by Francis King
‘It’s wonderfully calm. That tidal wave was only a freak.’
I clutched the misty glass in my hand, shaking my head. ‘I feel too lazy.’
‘But you seem such an energetic person. I’ve never seen anyone who walked with quite such a spring in this heat.’ She turned to Bill. ‘ You’ll join me anyway, won’t you?’
‘I couldn’t possibly swim here after what happened so recently, I’m afraid.’
‘And how long an interval would have to pass before you could swim here?’ She gave a brief laugh. ‘It’s the same sea wherever you go. And people are drowned in it hourly.’
‘Yes, I know. It’s not a rational feeling at all.’
‘But you—unlike your wife—seem such an entirely rational person.… So I must swim alone. Unless, of course, Nishimura-san will accompany me. What about it, Nishimura-san? Will you swim with me?’
‘Yes, I will swim.’
‘Good!’
She picked up one of the costumes and disappeared into the room containing the lavatory and shower. Bill and I exchanged glances; we did not dare to say anything, even in a whisper, knowing how in a wooden Japanese house every sound, however faint, is transmitted and even magnified.
Bibi reappeared, pulling on a bathing-cap. ‘ Your turn, Nishimura-san. Take any slip which suits you.’
Bill was staring at her with obvious admiration for the beauty of her figure; but I did not feel the expected pang of jealousy, since I myself was also staring. Her hips were as slender as Nishimura-san’s and her skin, though her tan was golden and his was mahogany, had the same extraordinary sheen, as though recently rubbed with oil. The breasts were small, round and uptilted, the shoulders voluptuously curved, with freckles lightly sprinkled over them. She threw herself down in a deck-chair on the porch as she waited for the boy—the paper shoji were drawn back so that the room and the porch were one—and stared up into the glare of the sky without a quiver of the eyelids. When Nishimura appeared, in a flamboyant orange slip, she appraised him coolly:
‘Isn’t it odd how western men look better the more clothes they have on—whereas Japanese men improve as they take them off? This boy has quite a physique. But one would never suspect it when he is dressed.’ She spoke about Nishimura as though about a dog or a horse; the boy began to blush. ‘Come,’ she said to him: ‘I’ll race you to the sea.’
‘Please?’
She repeated the invitation in Japanese and then at once shot off. Even if she had not had the unfair start, I felt that she still might have been the first.
‘What a splendid couple they make,’ I sighed.
‘Splendid but rather gruesome. Or do you think that we are being unnecessarily squeamish?’
I shook my head. ‘How can she?’ I said.
‘Pretty tough.’
She and Nishimura were now swimming far, far out, both of them doing the crawl. Then all at once I realised what was their destination. They were making for a group of rocks, sticking up like the rusty links of a huge, half-submerged anchor-chain at one side of the bay. Probably they were having another race.
On this occasion it was Nishimura who was the first, heaving himself up on to the largest of the rocks and squatting there, his chin in his hand. Bibi joined him a few seconds later.
‘You know, Mary. I do believe that that must be where.…’
‘Yes, it must be. Where else? … How can they?’
Possibly, I thought, fragments of her skin were still clinging to the rocks against which her body had been hurled repeatedly. It was a morbid idea, but I could not put it from me.
Nishimura stood up; then he dived. Of course he would be showing off to Bibi; he was proud of his diving and at the summer-school we had become bored with his habit of clapping his hands before executing some particularly spectacular figure. Bibi also rose; then her body followed his, flashing into the water.
Almost simultaneously, as though the sound was connected with that distant impact, we both started at the report of some object—a stone or a branch—exploding against the side of the chalet with a force so violent that one of the wooden shutters, held upwards on diagonal struts of metals, slammed downwards in a cloud of dust.
‘What was that?’
