The Great Fire

by Shirley Hazzard

  All high-flown utterance was to be deplored, alarming as nakedness. As to the speaker, it was unclear whether he had distinguished or disgraced himself, nor did he appear to care—smiling with rather fleshy lips and with eyes of a clear blue unsuited to his age. Something carnal was not incompatible with sensibility.

  He got off at a country crossroad. Helen, at her bleared window, watched him walk away on a dirt track, smiling abstractedly and slightly swinging a string bag of small packages wrapped in newsprint. Even so, there was the antipodean touch of desolation: the path indistinguishable from all others, the wayside leaves flannelled with dust, the net bag. The walking into oblivion.

  At a tin shelter that served as terminus, Barbara was waiting. When she stepped out into sunlight, tall, smiling, and dressed in blue, people could not help admiring; and thought, She should be meeting a lover.

  The two young women touched hands. They walked off on the earthy path, laughing not quite naturally, for they could hardly help being pleased by the momentary attention of descending passengers and by their own almost meritorious youth. In this place, too, the scrub closed in, but they were near a rise of handsome firs; and, nearer still, on their right, to the sandy shore.

  “A man on the bus spoke about longing.”

  “No, really? Out loud?”

  “Well, audibly—obviously.” Helen added, “Only a few words.” Meaning, This man was not a maniac.

  “They must have had a fit.”

  “They went rigid.” Recalling the man’s pink sensual face, the white excessive hair and brows, the incommensurate eyes. Elsewhere, he might have been a danger to young girls. But here the Bush had swallowed him.

  By now there was no one to see how pleasant these two looked in their coloured clothes, or how, in passing there, they enhanced the scene. They felt it themselves: the waste.

  The Baillie house was backed by trees and faced a short pale beach. At the far end of the cove there was one other house, smaller but similar; and that, too, was painted “cream.” Both built by the Baillie grandfather, architect also of a family house in the town and whiskered subject of an incompetent portrait in a civic hall in Tinakori Road. The profession lingered in Barbara’s father, who was a building contractor—an easy-natured, ruddy-faced chap who drank a bit, made good money, and was proud of, if baffled by, his three slim, articulate daughters. Bruce Baillie would have been, elsewhere, a plain good sort; but the great south wound was on him, as it was on many men of the hemisphere: the sense that something more was required of, and by, them. His eyes, when he laughed, remained dark and glassy like those of a Teddy bear.

  Barbara’s mother, born in Timaru, was distantly if emphatically connected to a signatory of the Treaty of Waitangi. Pale and heavy-lidded, with a grooved almond of mouth, she sloped into sad shoulders and attenuated limbs, and wore discreet clothes that appeared faded even when new. Some youthful glow had been consumed in the obsessive gentility that, without blazing, shrivels all. Though dissimilar, husband and wife were never quite distinct: the shared error of their marriage had grown to be a bond.

  Too cautious to detest, Mrs. Baillie did, with some regularity, not quite like. Mrs. Baillie did not quite like Barbara’s connection with the Driscoll girl—who had lived overseas but not in quite the right places; and was said, by her assertive mother, to be enamoured of a grown man met in India or Japan. To be in love was itself not quite desirable, was not at all the same as announcing the engagement and having one’s photograph—demure, pensive, and misted by tulle—in The Dominion. In Featherston Street, behind the Government Life Insurance Building, there was a nice shop displaying fruit plates in Crown Worcester, and a tea service with roses; and table mats, backed with cork, reproducing English county scenes by Rowland Hilder. Standing one day with Helen before this shrine, Mrs. Baillie had said, “I do feel that Barbara should begin to gather a few things together.” And the girl’s silence had displeased. Sharpening her argument, the mother had remarked that French was all very well, but would do nothing for Barbara in the life to come—an observation that referred neither to love nor to religion, but to domesticity.

