The Ginger Tree

by Oswald Wynd

  You see how disgustingly commercially minded I am getting? It is a racial trait that lurks somewhere deep in the core of most Scots, only needing the right circumstances – these usually far from home – to bring it out from hiding. After all, at the union of the two kingdoms hordes of us went south with Royal James, our one object in that descent on London being to loot the place. And ever since we have dug ourselves into England’s empire, in many cases great chunks added to it by Scottish effort. There was a time when you French worked hard to bring a leaven of civilisation to the wild tribesmen of the north but, alas, this never really ‘took’, and we have remained raiders at heart, subject to strange compulsions that the rest of the world can only look at slightly askance. As I grow older I have more and more sympathy for my English husband with whom I still have no contact of any kind. To do myself some justice though, I never blamed him in any way for what happened, for I knew perfectly well that it was all me. Further, as an observer, you knew this, too! It is one of life’s little miracles that you and Armand remained my friends.

  What you said about my visiting Europe after the war has made me wonder about that. Until very recently the answer would have been that I didn’t have the money, but now I do I still think it improbable that I will ever leave Japan, at least to go as far afield as the other side of the world. There are a number of reasons for this. I couldn’t be near it without visiting Scotland again but there would be no welcome for me there. As well as never having had a word from my mother in answer to all my letters from Japan, I also have not had so much as a postcard from any of my other relations; two aunts, an uncle, cousins, who all seem to have cast me into outer darkness, perhaps on a command from Mama. Over the last few years I have written her lawyers three times simply to ask how she was, just some basic information. I have had three ruthlessly formal replies stating that she was well, nothing else.

  It may puzzle you that such an unforgiving attitude should be part of living amongst a people with a wild streak, but it is awareness of this streak in all of us which makes our middle classes so determined to serve respectability at all cost. Maybe if I went back to Edinburgh it would be as a tourist viewing the sights and returning to a hotel bedroom with sore feet to stare at that castle on its rock.

  No, out here is the bed I have made for myself, and the thing for me to do is lie on it, especially since I am now able to afford a very comfortable mattress. I will always be a foreigner in Japan, of course, and at one time this would have worried me, but it doesn’t any more. When I was living as Kentaro’s mistress I tried to bend my stubborn will into some sort of conformity with the Japanese way of doing things, even seeing myself as some kind of adopted subject of the Son of Heaven, mortifying the natural flesh that is me in a bid to do this. All absolute nonsense; the Japanophiles, those Western converts to the Japanese way, are simply objects of amusement to the natives, who laugh behind politely raised hands. I laugh too, these days, but without raising my hand.

  You must come and see me in the little museum of old Japan of which I am the foreign curator, and this right in the middle of a suburb containing many examples of the most horrible new-rich housing you will ever see anywhere. Until that happy meeting at pier number one in Yokohama, my very real love to you and to Armand.

  Yours,

  Mary

  17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama

  September 11th, 1917

  Emma Lou’s news yesterday was in a way a shock. Since moving down here I haven’t seen anything like as much of them as I used to, and though she asked me to come up and stay in Karuizawa with her either in July or August I didn’t, largely because we chose the summer period when business is slack to make extensive alterations to the shop, and I had to be available during this. Japanese builders do eccentric things if you are not watching them.

  At the beginning of September I was away for a week at the Kamakura Hotel, having told no one where I was going and spending my time in and out of the sea from that wonderful beach. It seems that Emma Lou has been trying to get in touch with me ever since she returned to Tokyo. She is sailing on the Empress of Russia for America on the sixteenth with the children, but without Bob. There was something cryptic about this announcement over the telephone which made me uneasy, and I tried to get her to come downtown to have lunch with me, but she was too busy packing and making what she called the final arrangements for Bob. She has asked me to come to the ship at half-past ten before a noon sailing. All this is very unlike her, but I can’t just ring Bob up to find out what has been happening, and I realise suddenly that it is quite a long time since I have even seen him briefly, this at the end of May.

  Upheavals amongst one’s friends are what you have to expect out here, relationships being continually undermined by home leaves or appointments to countries thousands of miles away. Someone coming back to Japan after a five-year absence would be very lucky to find, amongst the foreigners still living here, even a handful of the people he had known before. I seem to be as durable as a marble slab in the cemetery, but then not so many returnees would go out of their way to look me up, even if they were feeling lonely. Somehow I had always thought of the Dales as fixed, too, and in recent years Emma Lou has stopped talking about Pasadena. Instead of going back to the States for their last long holiday they all went down to the Philippines for three months on a house exchange basis with other Americans.

  I wish there was some way I could find out what is going on without seeming nosey. I am certainly not looking forward to that time before the Empress of Russia sails.

