by Francis King
Nishimura left the water long before we did; it was so warm that there seemed no reason—except that the police at Abekawa had been told to expect us—to leave it until darkness fell. Usually it was we who preceded him. Then we saw that he was dressed and that he was setting off with the bucket which we kept in the trunk of the car to the shack at the other end of the beach, above which an iron pipe, sticking out of the hillside, dribbled water into a stone basin. ‘I suppose we’re out of water again,’ Bill said. ‘I hope the radiator isn’t leaking.’ But we eventually realised that Nishimura was planning to wash the car.
‘No need to do that now!’ Bill shouted, waving his arms. ‘It’ll only get dirty again. Don’t worry!’
But Nishimura merely shook his head and went on with the washing.
‘He’s really rather a wonderful boy,’ Bill said.
I agreed; and yet I could not help feeling a certain irrational annoyance with Nishimura for being so wonderful.
2
As soon as we entered the peninsula, more than a dozen miles in length, at the tip of which iay the little town of Abekawa, like a grubby nail at the end of a squat finger, the road narrowed and became almost impassable. In spite of the size of the car and the excellence of its springs we found ourselves being thrown from side to side, while the dust, although it could not get inside the closed windows—the Cadillac was air-conditioned—almost entirely obscured the view. Every so often a cloud of dust in front would indicate the coming of another vehicle; sometimes it was merely a three-wheeler, so popular in Japan, or a scooter, sometimes it was a local bus, a truck or a small private car, rocking perilously from rut to rut and pot-hole to pot-hole. In the latter case one or other of us had to pull up on the grass verge or, where the road hugged the cliff, back for several yards.
‘Bill, I think you’d better stop. There’s a policeman trying to catch up with us. At least, I think he’s a policeman.’
I had become aware, through the haze of dust, that a man in crash-helmet and goggles and with a bright green scarf tied over the bottom half of his face, was bouncing beside us like an outsize, malevolent frog.
Bill braked where the road had a momentary swelling in it; and at once the malevolent frog turned into a youth about the same age as Nishimura, who explained, his lips white with dust in spite of the scarf which he now drew off, that he had been sent to escort us to the police-station. He had been waiting, he said, by the roadside since just after midday; but when we apologised for this, he grinned and said that it had not mattered—it had been cool under the trees.
We moved off, with the boy wobbling now beside us when the road was wide enough, and now in front.
We crossed a hump-backed bridge over a stagnant stream, its surface like green baize, almost scraping one side of the car against its wooden parapet, and then crawled down one of those narrow Japanese streets in which everyone behaves as if the only traffic in it were the rickshaws and horse-drawn carriages for which it was once designed. A knowing schoolboy, whom one would have guessed to be eight in the West but who was probably at least fifteen, called out ‘Cadillac!’ A number of people stopped in their tracks and stared.
The police-station was housed in what looked like a Swiss chalet, with a concrete porch attached to it. On one side was the newly-built town-hall, an impressive example of modern Japanese architecture of which, I now remembered, I had seen a photograph somewhere; on the other a shop devoted to the sale of traditional Japanese medicines, with a window full of dead snakes, either lying desiccated in bowls or curled up like embryos in jars of greenish fluid, fantastically twisted roots, a wasps’ nest preserved in its entirety, and some live salamanders in a huge, cloudy tank.
‘Come, hurry, darling!’ Bill called when I halted to view the shop window. ‘Come!’
Nishimura said: ‘ In Japan there is still great ignorance.’
‘Oh, I expect that quite as many people are cured by drugs of this kind as by antibiotics.’
‘Please?’
A middle-aged police officer received us in an inner study. Unaware that we could both understand and speak Japanese, however imperfectly, he insisted on addressing all his questions to Nishimura, while another policeman, as young as our guide on the motor-cycle, set before us cups of weak Nescafé and cakes the filling of which, an ochre cream-like substance, tasted vaguely of paraffin. Politeness demanded that the officer should not at once touch on the subject of the death, and so for a quarter of an hour we discussed how long we had been in Japan, the beauties of Kyoto and Nara and the differences between western and Japanese food.
