‘What’s better when one’s being invaded; to stay put and rely on the fact that this is English soil or to get out?’ Vaulker asked softly. He was asking Mori, who had been waiting in silence by Thaniel’s chair. ‘Can their guns reach this far inland?’
Mori nodded once. ‘Easily.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I was in Canton when the British started shelling.’
‘Oh.’
The telegraph rattled. Thaniel translated the code aloud as it came through.
Safely into port. Russians are backing off. No casualties.
Relieved laughter rippled round the room. After a couple of minutes, the sirens stopped. Thaniel twisted back to look up at Mori.
‘See? I told you.’
Mori punched him on the arm, very softly. Thaniel caught his fist and dragged him close, just for a second.
It was almost warm, and with one of those strange unspoken group decisions, everyone spilled outside to buy tea and wine from the little stalls on the lawn. The schoolmistress must have given up on doing anything useful, because the children were out too. As Thaniel bought some wine, he saw Six pause, check them both over for any obvious signs of distress, then bob away again once she’d decided they were all right. Mori was waiting at a makeshift table built from old shipping crates, and he smiled when Thaniel gave him the cup. His expressions were coming differently now, more easily, like he didn’t have to concentrate to do it. Thaniel had been worried before that Mori would be a different person without that overriding thing that had made him remarkable. But he was exactly the same person, one who had just been allowed to put down a very heavy pack.
The silence unwound, but he still didn’t know what to say. Not far away, Six was showing Katsu to the other children. Little electric toys hummed in the stalls. Owlbert, looking bewildered, was hurrying after an electric mouse. Thaniel scanned the grass for the burned place where Takiko had fallen, but it was hidden now under the newspaper stand. Some of the headlines there boasted of a huge naval victory off the northern coast of Hokkaido. The Russians had actually landed troops ashore at a place called Abashiri, only to be repulsed first by thousands of furious labour camp prisoners, some of whom had stolen Russian boats, and then routed by some of the oldest ships in the Japanese fleet, sent there just in time. Abashiri; naturally.
‘Is it still February?’ Mori said finally.
Thaniel looked up. ‘Nearly March.’
‘End of the fog season.’
A tingle went over the nape of his neck. ‘It is.’
Mori touched their cups together and then sat back a little into a sunbeam, which showed all the red in his hair. It was the deep black red of church music coming up through the floor.
FORTY-EIGHT
London, April 1891
Thaniel let himself out the back door to breathe while he sipped at his tea. There was something silly about a man with hot tea in a china cup outside in hot weather, but the air in the theatre was getting pipe-smokey, even backstage. He propped himself against a poster for the show.
The air smelled of pollen and stone. He put his head back against the warm paper. The sky was just starting to turn mauve with the oncoming sunset. In another few months it would be back to Cornwall to beat the fog, but for now, London was warm and getting warmer, and the spring and the summer seemed like they would stretch out forever. He could have stayed there for a long time, but church bells started to sing out the hour.
After the quiet outside, the bustle in the narrow dressing rooms was much more colourful than it had been a few minutes ago. Because all the windows were open, it was balmy and the girls only had silk wraps on over their dresses. He was supposed to be in an evening jacket but he was down to his shirt and waistcoat, which he was enjoying, because nobody could tell him different. It was his show and he could conduct it how he wanted.
Arthur Sullivan flitted in. He moved fast for such a rounded man. There was sometimes a lasting impression that for whatever proportion he was made of muscle and bone, there was an equal measure of helium. Thaniel was still folding back his cuffs.
‘You’ll be fine,’ Sullivan said. ‘It’s always a hell of a lot easier conducting your own writing than someone else’s. You know how it’s meant to go. You know it’s good, don’t you?’
‘It’s all right,’ said Thaniel.
‘I think you’ll find it goes down a bit better than all right.’
‘Well, don’t hex it,’ he said, starting to feel embarrassed.
They were in a dressing room tucked off to the side of the Savoy Theatre. The corridor was alive with people tuning instruments and singers warming up. A strain from Mozart’s Requiem echoed along from another room. Arthur sat looking through the score with a pencil. He would be playing the piano.
