by Francis King
The others all swim a lot, they’re in and out of the water all the day long. There’s a wonderful beach here, like a private beach, there’s never anyone else on it except for one or two fishermen. I sunbathe while the others swim. But they say that it’s ridiculous for me not to learn and so I’m making a big effort. But the waves are often huge. Anyway you can be sure that I never go out of my reach. The son of the family, a sweet boy and extremely intelligent, is trying to teach me the breast-stroke, but I’m just what the Japanese call ‘a hammer’, I sink as soon as he lets go of me. Actually he’s not much better at swimming than me!
I was sorry to hear about the bronchitis, if you could get out of the damp and smoke of England, I feel.…’
The letter ended there—presumably she had been called away to lunch or to accompany Bibi and Sasha on that last fatal swim.
‘Terribly sad,’ I said, folding up the sheet and handing it back to Bill.
‘Isn’t it?’ Bill sighed and replaced the letter in a flap inside the writing-case. ‘I suppose that Neil or I had better post it to her father. He’d like to have it, I imagine.’ He handed me another letter. ‘This one I think we’d better destroy. Don’t you?’
It was on the same kind of paper and again the address ‘Oriental, Kobe’ had been slashed. out with a thick line in green ink; but on this occasion ‘P. O. Box 987, Kobe Central Post Office’ had been substituted and the writing, though recognisably the same person’s, was smaller and less distinct, with frequent erasures, some of which had all but gone through the paper.
‘Dear Leonard,
You promised me that just as soon as you’d arrived in New York you’d write to me and either send me my ticket to join you or some cash. That was seven weeks ago and here I am stranded in Kobe, not knowing what to do or to whom to turn. I went out to see the Andersons, thinking that perhaps something had happened to you. They didn’t exactly give me the big welcome, maybe you’d put them against me, but they did tell me they’d had a postcard from you and that they’d also seen something in an American paper about one of your lectures. So I knew that you were alive and well and making money!
I never guessed, fool that I was, that you’d treat me like this. You know what a fix you put me in. I can’t go back to Sydney now, my friend is thoroughly fed up with me, he never even answered my last two letters, and Atsuhiro in Tokyo has also turned against me, for which I can thank you as well. I know you’re a great man and that I ought to have felt it was a privilege to have anything to do with you, but I don’t look at it quite like that, strange isn’t it?
I’d hate to make trouble for you of any kind, even though you’ve brought me nothing but trouble ever since that day when I was stupid enough to allow you to give me lunch on the train. But fair’s fair.
I expect to hear from you just as soon as you get this. The disadvantage of being famous is that everyone knows your address in England and your whereabouts, don’t they? I’ve already looked you up in Who’s Who. This address will find me. I’ve had to leave the Oriental Hotel for lack of cash and have no idea where I shall go now.
Write soon! You’d better.
Yours
T.’
‘And what do I do about that?’ Bill asked. He, like Nishimura and Furukawa, had been watching my face as I read.
‘Well, you can’t send it to her father, that’s certain.’
‘Who do you suppose that it was written to?’
‘Obvious. Leonard Morrish.’
This highly successful English novelist had recently been on a lecture-tour of Japan.
‘Of course! How clever of you.’ Bill took the letter from me. ‘That makes him much more human, doesn’t it?’
‘More human, yes. But not really much nicer.’
‘I can’t make out whether this is a rough draft of a letter already sent or whether she merely intended to send it. It’s an awful mess.’
Bill detests untidiness, and as he now glanced again at the letter I knew that his look of distaste was not so much for its tone, at once self-pitying and vaguely threatening, as for the blots and scratches with which it was scarred.
‘You could send it to him,’ I suggested. ‘ With a covering note.’
‘I imagine that the news of her death would cause him some relief.’
‘Looks like it, certainly!’
‘Well, that seems to be the lot.… Oh, what’s this?’ He had plunged his hand deep into another flap of the writing-case and drawn out a length of pale blue ribbon from which a number of small metallic objects dangled. He turned them over. ‘A St Christopher medal. Joan the Wad.… And this is from the shrine at Ise, isn’t it?’
