He was standing at the gate of Lamorna, actually waving to Mrs Wheeby as Cousin Fred’s car bore her away, while these inappropriate reflections drifted upon him; and they were followed by a too-clear knowledge of what Pat and Shirley and Sheila and Joan would have said had they then been able, God forbid, to see into his mind.
Suddenly, such a longing for Pat swept over him, as he turned away from the gate towards her dusty, desolate, noisy home, that he almost staggered beneath it.
‘Morning’, said the postman’s voice behind him. ‘Raw today.’
Wilfred turned blindly. A letter was being held out.
‘Oh . . . thank you . . .’
‘Bet you won’t be sorry when that lot’s gone.’
The postman, an elderly man, nodded upwards at the ruddy-faced, Edwardian-moustached, flowing-haired pair of builders lounging in the wreck of the front bedroom window and chatting, unintelligibly – except to each other – as they sucked down tea.
Wilfred went into the house with Mary’s letter.
Dear Dad,
Mr T. wrote to me saying we’re going to live at your Yellow House. Suits me.
Love in haste
M.
Well! Suits her, indeed. The young were everlastingly rushing into matters with no examination of the probabilities involved, because they would not give a moment of their time to thinking things over. And when things go wrong, who gets the blame? thought Mary’s father. Us: Mum and Dad; the adults . . . Oh well . . . so long as she doesn’t mind.
And what of the hauntings? But perhaps Mr Taverner had cleared the way by mentioning the subject.
He began collecting the few things he wanted to take with him. Oxfam and Help the Aged and the rest of them obligingly sent collectors (usually after school and college hours, and disarmingly young and round-faced) to take away many of the smaller objects. The dustmen would have to be bribed to take away what was left.
And then, the night before he left Lamorna for ever, his father died.
Most of Derby Row was indoors, watching Till Death Us Do Part.
Kelly had dodged away from Mr Davis’s open front door. One or two passing matrons had asked her where was her mum? – adding that she would catch her death, in her nightie like that. So she had retreated into the warm little room she knew as well as her own home, where Samantha crouched in front of the television in the darkness, and Mr Davis was a dim bulk in the ancient armchair.
Kelly continued to wander uneasily between living room and street. The fire glowed dimly, settling into ashes. She glanced quickly now and then at the armchair, settled to stare at the figures on the screen, then scrambled up and went to the door again; backwards and forwards.
‘Wanna biscuit,’ whined Samantha.
‘Well yer – yer –’ her sister swallowed one of the bad words Mr Davis had forbidden her to say – ‘can’t ’ave one. ’E’s asleep,’ she ended in a whisper, glancing sideways again at the chair.
‘Wanna biscuit . . . Kelly, is ’e a stiff?’
Both stared towards the figure in the armchair, just visible in the bluish glare from the machine.
‘ ’Course not. Stiffs ’as blood.’
‘Wanna biscuit, wanna biscuit, wanna biscuit.’
‘Shut up!’ shrilled Kelly. ‘Shut up or – or I’ll do yer. Stiffs ’as blood, I tell yer.’
She ran to the door, tripping over her ragged nightgown, and out into the street, and peered up and down its quiet length. Frost glittered on the pavement and a freezing mist hung in the air. A car was slowly approaching.
She recognized the blue light on the roof, and, child of her generation, reared on Z Cars and Dixon of Dock Green, ran out into the middle of the road and stood in the glare of the headlights, waving both arms.
The car stopped, and a man got out.
‘Here, what’s all this?’ said a comfortable voice, as she was gently lifted six feet into the air and confronted by a pair of fatherly eyes.
Her thumb went into her mouth, and she ceased to be the efficient woman seven years’ worldly experience had made of her, and became all baby, staring and silent.
‘Come on, love. What’s up? Lost your mum?’
‘It’s Kelly,’ said the younger policeman from the car. ‘One of old Davis’s, sir.’
The old man’s habits were known to the men at the local station, which was not far from Derby Row, and so was his influence on the local children.
‘He’s over eighty,’ the boy added significantly.