Someone tapped on the door. Mori came in, speculatively. ‘Oh, good,’ he said. ‘I thought you might be the baritones again.’
Thaniel laughed. Mori had no sense of direction at all, although he seemed to enjoy the thrill of that. He kept going to churches to walk the mazes on the floors. He gave Thaniel a glass of wine, saw Arthur and then offered his own.
Arthur smiled and shook his head. ‘No, no, no, no need to be so polite, it’s quite …’ He trailed off and put the music aside. ‘Good grief. My dear fellow. It’s him, isn’t it?’ he said to Thaniel.
Mori looked between them, puzzled. The electric lights backstage brought out his colours and, even in evening clothes, he was brighter than everyone else. He’d taken off his jacket too, and all white suited him. So did his age. He was past that nearly feverish glow of younger health; the time in prison had eroded that and he was more faded, but there was real power across his shoulders now, and that old sense that he might only have been a trick of light in the dust was gone.
‘I hadn’t actually—’ Thaniel began.
Arthur took no notice and shook Mori’s free hand. ‘I’m Arthur, I’m playing the piano tonight—’
‘Yes,’ Mori said. ‘I’ve been looking forward to it.’
‘Oh, but you usually sit in the front row on the left!’ Arthur burst out, as if it were the most significant thing he had discovered all year.
Mori looked down at his hand, which was still trapped in both of Arthur’s, but he was too polite to ask for it back.
‘God, it’s uncanny,’ Arthur said, studying him like he was in a glass case. ‘My dear fellow, I thought you seemed familiar when you spoke – you have the most remarkable voice, you know.’
‘That’s very kind,’ Mori said, starting to sound like he was enjoying the bizarreness of a whole conversation whose object had managed to remain obscure for so long. The laughter lines had deepened around his eyes. They were always there now, if he stood in bright light.
‘Have you heard the whole thing?’ Arthur went on.
‘No, just bits and pieces.’
Arthur laughed. ‘Sorry, this is ridiculous, but I feel I know you quite well. You learned your English from Nathaniel, of course? Hence the, ah, northerly inflection?’
‘That’s right.’ It was less than it had used to be. There was a faint accent under it now, one that could have been from anywhere. It brought a sharpness on a few words, usually the kind of words you read more often than said.
‘Arthur, he’s got no idea what you’re talking about,’ Thaniel broke in.
‘Oh, but—’
Blissfully a telephone rang in the next room. Arthur hurried out. Mori folded into his chair. He moved more easily now. Thaniel gave him a programme.
‘I … might have put you in the music,’ he explained.
Mori didn’t say anything and only sat holding the little booklet open on the first page. The theatre had spent some money on it. The title was picked out in gold: the Joy Symphony. Behind his quiet, there was the effort of not saying that he thought describing one person who was not God or the Queen with an orchestra of a hundred and two was no different to trying to do a locket painting with a wallpaper brush
.
‘He recognised me,’ Mori said at last. ‘From this. Mr Sullivan.’
‘Yes.’ Thaniel’s insides were churning. ‘But – I haven’t hung a picture of you in a gallery. There are only about five people in London who could translate your name, so—’
‘No, I mean the way you see sound. It’s objective. Someone else could see it in the same way.’
‘Not the same colours, but the same – gist. I suppose.’
‘That’s extraordinary.’
‘Really?’
Mori kicked him gently. ‘Of course it is.’
‘Thanks. But it’s not a skill, it’s just how I see.’
Mori had been looking through the open door through to the next dressing room and the next, where the sopranos were tying each other into their dresses. The tables there were full of flowers and, double framed like that, they might have been something from a painting. His eyes came back and he smiled. He tipped the gold lettering so that it glinted. He kept the pages inclined inward, like he was holding something fragile in them. ‘What is that?’ he added.
Thaniel looked. ‘Easter egg. Want some?’
‘It’s chocolate?’
‘Fry’s do them.’ He tapped it in half on the edge of the table. ‘The altos gave it to me.’
