by Francis King
‘One can’t help feeling sorry for her,’ Bill said. Bill can never help feeling sorry for anyone; which may, I sometimes think in my gloomier moments, be the chief reason why I succeeded in persuading him to marry me.
The next morning Thelma was subdued. She had no doubt been asking herself the question which we had been asking each other: what were we to do with her? Since she obviously, and rightly, regarded Bill as more likely to be sympathetic than myself, she waited until I had left our bedroom, in which we had all just been served breakfast of rice, pickles and dried fish, before she brought up the problem of her future.
When I returned, I realised that, in my brief absence, a decision had been reached. ‘ Thelma has decided to go to Kobe,’ Bill announced; and went on to explain that she had a number of friends there who would be able to offer her hosipitality and lend her money until her remittance arrived. ‘Ghastly people,’ Thelma put in. ‘All members of the business community. But at least they have comfortable western-style houses and money to waste.’ Unlike ourselves, I added to myself. ‘ She’s going to see if Professor Ishikawa can help her get her things out of the hotel,’ Bill went on. ‘Some of them, anyway.’ ‘ My make-up, at least,’ Thelma interrupted. ‘ I’m going to lend her some money for her fare—and so on,’ Bill concluded.
That ‘and so on’ was ominous, and it took me some time to extract from Bill exactly what he had meant by it. Then I learned that he had given her money not merely for her journey back to Matsue, but also to leave a deposit at her inn and to pay for her travelling expenses to Kobe.
‘Well, I had to get rid of her somehow,’ he countered when the full force of my indignation hit him. ‘What else could I do? You certainly didn’t want her to spend the rest of Golden Week here with us. Did you?’
‘That’s fine. That really is fine. Now it looks as if we won’t have enough money to pay for our stay here.’
Predictably, we neither saw Thelma nor heard from her again; so that, to make up the money lost by Bill’s trustingness and generosity, I had to give classes in English at what was called ‘The Matsue University of Dressmaking and Domestic Science’ for the whole of the next term.
5
Soon after our return, Professor Ishikawa called to see us.
For a man reputedly so rich, he dressed with a dispiriting drabness and shabbiness; and yet again I wondered why he went everywhere on foot, swinging a battered brief-case beside him, when one of his family’s chief holdings was in the rapidly booming motor industry.
Evidently he held us to blame for everything that Thelma had done during her stay. ‘It is your responsibility’ was a phrase which he used repeatedly until I demanded ‘But Professor Ishikawa, why is it our responsibility?’ He then looked at me in amazement: ‘She is English lady, you are British Council.’ Since he had recommended her to the inn, he was, according to the Japanese code, himself responsible for her debts there, the majority of which were still outstanding. But obviously he was hoping to shift this responsibility over to us as well. When we made it clear that we were not prepared to accept it, he became even more disagreeable. ‘I do not understand how your country allows such people to travel,’ he exclaimed crossly, banging his brief-case against his knee. ‘This lady is not a respectable lady at all. I hear at inn that she has many visitors—gentlemen visitors late at night.… I cannot understand why she has no money,’ he added.
I remembered at that point how Thelma had said, when we were discussing her predicament just before her departure: ‘If only I could meet some really rich man! Not another Ishikawa of course.’ At the time I had assumed that she was joking.
6
And now she was dead. Drowned. (The mosquito was somewhere near my left ear, its whine becoming more and more menacing. Bill had started to snore: not as loudly as Nishimura in the car, but loud enough.) Poor Thelma. Before she had gone back to Matsue we had suggested a swim to her, but she had declined: ‘No, I really hate the water. I must be one of the few Australians who can hardly swim a stroke. And besides, if I ruin my make-up and hair how on earth am I going to get them fixed again?’ I had hated her for her lies about Morley Ricketts, who, when we had mentioned her to him had first said ‘Who?’ and had then exclaimed ‘My God, that woman! She never gave me a moment’s peace on the ship, from the time she pranced up to rae at the quay in Kobe to ask me to translate for her, to my giving her the slip in Takamatsu’; for her obvious, if understandable preference for Bill over me; and for the ease with which she had extracted from him (everyone’s sucker) the money which I had then had to earn by another six hours of teaching each week. But now I was overcome by sadness and even by remorse. Remorse? But I had done nothing with which to reproach myself.