At last the officer came to the point by asking Nishimura whether we had ever known ‘ Miss Lee’.
‘Miss Read,’ I corrected.
‘Yes, Miss Lee,’ Nishimura said and the officer nodded his head and got up and opened a cabinet from which he took a passport. For a few seconds he turned the pages, as though to make sure that it did not contain anything which we ought not to see; then he handed it to Bill. Knowing that I was behaving as no Japanese wife would behave—a Japanese wife would, in any case, have waited either in the car or in the police-station entrance—I looked over his shoulder. ‘ Yes, it’s Thelma,’ Bill said. The photograph was unmistakable, even though when it had been taken her hair had been blonde and her eyebrows no more than two gracefully pencilled arcs. ‘Poor thing.’
‘1923,’ I said. ‘I thought that she was nearer forty than thirty.’ But I felt mean in having discovered that secret.
‘She’s British all right.’
With the exasperating meticulousness of the Japanese, refusing ever to be hurried from one point which we had long since grasped to another which we had also grasped in anticipation, the officer kept us there for the best part of an hour. From time to time he would write laboriously in a file, which he managed to prevent us seeing by the device of holding close above it a sheet of blotting-paper, swiftly lowered each time his pen came to a halt.
Probably we should have been there even longer if a woman had not suddenly walked in. Our guide—who had presumably been sent to fetch her—clumped in behind her.
She was tall and strikingly handsome, with a high-bridged nose and green eyes set slightly too close together in a face which, like her bare legs and arms, had been burned to a marvellous shade of brown by the sun.
‘I’m Bibi Akulov,’ she said, ignoring the officer. She held out a hand first to Bill and then, coming round the desk, to me. ‘Was the journey hell?’
I knew the name Akulov: most of the make-up which I used—except when former colleagues bought for me Elizabeth Arden or Helena Rubinstein products from the Embassy shop—was manufactured in Japan by the Akulov company. They were a White Russian family, a huge clan, almost unique in having stayed in Japan after their flight from Siberia, survived both wars and made and retained a fortune for themselves.
The officer got to his feet, carefully placed the sheet of blotting-paper over the file, and then gave her a bow. It was not as low a bow as he had given to us by several inches; in fact, it was more a jerk of the head than a bow and, discussing it later, Bill and I decided that its perfunctoriness would have revealed clearly to anyone who had lived for any length of time in Japan that the officer was displeased.
In her turn, Bibi Akulov ignored the officer, continuing to question us about our journey: the road we had taken, where we had had lunch, at what time we had started off.
In the middle of all this the officer resumed his seat and again began to write, his tongue peeping out of his small mouth, and his head tilted now to the right and now the left.
‘I suppose that he’s been putting you through all that nonsense for hours. Name of father, name of mother, date of birth, place of education. God!’ She had a harsh, loud voice, which seemed even harsher and louder after the voices of the officer and Nishimura, both of which were soft and musical. She was leaning against the table, on which she had already thrown down her white linen bag in such a way that the officer had h
ad to move it in order to have access to his ink-well.
‘It’s a mystery to me how this marvellous industrial civilisation of which we are always hearing actually works. But it does, it certainly does.’ Like many other western families who had made their homes in Japan, I could see that the Akulovs still regarded themselves as aliens. ‘Where are you staying?’ she asked.
We explained that the officer had booked us into an inn called the Tawaraya.
‘I don’t know why I asked you, it’s the only inn in the place—the only respectable one. Two of our friends are in a maison de passe. Comfortable and much cheaper. They’re women teachers so, even though they are American, they have to save money.… Have you eaten?’
‘Not yet,’ I replied.
‘I’d ask you back to the house but, you know, its almost ten miles from here and I’m sure both of you are tired after that horrific journey.’ Her English, though excellent—we learned later that she had been educated at an international school in Switzerland—nonetheless had a slight foreignness about it. ‘Shall we go and have a drink?’
