One Morning Like a Bird

by Andrew Miller

  ‘Her situation?’

  ‘Her difficult situation.’

  ‘I see,’ says Feneon. ‘Yes. I see.’ He rubs his knuckles softly over the burnished wood of the desk. ‘Heaven knows how Junzo learnt about it. This city is even worse than Saigon for keeping secrets. I should have known it was pointless . . .’ He shrugs. ‘Though with half the world on fire and the other half about to catch, it begins to seem almost unimportant. What people think. What they know. I pity the poor child, arriving at such a moment.’

  ‘The child?’

  ‘Isn’t that what you’re talking about?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are enquiring as a friend, I suppose. Yes. It’s quite proper . . . Well, let me assure you she is being well looked after. There is no need for any concern. As for her plans, what she intends to do afterwards . . .’ He wafts the air. ‘She is, as I’m sure you have noticed, a rather independent young woman.’

  ‘I am glad she is well.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Physically quite well.’

  ‘And . . . the child’s father?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘She has told you his name?’

  For a moment it looks as if Feneon will refuse to answer his question. Then he moves his head, a sort of bridling. He shrugs again. ‘She has not,’ he says.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Why? Are you thinking of challenging him? I doubt he’s the sort of man who fights duels. That would require a certain sense of honour on his part.’

  ‘But if he didn’t know?’

  ‘Know?’

  ‘About the child.’

  ‘You think that’s likely? Anyway, it’s the not-caring that matters. The not-caring one way or the other. I think we know the type of man who does that. There are names, are there not?’

  ‘Names,’ whispers Yuji. ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘You better sit down,’ says Feneon, ‘before you fall down. You don’t look well at all. Shall I fetch you some water?’

  ‘I just wanted to say,’ says Yuji, switching now to the refuge, the audacity, of his own tongue, ‘I just wanted to say that I am the child’s father.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The child’s father.’

  ‘Who? Who are you talking about?’

  ‘I . . . Alissa . . . I am the father.’

  There is a long pause, then a bark of laughter. ‘You?’

  They stare at each other. On Feneon’s face there is a look of utter blankness. Then the blankness is replaced by a mask of astonishment. Not for an instant, not for a single instant, has Feneon imagined anything as impossible as Yuji being what he now claims to be. That much is clear. What is also clear, what has flashed from those grey eyes so plainly, so unguardedly, is the reason for such incredulity. Yuji is Japanese. He is a yellow man. A native. The daughter of a European gentleman might have such a person as a friend – it would almost be a mark of her breeding – but more than that?

  ‘It was me,’ repeats Yuji, tonelessly. Then, his face in a spasm, he shouts it in French. ‘C’était moi! C’était moi! Je suis le coupable!’

  On the little finger of Feneon’s right hand he wears a ring with a stone in it, a bevelled garnet of some sort, a semi-precious. It is this that opens Yuji’s lip. He falls backwards, is caught by the chair, and sits there, dazed, watching spots of blood fall in dark irregular splashes onto his coat. After a moment he focuses on Feneon’s hand holding out a handkerchief. He takes the handkerchief, presses it to his mouth. In the quiet between them the house moves through its repertory of small sounds, the fizzing of the lamp, the settling of boards.

  ‘It’s true?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not some idiotic fancy of yours?’

  ‘Fancy?’

  ‘One of your stupid ideas. Not true.’

  ‘It’s true,’ says Yuji. ‘It must be true.’

  ‘Must be?’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘It happened here?’

  Yuji nods.

  ‘Here in the house?’

  ‘You were away.’

  ‘So you sneaked in like a thief.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Yuji. ‘Like a thief.’

  ‘I used to keep a pistol in this desk,’ says Feneon. ‘You should be very happy that I no longer do.’ He sits, seems momentarily lost, then pulls a clean sheet of paper towards him, unscrews the cap from the pen, writes three lines and tosses the paper onto the floor by Yuji’s feet.

  ‘Can you read it? It’s where she is. In Yokohama. You will go there tomorrow or you will never see Alissa or myself again. It goes without saying that you would never be permitted to see the child.’

