by Francis King
‘Lafacadio Hearn admired views as Queen Elizabeth slept in beds.’ I stopped, staring into the haze which blurred the edges of the sea below us as though in a photograph into which the light had leaked. ‘Where’s the stone garden?’ I asked.
‘Through here.’
It was not a path but a mere crack between the bushes, and my bare legs soon became scratched and my clothes stuck with burrs. Sasha took my hand in his, drawing me after him. An overhanging bramble suddenly caught my cheek just below the eye and when I put a hand to the place there was a smear of blood on my finger-tip. ‘Hell!’
‘Nearly there,’ Sasha said.
A wooden hut stood in the centre of what must have once been a clearing; but now the grass was waist-high. ‘I hope there are no snakes,’ I said, advancing into it cautiously.
‘Not poisonous ones.’
I now saw that part of the hut had been destroyed by fire, a blackened hole gaping in one side. ‘How odd that the whole building didn’t burn down,’ I said, staring at it.
Sasha laughed. ‘Bibi started that. With a cigarette. Fortunately it was in the rainy season—we’d taken shelter there from a storm—and we were able to put it out.’ He looked up at the sky. ‘Wouldn’t be surprised if we had a storm now. It feels sultry enough.’
A small brown bird was perched on the sagging thatch of the roof. It hopped across it, untroubled by our presence, and then whirred off into the bushes.
‘A Japanese nightingale,’ Sasha said. ‘Tom once came up here at night to hear the nightingales. Or that’s what he said. But he brought with him a German student in whom he was interested.’
‘Is that the one from whom you bought the projector?’
‘The … Yes, that’s right.’ He began to colour slightly as he turned away. ‘ The stone garden is behind. The best way is along by this stream.’
The water of the stream, pressing between the fleshy lips of grass on either side of it, was a deep orange shade, I wondered if the colour was caused at least in part by the ominous orange of the evening sky, which was now swelling above us like a balloon, the edges veined with metallic grey and purple. Midges whined in my ears and settled on my bare arms and legs in clouds.
The garden covered about half an acre and looked more like the graveyard of one of the small secret sects which pullulate in Japan. Everywhere there were cairns of stones, piled high in the shapes of miniature pagodas, spires and towers. Most of the stones were of the same orange colour as the water of the stream which made a boundary on one side of the garden; but some were almost black and others white streaked with russet. Pebbles glittered between them, with an occasional blade of grass, etiolated to a pale yellow, thrusting weakly up.
‘If you look carefully,’ Sasha said, ‘ you’ll see that sometimes he used hundreds of stones of the same colour—carefully matched—to make a single one of these peculiar … erections. And there are more than eighty of them, not one like another. Tom counted them once. Yuki said that there were eighty-one, as far as I remember, and Tom eighty-three. They had a quarrel about it.’
‘And what are they for? What do they represent?’
‘God knows. I doubt if the old man did. Perhaps it was some kind of penance. Perhaps the d-desire to create a work of art. Or perhaps just a way of killing time before he died over there’—he pointed—‘of his heart-attack.’
A large drop of rain suddenly fell on my shoulder, slipping down through the thin cotton of my dress against my skin, with the weight and coldness of a penny. Another plopped on to my cheek, and trickled downwards. The hut creaked in a gust of wind and then, high up in the sky, the lightning wriggled, to be followed by a dry boom-boom-boom of thunder. I clutched at Sasha’s arm. ‘You were right,’ I said.
‘We’d better shelter.’
The inside of the hut was dank, gloomy and choked with dust. It was as though we were in the bottom of a dry well. The rain poured down through a number of rents and fissures in the ceiling, turning the dust to mud and dripping through cracks in the floorboards to join the swirling water beneath. We found a dry space where we huddled together in the tokonoma. A dock, the leaves huge and flabby, pushed up there, on a narrow yellow stalk, through a hole in the floor. I shuddered as my bare leg brushed involuntarily against it. The air was full of an odour at once pungent and nauseatingly sweet.
‘Frightened?’
I shook my head. But I was, in fact, feeling the stirrings of panic. If I thought about it, I knew that I should really be terrified.
