The Great Fire Read Online Free Page A

saying 'Ginger.'
    Ginger said, 'Sorry. Regrets, many . . .' and 'Thanks for all.'
    Leith was crouching by the sofa. An officer wearing red tabs came up and knelt, too. Someone lifted the needle off the raucous record, making it squeal.

2

     
     
    In the crystal morning, Leith was driving with Talbot into green hills: discarding the exploded dockland, winding around ledges of emerald rice. They stopped the jeep on a spur, jumping down among tough grasses to look out at sea and islands and to watch, some moments, the small white departing ship, elderly, simple, and shapely, that would have carried Gardiner to Hong Kong on the first leg of his deleted journey. Men and women are said to grow young again in death, but Gardiner, his snappers removed, his slack jaw bound up forever, had appeared immeasurably withered on the night of his death. The little ship, sailing to its appointments, passed among islands all glorious with morning, on a blue course channelled by minesweepers. The man watching was aware of Japanese grasses beneath his boots — of earth and gravel and of stunted shubbery trembling nearby. There were tufted wildflowers and specks of red and purple that might be speedwell or some odder saxifrage. He was aware of the reprieve.
    From a distance, on an outer ledge of terraced rice, his fellow man looked back at him: a single figure wearing a hat of conical straw and a red shift that came to his knees.
    The young driver, profiting from the hiatus, had meanwhile peed behind bushes. When they resumed the ride, with Leith at the wheel, Talbot remarked, 'I don't suppose you got much sleep.'
    'A couple of hours. Not that there was much to do for him, poor chap.'
    'Rough on you, starting out with that.'
    'With a death, you mean — a bad augury? Well, one was there. No one else really knew who he was. It was another war death, deferred.' Side effects, aftereffects. This time yesterday I hadn't met him. Today he's dead, and I'm his only mourner.
    They had churned into wooded country.
    'Pines, are they?' asked the boy, indifferent.
    'These are cedars, these tall ones. Pines are up there, on the right.'
    'We weren't taught about trees. At Sydney it was gum trees and Moreton Bays.' Bushes of wattle, bottlebrush. 'Soil's sandy.' Then, 'We heard more about British trees, from the songs and books: Hearts of Oak, beeches, birches. How green and wet they are, and how they play for dead in winter. Seemed more spectacular than the gums and the Bush.'
    Leith said, 'My home, if I have one, is near the North Sea. Bleak country in winter, the wind sweeping over, and the sleet. Bitter, solitary. Where I am not forested, although there are stands of trees, nurtured. It has its beauty.'
    'How's that?'
    'Oh — changing lights and skies, and the low land. Sense of separation, almost from terra firma.' He laughed. 'Away from it, as I've mostly been, I can become sentimental.' He noticed how often he qualified the reference to home: If I have one: I'm mostly away.
    Brian Talbot said, 'I'd like to see places before I settle down.' The settling taken for granted. Down, down. The wife and kiddies, the mortgage, the lawn and lawnmower, the car. 'I suppose being here is a start.' He was not really convinced that these uncongenial scenes, and these impenetrable people — tireless, humorless, reclusive — could meet the case.
    Thought made him vulnerable. That was the Australian way: say anything out of the ordinary and there was the laugh — the good laugh, not having much to do with goodness. You had to watch yourself. But you got curious, all the same. And then, Leith was not likely to take advantage.
    'You won't need war now, Talbot, to see the world — hardship, maybe, but not slaughter. Until this, war has been the way out, for most men.' Soldiering, or seamanship. Young recruits with their dreams of transformation: of conquest, plunder, fornication. Even, in some, the dream of knowledge. Inconceivable, in advance, the red mess and shallow