  By now, the two girls had crossed the wooden verandah at the bay and were entering a grotto of limp cretonne, rugs of grey peonies, and rose-painted tin trays. Fronds of real Dorothy Perkins, intruding through north windows, partook of indoor dust. A reproduction of The Laughing Cavalier called for alignment. For entertainment, an old wireless teetered on cabriole legs, and folders of sallow songs were stacked on an upright piano. Books, in their single mesh-fronted case, came from the lachrymose or costumed past: Anthony Adverse, Lorna Doone, The Prisoner of Zenda. Outdoor smells of shrubbery and shore were no match for humid linen in warped cupboards, pipe tobacco, camphor, mildewed bread, and a slight leak of gas.

  Only the presence of the three pretty sisters, all together, might have let in light.

  In the kitchen, Barbara put milk in an enamel saucepan and spooned coffee from a canister. They took turns to watch and stir. Drops from the spoon fell on linoleum. A window above the sink overlooked a fenced clearing between house and woods, where spring planting was even now coming through. The yard ended in tangled shrubberies, and in the twin peaks of a compost heap and kitchen midden.

  When the milk puckered, Barbara took a sieve, poured the mixture into mugs, and turned out the grounds in the sink. Helen had the better mug—uncracked, and marked CORONATION DAY, August 9, 1902—showing the royal pair in red and yellow: Queen Alexandra in pearl collar and satin bodice; King Edward incorrigible in ermine.

  There they stood: sipping, munching. As far as the world was concerned, they might stand thus forever, in this or similar kitchens. Of that menace, both were mortally aware.

  In the living room, light entered through diamond panes. They would read their French lesson. Each had a book in hand and was turning pages. Barbara Baillie, extending her legs on a sofa and imagining herself some third party, wondered whether she or Helen might be considered the more attractive. Decency did not permit an immediate decision in her own favour. Helen’s case was curious: so small as to be insignificant, yet sweetly made, and with strokes of undeniable interest—and having, as to wrists and ankles, what the French called les attaches fines. Some broad clumsy man might take her smallness under protection, for men were, and wished to be, disarmed by mere evidence.

  It could not be said that Helen’s reputed condition of love conferred luminosity. Such passionate absorption inspired pity, or some fearfulness. It was only when seeming to forget her far predicament that she appeared original, vivid, and destined indeed for other lands and lovely times. Meantime, the months were passing, and the southern spring.

  They began to read aloud what Barbara called “the famous passage,” because their teacher thus referred to it: “The celebrated passage of the thrush.” They opened their books laughing, but were soon decently engrossed.

  Hier au soir, je me promenais seul; le ciel ressemblait à un ciel d’automne; un vent froid soufflait par intervalles.

  Yearnings that were in themselves a consummation.

  Transporté subitement dans le passé—

  Declaiming such phrases in so remote a place, these women became not provincials but exiles.

  They continued to read, by turns, for that magic—which, on Barbara Baillie, worked less consistently. She was aware of the discrepancy, but did not repress—even while raising her voice to crystal words—some thoughts about love, clothes, and a possible trip to the Bay of Islands when summer came round. For her, for her contemporaries, love was above all a release of tenderness—of which they had far more than almost any man could stand. Of transgression, such a girl had no conception; and Wellington was no place to throw over the traces.

  For three years now, her father had annually promised to set his work aside and take the family to Britain: three months on the sea for the round trip, and three months to make sense of the blinking place. He did not expect to enjoy himself, but knew what wa
s due to his position and, more obscurely, to existence itself: they’d have achieved that much, at any rate, and could queen it when they came back.

  Again and again, disinclination prevailed. And when, in the third year, he renewed excuses, Barbara had asked—not, in that moment, a daughter, but speaking levelly as one person to another—“Won’t we go then, ever?” he’d shifted, shuffled, and mumbled, “Course we’ll go. Yair.” Had stood looking at nearby air, and from time to time taking a palmful of dried fruit—raisins and scraps of apricot—from a bowl on the sideboard. The girl was sorry for him, knew he would be concerned for expense and ill at ease abroad; even that he dreaded the entire enterprise. But she’d said, “I’d like to have the chance,” without comprehending all that this implied. Still examining vacancy, the father had replied, “Ar well. Next year she’ll be right.” Could not stave off a pang as he focussed on his girl at last and met her pleading, penetrating eyes.