  Yuji stands. He does not know if his lip has stopped bleeding. The handkerchief is heavily stained, probably ruined. He folds it, hiding as much of his blood as possible, then reaches out to leave it on the edge of the desk.

  ‘No, no,’ says Feneon, ‘I don’t want it back.’

  7

  The house whose address is scratched in large, angry letters on the piece of paper is a rambling foreign-style building on a quiet avenue high on the Yokohama Bluff. Brown shutters, a first-floor balcony with white wooden railings, a three-storey wooden tower, a small clock above its two upper windows like a mystical eye. On a board beside the porch a sign in English and Kanji reads, ‘The Bullseye Piano Academy. Lessons by appointment only.’ Across the windows of the ground floor, heavy, wine-red curtains have been drawn.

  Yuji pulls the bell (a kind of stirrup on a chain), hears a remote jangling in the house’s interior. He waits. No one comes. His heart is beating so hard that he has, after a minute, to turn away to catch his breath. He rings again. Another minute, then the door slowly opens and a face peeps out, young and blonde with dark eyes.

  ‘You delivering?’ she asks.

  ‘Delivering?’

  ‘We’re not open for hours.’

  ‘I was hoping to visit someone . . .’

  ‘Do we know you?’

  ‘Miss Feneon?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Alissa?’

  ‘Everyone’s in bed.’

  ‘Ah. I’m sorry.’

  She nibbles the edge of a painted fingernail, examines him, this handsome, somewhat battered young man, then steps out of sight and swings open the door. ‘You can wait if you want. Miss Ogilvy will be down soon.’

  The room he follows her into is large enough for a public dance. Certainly, shadowed by the curtains, it looks grand enough. She tugs a braided cord at the side of one of the windows, lets in enough of the morning to wake the mirrors and bring a glow to the gilded frames of the paintings – pictures of women beside pools of water, women in gowns on day beds, women combing out their hair. In the centre of the room is a billiard table, two cues laid side by side across one of its corners. There are no pianos.

  ‘I’m Sandrine,’ says the girl, sitting herself up on the ledge of the table. ‘It’s funny how you’ve both got sticks. You and Alissa.’

  Her Japanese, though comprehensible, is thickly accented. She is wearing a robe of pale tangerine and on her feet a pair of yellow slippers that curl extravagantly at the toes.

  ‘This is Miss Ogilvy’s house?’ asks Yuji.

  She tilts her head. ‘You don’t know much, do you.’

  ‘Are you a pupil here?’

  ‘A pupil?’

  ‘At the academy?’

  ‘What academy?’

  ‘The piano academy.’

  ‘Oh.’ She taps the curls of her slippers together, smiles at him. ‘I’m very musical.’

  She brings him, unrequested, a glass balloon of brandy. He has seen these glasses before but never drunk from one. For herself she has a smaller glass of something green, then perches again on the billiard table and tells Yuji about a great-uncle of hers who had both legs amputated in a war with the Austrians.

  ‘That must be difficult for him,’ says Yuji.

  She laughs as though he has said something extremely funny, then immedi
ately stops laughing and slides off the table.

  ‘This is Alissa’s friend,’ she says to the woman silhouetted in the doorway.

  The woman looks at Yuji, nods very slightly in response to his bow. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I was warned to expect you.’ She turns to Sandrine, addresses her in a language Yuji can only guess at. Russian, perhaps. Turkish, Farsi. The girl hangs her head, answers meekly, then hurries from the room, scuffing the leather soles of her slippers and leaving the little glass of green liquor behind her.

  ‘I won’t have them drinking in the morning,’ says the woman. ‘I would be grateful if you did not encourage it. They do not need much encouragement.’

  Yuji apologises. It is, in the circumstances, easier to apologise.

  ‘Can you speak English?’ she asks.

  He tells her he cannot.

  ‘French, presumably?’

  ‘Yes. Some.’

  ‘I am Miss Ogilvy,’ she says. ‘I speak six languages, including, self-evidently, your own. By birth I am a citizen of the United States of America. Battle Creek in Michigan. It is a place you will not have heard of.’

  ‘I would like to visit America,’ says Yuji.

