by Francis King
It was as I then held her, gently rubbing my cheek against her dusty fur, that I suddenly realised who it really was that had been drowned. Not Lee but Read, Thelma Read: saying in her slightly adenoidal voice ‘How can you do that? How can yon bear to touch them? Cats scare me stiff, they give the the creeps.’ She had given a little shudder, pouting and drawing her three-quarter-length leather coat close up to her pointed chin. Thelma, poor Thelma!
Still carrying Michiko; I hurried upstairs to tell Bill my discovery. But he was already asleep, the bedside light still on and a copy of Encounter lying crumpled on the floor beside him. I nearly woke him; then I decided reluctantly that I should have to wait till morning. After all it was he, not I, who had driven through that fearful downpour in almost total darkness. He had already begun to sweat, the sheet thrown, back from his body and his pyjama jacket open to reveal his bony torso, shoulders covered in freckles and a fuzz of orange hair on the chest. I undressed hurriedly, slipped on to the bed beside him and leaned over him to turn off the light. He grunted but did not open his eyes. I too began to sweat; and as I did so I became aware of a mosquito humming somewhere in the darkness just above us.
3
We had always felt that Thelma had come to us under false pretences.
One evening the previous winter she had telephoned from the Japanese inn, the most expensive in the town, at which she was staying, to announce herself as a friend of our friend Morley Ricketts. Morley was not really my friend, he was Bill’s; I always felt that he regarded me as trivial and ill-educated and when he called to see us on his journeys to the remote corner of Japan in which we lived, I used to try to efface myself as effectively as his own Japanese wife, reputedly much older than he, effaced herself in Tokyo. He was an American, who had retired from what would probably have been a brilliant career in the State Department, to devote himself to the study of Japanese folk-lore and religion. He kept himself and his rapidly growing family—he always seemed vague, when I questioned him about them, as to how many children he had and what were their ages—by translating Japanese books into English and lecturing part-time at a women’s college. He was a person whom it was easier to admire than to like; but Bill certainly liked him.
We saw few foreigners and those that we did see were chiefly missionaries. The prospect of meeting one of Morley’s friends, for whom his standards were, as I myself had cause to know, cruelly exacting, therefore delighted us. Nothing so exciting had happened since we had met in a bar two American women, performing in one of the town’s many night-clubs, whom we had seen billed everywhere as ‘ The Croquette Sisters’. (It had been something of a disappointment subsequently to discover that they were, in fact, ‘The Coquette Sisters’.)
Bill found Thelma beautiful; and when I protested at that, he amended ‘Well, extremely pretty.’ As she jumped out of her taxi—her inn was only five minutes away on foot—and ran up our steps, I thought, seeing her from the sitting-room window, that she must be still in her teens. But a closer view at once proved me wrong. The heaviness with which the pale blue eyeshadow had been applied could not conceal the in-numerable small cracks around the eyes; and the hands holding together the collar of her leather jacket, the nails long and painted silver, were those of a woman far older than myself. With her soft fringe of hair, artfully trained in irregular prongs across her smooth forehead, her matching shoes and bag of crocodile, her fawn dress, entirely straight and unornamented, and above all her smell—metropolitan and western, not provincial and Japanese—she made me feel depressingly dowdy and clumsy. I think that she knew that and that it gave her a certain pleasure.
Naturally we were curious about her and as the evening progressed we took it in turns to try to extract what information we could, without seeming to probe too crudely. Bill talked of Morley and then asked ‘ Have you known him long?’
‘Well, we did this fantastic journey together through the Inland Sea. And then I told him that maybe I might come to Matsue and he said that if I did I should be sure to look you up.’
Each time she spoke, I tried to analyse the accent. The flattened vowels and the slightly adenoidal delivery suggested London origins; but the vocabulary was often transatlantic.