  He thought, The trip, that’s one thing. But in the end she’ll have to knuckle under. His wife herself, however she queened it, had knuckled under along with the rest, raising the kids and pitching into the ironing and baking and mending, the lot. For her, too, he feared the great round trip, among glacial persons with whom Waitangi and Timaru and the whole bloody Canterbury Bight might cut no ice. He said to himself, Poor old lass, fading a bit, and never any capacity for a laugh; but still with some fancies tucked away, mulled over in silence with moist eyes.

  With women, disappointment could take the place of experience.

  With this never out of mind, his daughter lolled among dank cushions at the world’s end; swung a foot, twirled a lock of hair. On a low table, the mugs looked derelict, their stains and leavings. Putting Chateaubriand aside, Barbara observed, “No man here would stand for it”—meaning, Such ponderings, such poetry.

  “They couldn’t bear it.” That vulnerability should make a man strong. That there could be thought without helplessness; without that very helplessness in which their women were marooned, as if, by existing at all, one had become a victim.

  She would have said, I’ve known a full-grown man. But dreaded these death sentences that came to her as if from the perspective of future years: the antipodean consolation of having once touched infinity. As if, in age, she looked back to the exotic evenings when she had bowled along in a chariot, singing about the Foggy Dew.

  So they read from an anthology of wartime verse on wartime paper, lines from unhappy France that passed like spasms over the inert and wilted room. This in turn was put aside, and Barbara swung down her legs, of which she was proud, and proposed that they walk on the beach. The morning had passed, as mornings did pass there, with this and that. Later, there would be sandwiches and ginger beer.

  At the shore, the gale was returning in grainy gusts that hurt the eyes and throat and set hair flying at one moment forward and then streaming behind. Speech being swept away, they could not use expendable words about the strong sea and the rough passage of the Picton ferry; each thinking, rather, of what had been read and said, and recalling the rhymes of impassioned love. When, in a lull of the wind, they lingered under trees, Barbara asked, “But have you known—abroad, that is—a man who might really talk that way?—‘toi seule existes,’ all that.”

  “Yes.” And then: “Yes, yes, yes.”

  “I thought it might be only in books.” Barbara put both her hands to her hair. “Oh, I would like to find out.”

  The sea had risen so high on the horizon that those watching it might imagine themselves prostrate on the shore. In an intolerable instant of life, Helen wondered in what fine street on the other, centuried side of earth, the passersby glanced at him, who was more present to her than this sand and harbour, and more to her than all the beautiful splayed islands of the Great South Land.

  They walked on to the end of the cove, staying aloof from the smaller house there.

  “That place belongs to us, but it’s rented. I don’t want them to think, you know, that we’re hanging around.” Barbara said, “My grandfather built it for his children, so he’d always have them within cooee. A good idea, or maybe not. But the eldest son was killed at the first war, and Grandpa died early, and the house has drifted.”

  “It looks closed up.”

  The house needed painting, there was a break in the verandah railing, and a front plot of garden was untended. You could feel the splinters in the wooden steps.

  “Still, someone might be there.” Barbara turned away, scrunching over a glittering rubbish of weed, shell, and tiny carapace, and chips of coloured glass. Walking back, she said, “We’ve let it for the spring and summer to those Fairfax boys. They come out from the town from time to time.”

  Two British brothers were at Wellington awaiting the return of their father from the Antarctic. Explorer-father had set out months previously, from the South Island leading an expedition, and would resurface at summer’s end. The sons, meantime, were to experience the Antipodes. The elder was of an age, barely, to have served in the war; the younger might have been twenty. Here they would linger, figures in some legend, until the ice, melting, released their father. That was their nearly primaeval condition. The elder was writing a dissertation, of which no one had discovered the theme. It was not known how the younger passed his time. Rarely apart, they made a fine pair on the uneven pavements of the capital: well formed and well turned out, lighteyed and fair. Barbara’s mother had declared, Two princelings. The ladies of the town openly doted; their menfolk, resentful, were cowed by a quiet show of self-possession, which they mocked in surly asides; and by the reality of the icebound father, whose polar tradition had been sanctified, at Lyttelton in 1910 by the fateful departure, to his death, of Captain Scott.

