Foreigners, Drunks and Babies

by Peter Robinson

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘Peace,’ he said, ‘now, we have peace.’

  ‘I hope so,’ I said. He was shaking my hand.

  ‘English gentlemen and Japanese are friends.’

  ‘Friends,’ I agreed – as Gill arrived waving the key.

  ‘What was that all about?’ she asked as we headed inland.

  ‘He was saying the English are gentlemen,’ I said. ‘You know, not like the Americans, and all that.’

  ‘It’s a point of view,’ said Gill.

  Yes, a point of view; but one that I didn’t disabuse him of, even if I’d been able to try. Admitting to ourselves we must be escaping too, must be suffering from Europamüdigkeit, as our German colleagues called it, had been easy enough in principle. Either it had been my mid-life crisis, a way of improving the career prospects by publishing and being damned, or anyway it was a chance to spend more time together and rediscover the bonds in a love that went back to our meeting when still teenagers ourselves. Gill and I would pass the explanations back and forth, sometimes taking up one or the other, depending on which irritation had grated on which of us this time.

  These would tend to break out once more around the time of the bōnenkai, the year-forgetting parties. This was a tradition I could appreciate. Getting together with the department as the dead zone of the Japanese New Year approached, drinking too much and wiping out the past, could only seem a good idea. Our hiding place for failure, our breeding ground for resentments, the desire for imaginative revenges, the painful labour of regaining control of our lives … we could put it all behind us, finish the examining and approach the next semester with a wiped-clean whiteboard. But then the sudden drop in temperature, the retirement of the entire native population into their family rituals, the nothing to do but rent another movie – these would turn us in on ourselves in the nowhere of the present, emptily longing for a different future, and blanking out the past, whether recent or from previous lives.

  Though there was as little to do on Shiraishijima, we spent the day of New Year’s Eve exploring the island with what gusto we could muster. Our first plan was to try and beach-comb all the way round its shores, past the run-down wrecks of boats, shacks and boathouses, kicking through the wrack, with our footprints behind us in the sand.

  However, at a certain point the beach gave out into rocks. Round the back of the island, a company was quarrying its cliffs, so we set off inland on a mountain trail to visit the rocky niches where hermit monks would pray. And on one of those bare outcrops of lava from an extinct volcano, I bent down to tie my shoe laces and saw Gill walking on, seeming to leave me behind, though as she turned to find me, with a look of mild irritation on her face, it was as if she were accusing me of hanging back, of letting her go on alone.

  Yes, in that dead time of our brief holiday, I was rummaging around in the past for the precise point where it had happened. It wasn’t merely that my career had not lived up to expectations. I could have accepted that, had there been compensations. Rather, it was as if I had sacrificed too much for a life that not only wasn’t happening, but which now looked as though it could no longer be expected to begin. I had put all my eggs in one basket, nobody wanted to buy them, and now there was precious little left to fall back on. Perhaps it was merely a question of age. Doubtless I was going through a phase.

  Then and there I recalled that morning on the Kinki Nippon Railway Station at Nara when I had forgotten myself, forgotten where I was, and tried to kiss Aiko on the cheek. She had shrunk back in horror, and blushed a bright pink. Because she’d been abroad, I thought, it would be a nice gesture to part in the style she would know from her year out in the world. But no, I’d been mistaken. As the train pulled out, Aiko, standing opposite the carriage window, gave a slight bow and disappeared. If attachment to a man depended so largely on the elegance of his leave-taking, it would seem I had managed at a stroke to perform an utterly inelegant parting. But Aiko never so much as mentioned my faux pas, and from then on I followed her lead in that too. Doubtless it was another example of the foreigners, drunks and babies rule.