Mori smiled and shared a half with him. It went nicely with the wine. Thaniel watched him and wondered what he would do, if the worst happened and Thaniel’s lungs got the better of him. They weren’t right; he could tell they never would be. The house in Cornwall belonged to a friend of Mori’s who, until Christmas, Thaniel had been pretty sure was imaginary. In his experience only imaginary people disappeared to Peru for ten years, but it turned out that Merrick Tremayne did as well. He’d turned up suddenly, perfectly real, with tattoos, a Bristol accent, and an open invitation to South America. Thaniel liked that idea.
Someone called ten minutes off. Mori glanced that way.
‘I’d better find Six. Do your best, yes?’ he said in Japanese. It sounded private, and soft.
‘I will,’ Thaniel said. He wanted to catch his hand, but one of the sopranos was watching, curious. ‘On the right,’ he added when Mori hesitated at the door.
‘I know.’ Mori opened the door slightly before Six came through it. Thaniel sat still, feeling like he was hearing bells in the distance. Mori had been waiting for her.
‘I thought I’d come and find you in case you’d got lost again,’ she reported. Behind her was a woman in a blue velvet gown, which was so unlike her normal style that Thaniel didn’t realise at first that it was Grace. ‘Oh. This is Dr Carrow. I was talking to her about you,’ Six added at Thaniel. ‘Well, actually we were talking about electricity, and she told me about a new kind of microscope and something sticky.’ She looked back at Grace for help.
‘Medicine,’ said Grace.
‘Sticky,’ agreed Six.
Grace snorted, and then nodded a little to Mori, who bowed a fraction back. They didn’t exactly hate each other. It was the wariness of two territorial lions. Nobody mentioned to Six that Grace had used to be Mrs Steepleton. ‘Six happened to mention that the doctors think you’ve got tuberculosis,’ Grace said.
‘I …’ Thaniel shook his head a little, surprised. ‘Yes? Why?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘at the Aokigahara station, we invented a lot of new things with all the electricity everywhere. Just cobbled together. One of them is going into industrial production now. An electron microscope. Its magnification is far superior to an ordinary microscope. I was using it to try and observe ether particles. It’s no good for that, but I got talking with a friend in the biology department not long ago, and he’s overjoyed, because with the new microscope, he has finally isolated the bacteria which causes tuberculosis.’ She opened her hands a little to say, ta-dah. ‘He’s pretty sure he’s got a cure. He’s looking for people for the clinical trials. It looks very promising indeed. If you’d like to give it a try.’ She came across and handed him a card. ‘He’s at UCL.’
‘Really?’ Thaniel asked, feeling like she’d tipped him upside down.
Grace smiled. ‘Really. Go and see him.’ She glanced back at Six, and then laughed awkwardly, because Thaniel was staring at her. ‘Anyway, I’d better leave you to it.’ She nodded to Mori again and swept out.
‘And us,’ Six said to Mori. ‘It’s supposed to start soon.’
She held the door open for Mori. She didn’t rush anymore. She’d shot up in the last year and she was tall enough now to have noticed that Mori was slight, for England. In the street, she walked between him and the road. Thaniel was more proud of that than of any symphony. He’d never noticed before meeting Takiko, but it struck him all the time now that English girls didn’t have much chivalry.
He had the newspaper photograph of Takiko on his desk. It was impossible to look at the image without feeling ashamed, but he kept it so that he would keep remembering the debt he owed her.
‘Hey,’ he said to Mori.
Mori leaned back in.
‘Microscopes,’ Thaniel said.
Mori smiled. ‘Yeah.’
‘If there’s a cure – you’ll have saved hundreds of thousands more people than you hurt arranging it.’
Like always with any kind of praise, Mori didn’t look wholly like he knew what to do with it, and only nodded. ‘Well. See you soon.’
Then he was gone. Thaniel gazed down at the card. At last, he slipped it into his breast pocket, and then had to sink his head into his hands and laugh. It was nothing, a clinical trial, but even the chance of getting better made him feel so light he could have out-floated a hot-air balloon. He wanted to drop everything and steal Mori away and get drunk at home, and shout at him for being so reckless, and die for him, or live for him, and everything. Over the last few months, he’d felt how his own future had sort of rolled itself up, the way ahead shortening. He could feel his body shutting down, a little more each day. And now, just a thread of it unspooled out and out to the horizon.
