by Francis King
‘Well, I suppose he was embarrassed. And—and ashamed,’ she added slowly.
‘Ashamed?’
She leant forward, clasping her hands. ‘I’m going to tell you the real story, but you mustn’t make it public. Your husband can know of course, but I don’t think that that Consul of yours should be told. And certainly Thelma’s father should be told nothing. Promise?’
I nodded.
‘Well, if it hadn’t been for poor Sasha, I—I think that I could have saved Thelma. I almost did, in fact I thought that she was safe. When the tidal wave hit us, my first thought was of her. She went under and I grabbed her at once and dragged her towards the shore. Then I heard Sasha shouting for help—the poor creature was in a complete state of panic. So I let Thelma go and went after him. I was sure that she was safe, she must have been in her depth—or within her reach, as she put it in that pathetic letter to her father. As soon as I got to Sasha he threw his arms around my neck and clung to me. I thought I was going to drown, really I did. It was almost impossible to keep afloat. One is always told that in those circumstances one should give a right hook to the jaw, isn’t one? But if one’s a woman and the man is nearly six foot tall and his body is festooned around one’s own, God knows how one does it. Eventually I somehow got moving with him towards the shore—it was rather as if I was in the grip of an octopus—and his panic began to subside. Then I looked around for Thelma. It never struck me that she was still in the water. I thought she must have run up the beach for help. Then it dawned on me. I think—though I’m not sure—that I even saw her momentarily. Perhaps it was only a fish or some driftwood. I swam out and searched and searched for ages. And Sasha did nothing, nothing at all. Can you imagine? Later he said he also thought that Thelma was out of the water and that he was too dazed and shocked to realise what I was doing.… Well, you can imagine what he felt afterwards. He began to cry,’ She gave a shudder. ‘That was the worst part of all. So I packed him off home. I knew that the police mustn’t see him in that condition. It would give an idiot like Furukawa all sorts of wrong ideas—especially as Sasha kept saying how it was all his fault and that he would never forgive himself and that he could never look any of his friends in the face again.’
‘How awful for him!’ I exclaimed.
It was the kind of situation which I suppose that all of us secretly dread: when in a few seconds a lifetime is put to the crucial test and the verdict is an unequivocal yes or no. Fortunately; though all of us dread it, few of us have to endure it. Sasha had endured it; and now had to endure the knowledge that he had failed in the most hunuliating fashion that anyone could imagine—clinging in abject panic to one woman while another woman drowned. The experience might rob all other experiences, past and future, of their validity.
‘And how awful of him,’ Bibi added. ‘I’d never imagined he was a coward.’
‘Oh, you can’t divide people into cowards and non-cowards! At some time everyone is brave; and at some time everyone is cowardly.’
‘Sasha’s so lucky—people are always disposed to make excuses for him. Particularly women. No one ever wants to make excuses for me. Not even men.’ She laughed. ‘Anyway don’t let it be known. Though it will be known—eventually. Such things always are. Aren’t they?’
Even then the thought came to me that if she did not wish it to be known, then why was she telling me? Surely the obvious thing would have been to say nothing at all? To show so ruthless a candour in exposing the weakness of a friend or even of an acquaintance would have been an act of cruelty; where a brother was concerned, it struck me as both unforgiveable and inexplicable.
Chapter Four
I
Furukawa was at our hotel.
He was sitting, half-asleep, in a chair in the hall, his legs drawn up on to the seat and his shoes arranged neatly on the floor below, with his brief-case beside them. The young policeman who had escorted us into the town was lounging in the doorway, a cigarette, which he at once threw away at our approach, held surreptitiously in one hand while the other, still in its white gauntlet, rested on his hip. Furukawa scrambled into his shoes, the laces of which he had not undone—all Japanese tend to wear shoes at least one size too large for them—and hurried to do up the top button of his tunic before he greeted us with the usual bows.
‘Miss Akulov is not with you?’ he said to Nishimura.