  But I could never understand what had made their relationship tick. Other people’s feelings were mysteries – you never could see a love affair from the outside, and yet people do sometimes intuit things about other’s feelings, even ones concealed from themselves … They can see the balance of power in a relationship far better, sometimes, than can the protagonists. And there was nothing like someone’s death to bring her back to life a while. ‘Looking out on the morning rain,’ as the song had it. Aiko happened to mention that one once. ‘I couldn’t face another day … and when my heart was in the lost and found …’ Yes, that was her favourite song: ‘You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman’ by Carole King, but the Aretha Franklin version. She was so small and, like I say, if she so much as turned sideways you’d think she’d disappear. I used to wonder if she was large enough to bear children. What had the birth of her daughter been like? Don’t so much as imagine it. But now Aiko had really disappeared.

  It was way past midnight. The picture windows were all of a black, though punctuated here and there by points of light from the mainland. We were standing no more than a few inches from each other, right up at the glass, but weren’t about to kiss in that lonely atmosphere. If you’d been lurking in the darkness outside, in the darkness like some peeping Tom, you could have seen us there at the window, lit by a single lamp standing upright in the corner of the room. If you’d been standing in the darkness there, you’d have seen us gesturing with our hands, seen the exasperated expressions on our faces, faces flushed with the rather too much drink from that desultory New Year’s Eve. You’d have seen first one and then the other brushing tears from flushed cheeks. Yes, if you’d been standing outside you’d have been able to watch it all like a dumb show, would have seen Gill turn away with one last pained expression. But you wouldn’t have heard us say a word.

  As so often before, we had stumbled into a line of talk that neither of us planned or exactly expected. Perhaps it was just the drink talking. Or maybe it was the excuse of the drink.

  ‘So why didn’t you tell me straight away?’ Gill asked, her tone grown harder.

  I took a slight step back, but didn’t reply.

  ‘Something to hide, eh, Rob?’ she asked, taking another swig from her gin and squeezed oranges, and wincing.

  ‘No, not at all, no, why? Should I have?’

  ‘Playing the innocent, as usual,’ she said. ‘Surely, it’s far too late for that.’

  ‘Far too late for what?’ I asked.

  Gill took a step towards me. Then she leaned forward as if to whisper some tenderness into my ear.

  ‘You’ve been in love with her all along, haven’t you?’

  I couldn’t help smiling, even if letting out a deep sigh that tasted again of the Suntory whisky.

  ‘Go on, admit it,’ she said, fixing me with her inquisitorial gaze.

  Had there ever been the shadow of such a possibility? I searched my tired mind for the slightest twinge of guilt that would tell me I was lying – should I so much as deny it there and then. No, I told myself. No, I never loved her. There wasn’t the slightest trace of a qualm. But at that very moment, thinking of Aiko once more, just to reassure myself, I found the tears starting again to my eyes. Aiko Mori was dead. But why, why had she done it? What in the world could have happened? How get to such a state of despair that it would seem better to waste all the possible life still left to live?

  I was gazing into Gillian’s face. My wife was no longer what she’d been when we were young and starting out. That innocent creature was a long time lost. We had been through too much together, the painful and banal, had survived despite it all. But if her innocence is gone, well, so has mine, I thought, while Gill’s eyes darkened and her lips parted as if to speak. I saw how my wet face must look, and what it would seem to mean. I turned away as if to catch a sight of ships passing through the dark of night an
d the darker waters of the Inland Sea. There was nothing but blackness, not even the sound of the waves. I was brushing the moisture from my cheeks as I turned.

  ‘Tears before bedtime!’ said Gill with a sickening smile. ‘I knew it.’

  ‘No, you didn’t and, no, you don’t,’ I said, my upset about the suicide getting the better of those too volatile feelings for the long-time love and wife who seemed to have taken it upon herself to begin the New Year by tormenting me with my store of regrets. ‘I was never in love with Aiko Mori. Do you really think I could be attracted to someone like that? Don’t you know me at all? Don’t you know yourself?’

  ‘These last couple of months, even when we were in bed, it’s like you’ve hardly been there.’ Gill stopped short with her lips slightly parted, as if aghast at what had come through them.

  ‘Look, if I weren’t really there, I couldn’t even do it!’