Nishimura, who was still sprawled on the bed, pronounced slowly: ‘Miss Lee had many things to bring her good luck. But this proves that such superstitions are foolish. She had bad luck, since she drowned.’
‘Yes, she had bad luck,’ Bill sighed, zipping the writing-case shut.
Furukawa rose to his feet and came over to us, smiling. ‘ Finished?’ he asked in Japanese.
We nodded.
He then held out his inventory and asked Bill to sign in triplicate. Every item of clothing had been precisely enumerated, we later discovered; but fortunately the letters merely appeared as ‘1 writing-case and contents’. So we should be able to suppress that letter to Thelma’s former protector, without anyone knowing, I told myself in relief.
Furukawa produced two other documents also to be signed in triplicate. Bill asked what they were and Nishimura translated. ‘They are only formality.’ Bill signed. Then Furukawa began to bow to us, thanking us profusely for all that we had done, while we attempted to reciprocate with the same uniquely Japanese blend of self-regard and deference.
‘When are you leaving?’ Furukawa asked at the end of this performance.
We said that we were not certain.
‘Please inform me by telephone,’ he murmured to Nishimura.
We wandered out of the room into the sudden icy cool of the passage outside. I had forgotten about the open window and now sent Bill back to close it again. Furukawa gave instructions to the young policeman to load Thelma’s possessions into his car—they would, he said, be delivered to the hotel for us. When we suggested that we could easily take them in the Cadillac, he firmly replied that he would not dream of giving us so much trouble. Later I wondered if he had been afraid that someone at the villa might make off with something.
Bibi appeared on the other side of the pool. ‘Ah, there you are! I was just coming to see what had happened to you.’ Although she evidently wished to make her sudden appearance seem accidental I had the feeling, I could not say why, that she had all that time been lingering near the room, waiting for us to finish. ‘Was it all very upsetting?’
‘Less upsetting than last night,’ Bill said.
Bibi turned to Furukawa to ask if she could now send in the maid to clean out the room; to which he replied, chillingly polite, that as soon as everything had been moved out, his officer would inform either her or one of the staff.
‘You must both be dying for a drink. Or would you rather have some coffee?’ She ignored Furukawa, turning away from him as he began once again to bow and to say his thanks.
‘Ridiculous man!’ she exclaimed when at last, shoes creaking and arms held stiffly to his sides, he had made his way down the passage away from us and had disappeared from sight. ‘ I expect that you think that I was rude to him? Well, yes, I was. But that sort of petty official understands only two kinds of treatment—either you must cringe to him or you must kick him. There’s nothing in between.’
‘We didn’t cringe to him,’ Bill said with a smile, ‘and he didn’t seem to expect it from us.’
‘Of course not. You’re the Consul and his lady—or so he imagines.
But he probably was slightly disappointed that you didn’t kick him.’
‘He was awfully kind,’ I put in. ‘Not only to us but also to Nishimura.’
‘Nishimura
has your ear—that’s how he would look at it. So it would be a mistake to get across him, even though he is only a student.… I see that you don’t agree with me. Well, never mind. But take my word for it—Furukawa is not a very nice character, whatever he seems. I’ve known him for a long time. As a schoolboy he used to help to look after our boats during the vacations.’
As she spoke, she had been leading us up the stairs and into the other, smaller wing of the house.
We now entered a sitting-room, which would have been small even if it had not been cluttered with so many possessions: books along the whole of one wall; pictures crowding each other; photographs in silver frames of what I assumed to be Tsarist generals and officials in full uniform and of ample women under massive coils of hair or picture hats as wide as their alabaster shoulders; footstools worked with beads; a huge brass samovar surmounting the mantelpiece; a stuffed peacock on a perch by the window, its bedraggled tail-feathers sweeping the Turkish rug; snuff-boxes; Japanese fans; a china slipper; some Meissen figures; and a Staffordshire bust of someone who looked improbably like Charles Wesley.