As I asked this, a figure, half-human and half-animal, appeared almost on all fours from behind a mound of sand to the side of the house. It straightened, to reveal a girl’s face fixed in an idiot grin, with matted black hair falling over the eyes and a snub nose crusted with mucous. She was bare-footed, her blouse rent under one armpit and her full skirt tattered and stained so that its pattern of huge roses was almost obliterated. She came forward until she could grip the vertical stakes of the paliside and hung there as though for support, her tongue shooting in and out of her mouth and her wild eyes fixed on me. Suddenly she let out a shrill cry of fury: a stone had struck her legs, ricocheting off it to land in the pool, all green slime and water-lilies, outside the chalet. Blood began to ooze in black drops on the wrinkled grey skin. Bill had jumped to his feet.
‘The little bastards!’
I too had now risen and could see the two children we had passed earlier racing up the beach, bent almost double, with a huge lanky dog loping along behind them, until they disappeared into the wilderness of shrubs and twisted pines out of which the hills reared up.
The girl began making incomprehensible noises; then she raised an arm and pointed at us, with a curious jabbing motion of the forefinger.
‘What does she want?’
‘God knows!’ Bill replied. ‘Let’s give her some Coca-cola. Bibi won’t mind.’
I went into the kitchen, fetched a bottle of Coca-cola from the refrigerator and handed it to Bill after I had opened it. I was afraid of approaching the girl myself. Bill stepped down into the garden, smiling and holding the bottle out before him. ‘Here,’ he said in Japanese. ‘For you. Come.’
But when he was about ten yards away from her, the girl suddenly clutched her skirt and began to run away, with a curious sideways movement as though one of her legs were shorter than the other. She stopped at the top of the sand-dune from behind which she had appeared, and stared back at Bill, who was still calling in the kind of voice one uses to coax a nervous dog: ‘Come, come, come. This is for you.’ When he again attempted to approach her she shouted something fierce, baring her teeth like fangs, and then snatched at a piece of driftwood which she brandished before her. Bill set down the bottle on the other side of the palisade, propping it between two stones, and retreated to the porch. ‘ Don’t appear to be paying any attention to her. Let’s wait.’
Slowly I became aware out of the corner of my eye that the girl was creeping back, crouching low on the sand as she took one sweeping step forward after another, with her head so bowed that one could see only the tangled mass of hair. She was like a huge, dishevelled bird of prey, edging towards its carrion, all jutting elbows and out-thrust neck. Suddenly, in a flurry of dust, she grabbed the bottle and was off, wheeling out over the sand and then racing up into the shelter of the bushes behind the chalet.
‘Bibi’s not going to get anything back on that bottle,’ I said.
We both lay silent in our chairs, staring out at the glare of the sea through half-closed lids. I guessed that Bill, like myself, was afflicted with a disquiet for which the sudden appearance of the half-wit girl had been the trigger not the cause. Bill sighed and shifted from side to side in his wicker chair as though incapable of finding a position in which he was comfortable.
‘Fancy that brother of hers going off like that,’ he said at last. Then he lapsed again into silence.
‘Has Chieko been a bore?’ It was Bibi, calling from the other side of the gate. Nishimura was behind her, both of them still dripping from the sea. ‘I’ve told her mother that she must not be allowed down on to the beach.’
‘Who is she?’I asked.
‘Her mother is one of our maids. Chieko is a total imbecile. The mother has given up bothering about her—I do
n’t really blame her, the poor woman has no husband and she works all day long.’
Nishimura was hopping on his left leg in the garden, while with his right hand he thumped on his right ear. Only in Japan have I seen people do this to get the water out of their ears. A moment later he was hopping on his right leg.
‘You missed something,’ Bibi said, clambering on to the porch instead of using the steps. She threw her towel down and then stretched herself out on it, tugging at her bathing-costume where the wet fabric cut into her thighs. ‘ It was marvellous, even better than yesterday.… I like your boy.’ Nishimura had just leapt on to the porch, scattering drops of water over both Bill and myself, where he began at once to do a series of press-ups. ‘How long have you had him?’
‘We’ve known him for—how long is it, Nishimura?’ Bill asked.