  But now I did feel a twinge and a qualm. I saw myself lying with my face over the side of the bed, staring blankly at the dusty wood block floor, Gillian speaking all the while. It was so silly. We had relaxed into each other’s arms, and dozed for some minutes; then, disentangling, I noticed a small scar to one side of her navel. Not having recalled seeing it before, I asked what it was – which was when she’d decided to tell me. That summer, taking annual leave in England, Gill had missed her period. It was one of those years I came back early to finish correcting the questions for the university entrance exams, and we’d agreed that she would take an extra couple of weeks’ vacation before rejoining me in Japan. By the time Gill found she had an ectopic pregnancy, the fertilized egg stuck to the side of one of her fallopian tubes, I was already on the far side of the globe. The doctor explained it would have to be removed, and she would lose one of the tubes. Another pregnancy would be difficult, and might result in complications too. The doctor had suggested that at her age, thirty-seven, she might seriously consider making it impossible for this to happen again. She should talk to her husband.

  But she hadn’t. She had made the decision herself. It was her body after all. And this was how I found out. I lay there with my head over the side of the bed, continuing to stare at the dusty wooden floor. She knew how much I’d wanted children. She said she thought the lost pregnancy would be too much for me to bear, so the first time we talked she said her doctor had recommended she have the operation, and she’d done it to simplify our sex life. Simplify our sex life! I tried my best to adopt what must be the politically correct attitude. It was her body, and it was her decision. Yet, even as I lay there, it was as if something had been taken from our life together. It was as if we were one flesh, and what the doctor had done to her, he had also done to me.

  It had been almost two months later, as I lay there unable to get interested, Gill beginning to wonder what had got into me, that she gritted her teeth and told me about the pregnancy – to reassure me about my manhood, she said, but also to give the real justification for her unilateral decision, which of course she couldn’t help sensing had upset me. So it had all come out. We had finally, near as damn it, become parents. Not through any decision we’d made, no, but through a mishap. Yet even then it was not to be. The chance of fulfillment had been snatched away as if by some malign fate.

  ‘You’ve been somewhere else ever since that student of yours died,’ said Gill, staring out into the blackness herself.

  I was thinking I could make out the lights of a fishing boat afloat in the distance on those waters. Still I couldn’t help wondering why my wife had to keep insisting on this implausible fiction to explain the latest of our difficulties.

  ‘No, honestly, no,’ I mumbled.

  ‘So why didn’t you tell me she’d died as soon as you found out? Why did you keep it to yourself?’

  ‘I was too upset,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know what to think … and I didn’t want to burden you with it as well – when I knew so little.’

  ‘Not that you know any more now,’ she said, as if to dispense with that justification. ‘Well, anyway, it was obvious to me from the first that she was just all over you. If you hadn’t been married, she’d have been doing a Jude and Arabella on you right away, and that’s for sure.’

  ‘If you say so,’ I said, losing my balance all the time. ‘Then why didn’t I just ask you for a divorce and run off with Aiko if I was so bloody infatuated?’

  ‘Ah, now he’s angry. Now we’re getting near the truth.’

  The truth, I thought, that would be a fine thing. And then, whether it was the whisky, or the strain of the last few months, or the salt of Aiko Mori’s death being rubbed into the wound by Gill’s words, an imp of the perverse came out and overwhelmed me.

  ‘All right, all right, I admit it,’ I said. ‘Oh God, you’ve dragged it out of me.’

  ‘Tell me, then,’ said Gillian, seeming visibly to relax in the knowledge that she had been right all along.

  How bizarre to feel such a release in confessing to something that I knew not to be true! Yet in the small hours of that New Year I dipped into the murky sea of my feelings and began to spin a tale of how I’d tried to forget her, had encouraged her connection with Brook to get her out of my life … and now couldn’t help feeling I was somehow to blame for her death.