‘No. We left her at her house,’ Bill replied in Japanese.
‘Her brother has gone,’ Furukawa said, again to Nishimura.
Nishimura looked at us in bewilderment.
‘Yes, he has gone to meet a ship in Kobe,’ I said. Furukawa stared at me in total incomprehension; then Nishimura repeated the words almost exactly as I had said them and Furukawa’s face cleared: ‘Ah, so deska? Hen desu, ne?’
‘He says it is strange,’ Nishimura translated needlessly.
‘No, it’s not strange at all,’ I replied, feeling that I must defend this man I had never met. ‘He has to meet a friend on a ship and there’s no way of getting in touch with him.’
Neither Furukawa nor Nishimura made the obvious answer that, if he knew the name of the ship, it would be easy enough to send a telegram. Just as in the Japanese bath the demands of decency are satisfied if a towel, however meagrely inadequate, is held near the private parts, so the flimsiness or transparency of a Japanese excuse is of little importance provided only that the formality of producing it is observed.
We began to load the car, Nishimura and the young policeman carrying first Thelma’s suitcases and then ours over to the trunk, while Bill stowed them away and Furukawa and I looked on. Obviously Bill was losing face by not leaving this menial task entirely to the underlings. Furukawa was not going to put himself in the same position and even when one of the maids, an ancient woman of a skeletal emaciation, staggered down the stairs carrying a hold-all belonging to Bill, he made no move to help, so that it was left to Bill to hurry over from the car and snatch it from her hands.
At last everything was in place. Furukawa stepped out into the drive and appraised the car, running one of his small hands along the rear bumper and then, placing both hands there, bouncing up and down on it, as though to test its strength. It was fortunate that at the hotel they had given the car a wash. Satisfied, he looked up to say: ‘Nice car,’ in English. ‘Cadillac is best car.’
He then walked briskly back into the hotel to emerge with a parcel wrapped with scrupulous neatness in tissue-paper and tied with white ribbon, crossed over to Bill, who was examining the tyres, and cleared his throat before he bowed and said: ‘Warner-san, please accept this from me with my humblest thanks, my deepest condolences, and my sincerest apologies.’ At the time neither Bill nor I took in the significance of the oratorical flourishes accompanying what seemed to us the presentation of some gift—no doubt a doll of the district or an example of the local ceramics. Bill accepted the proffered parcel and put it under his arm. ‘That’s awfully kind of you,’ he said in English and then hastily began to repeat in Japanese the fulsome phrases of thanks he had learned for such occasions. I also joined in.
Bill then put the parcel on the back seat, threw his jacket on top of it, and embarked on the elaborate ritual of saying goodbye not merely to Furukawa and the young policeman but to the whole of the staff of the hotel who had by now assembled around the car.
It was only as we were leaving the town that Nishimura told us that the parcel contained Thelma’s ashes in their traditional Japanese container.
2
Bill, like myself, felt only sympathy for Sasha when I told him Bibi’s story. ‘I suppose one should be disgusted—he would certainly expect one to be disgusted—but somehow I can’t. Can you?’
I shook my head.
‘Silly of him to run away like that, though. He ought to have stayed to see us.’
‘Once one has started to run, I suppose it’s difficult to stop.’
When we reached home, after what seemed to be an endless journey, Bill
at once hurried upstairs to his study to return with a book. ‘ Yes, that’s it. You remember it, don’t you? It’s that passage about Starbuck.’ Even after seven years of marriage Bill still assumes that I am as well-read as he. ‘Yes, listen to it. Listen to this, Nishimura.’ The boy looked up from the baseball scores in the evening paper; he always did what we told him to do. ‘It’s rather magnificent.’
Bill began to read, holding the book close to his face, since he had once again left his glasses in the car: ‘ ‘‘Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations: knaves, fools and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone, bleeds with the keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of the valor-ruined man.’’ ’ He tossed the book on to the sofa. ‘The valor-ruined man,’ he said.
