The Great Fire Read Online Free Page B

grave.
    Women's yearnings had scarcely featured, being presumably of mating and giving birth. Their purpose had been supplied to them from the first: their lot. A woman who broke ranks was ostracised by other women. Rocking the boat instead of the cradle.
    The wheels threw up dirt and noisy gravel. Labourers passed them in pairs and foursomes, all moving downhill, all bearing burdens; each falling silent as the car approached, not meeting glances from these invulnerable strangers in their well-fed uniforms. Wrapped in shabby darkness, women came shuffling, one with a great bundle of kindling on her back, another hooped under a strapped child.
    The man thought, Their lot. A brute word.
    He said, 'It's the devil, Talbot.'
    Talbot looked at the roadside. He hadn't expected this contest, continual, between a decreed strength and the nagging humanity of things. Any show of softness would bring, from his companions, the good laugh — to shut him up, perhaps, they being baffled as he. Yet the man at the wheel felt it, too — who, with his coloured ribbons and great medal, couldn't be accused. Talbot had been told that this warrior, though wounded and captured, had escaped his prison and fought again in the last winter of the European war. So the story went, anyway, and some of it plainly true. Straightforward matters you could understand.
    'You speak the lingo. Sir.'
    'I've made a beginning. My languages are from China, where I was a schoolboy. Here, I need a teacher.' That morning, at Kure, he had called on the tutor recommended by Gardiner.
    Talbot looked at his own hands, which were spread on his knees. Young hands, seemingly unveined, broad, supple, modestly capable, and with decent nails. He compared them with his companion's, resting on the wheel: brown, definite, broad in the palm, and long-fingered; like the man, experienced. By extension of impressions, Brian would have liked to ask, Do you have a wife, a girl? But refrained.
    Leith said, 'The teacher, this morning. You saw him, elderly, respectable. If I were to get up a small class with him — depending on what I find here — would you care to join in? A few hours a week; I'd square it with your outfit, I think I could do that.'
    It was too much like having your bluff called. Brian, hedging, said, 'But you — you're already halfway there. You know a lot of it.'
    'I'll be seeing him more often, he'll probably come to me up here. In your case it would be separate, with a few of your chaps if they care to join. That would be down in Kure, near your quarters.' Leith said, 'Think it over.'
    The boy's impulse was to withdraw. It was too outlandish, and too much trouble. You despised Japs, you ridiculed and killed them. They'd behaved like animals. You didn't learn their lingo. You didn't study any language, even your own. He'd done a bit of French at school, compulsory: Je m'appelle Brian, donnez-moi à manger; je suis né en Australie. Donnez-moi à boire. Arriving at Kure, he'd been given a Japanese phrase book got up for Occupation forces; but had no use for it. 'Well, thanks. Well, yair, I'll see about it. Let you know.'
    He could imagine the hoots of his mates. Yet knew that, to them, he would defend the idea.
    He asked, 'Ar — what would this. . .?'
    'I'll take care of that, it won't be much.' Leith thought of the teacher, on his beam ends.
    'Your shout, then?'
    'My shout.'
    They drove on, less contented. Another mile or two and they'd arrive.
    Brigadier Driscoll was coming from the pond. In youth an athlete, Driscoll continued to hold himself in past tension, barrelled against every challenge. Wet and near naked, his body was corded by evidence of past exploits, muscles and sinews pushing up through tissue, as roots of an old tree might displace a pavement — the impression confirmed by a trunkish neck, seared by pale creases. On head, chest, limbs, the curled hair was grey.
    Driscoll cried out, 'Dench' — loudly, although the uniformed subordinate was by his