‘Go in and have a look,’ his superior ordered quietly, with a glance towards the bluish cavern with its open door.
Samantha staggered up out of sleep, and blundered across the room and into the younger policeman.
‘Now, now. It’s all right,’ he said soothingly.
She stared up at him, fair hair falling over her shoulders and torn, grubby nightgown, her feet dirty and bare.
‘I bet you’d like a biscuit,’ he blurted out.
‘Said a mustn’t,’ she gabbled, thumb in mouth.
‘He won’t mind . . . he’s asleep. Now, you show me where they are,’ he coaxed.
In a moment he had her riding in his arms. He carried her to the door.
The sergeant said resignedly, ‘Two of ’em.’
‘That’s my Sammy,’ cried Kelly.
‘All right, all right. Here, you have a nice sit-down in the car,’ and he arranged Kelly carefully on the seat. Samantha was fitted in beside her.
Then the two men went into the cottage.
‘Still warm.’ The sergeant stood up, taking away his hand from the broad, white-haired breast. ‘Must have been – oh, couple of hours ago. In his sleep, I’d say.’
‘“What a lovely way to go”,’ muttered the young man, frivolity masking other feelings.
‘That’ll do . . . you seem to know all about it . . . p’raps you know who those two belong to?’ He jerked his head towards the door.
‘A Mrs Singer, sir. Lives just down the street.’
‘Yes, I know her. Go down and tell her, will you? If she isn’t in’ – and that’s likely enough, he thought – ‘you can take them down to the station. I’ll stay here till the doctor comes.’
But Mrs Singer was in, sketchily finishing some long-postponed housework, and half thinking she might just run down to Davis’s and see if the kids was there – it was after eleven and freezing cold. When she opened the door to the policeman, she screamed.
‘Oh God – the kids – they bin run––’
‘It’s all right, Mrs Singer. Nothing wrong with them. But they’re up at old Mr Davis’s, and he’s deceased – passed over,’ he amended, at her bemused stare. ‘You come with me, will you?’
‘I was just goin’ up to fetch them . . . gone, ’as he? Wasn’t a bad old chap,’ she added.
‘In his sleep,’ the young policeman said shortly. He regarded her tolerantly, handed her daughters over to her, recommended a hot drink and bed for both, and began to set in motion the apparatus for disposing of an eighty-seven-year-old body – male, retired railway worker – decently, and in order.
‘It’s almost the first time in her whole life I’ve been angry with her,’ Wilfred said wearily.
It was five days later, and he was sitting at the kitchen table in the Yellow House, red-eyed and exhausted after the bustle of the last week: the paying out, the telephoning and letter-writing and disposing of his father’s few possessions. In the middle of it all he had opened his front door to Sheila – or was it Shirley or Joan? – ablaze with interest (or sympathy, or ravenous curiosity) and offering hospitality and help.
‘She sends me two lines, a couple of lines, that’s all, about us coming to live here,’ he now said bitterly to his three silent listeners, knowing too well that he was whining but unable to stop. ‘And then a wire – a wire, mind you – she can’t come to her grandfather’s funeral. And he would have minded, Mrs Cornforth, he would have. That’s what upsets me. Two of my wife’s friends came with
great wreaths – must have cost a fortune. I never asked them – they didn’t even like him. And why they showed up I don’t know. Well, I suppose I do, really . . . But he wouldn’t have wanted their wreaths. He never forgot one Christmas when one of them and her husband came to our place. Called her a cow. And then I had all of them, dozens it seemed like, meaning it kindly, but phoning, and coming round, and saying what would Pat say if she could see how Dad’s place looked. Oh, it was well meant, of course, I know that –’
‘Always makes one feel worse, when it’s well meant,’ Mr Taverner said languidly.
‘I know they thought Father was low. Pat did, too; it was the only thing we ever had words about; and all her friends agreed with her. – I know they meant it kindly, but . . .’
For the first time in perhaps sixty years, he put his face into his hands. No one spoke. Then he heard the soft rush of champagne being poured into a glass.
