The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

Chinese town: 'Filth.'
    Filth was in fact on Peter Exley's mind in those first weeks: the accretion filming the Orient, the shimmer of sweat or excrement. A railing or handle one's fingers would not willingly grasp; walls and objects grimed with existence; the limp, soiled colonial money, little notes curled and withered, like shavings from some discoloured central lode. Ammoniac reek, or worse, in paved alleys and under stuccoed arcades. Shaved heads of children, blotched with sores; grey polls of infants lolling from the swag that bound them to the mother's back. And the great clots and blobs of tubercular spittle shot with blood, unavoidable underfoot: what Rysom called 'poached eggs.' In such uncleanness, nothing could appear innocent, not the infants themselves or even diseased chow dogs roaming the Chinese streets, or scrawny chickens pecking at street dirt.
    What had not harrowed Exley as a soldier in Egypt or South Italy now brought revulsion. He longed for a measure of cleanliness with which he had somehow associated peace. Returning to the barracks with Rysom, he said, 'I realise now that I came out here to be well fed and housed and to have people wait on me. I see now that was in my mind.'
    Rysom kicked open the door of their room. 'Well, this is it, mate — the life of luxury.'
    The greater thing was heat. In North Africa, the sun had been neutral, an impartial horror of war. Now, with cessation of hostilities, heat came out in its true colours as the enemy. The privileged of the colony clung to the mountainside. The rest took refuge in any merciful shadow or flutter of the humid air. The town never cooled: streets and street stalls broiled all night in the glare of naked electricity or paraffin lamps. A dry skin was an ultimate luxury, even for the privileged, even on a soft white body. Lust, if there was energy for it, must be consummated in a lather of sweat. And it was the same thing, no doubt, with love.
    Exley's typist, the Portuguese Miss Xavier, was thin and possibly thirty. Skin like an apricot, with an apricot's minute brown flecks; straight black hair, not abundant, curved on shoulders. At her throat, in the soft hollow disclosed by a Western dress, a small gold crucifix quivered like a heart. Convent schooldays lingered about remote Miss Xavier. Someone — Brenda or Monica — told Exley that her four sisters were nuns.
    'Eurasians,' Brenda told him, 'maintain a caste system of their own. It's no good mixing up in that.'
    It would have been pleasant to refute dogmatic Brenda. But in truth Miss Xavier of good family held aloof from Mr da Silva, chief of the translators. Da Silva in turn condescended to his colleagues. All dealt brusquely with the Chinese.
    Peter Exley wrote in his notebook: 'There is a community of mixed races here claiming Portuguese descent through the Jesuit settlements at Macao. They interpret the British to the Chinese, and vice versa. I don't refer only to language, though that is their essential service. I mean that they form a bridge by which business is rationally done and power exercised. Disdained by both factions, ill paid, indispensable, and far too obliging.' If he wrote this to his parents in Sydney, his mother would write back, 'So interesting, pet,' and put his letter with all the others in a cardboard box. She would tell some crony, 'Peter always feels for the underdog.'
    She could not quite suggest, but pervasively implied, that some cheerful young woman would redeem her son's restlessness — not perceiving that the son, whose wanderings were far from wayward, was in some respects overredeemed already. Her husband, if appealed to, would turn another page of The Sun , remarking, 'She'll be right' — habitual invocation of Destiny whereby the Australian male quelled speculation. He had given up expecting sense from this eldest son, whose bookishness led nowhere and who frittered the last of his youth scrambling round crammed little countries and learning dead