winding down.
    Sweetheart, if you should stray
    A million miles away
    I'll always be in love with you . . .
    Leith drew up a bamboo divan and helped Gardiner into it. Gardiner said, 'It was the stairs.'
    'I'll get you a shot of something.'
    He came back with brandy. The professor was listing in his bamboo chair: an old pallid man who said, 'Be right in a minute,' whose fingers could not hold the paper cup. Whose colour and texture were that of old bread. Aldred Leith took his hand,