by Francis King
‘Yuki isn’t going to leave you for any university teacher. You know that as well as I do. He knows which side his bread is buttered.’
Starkie stared at Bibi through narrowed lids. Then he muttered: ‘Christ, you are a bitch! Just listen to that bitch!’
Bibi smiled.
‘Well, it’s getting late,’ Rachel said, yawning behind a plump raised hand on which she was wearing three heavy rings.
‘Yes, we ought to be getting back to Kyoto,’ I said.
Bibi protested that it was still early—although it was by then almost one; that she wanted to show us another bar; that we could even go back to their house for a last drink. But Bill and I refused.
‘Anyway we must meet again soon,’ Bibi said to me. ‘I’m sure that you find life in Kyoto terribly boring.’
With a maid and a cook to do all the housework for me, Bill at the institute often until late into the evening, and no friends whom I found really congenial, this was certainly true. But Bill now replied: ‘Oh, Mary’s never bored. She always finds things to occupy her. She’s learning flower-arrangement, and she’s thinking of taking up sumie painting, and she spends hours in the garden.’
‘Still—you must sometimes want a gossip. Let me have your address and telephone number. And let me give you mine.’
When we had written in each other’s address books, Bill and I began to say a round of goodnights.
Sasha took my hand. ‘ I enjoyed dancing with you.’
‘Yes,’ said Bibi behind him. ‘You must take Mary out dancing again.’
‘Can we give you a lift, Nishimura?’ Bill volunteered.
‘Thank you. Mr Starkie has asked me to accompany him to other bar.’
‘Well, have a good time then.’ Bill began to thank Nishimura for having taken us out to dinner and I joined in. Starkie, very drunk by now, scowled at us, swaying from side to side.
When we left with Bibi and Sasha, a crowd of the ‘girls’ accompanied us out into the streets to admire the Akulov Jaguar with shrill little squeaks and excited titters.
Bibi put her arm round the one called Michiko. ‘Isn’t this one adorable?’ she appealed to me. ‘She’s awfully naughty really—as hard as they make them and greedy for money. But she has tremendous appeal.’ Michiko turned his little snub nose up to Bibi, who was almost a head taller than himself, rubbing his body like a cat rhythmically against hers, while he smiled with parted lips. Suddenly Bibi bent down, took his face between both her hands, and gave him a long greedy kiss on the mouth. The other ‘girls’ clapped their hands and ‘La Traviata’ cried ‘Bravo! Bravo! Bis! Bis!’
Bibi gave Michiko a little push away from her. ‘Your husband looks shocked,’ she said to me.
‘Bill is easily shocked.’
‘Nonsense,’ Bill said. But when we were alone together in the car, he exclaimed: ‘What a crowd! And what a waste of time!’
‘Oh, I rather enjoyed the evening.’
‘You can have it.… What do you suppose that Nishimura was up to with that American photographer?’
‘It was obvious what Yuki thought that he was up to!’
‘And was he?’
‘Oh, surely, Nishimura is entirely innocent. I don’t suppose he had a clue.’
‘I wonder.’
‘Sasha apologised for running away from us.’
‘And did he say anything else—about Thelma’s death I mean?’
‘No. I let the subject drop.… Wasn’t that the best thing to do?’
‘Much the best. After all, it’s now all ancient history.’
Chapter Two
I
‘I wish I could postpone it. But it is rather important. It’s taken so many months to get up the meeting at all.’
Bill was going to Tokyo to discuss the work of the Institute with the Director of the department of the Ministry of Education concerned with the teaching of foreign languages in japan. I wanted to say that if he wished that he could postpone it, why didn’t he postpone it? Ill and unhappy, I was in that mood. But I restrained myself.
‘If it weren’t that there was this possibility of getting seme funds out of them.…’
‘Yes, I know, I know,! I said. ‘Wider yet and wider, may our bounds be set.’ I covered my eyes with one hand, not so much because of the glare of the April sun out on the terrace but because I suddenly had an absurd desire to cry.