‘Another sip,’ came Mrs Cornforth’s warm voice. ‘Won’t hurt you. Drink up. You’re here now, and we all love you, and we’ll see to it that . . .’
BOOK THREE
18
‘I’m done for’
Yasuhiro came slowly down the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, relieved to be out in the bitter spring air again.
He did not admire the vast walls the colour of honey, nor the statues, nor even, he told himself, the height of the roof. But he had had to recall the size and height of the figure of the Buddha at Beppu in order to remind himself that Japan, too, possessed mighty monuments.
The exercise had not sweetened his mood.
His mood was one of criticism; he had been critical since he got into the taxi at the airport, and he was also – though he did not like to admit it – disappointed.
Last night, after that very peculiar meal in the ugly eating-room of the hotel in Bloomsbury where he was staying, he had remained in his room reading Auden. Yasuhiro had not ‘embraced the West’. His adoration of his own country, and his secret intention to die for it, would remain: a stone torii, unchanged.
But English poetry! Reading it had been like breathing the scent of unfamiliar flowers.
Tokyo was as ugly as London, but its ugliness was familiar; and the miniature beauty of the small town some twelve miles from the capital, where his family had lived in the same house for three hundred years, had changed little in essentials, since 1905, when Great-grandfather and his comrades had flung themselves on the Russian gun emplacements at Port Arthur. The American bombers had done the town little damage, surrounded, as it was, by woods.
Great-grandfather:
A smile of tenderness moved Yasuhiro’s proud lips. Following the account of the snow, the cold, the corpses, the dirt and danger, there would always come the climax: ‘And nothing to eat but hard biscuit and pickled plums!’
His brain had been imprinted with those plums.
He had passed the morning in writing a letter to Great-grandfather. In the afternoon, he had called on his father’s friend at the Japanese Embassy, and had heard roguish jokes about young men and London night life which he had received with the correct, polite laughter due to jesting from an older person in a high position, and with a haughty gleam in his eyes.
So Yasuhiro’s first day in England had been dutiful rather than palatable to his natural love of pleasure; and everywhere he went he encountered this cruel English ugliness. He came slowly down the steps of St Paul’s, ivory-faced and appearing, if possible, even calmer than usual because he was feeling cross. His camera was slung across the shoulder of his long pale grey overcoat. He would have liked to look at some flowers; he was hungry.
He walked slowly onwards, past shops and eating-places, in the thin spring light. The only beautiful things to be seen were the great clouds, coloured like pearls, drifting quickly through the blue sky above the tall white offices and old houses of dark brick, while the traffic thundered in his ears; and the English hurried past, with their alien faces all looking alike.
What was the name of this street? he wondered, after twenty minutes. There it was, high up on that brown wall.
‘Liverpool Street,’ he muttered, pausing on a corner and staring about him – and there, immediately opposite, were some flowers: bunches of them, yellow and white and crimson and pale purple, and an old man with a red face selling them.
Yasuhiro crossed the street leisurely, through a small herd of panting cars. This traffic was nothing to one accustomed to Tokyo. He paused in front of the flower seller.
‘Lovely daffs,’ instantly said the old man. ‘Fresh narciss.’
‘I will have those.’ A long finger in a pale glove pointed.
‘Forty pence a bunch.’ The seller shook out a cluster of half a dozen irises and presented them, clasped in a hand also gloved, in dirty black wool.
‘More,’ commanded Yasuhiro, and it was a command. ‘All.’ The pallor and purity of the irises and their shape were ravishing his senses.
The old man, however, had been through the 1914 war, the depression of the ’30s, and the Blitz, and commanding tones (now that he was no longer in anybody’s bleeding Army) made no impression upon him. Also, he disliked foreigners.
‘Wot, the ruddy lot?’ he demanded, incredulous and far from overwhelmed with gratitude. ‘’Ow about my girlfriends? Comes out of the offices lunchtime, they do, and buys a button’ole or a bunch for their mams.’
‘All, all,’ Yasuhiro repeated imperiously, thinking that this impoverished old peasant did not understand.