Suddenly he drew me to him, giving a high-pitched laugh such as I had never heard from him before. ‘This is rather exciting really.’ His body was trembling against mine. I watched the tattered, yellowed paper of the sliding-doors flicker innumerable rustling tongues as the wind tore at it.
‘Yes, it is.’
‘I’m frightened,’ he said. ‘ Thunder terrifies me.’ Again he gave thai brief high-pitched laugh. Was he joking? ‘ So many things do.’ He pressed his mouth, ferociously to mine, biting my lower lip, as he gripped me to him. Briefly we seemed to wrestle; then we fell downwards on to the dust-laden floor, the thick leaves of the dock so close to our heads that from mine to time they rested on my hair as we threshed from side to side.‘Our clothes,’ I moaned once in protest.
‘The rain will wash them,’ he murmured. The thunder banged back and forth.
His love-making was both selfish and inexpert; a flurry in the dust and gloom, with curious grunts and whimpers which both teriffed and thrilled me and a reiterated ‘Love me, love me, love me!’
‘But I do love you, I do, I do.’
He groaned, his face contorted as though in a spasm of agony; then he rolled back on top of me in a renewed frenzy of unfulfilment.
Suddenly his whole body went stiff in my arms; he raised his head intent and listening. I tried to twist my head round, to see what he could see or to hear what he could hear. The wrenched muscles made me wince. Then, for a moment, I saw the shadow on the other side of the paper screen; I heard the footsteps rattle along the porch, followed by a splash. At the same moment his struggle ended in a sudden releasing flood, although his face was still turned from me and his eyes were still fixed, nostrils dilated and lower lip quivering, on the place from which that shadow had moved off into the faltering storm outside. He began to scrabble at his clothes, first rising to his knees and then jumping to his feet.
‘Who was it? Who was there?’
‘My sister.’
‘Chieko! How ghastly! Oh, how awful! But she wouldn’t tell anyone, would she?’’ She couldn’t tell anyone. And no one would believe her. Probably she didn’t even understand what we were-doing.’
Sasha gave a strange grunt; then he put both hands to his face and began to sob with odd little gulps and whimpers of distress, like a child.
I put my arm round him. ‘It doesn’t matter. What does it matter? Don’t be silly. Sasha don’t! Please don’t! What is it? What’s the matter with you? It wasn’t the first time, was it? Sasha!’
He did not speak; but slowly he got control of himself and the crying came to an end. His face, however, remained wild and contorted as though with an inconsolable grief. ‘Let’s go,’ he said, in a tone which seemed to express nothing but hatred for me. ‘The storm has almost ended. L-Let’s go.’
I tried to take his arm but he roughly pushed me away, striding out on to the porch and then jumping down into the teeming waist-high grass below, without looking to see if I was following him.
I went after him but it was difficult to keep pace. ‘Sasha.… Wait for me … I’m sorry.… But it wasn’t I who started.… It was your idea.’ My legs were drenched; I could feel the rain as high as my thighs. He never once looked round and it was all that I could do to keep up with him. ‘Sasha! Wait!’ I screamed in sudden fury. But even at that he did not look back. I began to cry. ‘My dress is ruined. I’m soaking wet Sasha!’
We were out on the plateau, the baked mud now a morass. Looking down through
the dripping tunnel formed by the path through the bushes, I could see the sea, ridged with white where the huge waves swept in. Sasha halted, he looked over his shoulder. I thought at first, with a surge of relief, that he was responding to my cries of fury and despair. Then I realised that he was staring so fixedly not at me but at something behind me. I, too, turned.
A figure was standing on the darkening slope between two trees, entirely motionless, with her clothes clinging to her from the rain which had drenched them and her hair limp about her face. It was not Chieko, as I at first supposed: not Chieko, but Bibi.
‘Come!’ Sasha shouted at me in hoarse voice. ‘Come quickly!’
He began to run down the path, the stones tumbling after him, and in sudden panic I began to race too, stumbling and slithering and tearing my legs on the brambles.