‘Yes, if he’s finished with us here,’ Bill said. ‘I can’t really understand how it happened—the drowning, I mean. He seems puzzled by it himself. As far as I can gather, she was not even out of her depth—’
‘I’ve told him all the details and so has my brother. But his stupidity is really something out of this world.’ She talked as if the officer were not in the room. ‘Did you know her, by the way?’
The casualness of her tone, so different from that of the officer—who was obviously both upset and reluctant to upset us—shocked me.
‘Slightly,’ I said. ‘She spent a short while in Matsue.’
‘Was that when she was trying to get her claws into old Ishikawa? She told us about that. He’s far too shrewd an old bird.’ She gave her curiously raw laugh. Bill scowled; I could see that he was beginning to take against her, as I was myself.
The officer now looked up, his narrowed eyes on her face as his hand went out with his pen to the ink-well. Turning to address him in Japanese, she asked if he had finished with us. When he had replied, she translated back to us: ‘He says that of course you can go to the inn now. But he will have to see you again. There’s the question of the identification. And her belongings—at present he has them under guard at our house. And then, of course, the cremation—or burial, whatever it is to be.’
‘Identification?’ Bill was obviously appalled. ‘But surely the body must have been identified by now? Why should we have to identify it?’
Stopping to scratch one of her bare legs, she mumbled ‘I refused to identify her. It’s—it’s not my kind of thing. And Sasha—my brother—also felt squeamish about it. He’s not well in any case,’ she added. ‘He has a bad migraine. He suffers from them a lot.… But he took a look at her when the fishermen dragged her out of the water and I—I had a glimpse too. There was no doubt it was her. Some of the fishermen had seen her and they confirmed it—in spite of—of the condition of the face.’ Her lips curled outwards as though she had tasted something bitter. ‘There’s no reason really why anyone should look at her again, there’s no doubt about it, no doubt at all. But I suppose he feels that she’s not officially dead until the British Consul says she is.’
‘I’m not the Consul,’ Bill said. ‘ Wasn’t that explained to you? Someone rang up and told the police I was coming in the place of Mr Waters.’
‘Oh, how amusing! And I was under the impression I was talking to Mr Waters and his wife. I met him once but I’d completely lost all recollection of him. He’s not exactly the sort of person one remembers.… Then who are you?’
We explained.
‘Does Furukawa-san—’ she tossed her head in the direction of the officer—‘know all this?’
‘Of course.’
‘And he doesn’t mind?’
‘I don’t think so. I hope not,’ Bill said.
Eventually, having told the officer that we should be back within the hour, Bibi Akulov guided us on foot to the inn, while Nishimura brought our luggage over in the car.
‘Mrs Akulov,’ Bill began, as we emerged into the raging sunlight.
‘Miss Akulov,’ she corrected.
‘Miss Akulov. Sorry.… I’ve been wondering—can you perhaps—can you add to anything to what he’s told us about the way that Thelma Read died?’
‘Let’s wait until we’ve got you settled into the inn, shall we?’
When at last we were all seated on the floor around a low, oblong, lacquer table, chipped and covered with innumerable cigarette burns, while the maid poured us out cups of Japanese tea, Bill resumed again: ‘Now, Miss Akulov.…’
‘Yes. I’d better tell you our side of it.’ She sipped at her tea; it was the first time that I had realised that there might be two sides. ‘Well, let’s see now. It was the afternoon before last—though God knows it now seems much farther away than that. We’d all had lunch—we had some guests up at the house, the American teachers I mentioned to you before, and—and an American photographer and his Japanese assistant—and Thelma—and of course my brother, my brother Sasha. After lunch the others decided to sleep. We dragged some futons out on the verandah before the house—you must see the house tomorrow, you’ll want to go over her things anyway, won’t you? I really believe Furukawa-san thinks that we might pinch something.… Anyway three of us—Sasha, Thelma and I—went down to the beach to swim. We didn’t swim in front of the house—we seldom do, unless we’re in a hurry, because the water tends to get dirty and there are some nasty rocks. Thelma was a rotten swimmer and she didn’t enjoy it much in any case. But she said that she had had a headache all day and the large lunch had made it worse. Perhaps the truth was that she didn’t want to let Sasha alone with me. She seemed terrified of letting him out of her sight.’ She gave her raw laugh. ‘Sasha’s not much of a swimmer either. When you see him in the water, you’ll realise that. It’s odd because he really loves swimming. I suppose he took it up too late—you see, he once had rheumatic fever and for years was forbidden to bathe.… Well, you’ve probably often swum in the Japan Sea, you know what it’s like. There’s a perfectly calm sea and then all at once a huge wave sweeps in.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We nearly lost someone at the summer-school like that. An old woman. Nishimura saved her.’