She went on to describe Morley as ‘ such a very dear person—so humorous and human and warm’: qualities which I myself should certainly not have ascribed to him. ‘His companionship made the trip for me,’ she added, once again giving me an entirely novel view of Morley, whom I should never have imagined putting himself out sufficiently to ‘make’ a trip for any woman, however attractive.
‘And what on earth brought you to Matsue?’ I took over from Bill. ‘So few tourists ever find their way here.’
‘Well, of course there was the connection with Lafacadio Hearn,’ she said, surprising me both that she had heard of Hearn and that she should have known that he had once lived in the town. ‘ I admire his work so much, don’t you? I don’t think that anyone since has ever written quite so well about Japan.’
Bill, who had once contributed an article about Hearn in Matsue to some American academic journal or other, was obviously impressed.
‘Then I met Professor Ishikawa on our trip. You know Professor Ishikawa, do you?’
‘I could hardly say that I know him. He often doesn’t seem to know me,’ Bill said. ‘We’ve been introduced and once when he had to make a speech in English at a medical congress he asked me to correct it for him.’
Bill had not minded not being paid for his work on this speech; after all the professor was a colleague. But on the occasions when they had subsequently met, he had resented receiving either no acknowledgement at all or merely a curt nod, as from a superior to an underling. Ishikawa was more than a professor at the university; also a member of an industrial dynasty famous in Japan, he was regarded as one of the richest men in the district. His wealth no doubt accounted, in part at least, for the arrogance of his manner.
‘He was awfully kind to me. He said that I must be sure to visit Matsue. He arranged it for me, booking me into my inn and so on. He’s a sweetie. You see, I’m a painter. And he told me that this part of the coast had some of the most beautiful scenery in Japan. But I’ve been awfully lazy since I got here. I’m afraid that I’m really an awfully lazy person.’
Throughout the evening I felt that we were being measured against Morley Ricketis and Professor Ishikawa and all the other people—members of the corps diplomatique in Tokyo, writers, painters, scholars—whom in a mere six weeks in the country she had miraculously contrived to meet although after four years in the case of Bill and two years in the case of myself they still remained, with one or two exceptions, entirely unknown to us. We were being measured; and we were being found wanting, myself even more than Bill. I was conscious of the sourness of the Japanese wine; of Tanaka-san’s habit, which I had long since given up trying to correct, of serving food on the wrong side; of the shabbiness of our little dining-room; of the way in which the cat had pulled the threads of the fabric, never in any case attractive either in texture or design, of the armchair in which Thelma had curled herself up; and above all of the cold which eventually drove her to crouch on the hearth-rug before the meagre gas-fire, with the claim that she ‘so much preferred to squat Japanese-style’.
The evening was not, I felt sure, a success and it therefore surprised me when she said, with every appearance of sincerity, when she was leaving: ‘I’ve so much enjoyed this evening. One gets lonely—doesn’t one?—with only Japanese for company, however kind they are. Do let’s meet again soon.’
‘How long will you be here?’ I asked.
‘Oh, ages and ages. I hope.’
‘Are you going to walk or take a taxi?’
Bill was putting on a coat, so whichever it was to be, he was evidently planning to accompany her.
‘I think I’ll walk,’ she answered. ‘But you don’t have to escort me.’
We had been married too short a time for me not to feel a pang of jealo
usly as the door closed behind them.
It was more than forty minutes before Bill came back.
‘You took good care not to return until I’d done almost all the washing-up.’
‘Sorry, darling.’ Bill fingered the straggling orange beard which he had started to grow soon after Christmas as a defence (so he claimed) against the cold. A week later I had mercifully persuaded him to take it off. ‘ But we passed ‘‘De Luxe’’ and she suggested our having a drink.’
‘Didn’t she have enough to drink here?’
‘She certainly puts it away, doesn’t she? Oh, I don’t think it was really the drink she wanted. She wanted to see what ‘‘De Luxe’’ was like.’
As Bill helped me to put away the things, we continued to discuss her. ‘An awful little name-dropper,’ he said: and then ‘I can’t believe she’s really much of a painter.’ When he finally remarked that she had one of the most unattractive accents he had heard for a long time, I at last began to feel less prickly.