2
I had just changed out of my drenched clothes and had a bath, when there was a knock at the door. I struggled to a sitting-up position on the bed, where I had been lying, completely exhausted, and drew my wrap closer about me as I called out ‘ Come in!’ I expected it to be Sasha, but it was Bibi. She surveyed me from the door; then she smiled and entered.
‘Sorry to have abandoned you the whole day. But I was suffering from a fearful hangover. I feel better at last.’
She looked better, the colour in her cheeks high and her eyes gleaming. It seemed astonishing that less than an hour ago hers was the figure I had seen standing motionless on that darkening slope, down which the rain coursed in muddy rivulets, while the two trees on either side shuddered in the wind. Or could we have imagined her presence there? Might it, after all, have been Chieko?
‘No, don’t get up. Stay where you are. Sasha tells me you got caught in the storm and that you had to run home.’ She glanced down at my naked legs. ‘Goodness! I must give you some iodine for those scratches. At this time of year it’s so easy for places like that to go septic.… Wait a moment.’
When she had left the room I quickly slipped into brassière and pants and then began to brush my hair at the dressing-table mirror.
‘Here. Come to the bed and I’ll put it on for you.’ She had returned with a bottle of iodine in one hand and a packet of cotton-wool in the other.
‘It’s all right, thank you. I can manage myself.’
‘Nonsense. Come!’
I obeyed her as I always seemed to obey her, feeling an acute embarrassment, at the continuing recollection of that scene when Sasha had looked up at the shadow on the tattered paper screen, his body rigid before it all at once collapsed in a passionless fulfilment. But Bibi seemed entirely, even insolently, at her ease about it.
‘You poor thing.’ She held my foot by the ankle, rubbing her thumb along the instep. ‘ You must have been running away from that storm like someone possessed. Sasha has a nasty scratch across his back.’ She removed the cork from the bottle and shook some of the iodine on to a pad of cotton-wool, her gaze still on my face with an expression at once quizzical and benign. ‘Now this may hurt a little.’
She began to dab at the scratches, holding first one ankle and then the other tighter and tighter, as I screwed up my face and gasped with pain. ‘It won’t look very pretty, I’m afraid. But never mind.’ She replaced the cork and put the bottle down on the bedside table, as the stinging of the iodine slowly became a strangely pleasurable glow. She stood, again looking down at me, her hands in the pockets of the house-coat she was wearing. Then she sat down on the bed beside me. The house-coat parted to reveal one of her magnificently straight legs almost to the thigh.
‘What did you think of the garden?’ she asked. ‘Extraordinary, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, extraordinary,’ I mumbled, feeling the blood thudding behind my eyes and in my throat. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘He was an artist. What self-dedication! … Sasha tells me Chieko was up there.’
I nodded.
‘He told you her story?’
I nodded again.
‘She was the last, I think.’ She laughed softly. ‘But with, my father one could never be sure.’ All at once, she had stretched herself on the bed beside me, still not caring that the housecoat was gaping open. Her arm rested along mine, the flesh cold and firm. She opened the hand and gripped my fingers with an unexpected savagery that made me almost cry out.
‘Don’t go on Monday,’ she said.
‘I must.’
‘Tell that boring husband of yours not to come for you. Tell him to come a week later, Or—’ her body shook beside me as she began to laugh—tell him not to come at all.’ She sat up on an elbow, leaning over me: ‘I’m being serious. Stay with us. Why not? You like it here, don’t you? And we like you.’
I attempted to make a joke of it. ‘But what about poor Bill?’
She gazed fixedly down into my eyes. ‘Do you really care about him?’
‘Of course I do.’ But my voice sounded faint, as though, an invisible hand were pressing gently at my wind-pipe.
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said slowly. ‘I just don’t believe you. You’d far rather stay here with me and Sasha.’
I shook my head from side to side, as she put an arm over my chest, pinioning me to the bed. Suddenly her face began to descend, slower and slower, until, as I continued to shake my head, her lips closed on mine. For a brief moment I allowed them to rest there; then I flung her off me and jumped off the bed. She gave her little laugh, still sprawled across it as she looked at me.