  Helen might have liked to know what books the explorer-father had taken with him to the ice floes, and by what light they were read; to smell the reek of whale oil, and to learn whether, in winter, the sun rose at all. She had seen the two brothers one evening at the Majestic, where dances were held in a big blank room, darkly red, that also served as a cinema. The young men had been pointed out to her, and she had tried to understand whether, in their own land, they would have appeared as princelings or merely as a pair of pale-headed and impassive youths. With these matters in mind and her elbow on the viscous tablecloth, she’d watched them refuse dry sandwiches and swallow thin coffee in heavy cups; and rise civilly, to dance well, with each of the women in their small party. Meanwhile, her own coffee was cooling. And when her partner for the evening asked her to dance the hokey-kokey he placed her white saucer over the cup, to keep it warm.

  Barbara said, “It’s obvious. They made a vow, coming here, not to saddle themselves with local girls, not to risk life sentences to colonial connections.” She picked up a pebble, as if to throw, and instead examined its markings. “What I mind is their imagining we don’t see it.” She laughed then, rolling the stone in her hand. “If one of them did ask me out, I’d probably go. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I might.” From curiosity, or boredom.

  “How funny you are. So indifferent. Anyway, when they came to see the house, my mother had them to tea. It was only polite, but did look pointed. Janet wouldn’t show herself, Flora and I sat and smiled. Afterwards, the sides of our faces ached from the smiling. And Mummy actually wore a hat, the big white hat she got at Kirk’s. In her own house, as if it were Windsor Castle.”

  The white hat from Kirkaldie’s, flat and circular: a saucer placed to impede further cooling.

  “They haven’t asked us back. They’ve been lent a flat in town and are mostly there.”

  “Whose flat?”

  “I don’t know. I daresay, someone with daughters. It’s in Buckle Street, near the museum.” Barbara disclosed the stone in her palm, then dropped it. “Out of exclusivity, they’ve become mysterious and desirable. As women are supposed to be.”

  If Barbara were to wed a Fairfax, she would supply the spontaneity and candour. Realising this, why would some Fa
irfax not go on his knees to her? Such was the thought of both young women; so clear to them, it went unspoken.

  Reaching home, returning to the sink, they spread mustard and hacked at corned beef. Barbara had brought, from town, a dod of cabinet pudding, and they ate in the living room on a seat by the leaded windows. They did not go back to their books: that aspect of their day had run its course.

  Barbara carried the dishes back to the kitchen and splashed water in the slate sink, into the Coronation mug: ENTHRONED IN THE HEARTS OF THEIR PEOPLE. It was said that Queen Alexandra always wore that collar, of pearl or diamonds, because she had once tried to cut her throat. Probably untrue, the legend gave the private measure of such a marriage.

  She looked from the window at the tumbled yard, which had been this way, with seasonal variations, ever since she could remember. She would have liked to rush, like the girl in a poem they had read that morning who ran to meet her lover in the street, under the rain.

  She could not remember whether, for his part, the lover ran to her also; or just stood waiting.

  When it was time to take Helen to the bus, Barbara closed the house against the wind. Along the shore, the sea rose, and combed, and fell heavily; and rose again, thundering, and again fell. The gale was bedevilling the furze, and the small house of the princelings was preparing to yield more of its matchstick decoration. Solitary, irrelevant, it did suggest the last obscure retreat of some monarch no longer enthroned: one could envisage the historic photograph. Unlikely places of the kind lay in wait for the deposed.

  Barbara was recalling, not happily, how her father’s brother, staying there with his family on a visit from Auckland, had broken the verandah rail during a balancing act. The girl liked her Uncle Doug, who was funny and kind. There had been other damage, including a broken toaster, and the holiday had ended badly. When they had all gone, her mother had sat in a chair and said, “That’s Auckland for you.”