‘Oh, all right. Cost yer four quid, though,’ and he began to take out the irises from their place among the glowing mass.
‘Kwid?’
‘Pahnds – pahnds,’ said the vendor impatiently. ‘’Ere, I better wrap ’em for yer – this ’ere wind’s enough ter – well, ne’er mind – let alone flars.’
He bustled the flowers into a cone of white paper, whence their strange and lovely heads looked out remotely at Liverpool Street. ‘Bit free with it, ain’t yer?’ he added, as Yasuhiro took four notes from his wallet and held them out. ‘None o’ my business, come to that . . .’ – tourists; plenty of it – ‘Thenks.’
He was not going to add ‘guv’nor’ to a kid, and he did not feel like saying ‘son’ to this little bastard. However, he did say ‘Larst a week, they will. Keep the stems cut every day and a drop o’ fresh water.’
Yasuhiro, who was not little, and who seemed taller than he was in the grey overcoat, strode on, and more than one alien eye glanced at him with interest.
‘Sights’, of all kinds, have become so commonplace in London’s streets in the last few years that no one stares at anybody; but a beautiful oriental youth, dressed in the height of Western elegance and clasping an armful of flowers carefully protected from the wind, at which he gazed down immovably, caused heads to turn. His serenity was irritating. He made no attempt to avoid bumping into people, leaving others to get out of the way of him and his flowers.
When he looked up at last, he was on the corner of a narrow little street. Nearby were steep steps leading up into a vast, arched cavernous building. Some of the other buildings were large and new, others small and old, a mixture of ages and styles with which he was familiar in Tokyo. He glanced vaguely around, suddenly very hungry, and saw that the shop nearest to him sold cigarettes and sweets. No: sweets were a self-indulgence, and followers of Mishima did not smoke.
His gaze wandered across the road, caught by some coloured dresses, unusually ugly even for England, blowing in the wind outside a small corner shop. The March sunlight shone full into it.
He saw a glint of moving silver in a sunray, glittering out of the dimness, and then, looking closer across the crowded street, saw that the tiny light was hanging on a chain about someone’s neck. His stare moved onwards, and at last he saw, above silver chain and medallion, a girl’s face.
Dark and quiet, in the flow thrown up from the sunray: a Japanese face?
He crossed the street and, inclining his head to avoi
d the fluttering dresses, went out of the brilliant day into the dimness of the shop.
Mary looked up from a paperback recommended by Mrs Cadman and saw him silhouetted against the bright square of the door.
She saw his face, first, because it glimmered like ivory in the dusk, and her thought was, beautiful. Then she thought – but it was emotion rather than thought – that this was a man.
Young, very young, but the . . . the mannest man she had seen in all her seventeen years, and the shape of his head, capped with soot-black hair, and the cool stare, and the set of his long pale grey overcoat on his slender but strong-looking body, drew her eyes into a silent, bemused gaze.
Yasuhiro had seen at once that this was not a Japanese girl, and was annoyed with himself for the mistake. He was also annoyed with her.
He parted his lips – but she spoke first.
She said: ‘Good morning. Can I help you?’
In Japanese.
He was so surprised that he started. Then, angered by this betrayal of his feelings, his face darkened, and he quickly said something incomprehensible – more Japanese, Mary supposed.
‘That’s all I know,’ she managed to say sedately. ‘Do you speak English?’
Sweet voice, not loud, thought Yasuhiro. But I believe she’s laughing at me. You’re not going to laugh at me, modern girl.
‘Of course,’ he answered coolly. ‘I do not want to buy anything.’ (This came out so quickly and smoothly that Mary supposed it to be a phrase from a tourist handbook.) ‘Do you know – can you tell me, about a clean place near to here where I can eat?’ His face had become calm again.
Mary considered. With the usual kind of young man who came in to finger Mrs Levy’s tourist-baits, cheapness would have been her first consideration in suggesting a café; even the American boys, unless accompanied by Mom and Dad, never seemed to have any money. But her eyes had taken in the quality of the overcoat by now, and those flowers, and she decided that this one did have some money.
The Yellow Houses Page 19