  Which was why all my attempts to keep on the straight and narrow had come to nothing when I discovered she had taken her own life. But why had she done it? Could it have had anything to do with Gillian’s jealous intuitions? Now I could only be in love with her memory, it was true, and I couldn’t get her out of my mind. And yet as I continued in that vein, it was as if I too felt myself relaxing, as if the idea that I’d been in love with her was the only justification for the extent of those feelings about her death. Why had I become so obsessed with her? No wonder Gillian thought there must have been something going on. It was as if my grief had need of an explanation, and this one fitted it only too well.

  ‘Bet you envied the fact they had a child,’ said Gill, as if the least harmful thing would be to have it out then and there – and move on.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ I said, keeping up the fiction, ‘but you did know I wanted to have children, didn’t you?’

  Which was when the tears had started, uncalled for, into her face too. They came swelling out from around the lashes, making her eyes seem that much larger, making it seem as if the eyes themselves would melt and pour down across her cheeks, before she pulled out a handkerchief and dried them there and then.

  What in Heaven’s name was I doing? What an idiotic thing to do! Doubtless, Gill had been putting a bold face on the whole business of not having children. She would always say she didn’t have the mothering instinct, and didn’t see why she should have to fake one – but maybe that was a mark itself of the inner hurt she couldn’t address, the hurt expressed in those obviously hapless tears. We stood there silently a moment by the window, wondering where our talk would go to now.

  ‘So what do you propose we do?’ said Gillian. ‘I can’t have children, and you can’t have Mori-chan!’

  Again, as if looking for inspiration, I turned to the cold glass pane of the window and stared out into the dark waters of the Inland Sea. I was feeling self-pity, it was true, but I was feeling pity for Gill too there beside me – and pitying us both for the death of our love. Yet why did she have to torture me so? And why did I have to torture her in turn? She could give up the pretence of liking Japan. She could go back to England where she belonged. I could keep on with the job I’d got used to, and try to find a life for myself out here … Why not? It couldn’t be worse than this mutually inflicted pain.

  ‘Don’t know,’ is all I said. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, that sounds like the simple truth, for once,’ said Gill with the semblance of a smile. ‘Why don’t we sleep on it and see how things look in the morning?’

  ‘It already is the morning, but I can’t wish you happy New Year, now, can I?’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Gill said. ‘
Neither of us can.’

  She turned away from the window and walked straight out through the living room door without so much as a look behind.

  So if you’d been standing in the blackness outside the foreigners’ holiday hostel, you would have been able to make out clearly that when the woman turned and walked away, the man didn’t move for quite a long time. He remained there by the glass just staring out into the darkness. Then, after taking out a handkerchief and wiping his face once more, he turned and walked over to the stereo system positioned against the opposite wall. He picked out a cassette from the three or four lined on the top of one speaker and placed it in the deck. The volume must have been right near the minimum, because you would have seen the man crouch beside one of the speakers. Yes, you would have seen him crouch like that, trying to get some comfort or consolation from the music. But you wouldn’t have been able to hear what music it was, and, anyway, out in the darkness of that island on the Inland Sea, there was in fact nobody there.

  ‘What a pleasant coincidence!’ said Professor Haneda, as he sat down beside us there at the counter of his favorite haunt.

  But this was the last thing I’d wanted to happen. How could I possibly have a quiet talk to Toshi about why Aiko died with Haneda’s smiling sybaritic face engaging us in conversation? Assistant Professor Satoshi Miyazaki’s favourite watering hole had been closed. So we had descended its darkened stairs and come back out onto Shijo, not far from the Kamogawa bridge. There was nothing else for it but to head for the Department’s usual haunt in one of the labyrinthine alleys that formed Kyoto’s pleasure district, its Geisha quarter, the Pontochō.

  As suggested in my office at the end of his course, I got in touch with Toshi when it emerged we would be stopping overnight in Kyoto on the way back north after our New Year on the Inland Sea. Gill would allow me an evening on the town alone, so I arranged to meet Toshi in the hope of a quiet talk about what had happened. John Frost, the foreign professor at Doshisha University, a friend of mine from those first years in the city, was going to be back home in Chicago for the festive season. He’d offered to let us stay in his traditional-style house on the northwestern flank of the Y-shaped old capital.