4
We saw Thelma two or three times after that in the street. Once we went to her inn to have dinner with her, in a beautiful room overlooking the lagoon. Since—as so often in Japanese inns, however expensive—there was no cupboard in which to hang clothes, innumerable dresses were draped around the walls on coat-hangers suspended from the cornices. Thelma told us that she had also invited Professor Ishikawa but that he had been unable to come.
In return we asked her to a party we were giving for some of our students. To our surprise Thelma not merely came to this but got on extremely well with all our other guests. ‘She’s a good sport really,’ Bill said after that occasion. (He himself had been so little of a sport that as soon as the dancing had started he had retreated upstairs to his study to work on a review.)
The students, as I had hoped, asked all the questions which Bill and I had never dared to ask:
‘How old are you, please?’
‘Twenty-seven.’ (Could any of them have believed her?)
‘Please, are you university graduate?’
She shook her head. ‘Oh, lord, no. I was never brainy enough to go to a university. No, I studied at Art School.’
‘And what is your home-town?’
‘Sydney, Australia.’
‘What do you think of Japan?’
‘I just adore it.’
‘And how long will you stay here?’
‘I hope for ever.’
‘We hope so too.’
She had passed the inquisition with complete success; and in passing it she had also solved for Bill and myself some of the questions about which we had argued since her arrival.
Soon after that it was ‘Golden Week’—a string of public holidays—and knowing that if we did not go away we should be badgered incessantly by Bill’s colleagues and students, we decided that we would take ourselves off to a small seaside village where we had spent ‘Golden Week’ the year before. ‘ There’s nothing to do here,’ one of our uninvited visitors, an American lecturing at Kyoto University, had complained to us about this place; but for us that was precisely the reason why we chose it.
We had just come in from a walk along the seashore and were about to go to the Japanese bath before our dinner was brought to us in our room, when the maid arrived to announce that there was someone to see us.
It was Thelma.
‘How on earth did you find us here?’ we both of us asked simultaneously as soon as we had greeted her.
‘Oh, I had a fearful time discovering your whereabouts, you’ve no idea.’ We had, in fact, a very good idea, since we had taken every possible precaution against our whereabouts being divulged. ‘You’d think that you were the Crown Prince and Princess travelling incognito from the way that the University office carried on. First, of course, I telephoned to your house and then went round, but neither your cook nor that student who works for you would tell me where you’d gone. They must have known, didn’t they?’
Bill said, ‘Well, yes’ and I said ‘ Oh, no’ at almost the same moment. But either Thelma did not hear us or she preferred to ignore the contradiction.
‘I expect that you didn’t want to be bothered during your holiday? But I did think that they might have made an exception for me, seeing that I’m not Japanese.… Well, eventually I got on to old Professor Ishikawa and of course he got your address out of the University office in no time at all. And—me voilà.’
‘It’s flattering that you went to all that trouble to find us,’ I said, surprised by my own acidity.
‘Oh, I just longed to talk to someone to whom everything did not have to be repeated at least three times. Even Professor Ishikawa doesn’t understand awfully well, does he?’
I noticed even then that, as she ran on, exclaiming about the beauty of the village, the excellence of the dinner (it was in fact, even worse than usual) and the pleasure of being with us again, that something was worrying her. On the rare occasions when she allowed either Bill or myself to talk, I would catch on her face an expression of anxiety, one might almost have said of panic. As soon as the waitress, a peasant girl of fifteen, filled her cup with saké, Thelma would at once drain it greedily, to the amazement of the girl. Catching me eyeing her, she laughed: ‘I just adore this saké. It’s lucky that it’s so mild.’
‘Not as mild as all that,’ Bill warned.
But the astonishing thing was that, as on her first visit to us, the huge quantity of alcohol she threw back seemed to have no effect on her at all.