Bibi seemed to enjoy our surprise. ‘This is my private sitting-room,’ she said. ‘The others are all in the other sitting-room, so I thought it would be nicer for us here. I told my brother and the architect that they could do exactly as they pleased elsewhere in the house but that in this room I wanted to have all the things I really like around me. The architect wasn’t at all pleased. He’s a fearful tyrant and he regarded this as the best room in the house—facing south and that marvellous view of the sea.… He was awfully cross, you know, because he had commissioned someone to do a huge piece—I don’t know what else to call it, just a great lump of jagged stone—for the centre of the pool, and when he was last down here he found I’d had it moved into the rock-garden and had put a fountain in in its place. However, he had the last laugh—the fountain was installed by our local builder and it never works except during the rainy season.’
As she talked she prepared for us coffee in an electric percolator.
Setting down the cups on the elaborately carved and hideous little Victorian-style table between us, she asked: ‘Have you ever been to Russia?’
We shook our heads.
‘We come from there, you know. Of course my parents had left there long before I was born. I’d love to see it. But I wonder if it would really be safe to make a visit? My brother thinks it would. Friends of ours have been there on holidays. But my father fought in Siberia—he was a general—and there was some huge price on his head. He’d never have got out alive if someone in the American military mission hadn’t helped him. It’s an exciting story.… My father’s dead now,’ she added.
‘Yes, I know,’ Bill said. ‘ He must have been a remarkable person. One’s always hearing about him.’
‘Yes, he was. Remarkable. But awfully ruthless. Which is why—thank God—my brother and I aren’t running a restaurant or teaching Russian like most of our relations.’ She laughed. ‘A foreigner in Japan has to be ruthless if he wants to make any money or keep it—even the Japanese themselves have to be ruthless.… More coffee?’ Without waiting for an answer she refilled my cup. ‘Yes, I’m nervous that my brother might take himself off to Russia. He’s obsessed with the idea.’
‘I suppose we’ll be seeing him at lunch?’ Bill said.
‘My brother?’
‘Yes.… You remember—I wanted to have a word with him.’
‘Oh, he’s gone, I’m afraid.’
‘Gone!’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’
The off hand tone was, I was convinced, a pretence: she knew well enough how we should take the news.
‘But didn’t you tell him that I had to—?’
‘Oh, yes. I told him. But he had to meet some friend who was arriving by ship in Kobe this afternoon. Or something of that kind,’ she added, as though inviting us to make up any better excuse if we could do so. ‘He left in the Aston Martin long before I was up. I wish he wouldn’t drive in that car. Having only just escaped drowning, it really does seem to be tempting providence. He’s hopeless on the roads.’
‘But this is extraordinary,’ Bill exclaimed, making no attempt to conceal his surprise and disapproval. ‘It’s quite extraordinary. It was odd enough his not coming with you to meet us last night—and not attending the service. After all, you say that Thelma was more his friend than yours. And now to go off like this.… I can’t understand it.’
‘Well, Sasha’s an odd boy. And as I say—he was terribly distressed about poor Thelma’s death.’
‘That only seems to be all the more reason for having a word with us. Didn’t he leave any message?’
Bibi shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. No. When I got back last night I went along to his room to see how he was, and he was up, writing some letters. I told him about—everything. He then said this about meeting a ship in Kobe. He left without even having any breakfast. I didn’t see him. I’m afraid that I was still asleep.… Some more coffee? No? Then shall we go for a little walk before lunch? Would that amuse you? We can have our drink down on the beach. We have a little chalet there.’
‘Extraordinary,’ Bill repeated; and then a few seconds later muttered again ‘Extraordinary.’
Bibi shrugged her shoulders and turned to me and smiled, as though inviting me to agree that if Sasha were extraordinary, then Bill was even more so.