Arthur leaned in. ‘It’s time,’ he said. ‘Nervous now?’
‘Nope,’ said Thaniel, who felt like he might be able to fly.
From the stage, the lights made the audience almost invisible. He could only see the galleries. The gilt along them glittered. A stir went through the audience when a couple of the violinists took their lightbulbs from their violin cases to make sure the electricity was working and the filaments lit. He hoped Six had seen. She had helped set it up.
The last thing he saw before the auditorium lights dimmed was Mori, who offered him a one-sided toast. Thaniel turned back to the lectern.
Arthur winked at him from the piano. The choir looked cheerful. Thaniel took a deeper breath, felt the familiar catch in his lungs, clocked the end of the baton against the music stand, and brought in the strings.
HISTORICAL NOTE
This story is mostly fiction. Mori, Thaniel, and Takiko are not real historical figures, and Filigree Street and Yoruji are imaginary. But lots of other things are based on real history.
The electricity towers at Aokigahara are modelled on a real place. In 1901, Nikola Tesla built Wardenclyffe Tower in New York. It was designed to emanate wireless power, based on the experiments he conducted in Colorado Springs – where you really could hold a lightbulb, and watch it light up.
Ether theory was widely considered scientific fact until it was disproved in 1905, by Einstein. This should have been pretty momentous, but he didn’t point out that he’d disproved it, because his tutor was so sure that ether did exist.
Kiyotaka Kuroda was notorious for his warlike habits, a huge illegal land deal, and having possibly killed his wife. He was lampooned for the latter in the national press. The rhinoceros cartoon that Takiko Pepperharrow mentions is real.
The Education Minister, Arinori Mori, really was assassinated on the day the new Constitution was announced. It was probably religiously motivated; Arinori was a Christian, and his murderer was a guardsman from the heart of Japanese
Shinto, Ise Shrine. A side note here: Arinori is his first name. Correctly I should be calling him Mr Mori, but I wanted to avoid confusion. He’s no relation of Keita Mori. In Japanese, the samurai Mori (pronounced Morey) translates roughly to Featherworth; while Arinori’s (pronounced Morry) means Woods.
Abashiri prison was one of several huge labour camps active in the 1880s and 90s. Thousands of men, some of them guilty only of political crimes, died in the punishing Hokkaido winters as they built the road system there. Today, the nineteenth-century prison is a museum, and open to the public. It’s full of plaques that show prisoners’ anecdotes. One is about remembering to rub your nose.
LANGUAGE NOTE
It’s easy to translate Japanese badly. Even today, English dictionaries tend to hit too lofty a tone. We end up, when we watch anime and Japanese drama, seeing subtitles that say things like, ‘isn’t it nostalgic!’ whenever anyone says the rather common phrase, ‘natsukashi ne!’ This is silly. It just means ‘I really miss that’.
There’s a myth that Japanese doesn’t have swearwords, which is prone to give English speakers a strange, romanticised idea of the language. Japanese does have swearwords, but it’s also incredibly easy to be rude without swearing at all. The different formality levels of the language are so clear that they actually have names. The highest level of formal language is called keigo, which is notoriously hard to speak, because all the verbs change. Teachers love to say we don’t have it in English, but we do; it’s the equivalent of saying, ‘I wonder if you’d like to take a seat?’ rather than, ‘Park yourself there, mate.’ For me, the big difference is that while we’re all aware of what constitutes polite language and what doesn’t in English, we tend not to demarcate it and name it. We’ll tell kids to ‘ask nicely’, or adults to ‘sound professional’, but we’re only hinting at what we mean. There’s such an intense awareness of these distinct registers of speech in Tokyo that sometimes, when what someone has said in Japanese literally just translates as ‘no’, it means something closer to ‘sod off ’ – because saying a flat no, rather than using a proper sentence, is rude.
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow Page 40