  ‘Have you travelled at all? Have you ever been outside Japan?’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ says Yuji, picturing to himself the map in Horikawa’s office, the black lines sealing the coasts, ‘that has not been possible.’

  ‘Yet I am informed you have pretensions to being a writer. A writer, even a Japanese one, must surely travel, if only for the stimulus of disappointment.’ She scoops up a silent grey cat from the rug between her feet, strokes it with her wrist. She is taller than Yuji, thin, very upright. Her hair is of a kind that does not exist in Japan, fine and finely crinkled, brown, auburn, dyed. She is certainly old enough to be Sandrine’s mother.

  ‘Very well,’ she says. ‘Let us talk of the matter in hand. You are here to see Alissa.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are her friend.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are the one responsible for her condition.’

  ‘I . . . Yes.’

  ‘The baby, in Dr Saramago’s estimate, will be born two weeks from today. On this occasion I happen to agree with him, though babies are not trains. They do not arrive according to a timetable.’ She watches him with her small, brazen eyes. ‘What do you know about babies, Mr Takano?’

  ‘Know?’

  ‘Do you, for example, like them?’

  ‘Hmm. It’s quite difficult to say.’

  ‘I don’t see it’s difficult at all.’

  ‘It’s only . . . I have not met many.’

  ‘Babies are everywhere. You do not need to be specifically introduced to one. I wonder,’ she says, ‘if you have the stomach for this. Being afraid, of course, is not itself a disgrace. Your life is about to be altered in a manner you apparently did not expect it to be. You will be a father, and whatever arrangement you come to with Alissa, that will remain inescapably the case. The question, then, is this: are you sincere?

  ‘Sincere?’

  ‘In your wish to be here. In your intention to behave with rather more practical decency than you seem to have felt necessary in the past. Nothing more, given the circumstances, can reasonably be expected of you. But neither can anything less.’ She sets down the cat. Immediately it starts to wind itself round her narrow, stockinged ankles. ‘I will give you a quarter of an hour to reflect. It is quite enough time to finish your refreshment and leave the house, if that is what you choose. If, however, you are still here when I return, then I will assume you wish me to understand you are indeed sincere. That we are to trust you.’

  She wheels from him, walks out, followed by the prancing cat. For several seconds Yuji is as motionless as the women in the pictures, then he sets his glass balloon on the mantelpiece, limps to the billiard table, and spends the minutes granted him, precious minutes in which he ought to be grappling with the question of his sincerity (though the problem feels impervious to normal thought, almost mystical), rolling a billiard ball against one of the baize side-cushions. He does not hear her return. Her voice startles him.

  ‘Very well,’ she says. ‘Shall we go up?’

  Alissa’s room is on the second floor at the end of the house furthest from the clock tower. It is slightly larger than her room in Kanda, its walls decorated with pink paper that light and time have faded to a blush. Opposite the door is a sash window looking towards the sea, where a pair of fishing boats, black shapes on the glittering swell, are making their patient progress from frame to painted frame.

  Miss Ogilvy picks up a towel, a dirty cup. ‘Do not,’ she says to Alissa in briskly enunciated French, ‘tire yourself out with talking.’

  When she has gone, when the clip of her footfall has faded along the corridor, Yuji and Alissa are like shy children left by a well-meaning adult to become friends. At last, still stood by the door, Yuji looks up to where she is sitting in the floral armchair beside the window. She is wrapped in a rose-coloured gown, a fringe of flannel nightdress showing below the hem. Her hair, black as his own, is plaited and tied with a ribbon. She looks both exactly as he remembered her and entirely different, a change that is not simply the swollen abdomen on which she rests a small protective hand.

  ‘Papa called last night,’ she says. ‘I don’t know which of us he is more angry with. He said he hit you.’

  ‘Not so hard.’

  ‘It must have been hard if you need a walking stick.’

  ‘That was something else. A fall.’

  ‘He had no right to hit you.’

  ‘Please. It is not important.’

  ‘He had no right.’

  Yuji nods, looks to the window. ‘It’s a nice view,’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The sea . . .’