When, at ten o’clock—the hour when Bill and I were in the habit of going to bed—the girl came back into the room to put the Japanese mattresses down on to the floor for us, Bill had to tell her in Japanese to wait. Thelma went on talking with hysterical gaiety and continued to do so after the girl had returned twice more. On the second of these occasions Bill told the girl, who usually got up at sis o’clock, in the morning, that she had better go to bed and that we would prepare the mattresses ourselves.
At half-past eleven, I said: ‘We don’t want to get rid of you, but how exactly are you planning to return to Matsue?’
Thelma looked at her watch. ‘Oh, there’s a train at ten to twelve. That’s the last.’
‘I’ll drive you down to the station,’ Bill volunteered.
While he was gone I made up the beds on the floor and went on to do my face.
Then to my amazement I suddenly heard Thelma’s voice in the corridor outside. ‘… too awful of me to wake up the landlord. Do please tell him that I’m more sorry than I can say.’
At that she, Bill and the landlord entered the room. I did not mind the landlord seeing me with my face covered in grease, but I was annoyed that Thelma should do so.
‘Thelma’s missed the last train,’ Bill announced.
‘But it’s not even quarter to twelve. How can she have missed it?’
‘She got the times wrong.’
It was only after we had settled Thelma into the room next to ours—I had to lend her a nightdress, which she must have taken away with her, either in her bag or under her dress, since I never saw it again—that Bill, whispering so that she should not hear us through the paper-thin wall, told me what had really happened.
When the car had drawn up outside the station, he had seen at once that the gates were locked. ‘The station’s already shut,’ he said; to which Thelma replied to his astonishment ‘Yes, I know. The last train was at ten past ten.’
‘Then why on earth …?’
‘Oh, dear, it’s too embarrassing. I didn’t know how to tell you. I could have told you, but Mary—I know she doesn’t really like me or approve of me. I meant to tell you, I kept meaning to tell you throughout the evening. That’s why I drank so much. But I—I just didn’t dare.’
She then confessed that she had not paid her bill at the hotel for the last three weeks. ‘I’m waiting for a remittance,’ she explained. ‘A friend of mine in Sydney. He’s often late with it. I told them that, but they just wouldn’t believe
me. Actually, it was all rather a muddle. You see, Professor Ishikawa was awfully sweet and paid for my first two weeks—I’d never expected it, of course—and after that I just didn’t know where I stood. I mean he is awfully rich, isn’t he, and I didn’t want to offend him by going to a cheaper hotel after he’d found me that gorgeous room overlooking the lagoon. It would have seemed so rude.’
At midday when she had returned from a trip to Izumo with two of the students she had met at our house, she had found her room locked, with her luggage inside it. ‘The students were absolutely sweet, but what could they do, poor dears? We called the police—such a disagreeable man—and we spent hours, literally, going over things, and at the end of it all he told me that those loathsome people in the inn were quite within their rights and that of course they would return my things to me as soon as the bill was settled. Well, I tried to get hold of you, but when I telephoned they told me that you had gone. And, as I said, they refused to give me your address. And then I managed to get on to Professor Ishikawa. The old boy was in some kind of meeting but I said it was urgent and at last he came to the phone. Not in any too sweet a mood, I can tell you. I explained to him what had happened and I sensed at once that he was not prepared to be helpful, though it was really all his fault—basically, I mean. After all, if he’d never spoken about Matsue to me—invited me there—I’d never have dreamed of visiting such a hole. And it was he who put me in that inn—Lafacadio Hearn had stayed there, as if that meant a thing!—where the service was wretched and I had to pay an absolute fortune for everything. Why, they even charged me for my laundry! In every other Japanese inn they do that for you free.… Anyway the best thing that he could suggest was that I should get on to you. The British Empire—sorry, Commonwealth—hands across the sea, and all that kind of thing, I suppose.’
‘I knew that she was going to bring us trouble.’ I said gloomily at the end of Bill’s narration. ‘ I sensed it even that first evening when she came to dinner.’