‘One year and eleven months,’ the boy grunted, as he heaved himself up, face scarlet, for what seemed certain to be, but was not in fact, the last press-up.
‘But he’s been actually working for us for only a few months. Though it’s hard now to imagine how we ever managed without him,’ I said.
‘Of course, having him makes us lazy,’ Bill at last seemed to be totally relaxed in his chair. ‘We seldom have to speak Japanese because he does it for us. When we want a drink he fetches it. And it’s ages since I had to walk out to post a letter.’
‘Yes, I can see his merits.’
Eventually, after several minutes of desultory conversation Bibi got up and went to change. Nishimura, who had been asleep, then opened his eyes to murmur: ‘Those rocks where I dived are the rocks where Miss Lee was found—the body of Miss Lee.’ He said it with the same pride that people in Matsue showed when they told us that Lafacadio Hearn had once slept in the family house or shopped at the family store. ‘It is lucky that body reached rocks. Otherwise it would be lost.’
‘Are you going to change, Nishimura-san, or do you want to come up to the house like that?’ Bibi had appeared.
‘I shall change.’
‘Do you want him to eat with us?’ Bibi asked even before he had vanished into the lavatory.
‘He usually does,’ I replied. ‘But he isn’t offended if he doesn’t.’
‘It’s entirely up to you,’ Bill added.
‘Well, let’s have him lunch with us. He’s really rather sweet in that solemn, humourless way of his.’
After we had trudged back to the house in the heat of midday I felt that if I were to face all the people we had seen on the beach—they had now disappeared, one of the two beach umbrellas lying on its side where it had presumably been blown by the wind—I should have to do something about my appearance. ‘I wonder if I could have a wash,’ I said to Bibi as we entered the cool of the house, my eyelids stinging as the sweat began to dry on them.
‘Of course!’
She led us upstairs into the smaller of the two wings, showed Bill and Nishimura back into her study, and then took me down the passage to her bedroom.
‘Would you like a shower?’
‘Oh, no, that doesn’t matter.’ I was gazing with consternation at my bedraggled reflection in the huge triple mirror at one end of the shadowy room.
‘I can lend you whatever you need. Why not? Here—this towel is clean. The maid has just put it out this morning.’ The thick Turkish towel, a terracotta colour, was the size of a double bedspread. ‘Come. Or would you prefer a bath?’
Bibi sat on the bed—it, like the triple-mirror, was elaborately carved and gilded—and smoked a cigarette through a small amber holder, while I undressed. It was the first time that I had seen her smoke; the cigarette was a Gauloise, taken from a silver box on her bedside table.
I am not usually self-conscious about dressing or undressing in front of other women—after all, I spent six years at a boarding-school—but on this occasion I found myself not merely half-turning from her in a corner of the room, but also making a point of slipping into the yukata she had handed to me while I was still in my pants and brassière.
‘If you’d like a change of clothes I can lend you anything you need. We’re about the same size.’
‘Oh, no. It’s all right, thank you.’
‘Here.’ She pulled open a closet, with the same gesture that she had used to produce the bathing-costumes in the chalet. ‘At any rate borrow a blouse. Take your pick. This one would suit you—rather severe, but smart.’ She held it against me, her fingers strangely cold as one hand rested on the flesh of my neck. ‘ Yes, you’ll look wonderful in that.’
She over-rode all my protests: I could return the blouse to her whenever I wished; if I really liked it, I could even keep it, since it suited me so much better than it suited her.
When I emerged again from the bathroom, she was seated at her dressing-table, making up her face.
‘I envy you your marvellous colouring,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘You don’t have to fuss with all this kind of thing. English women really have the best complexions in the world. But you must take care not to get sunburnt.’ She touched my arm briefly with her fingers, putting out a hand and leaning forward to do so. ‘Look. This is red.’
‘I peel horribly.’
‘Well, you must always carry a parasol with you, like a real English lady. The Japanese make such pretty ones so you have no excuse.’
‘Perhaps not.’