‘I must get dressed,’ I mumbled. I picked my watch off the dressing-table and looked at it. ‘ It’s past seven-thirty.’
Slowly she sat up on the bed; then she got to her feet.
‘You’re making a mistake,’ she said softly. ‘Believe me. I mean—She began to walk towards the door—‘he’s not really interested in, women. Not really. He’s—that’s not his thing. Thelma found that out. So many have. So—’she smiled with apparent friendliness—‘don’t let yourself be disappointed. It’s as well for me to tell you now, instead of your discovering when it may be—too late. All right?’
I nodded.
‘No hard feelings?’
I shook my head.
‘See you at dinner then. Don’t be long.’
When she had gone, I went into the lavatory and stood over the bowl for several seconds, thinking ‘Now I shall be sick.’ But I could not be sick; and slowly my sensation of nausea was replaced by one of calm and extraordinary physical well-being.
3
It was a curious dinner: Sasha, pale and his hands shaking whenever he had to pass anything or help himself to food, spoke hardly at all and kept his eyes lowered except when he addressed either Yuki or Tom. Bibi, on the other hand, was unnaturally euphoric in the vivacity of her conversation. Even Yuki she now cajoled and teased with so much good humour that the habitual expression of petulance and anxiety which appeared on his face whenever she addressed him slowly disappeared.
‘What’s the matter, Sasha?’ Tom asked at one point. ‘Something on your mind.’
Sasha shook his head, as Bibi answered for him: ‘He took Mary for a long walk in the storm. To the old man’s stone garden. I think that the unaccustomed exercise was too much for him!’ She put a hand solicitously over his: ‘I hope that you haven’t caught a cold.’
He drew his hand away. ‘I’m all right,’ he muttered, as though he hated her.
‘Yuki, what a fetching tie!’ she turned away from Sasha to exclaim. ‘Isn’t it a marvellous shade, Mary?’
Yuki grinned his pleasure, his little tongue flickering in and out from between his full lips.
After dinner Sasha excused himself—he had a headache, he said—rand left the sitting-room almost without saying goodnight.
‘I do hope that he isn’t sickening for something,’ Bibi said.
We spent the rest of the evening trying to teach Yuki to play bridge. He showed an unusual and surprising aptitude for the game ahd Tom was delighted. ‘Maybe I was wrong about you,
Yuki,’ he laughed. ‘Maybe you’re not quite as dumb as I’d thought.’
It was soon after ten that we separated to go to bed.
Bibi yawned in the passage, stretching her arms above her. ‘Tomorrow that husband of yours will be with us,’ she said.
‘He should be here in time for dinner.’
‘What fun!’ She laughed and then said with a sudden hidden viciousness: ‘You’ll be delighted to see him, won’t you? The reunion of the loved ones!’
4
I slept heavily, to be woken by the sound of someone tapping on the window. After the storm, the temperature had dropped by several degrees, but I had forgotten to adjust the gauge, of the air-conditioning and the atmosphere was icy. I sat up in bed, wondering if I had imagined the sound; but then it came again. It was too dark to see anything from where I was. Was it merely the wind? Or a dog? Or—I shivered involuntarily—Chieko perhaps? I got slowly out of bed, drawing my wrap over my shoulders, and then walked uncertainly over to the window to peer out.
It was Sasha, in nothing but his pyjamas.
It took me a long time to get the window open. I pressed the electric button, but nothing happened. Sasha shook his head impatiently, at the same time gesturing at the handle. At last when I had managed to ease one of the glass panels a foot or so to the right, he squeezed quietly through. ‘ No, leave it,’ he said, as I began to reclose it. ‘ Or I’ll never get out again. We had the mechanism fixed only a week ago by a man from Kobe. It cost a fortune by the time we’d paid his fare as well.’ He gave the curtain cord a jerk. ‘Don’t want anyone looking in,’ he said. ‘ Don’t you draw your curtains at night?’
‘Not here. I like to wake at dawn and watch the sun over the sea.’
We were both talking to each other with an ordinariness, the artificiality of which was betrayed by our reluctance to meet each other’s eyes.