‘Nishimura?’
I indicated the boy, who was seated apart from us in a corner, his back against the wall. Busy picking some dry skin off the sole of one of his feet, he was paying no attention to us.
‘Oh, I see. Him. Well, there we all were swimming—in our depth, it’s difficult to get out of your depth in that bay—when all of a sudden I saw this huge wave bearing down on us. I shouted to warn both Thelma and Sasha. I’m a pretty good swimmer myself, that kind of thing never worries me. But I guessed they might panic. As they did. I got hold of Thelma and brought her in—close enough to the shore as I thought. And then I went after Sasha. By the time I’d got him to safety—a matter of thirty seconds, I suppose—Thelma had completely disappeared. Completely. Sasha was quite done in, poor thing, but I swam for ages under water looking for her. Not a sign. Eventually the two of us ran across to the huts of some fishermen—unfortunately there was not another soul on the beach—and got them to drag down one of their boats and help in the search. Hours later—by then it was almost evening and the whole town had joined in the search—they spotted her out on a line of rocks, miles and miles away. Well, at least two hundred yards. She’d been flung against them repeatedly—by then the sea was pretty rough—and her face.…’ She stopped and again her lips curled outwards: she picked up her cup of tea and gulped at it. ‘But there was no doubt that it was her. No doubt at all.’
‘Horrible,’ I said.
‘Yes, it wasn’t awfully nice, not really.… Then, of course, Furukawa-san had to get in on the act—so little that’s exciting ever happens here, you can hardly blame him. It seemed best to get on to the Consulate. I ad
vised him to do that.’
‘He seemed to imply,’ Bill said slowly, ‘ both on the telephone and just now when we were talking to him, that all of you were—how shall I put it?—well—eager to wash your hands of the whole business.’
Bibi Akulov thought, staring down into her raised cup with her large green eyes, eyebrows drawn together. ‘ I don’t think that’s quite fair,’ she said at last. ‘Sasha—who knew her best of us—was terribly cut up. This migraine of his started almost at once. But even he didn’t know her all that well—in fact, hardly knew her at all.’
‘Nonetheless—she was your guest,’ Bill pursued, staring at her so intently that there was a moment when I thought that she was about to lose her temper.
‘Yes. She was our guest. If you can call someone a guest who dumps herself on you and refuses to be dislodged.’
There was a long silence.
Then: ‘What more did that idiot expect us to do?’ She suddenly demanded.
‘I don’t know,’ Bill said.
‘It’s the responsibility of the Consulate,’ she said. ‘The British Consulate. That’s what they’re there for, that’s their job. It was kind of you to agree to come, but one of them should be here. It’s not as if you have any official position, is it? Oh, I know what all those Consular and Embassy people are like. They imagine that their only duty is to give lavish parties for each other.’
Bill and I had often enough made the same accusation, but now it angered us.
Bill said coldly: ‘The Consulate usually only acts when a person has no friends.’
‘Well, we were not her friends.’
‘Then how did she come to be with you?’ Bill pursued.
‘How did she come to be with us? Because one afternoon a taxi drew up outside the house and there she was, with a hat-box, five suitcases and two umbrellas.… Oh, my brother met her in a bar in Kobe. God knows what she was doing there, but I can make a good guess. God knows what he was doing there for the matter of that. Sasha was with an Australian friend, I gather, and when Thelma heard this Australian talk she used it as an excuse for coming over and saying that she had lived in Sydney for some years. It seems some wealthy Australian kept her there—well, not really an Australian, a Polish immigrant who made an enormous fortune. You must have heard the story?’