Bill, perched on the stone parapet, looked surreptitiously at his watch. ‘ I’ll get the first train back tomorrow afternoon. Just as soon as the meeting breaks up.’
‘Haven’t you booked yourself a seat?’ He shook his head. ‘Then how on earth do you imagine that you’re going to get on to a limited express?’
‘That’ll be no trouble. I’ll manage to wangle it somehow.’
I knew he was right. I myself am no good a wangling things, perhaps because I have too much pride. Once when Bill and I boarded a limited express train for which we had no reservations, he walked smiling into the minute compartment reserved for the two ticket-collectors, greeted them in Japanese, and offered them some of the cold chicken we had brought for our lunch. Once they had accepted a leg each, they were, as Bill had calculated, under an obligation to us, which prevented them from turning us out of their compartment, much less asking to see our reservations. ‘I’d never have got anywhere, if I hadn’t learned to wangle things,’ Bill defended himself against my protests on that occasion. ‘Getting to Oxford was a wangle. And so was marrying you.’
He now jumped off the parapet. I knew that he was both eager to hurry off to the Institute and reluctant to appear to be so. He put a hand on my forehead. ‘What exactly is it that you feel?’ he asked.
‘Oh, just awful. As I did the—the last time.…’
‘But Jardine says everything’s quite in order. It’s just an idea you’ve got. The last time was different—that awful storm on the boat, the food-poisoning. Why on earth you’ve made up your mind you’re due for another miscarriage I really can’t—’
‘I’ve not made up my mind about anything. But I do feel awful. Awful.’
‘Poor darling.’ He sighed. ‘Well, I must return to the treadmill, I suppose. I’ll get back for a quick cup of tea before I go to the station. I’m all packed.’ He turned at the French windows into the sitting-room. ‘I wish you could come with me. The change would do you good.’
‘You know I hate Tokyo.’
2
It was past eight o’clock the following afternoon. Bill had neither arrived home nor telephoned. There were still a number of trains from Tokyo, he had often returned far later; but as I looked at the travelling clock by my bedside, a cup of untouched consommé beside it, I found myself whimpering. In an angle of the tokonoma what appeared to be a huge shrivelled spider was hanging by one leg. I had never noticed it before, but now I could not stop looking at it. At first I had thought that it must be a tangle of string.
When the girl came in to see if I wanted anything else for my supper, I pointed at it. She staffed and then turned to me in total incomprehension.
‘Look!’ I shouted in Japanese. ‘ Take it away. Look!’ I did not know the Japanese for spider.
The girl gaped at me, her mouth ajar to reveal her two widely spaced front teeth, one of which was chipped. I leapt out of bed, scrabbled for a paper tissue from the box on the bedside table and went over to the tokonoma. It was not, I realised, one spider, but two, the larger suspended from the smaller. Having removed them, I thrust the crumpled ball of tissue into the girl’s podgy hand. She stared down at it as though it were some gift, the use of which was obscure to her. I picked up the tray off the floor and thrust that at her too, disagreeably conscious that the bleeding seemed to be starting again. The girl balanced the tray in one hand and held the ball of tissue in the other, until I took the tissue from her and put it on the tray. She gave a nervous smile and I forced myself to smile back, as I clambered back into bed. Did I want anything else? she asked in the southern Kyushu accen
t which I found almost totally impossible to understand. I shook my head and, obviously relieved, she clattered down the stairs to the television set. This was the evening when she watched the professional wrestling.
I lay back for several minutes against the pillows; then I decided to read and sat up, reaching across to the bedside table for the Agatha Christie which one of the missionary wives had brought me that morning. But suddenly feeling sick and dizzy, I again lowered myself into a horizontal position, the book in one hand. A cold sweat began to prick through my forehead. I shut my eyes. I must have dozed.
‘What is all this about your being ill?’
Suddenly Bibi was in the doorway with the maid peering over her shoulder behind her.