‘I’ve also put out some underclothes for you. On the bed over there.… No, really, go ahead and put them on.’ Once again she refused to listen to my protests. ‘We might almost be twins—you’re dark and I’m fair, but we’re exactly the same size and shape.’ I suddenly realised that what she said was true: and at that I felt as one feels when one suddenly realises that the distant reflection in a mirror at which one has been peering is, in fact, one’s own.
Reluctantly I slipped into the clothes, so much more elegant than those I had taken off; and on this occasion too I turned my back to Bibi and kept the yukata around me.
‘I’ll have the maid wash out your things. If they don’t dry in time, we can post them to you. But with this wind and heat, they shouldn’t take a moment.’
When we returned to the sitting-room Nishimura was again asleep, his shoes kicked off and his body slack in one corner of the sofa. Bill was reading a copy of the New Yorker.
‘How did you get this so quickly?’ he asked, stifling a yawn as he held up the magazine.
‘Oh, we have it air-mailed direct from the States. I never seem to have time to read it, but my brother does. He was cursing because he couldn’t find that number and I vowed that I hadn’t seen it. I’ll have to smuggle it out of here.’
Bibi went over to the bell and pushed it, leaving her finger on it for several seconds on end. ‘I told them to bring our lunch here. Let’s leave the others to their own devices. There’ll be absolute chaos—and Tom and Yuki do nothing but quarrel with each other. They started at breakfast and that means that they’ll be at it all day.’
Since I had looked forward to meeting all the people we had seen in the distance on the beach, it was a disappointment now to learn that we should be kept secluded from them. But I knew that Bill, who has none of my eagerness to meet new people, however trivial or disagreeable, must be relieved.
The maid, a dignified woman in late middle-age, in an indigo kimono of shimmering silk—one might have supposed her to be the wife of a professor or a well-to-do business man—entered the room silently and began to clear a card-table on which she then set out the things brought in for her by a plain girl of eleven or twelve, wearing a white pinafore and a white bow in her hair.
‘She’s the mother of the girl on the beach,’ Bibi said in her low, clear voice.
The food was delicious, a mixture of Japanese and English: first raw tunny-fish served with a sauce of tart green mustard, the roseate flesh dissolving in the mouth like marshmallow; then bowls of ice-cold chawan-mushi, the delicately flavoured custard containing fragments of chicken-breast, mushrooms, eel and ginko-nuts
; then Kobe steaks with a salad of watercress and celery; and lastly Stilton cheese and ripe Camembert—‘From the black-market street in Kobe,’ Bibi explained. ‘Those stewards from the ships must make a fortune on the side.’ When the meal was over Bibi herself again made us coffee.
‘Is this meal western or Japanese?’ Nishimura asked.
‘I suppose that it is both.’
‘It is a very strange meal. This is first time that I have tasted such sauce with sashimi. But I liked it,’ he added.
‘Well, that’s a relief to know, isn’t it?’ said Bibi with an irony wholly lost on him.
Soon after three o’clock we said that we must leave. Bibi tried to urge us to stay the night—we could leave early the following morning; it was silly to make such a long journey and not to see more of the place; there was an interesting temple on the top of the mountain behind the town. But I insisted that we must go, even though I knew that Bill would be willing to stay.
‘Too bad.’ Used to getting her own way, she was obviously piqued. ‘Well, you must come again another time.’
‘That would be lovely,’ Bill said with unusual enthusiasm. When Bill and Nishimura left the room, the one to have a wash and the other to telephone to Furukawa to tell him of our departure, Bibi came and sat on the sofa beside me: ‘What a shame you can’t stay! I’ve so enjoyed your company. This is a lovely place and I suppose that the house is also lovely in spite of all the things that keep going wrong with it. But one does get bored. Do let’s be sure to meet again. Perhaps next time the circumstances will be less horrid.’
There was a silence. She seemed to be waiting for me to say something.
‘I’m sorry we didn’t meet your brother.’ On an impulse I added: ‘It was rather odd of him to take himself off like that. Wasn’t it?’