We walked by an ugly concrete path, down through a garden in which everything looked dry and stunted in spite of the obvious attention lavished on it. Even the Japanese-style bridge which carried us across a small ravine was made of concrete to simulate bamboo, a substitution which, since the bamboos were thick on the hill behind the house, seemed to be pointless. ‘Too hot for you?’ Bibi asked and I shook my head, although in fact I was regretting that we had ever left the air-conditioned comfort of the house. Far below us and at the extreme left of the beach there were two gaudy beach-umbrellas, one purple and one green, with a group of people sprawled out under them, while a short distance away a tall, grey-haired westerner with a paunch and thin but muscular legs was playing ball with a tiny Japanese youth, the two of them sprinting back and forth across the sand with sudden incomprehensible shouts and spurts of laughter. A woman’s hand waved from under the purple umbrella and a man’s voice shouted: ‘Bibi! Hey, Bibi!’
Bibi continued to walk on, leading us in the opposite direction. ‘Let’s keep to ourselves. It’ll be more fun. People don’t think that it’s worth coming all this way for a day or a weekend and so one is stuck with them for a week at least. That’s time enough for even the dearest friend to become a bore—let alone someone like Thelma.’
Apart from the cluster on the other end of the beach—as I looked back at them, the two umbrellas were shimmering in a heat-haze which made it look as if they were about to melt away—the whole wide arc of the beach was entirely deserted except for two boys, probably eight or nine years of age, who were scouring the sand for what I assumed to be sea-shells or flotsam. Skinny, their shoulders raw from sunburn, and their legs caked with salt, they peered up at us from under the hair tangled over their foreheads, with what seemed a mingling of fear and hostility.
Bibi greeted them in Japanese and eventually they mumbled her greeting back at her.
‘A gracious couple,’ she said. ‘They’re all like that in these parts. Inbred. Suspicious of foreigners—and even of Japanese from more than twenty miles away.’
‘We’ve found the people round here so wonderfully kind and friendly,’ Bill said.
‘You surprise me,’ Bibi retorted drily.
She had been making her way towards a small hut, built in the Japanese style on stilts with a deep porch running round it and some straggly pine trees, all bent sideways by the wind, dappling its steep roof with shadow. There was a bamboo palisade enclosing a small garden, in which most of the plants seemed to be either dead or dying. Suddenly Bibi paused. In the sand outside the gate, which was pa
dlocked, someone had inscribed five huge characters. Bibi looked at them for a while; then she walked over to them and scuffed them with her feet until they were obliterated, her face, which until that moment had been good-humoured and relaxed, all at once setting into a number of grim lines. ‘ Do you read Japanese?’ she asked us. We felt that if we had replied that we did, she would have been even angrier.
‘What does it say?’ Bill asked.
‘Oh, just some childish abuse. I told you they were not very friendly people round here. I expect it was the handiwork of those two urchins we passed.’
She took a bunch of keys out of her bag and inserted one in the lock, twisting it irritably when at first it would not open. ‘ Now for a drink,’ she said. ‘I need it after that walk.’
The chalet was surprisingly cool. It consisted of a single large room, containing a bed, a bamboo table, several chairs and a television set. On one side there was a kitchen and on the other a lavatory and shower. Bibi, assisted by Nishimura, fetched from the huge refrigerator in the kitchen bottles of the iced Sapporo beer for which we had asked.
Having given us our drinks, she opened a closet and pulled out an assortment of bathing-costumes, trunks and towels. ‘We’ve an excellent selection—all sizes, all colours. Take your choice.’
‘Oh, I don’t think I shall bathe, thank you.’ As I reclined almost full length in a bamboo chair and gazed out at the glittering curve of the sea under the, curiously dull Japanese sky, I had been wondering to myself where exactly it had been that the sudden tidal wave had caught poor Thelma; where she had struggled briefly to save herself; and where, hours later, the fishermen had dragged her off the jagged rocks, her face cruelly lacerated as I had seen it the day before and continued to see it in my memory with sudden intermittent jolts of nausea. It seemed to me astonishing that Bibi should even suggest bathing so soon after the tragedy.