‘Oh, Bibi.…’ I tried to sit up; but again the nausea and the dizziness overcame me. I put a hand over my face, ashamed of how I must appear to her. ‘Yes, I’m not feeling too good. In fact, I feel awful.’ I gave a small laugh, which ended in a hiccough as my voice broke.
Bibi came slowly over to the bed and lowered herself on to the end of it. As she did so, I said in panic: ‘I think I’ve started bleeding again. Badly, I mean.’
She stared at me. ‘Bleeding?’
Haltingly, I explained.
‘What does the doctor say?’
‘He came yesterday. It wasn’t bad yesterday. He said I oughtn’t to move about. Nothing serious. He was supposed to come again this afternoon but he still hasn’t been. When I telephoned they said that he was still in Osaka. He’d come as soon as he got back.’
‘And Bill? Where’s he?’
‘In Tokyo.’
‘In Tokyo!’
‘He’s due back any moment now.’
‘Lucky I called. Do you often bleed like this?’
I shook my head. ‘ You see—I’m pregnant. Four months. That’s what makes me nervous.’
‘Pregnant!’ She said this with a mixture of astonishment and disgust. ‘ Then you ought to see a doctor as soon as possible. Naito is the man. I’d better get on to him.’
‘Naito?’
‘One of the best gynaecologists in the country. I know him. I’ll get on to him.’
‘But our own doctor—’
‘You can’t wait for him. And he’s not a specialist, is he?’ I shook my head. ‘Well, then.…’ She got to her feet.
I still protested feebly. But her presence, dominant and self-assured, had brought me a marvellous relief.
She smiled: ‘Don’t worry. I’ll just go downstairs and get on to Naito on the phone. You’ll like him a lot. You’ll see. He’s spent a number of years in the States. Don’t worry.’
It was from that moment that I ceased to worry.
3
‘It was lucky I called when I did. Naito says that in another few hours she might have been critically ill.’
Knowing that Bill sensed an accusation behind Bibi’s words and that this would only intensify his feelings of guilt, I put in quickly: ‘Oh, I don’t think it was really as serious as he wants to make out. He’d like us to think he saved my life in the nick of time. But I was far worse the last time—on the ship. That time I really did lose pints and pints of blood.’
‘It was touch-and-go this time too, I can assure you,’ Bibi said.
We were all on the terrace outside my room at the Baptist Hospital. The following day I was to be allowed to go home. Bibi took one of the grapes from the bunch she had brought with her, and squeezed it into her mouth.
Bill looked harassed and pale. He was already overdue at the Institute where he had a lecture to deliver, but I guessed that, for some obscure reason of jealousy, he was reluctant to leave before Bibi did. ‘You look tired,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we ought to go.’
I was tired. ‘All right.’ I sighed.
Bill got up, but Bibi did not do so. Barely glancing at him, she said to me: ‘Naito told you, didn’t he, that it would be madness to attempt to have another child until you’ve had that little operation?’
‘Yes, he told us,’ Bill said. I could see that he was furious at what seemed to him, no less than to me, an unnecessary interference.
‘That’s all right then.’ She looked from one of us to the other. ‘Even doctors in Japan prefer to tell one things through a third-party. The operation’s nothing very serious, he told me. In fact he’s amazed that neither the doctor on the ship nor that man of yours here insisted on your having it.’
‘I want Mary to see a man in London when we’re back there next summer on leave.’
‘I doubt if you’ll find anyone better than Naito. He really is the tops. But if you’re not going to have the operation until then, then it’s absolutely essential that you—’
‘Yes, we do understand. Thank you. Now, Bibi.… Let’s leave Mary to have a good sleep.’
Bibi stooped down to take my hand. ‘You must have a holiday. Get Bill to take you away somewhere. To Hokkaido. You’ve never been there; have you? Just the place now that the weather is hotting up. Or come and stay with us at Abekawa. Then you won‘t have to spend any money. Why not do that?’
‘Thank you,’ Bill said. ‘We must think about it.’
‘Yes, think about it.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘ I’ll come by again tomorrow.’