I suppose that the dead, however unworthy, make one feel like that. One is guilty merely by virtue of being alive.
7
It must have been after three o’clock when I at last fell asleep; and as soon as that had happened, it seemed as if I were at once woken up again by the ringing of the telephone. I lay with a hand over my eyes to shield them from the shaft of sunlight which each morning pierced through a crack in the blind, and prayed that the ringing would stop. But it didn’t. Obviously Nishimura was still asleep and Tanaka-san had not yet arrived. I looked at my watch. It was twenty to nine. Then I struggled out of bed, my mouth tasting vaguely metallic and my temples throbbing, and tottered downstairs.
‘Is that you, Mary?’
‘Yes. Who is it?’
‘Neil—Neil Waters. I can’t hear you very clearly. Did I get you out of bed?’
‘No, oh no. I’m sorry I took so long to answer. I was in the garden.’
‘I can’t hear. Try to speak a little louder, old girl, would you?’
‘I was in the garden,’ I croaked.
‘Oh, in the garden. Fine.… Well, what I wanted was a word with the old man. Is he there?’
I knew that to get Bill out of bed and on to the telephone would take me at least five minutes. ‘I’m afraid he’s gone out,’ I lied. ‘He—he has this early morning class.’
‘Hell!’
‘Maybe I could take a message?’
He seemed dubious about that but at last he agreed. It was about the drowned Englishwoman, he explained—perhaps we had heard about her? The police had got on to him at seven-thirty that morning and had demanded that someone from the consulate should come to Abekawa at once. Apart from the distance—the journey would take the best part of the day by train—the trouble was that there was no one free to send. Forster-Brown was on leave, Yonemura was ill with dysentery, and he himself had what he called ‘a visiting fireman’ on his hands. ‘Frankly I don’t see how we can do it. Not for a day or two at any rate. Of course in cases like this, it’s the friends of the deceased who are supposed to deal with things. We only get called in as a last resort. Since the poor woman was apparently staying there with a party of foreigners, I really can’t make out why we should be bothered at all. All very odd. But there it is. Now what I wanted to ask your old man was whether possibly.…’
But I had known all along what he had wanted to ask Bill.
‘We only got back from our summer-school late last night,’ I protested, when I could finally get in a word. ‘We had a gruelling journey. Poor Bill is badly in need of a rest. I don’t honestly know—’
‘Of course I realise that this is not strictly your pigeon. But Abekawa is only sixty miles away from you—whereas it’s more than two hundred from here. You’ve always been so awfully good about this kind of thing in the past. Otherwise I’d never have asked you in the first place.’
He went on for some time with the same kind of flattery, before he said: ‘There’s really jolly little you have to do, in any case. One snag is the disposal of the—the body. It seems that this Miss Lee, or Mrs Lee—I’m not too clear about that, we have no record of her on our files—was a Roman Catholic. The police seem to have found that out, as well as the address of her father in—in—yes, I have i
t here—in Pinner. Well, I’m sending off a signal at once to the F. O. asking them to arrange for someone to break the news to the old boy and to get his permission for her to be cremated. If she has to be buried, it may cause no end of a bother in a small place like that, don’t you think? Well, as soon as I get the all-clear, I’ll send a telegram to you, care of the police-station in Abekawa—or I might even try to telephone. Got that? Or you could telephone to me, any time after six this evening at the house. We have a party for Sir Miles—more than a hundred guests—so we’ll certainly be in.’
He had obviously already assumed that we would meekly agree to go.
Ignoring anything that I might have to say to the contrary, he then went on to reassure me that we need not, of course, worry about expenditure—‘Just charge it all up and I’ll see that H.M.G. reimburses you.’