  ‘Yes. It’s restful.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘They’ve been very kind to me,’ she says. ‘All of them. Miss Ogilvy especially.’

  ‘Miss Ogilvy?’

  ‘I know she can appear rather fierce at first. It’s only because she has to keep everyone in order.’

  ‘She told me I should travel.’

  ‘That sounds like her.’

  ‘And that I must not encourage her students to drink.’

  ‘It was one of the girls?’

  ‘Sandrine?’

  ‘I expect she was encouraging you, wasn’t she?’

  ‘It seemed like that.’

  From under the edge of the counterpane a seal-grey head appears, a black nose, two eyes sticky with sleep. Seeing Yuji, the animal sneezes and waddles over to him.

  ‘She has to stay in here because of the cats,’ says Alissa. ‘Dr Saramago doesn’t approve, but Miss Ogilvy says the Portuguese don’t understand dogs. Horses but not dogs. She has opinions on every nationality you can think of. Lots on the Japanese, of course.’ She gives Yuji a quick smile, then seeing how his attention returns again and again to her belly, the evidence of her belly, she says, ‘I can’t get used to it either. Being so . . . big.’

  ‘It hurts you?’

  ‘A little. At night, mostly. It depends on where the baby is.’

  ‘Ah . . .’ Yuji puts on a most serious face. He has no idea what she means. Where can it be? Sitting on the end of the bed?

  ‘They move,’ she says. ‘They sleep, wake . . .’

  ‘Is it sleeping now?’

  ‘No. Awake, I think.’ Then, after a pause, ‘It’s probably listening to us.’

  She is teasing him, of course. Surely, she is teasing him, but the thought of a foetal witness to this scene, of a baby, his child, theirs, sitting the other side of her skin listening to everything . . . He searches her face for some hint of levity, but she is not smiling now. She is gazing at him intently, nakedly.

  ‘Papa said Junzo told you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Two nights ago.’

  ‘Just two nights!’

&n
bsp; ‘We met . . . by chance.’

  She shakes her head, and for the first time a note of irritation enters her voice. ‘A pity you couldn’t have met by chance three months ago. There isn’t much time now. Will they send him to China?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I don’t know. One day, I suppose.’

  ‘This horrible war.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can’t even bear to read a newspaper. I look at these’ – she gestures to the little pile of magazines on the side-table – ‘read about knitting and colic and what husbands like for supper.’

  ‘I don’t read as much as I used to,’ says Yuji. ‘I have become quite busy.’

  ‘It’s nice that you’ve come,’ she says. ‘I don’t really know why you’ve come. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.’

  He opens his mouth. She silences him with a movement of her hand. ‘Don’t explain,’ she says. ‘I’m not angry with you. I was at first. Then I was sad. Now all I want is for the baby to be safe. You see, it’s really going to happen. It’s not just an idea, something to amuse ourselves talking about. It’s a real baby who’s going to grow up, who’s going to . . .’ Her face creases. In Yuji something comes undone, some strapping of the heart. He would like to yell, let out a shout so loud the men on the fishing boats would hear him. He steps towards her, tries to crouch at her feet, but his knee is too sore, too stiff. He stands again, wincing.

  She wipes her eyes, grins at him. ‘Look at us,’ she says, ‘with our sticks.’

  8

  He visits every day, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for a whole morning or afternoon. They meet in her room or in the small dining room at the back of the house, or, on fine days, on the bench between the eucalyptus trees in the little salt-stunted garden. When she is not too tired and her ankles are not swollen, they walk in the winter sunshine, sticks in hand, Beatrice trotting contentedly at their heels. The awkwardness of the first encounter, of the second and the third, the confidences that awkwardness inspired, gives way to a gentle, mutual reticence. They talk together, easily, fluently, but sound, even to themselves, like strangers enjoying an unexpected friendship at a holiday resort. Little is said about the recent past, the three seasons since they knelt side by side in the dark to watch Kasane. Little is said about the life that sits or walks with them in her belly. And when, now and then, a silence between them fills with the weight of unspoken thoughts, there is always something to rescue them, some task, some antic of the dog, some intriguing or comical behaviour from one of Miss Ogilvy’s ‘girls’.