‘But it’s such a long journey for you,’ I protested.
‘Nonsense. I’d like to come.’
‘Goodbye, darling.’ Bill waited for Bibi to move away from the day-bed on which I was lying; then he stooped down, and with a demonstrativeness unusual for him in public, kissed me twice, first gently on the forehead and then on the mouth.
4
‘I wish she’d leave us alone just for a day or two.’
‘These are not from her, they’re from Sasha,’ I said, unwrapping a huge bunch of orchids, to stare at them with a mixture of pleasure and consternation.
‘It comes to the same thing.… God, what a stink!’
‘These must have cost a fortune.’
‘Well, they can afford it all right. But I don’t like this flood of expensive presents. It’s—it’s damned embarrassing!’
‘I don’t know why it should be. Unless you’ve become so Japanese that you feel that every kindness demands an equivalent return.’
‘It’s not that.’ He scowled down at the thesis he was correcting for a student friend of Nishimura; then irritably he scrawled in a correction, the stub of his pencil biting deep into the paper.
‘He’ll have to type that again,’ I said.
‘He certainly will. It’s a shocking mess. What is the point of someone who can hardly write the simplest sentence in English without at least one grammatical error, being made to produce a thesis on the style—I ask you, the style—of ‘‘Henry Esmond”? It’s crazy.’ He put the pencil between the pages of the thesis, and lowered it on to his knees. ‘ What do they want from us? That’s what I’d like to know. That’s the question which intrigues me.’
‘Why should they want anything from us? Obviously they like us. Considerably more than you like them,’ I added. ‘They don’t want anything. They’re not the kind of people who need anything at all.’
‘Not material things,’ Bill said. ‘But they’re parasites, nonetheless. I don’t mean because they live on the money made by their father and hardly lift a finger themselves,’ he went on, ‘but they have to feed on others—feed on them if they are to survive at all.’
‘You don’t like them. They shock your nonconformist morality. You believe that people should Work. And that pleasure is somehow wicked.’
‘No, I don’t like them. I don’t really like them at all. And they do shock me.’
‘Well, I like them. I like them a lot. If it weren’t for them, I don’t know how I’d stand this place.’
‘You could stand it all right until they erupted into our lives.’
‘I’ve never really enjoyed being here,’ I said quietly.
‘They’ve made you discontented, that’s what they’ve done.’
‘Don
’t be so silly. If it hadn’t been for them, I might have.…’ I broke off.
‘You might have what?’
I did not answer. ‘ Bibi saved my life,’ I said. ‘Naito told me that.’
‘Well, Sasha didn’t save Thelma’s.’
‘What has that got to do with it?’
‘Somehow a fact like that sticks. However hard one tries to put it out of one’s mind. Whenever I meet him, I think. ‘‘That’s the man who was responsible for a woman’s drowning’’.’
‘It could have happened to any man.’
‘Could it? I damn well hope not.’
‘It could have happened to you.’ But I knew that that was not true: in the same circumstances Bill would have been incapable of behaving in the same way. He would have preferred to go down, gulping water with a look of exasperated stoicism on his face.
‘Well, perhaps. Perhaps.… Anyway, if Bibi hadn’t arrived then—to save your life, as you like to think of it—I’d have been back less than an hour later. You’re not going to tell me that hour would have made all that difference, are you?’
‘But would you have done anything? Would you have realised how ill I was?’ I wanted to press him. ‘And would you have called in Naito at once, or would you have waited for kindly, bumbling old Sogami to arrive, probably not until the following morning?’ But I checked myself. I knew that Bill was hurt; I did not want to hurt him further.
‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘ I still think Naito and Bibi have exaggerated the seriousness of the haemorrhage. They want to dramatise it—to get the credit for saving your life. I just don’t believe that you were all that ill.’
‘You didn’t believe it at the time, did you? When you went off to your meeting in Tokyo—and left me all alone here—and came back late without even bothering to ring up to say you’d been delayed.’
I got up and hurried out of the sitting-room before he could reply.