‘Well. I’ll have to see what Bill has to say about it all when he gets back.’
‘That’s a good girl. We’ll keep in touch. I’ll be in and out of the office all morning with Sir Miles. But as I said, you can always get us at home in the evening. All right?’
‘If Bill decides that he can’t do it, then we’ll ring you as soon as we can, so that you—’
‘Fine, fine.… What’s that, darling?’ I could hear him talking to someone else, presumably his wife. ‘Just coming … Aileen’s in a flap because I’ve still not had my breakfast and I’m supposed to be picking up Sir Miles at half-past nine. Let him wait, I say.’ But I knew from my seven months as Neil’s secretary that he would do nothing so foolish. ‘And how’s your good self?’
‘Oh, all right.’ At that moment I felt ghastly.
‘You must both come and stay with us soon. Just as soon as we get this official visit out of the way.’ He had been saying that Bill and I should come and stay with them soon ever since he had been unable to attend our wedding because it was the Ethiopian National Day.
‘Thank you. We’d like that.… Well, I’ll give your message about the Abekawa business to Bill.’ Suddenly I remembered that I had still not told him that I thought that the name of the drowned woman was not Lee but Read. But as I said ‘Oh, just one more thing, Neil,’ he rung off with a cheery ‘ Well, best wishes to the old man. See you soon.’
8
The old man was in a bad temper: even worse than mine. He battered the top of his egg and then began to bawl ‘ Tanaka-san, Tanaka-san’ as the stench of sulphur reached us both. Tanaka-san removed the egg with an expression which suggested that foreign men were fussy to the point of effeminacy. ‘ Where did that egg come from?’ Bill demanded.
‘Please?’
I repeated the question for him.
‘From refrigerator.’
‘And how long had it been in the refrigerator?’ Bill asked, this time in Japanese.
‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘Okusan’—this was myself—‘ put it there.’
Evidently the egg was a survivor from before our departure for the summer-school.
Bill shook some soggy cornflakes out of their packet so that most of them showered on to the floor. ‘ Blast! … It’s time they realised that I’m neither a member of the British Council nor of the Consulate staff. A subsidy of two hundred a year really doesn’t justify them in assuming otherwise.’
‘None of the other lecturers are imposed on in the same way, I’m sure of that. It’s because you allow yourself to be imposed on. Why, for example, should we have been expected to give a party for Dr McAndrews to meet all the Lafacadio Hearn scholars—?’
‘Oh, I quite enjoyed that.’
‘But it set us back twenty pounds at least. And that ghastly B.B.C. man who wanted to film the local potters at work—what had that to do with us? He never even wrote us a rice-and-pickle letter after those nine days he ate us out of house and home.’
‘Do you remember that Canadian who wanted me to marry him to a bar-girl from ‘‘Den-En”?’
‘You ought to have done it—and charged him a whacking fee. Think how grateful he’d have been five years later to discover he wasn’t married at all.’
‘Anyway, if it is poor old Thelma—and I hope to God it isn’t—then what is it to do with the British anyway? She’s Australian—was Australian,’ he corrected himself.
‘I told Neil that but he said it didn’t matter, ‘‘They’re all part of my flock’’ he said. Have you noticed how he likes to speak in ecclesiastical terms?—he also said that Abekawa was ‘‘in his parish.’’ But what’s odd is that according to him the police found the girl’s passport and it was British—English. And, oh, yes, they also found an address for her father—in Pinner, I think Neil said.’
‘I don’t believe it was Thelma at all.’
‘I do. I have a hunch about it. She was such a liar that discrepancies like that mean nothing at all. And you know how easy it is to mistake Japanese r’s and l’s.’
‘Poor Thelma. If it is Thelma. I suppose that that’s one reason for goihg.’
‘Oh, Bill, no!’
‘I don’t care a damn about Neil. But when I think of her.… She was not really a bad sort. And someone who knew her—however, slightly—ought to be present to identify her and—and attend her funeral. Don’t you think?’