‘One could hardly say that Bibi ran to cast her costliest robes over her brother’s ignominy or whatever it was. It was almost as though she took pleasure in it.’
‘Please, I do not understand,’ said Nishimura. ‘Is this poetry?’
‘Of a kind,’ Bill said.
A package deal
Part 2
Chapter One
I
Every Wednesday of that next summer Bill and I would drive from Kyoto into Kobe, to shop at the stores at which they sold western goods smuggled off the ships, to go to a cinema or a concert, and then—most important of all—to eat dinner either at the Texas Tavern or at the ‘English’ pub, the King’s Arms. If anyone had told me, before we went to Japan, that one of the most intense pleasures of our week would be to gorge ourselves on T-bone steaks or steak-and-kidney pie, I should have been astounded.
That Wednesday we had been invited out to dinner by Nishimura, who had graduated from the university and was now what the Japanese call ‘a salary man’ with a firm of architects. He took us, not to the Texas Tavern or to the King’s Arms as we suggested, but to a new restaurant, high up in the hills above Kobe, where it was possible to dance and to see a floor-show. Knowing that it would be ruinously expensive, we tried to dissuade him, but we could not do so. Probably for years he had been suffering, in the Japanese manner, under the obligations which we had piled on to his shoulders with each trivial act of kindness or generosity, and now that at last he had the opportunity of unburdening himself by spending on us most of his salary for a month, he was not to be denied the relief.
‘You will drink some wine?’
‘Just some saké, please,’ I said.
‘No, you must have some wine.’ He ordered for me a double Kummel—no doubt remembering from the days when he worked for us that this was my favourite liqueur—and for Bill a double Bourbon. I took a spoonful of my Vichyssoise, then a sip of the Kummel. It was less nauseating than I had expected. I looked up and smiled at Nishimura, so solemn in his dark-blue suit, white shirt and striped red-and-navy tie, the hair which he once wore crew-cut now long and brushed into glossy wings at the side as though it were lacquered; his finger nails scrupulously manicured, with generous half-moons. It was difficult to believe that this was the schoolboy who had stayed with us; still less that under the neat clothes there must still be that superb physique revealed to our admiring gaze only on the beach.
Later he asked: ‘You will have Baked Alaska?’
‘Just some coffee, please.’
‘And coffee for me too,’ Bill said.
‘But all foreigners like Baked Alaska. For us Japanese it is too sweet, but all foreigners like it.’
So we each ate a Baked Alaska.
Nishimura danced with me, holding me at a distance from himself, with his hand barely touching my back. Both before the dance and after it, he took out a clean handkerchief from the breast-pocket of his suit and wiped his palms on it.
‘You will have some more wine?’
‘No, thank you.’
But a third double Kummel was brought for me.
‘This comedian is American. He is very popular in the States. I hear that he is very funny.’ Nishimura laughed conscientiously through jokes which were not funny to us and certainly could not have been funny to him. (‘Do you think that lovers should be frank and earnest?’ ‘Well, I guess that it would be better if one of them was a girl!’)
‘Do you wish to leave before strip-tease?’ he asked me anxiously at the end.
‘No, of course not!’ I laughed. ‘Bill would never forgive me.’
Nishimura frowned, vaguely troubled. In the old days, he would have understood a remark like that; certainly he would not have taken it seriously, as he appeared to do now.
‘You remember that I wrote to you that I had had an o-miai?’ The o-miai is the meeting arranged between a young man and a possible bride, selected for him by his family or a go-between.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘That o-miai was not successful,’ he continued. ‘I considered that girl but I decided that she was not sincere enough. She was an art student,’ he added. ‘Maybe also she did not like me.… But now I have met other girl, daughter of company president of Ran-Maru Metal Box Company. She is very sincere girl. I think that I will marry her. Please give me your advice.’
‘But we know nothing about her,’ I said, baffled.