‘No, I don’t. She was there with friends and they must be capable—’
‘Well, evidently they’re not. Otherwise the police wouldn’t have got on to us and the Consulate.’
‘But there’s so much for us to do here. And you’re tired, dead tired. And honestly I can’t face another Journey like yesterday’s quite so soon.’
‘I could go alone. And I needn’t take the car.’
I knew already that he had made up his mind to go. Bill has always been over-conscientious—when there were strikes at the University, instead of agreeing to go away for a holiday, he would each morning insist an appearing in his empty lecture-room, explaining to me patiently ‘But darling, it’s the students who are on strike—not the teachers.’ And if he decided to go then I should have to go with him. At that period we had still never spent a night apart since our marriage.
We called Nishimura, who was having his Japanese-style breakfast with Tanaka-san in the kitchen, and told him to look up trains to Abekawa in the time-table. Half-an-hour later he was still at work, a large sheet of paper on the table before him, covered with figures and Japanese characters. ‘What’s the matter? Is it so difficult?’ But it was always difficult, whoever the Japanese consulting the time-table on our behalf.
Nishimura began to explain. We were already too late to take the one through train of the day; if it had been Saturday we could have taken another through train at 13.07; there was a train in the evening which involved only one change but it would get us in shortly after two in the morning; there was another train he was still not sure about, but he thought that if we changed twice we could probably.…
Since the distance was only sixty miles, we eventually persuaded each other that there was nothing for it but to travel once again by car. We therefore despatched Nishimura to the garage to see if the lights could be fixed, and to have the tyres and oil checked and the petrol-tank filled.
Secretly each of us, without admitting it to the other, preferred the exciting uncertainties of travel in the battered old Cadillac to the dull certainties of a journey by rail. Most of the memorable things which had happened to us in Japan had happened by the roadside or in out of the way villages when we had been obliged to stop for repairs.
Chapter Two
I
As though remorseful for its conduct the day before, from now on the car behaved impeccably. The faulty connection—a matter of one of the leads to the battery—had easily been fixed; and we had decided to commit the extravagance of buying a retread to replace the worst of the tyres. Nishimura had not had time to clean the body and I knew that that upset him: if we arrived at Abekawa with the car in that condition, spattered with mud and even the windscreen streaked with it, the loss of face would be grea
t. If the car were not so large, he explained, it would not matter so much. I could see his point: a dirty adult is far more repellent than a dirty child.
It was late in the afternoon when, having bumped over unmade roads for more than three hours, we eventually decided to stop for a swim. The road was skirting a wide, shallow bay, deserted except for a single shack at one end of it, from which we could hear, but not see, a dog barking at us. I changed into my bathing things in the back of the car—a Cadillac is one of the few vehicles in which one can do that with no discomfort—while Bill changed on the beach. Nishimura wandered away for almost a quarter of a mile, dragging a towel behind him, in his search for a bush, behind which to hide Since, when he went to the Japanese bath, he thought nothing of revealing himself entirely to strangers, and since in any case what he called his ‘brief’ was, unlike a barrister’s, minuscule, I often wondered what taboo impelled him to take so much trouble.
Bill and I had been in the water for a long time, floating idly beside each other with our eyes closed against the glare, when suddenly the boy came thrashing out towards us. He was usually so solemn that it was impossible to believe that he was only nineteen; but as soon as he entered the water, the hard casing of obligations and conventions seemed to loosen and slip from him like a chrysalis and briefly he felt free. At such times, though usually so respectful towards us both, he would swim under water and terrify me by pretending to be an octupus or shark; or he would duck Bill, who would gamely try to take something which he in fact both dreaded and loathed, as the joke the boy intended. ‘Watch me! Watch me!’ he would shout, clapping his hands together; and he would then perform some trick for us—diving off a rock, or bringing a shell up from the bed of the sea, or executing a series of somersaults. It was at such moments that one realised the kind of person he might have been in a society less restricted and restricting; gay, irresponsible, reckless in his physical courage and compelling in his physical beauty.