‘This is her picture.’ He produced a photograph from his wallet; it was carefully wrapped in a sheet of tissue-paper, which he unfolded and placed under his side plate so that it should not get crumpled.
‘She’s rather pretty,’ I said doubtfully.
Bill examined the photograph. ‘Does she usually wear kimono?’ he asked, obviously at a loss for a comment.
‘No, she is wearing kimono for picture. Usually she wears western dress. But she is not modern girl.’ Nishimura took the photograph and began to wrap it up again before replacing it in his wallet.
‘What happened to that girl-friend of yours, Miss Taniguchi?’ Bill asked. When he was staying with us, Nishimura often went dancing with this Miss Taniguchi, who worked in a department store.
He shrugged indifferently. ‘After I graduated, I do not see her again.’
‘Is she still working at Daimaru?’ Bill pursued.
‘Maybe.’
Soon after this, I was obliged to go through the door marked ‘Lasses’; Bill had already gone through the one marked ‘ Lads’.
A young Japanese girl in a short-skirted black silk dress, a white frilly apron and a white cap was seated on a tubular steel chair in the marble ante-room while someone at one of the mirrors inside talked to her in Japanese. The attendant gave a high pitched excited laugh as I entered and then, seeing me, got to her feet: ‘Please, madam. Welcome.’ She bowed deeply as I passed her.
My eyes met those of the woman at the mirror, who was applying lipstick to her mouth. She turned: ‘It’s you!’
‘Oh! … Hello.’
The sight of Bibi in her silver sheath dress, her arms held out to me, gave me a feeling both of pleasure and dread. As always in her presence, I felt shabby and unkempt: conscious that my dress, worn throughout that day, was unsuitable for the restaurant; that my hair needed setting; and that the strap of my bag had not been repaired, in spite of my plan to have it fixed that day in Kobe.
‘Try to be a little more welcoming.’ She put her hands, one of them still holding the lipstick, on to my shoulders. ‘ I’d heard that you were back from your leave—back for some time too. Why didn’t you ever get in touch with me? When you were far away in Matsue I could forgive your silence. But Kyoto’s no distance.’
‘We were so busy. Settling in. And besides I wasn’t sure.…’
‘That I’d want to see you? Don’t be silly.’
‘Just one moment.’
‘I’ll wait.’
From outside I could hear her c
hatting once again to the attendant in Japanese, with the girl every so often emitting the same hysterical high-pitched squawk which I had heard when I had entered.
‘And Bill now has an important job, hasn’t he? Boss of the new British Council Institute. I read a little piece about it in the English Mainichi.’
‘That was by one of his former students. It’s not really all that important.’
‘And you’ll now be settled in Kyoto for several years?’
‘I hope not for that long! But for some time—yes.’
‘Then we must see a lot of you.… Oh, it is nice to be with you again!’ She linked her arm with mine as I made for the ante-room. ‘ You know, it’s very odd, I look back on that time we spent at Abekawa really with pleasure. And yet most of the things we had to go through together were either gruesome or depressing. That plastic sheet! Remember? … I wish you’d written to me.’
‘You never wrote to us.’
‘Yes, that’s true I’m a hopeless correspondent. And then suddenly I read in the newspaper that you’d gone off to England. For six months. I didn’t know that you were going on leave so soon.’
‘Didn’t you? We told you.’
She propelled me out into the restaurant, turning at the door to say something in rapid Japanese to the attendant. ‘I shall be cross next time … bad girl.…’ I could make out no more than those two phrases, delivered apparently in joke.
‘Isn’t this place macabre? Whatever brought you here?’
‘Oh, it’s not too bad. The food is good. And the view is marvellous. It’s not the sort of place we’d choose ourselves, but the boy who used to work for us—’ I broke off. ‘You met him once. Remember?’
‘The one with the marvellous physique. Yes. Of course I remember. We swam together.’ She peered. ‘Is that him over there?’