  17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama

  September 16th, 1917

  Two large whiskies have made me more depressed than I was before them. Probably I should have gone along with Bob to the Grand Hotel to give him support during the ritual of drinking himself unconscious, particularly since I don’t believe, though he is no longer a total abstainer, that he has ever before set out to get drunk. I just couldn’t go with him, even though he asked me to, and I don’t believe he really wanted me there as a witness. Perhaps, with no witness, he won’t do it, but if he does they are trained to deal with these things at the hotel, and will tuck him up in a bed at the end of it. I didn’t suggest that he come back here with me, he would certainly have refused even in his present state of mind. The reformed scarlet woman has had a relapse again and I think he would have been very unhappy if I had said yes to staying with Emma Lou in Karuizawa. He has always been secretly uneasy about my friendship with Emma Lou.

  Poor Bob getting drunk now, and me near to wanting to. I will never forget Emma Lou’s face as she shut that cabin door, having sent Bob away on some ploy, and after herding the children into their four-berth and a sofa cabin across the passage. She stood looking at me for a moment before she said: ‘Well, go on, ask why I am doing it.’ I said I didn’t know what she meant, wasn’t she just going on holiday to the States? ‘No, I am not just going on holiday to the States. I’m going to Pasadena and getting a house there. And the reason I’m doing this is because I don’t want any more children. If I stay in Japan I’ll have them, whether I want to or not. That’s the way things are.’

  What I said finally was that if she didn’t want any more children there were surely ways this could be arranged without having to take a house in California and leaving her husband in Tokyo? Her answer was in a louder voice than I think I have ever heard her use, even with the children. ‘There is no other way! Not with Bob!’ After a moment she added: ‘I wanted you to know.’

  The thing that makes me feel sick now is that I really had nothing to say to her. We heard Bob’s voice in the side passage to the cabins, the kids shouting at him. Then he opened the door to stand staring at us, hating two women for what he guessed had passed between them.

  The Empress liners are known for the speed with which they slide away from the dock after that final siren blast, but today everything seemed in slow motion, a deliberate lowering of the gangway, an even slower cast-off while passen
gers shouted messages from the promenade deck and, back in the second class, a schoolteacher returning to the States was being serenaded with a Gospel hymn by a platoon of her girl pupils. Bob and I were side by side, but he was a long way from me, staring up at an Emma Lou surrounded by his children, the youngest being held high so that she could throw a paper ribbon down to her father. Emma Lou must have determinedly bought those ribbons and handed them out, for soon Bob had a cluster of them in his hands and then I had one, too, that voice I knew so well shouting from above: ‘Catch, Mary!’ So I caught my long green strip and held it until the Empress of Russia finally did move and all those ribbons snapped to litter the dock and hang like the debris from yesterday’s party down the steel plates of the ship’s sides. The three-piece war economy orchestra up on the deck started to play, but wasn’t anything like loud enough to drown out the screeching schoolgirls.

  Bob was crying. I felt a terrible certainty that Emma Lou, in the distance no longer a recognisable face, was standing there dry-eyed.

  17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama

  October 7th, 1917

  Every morning a ricksha calls for me here at seven forty-five to take me to Sakuragicho Station for my train to Tokyo, always the same puller, a barrel-chested young man wearing his sweat band at a jaunty angle across his forehead who cracks jokes as we travel, quite often suggesting that it is time I got a motorcar. He says that when I do he will give up pretending to be a horse and sit in state behind the steering-wheel. I tell him that if he drove a motorcar with the same abandon he shows in manipulating a ricksha we neither of us would live long. The make he fancies he calls a Rosu Rossi, and it took me some time to translate this to Rolls-Royce.

  This morning Komoro and I were held up as we tried to cross the Motomachi, the obstacle being a long column of marching soldiers. Marching isn’t really the word for it, they were doing the Japanese variation of the German goosestep, something that I would imagine is still completely grotesque even when performed by smartly uniformed men, and these men certainly weren’t that, in dress for active service, baggy trousers under ill-fitting tunics, the packs on their backs looking thrown together.

  There was nothing we could do but wait at the intersection until what must have been a whole regiment went strutting past, with the people along the street deferential to them, standing in shop doors almost to attention. Komoro, I know, has been quite skilfully avoiding military service and I didn’t think this spectacle would appeal to him much, but I was wrong. He had managed to light the stub of a cigarette with one hand, the other holding the shaft to keep me on a level keel, and when I asked where he thought the soldiers were going he turned his head to say out of one corner of his mouth: ‘To the station for China. One day we’ll be marching all over the world.’

  I missed my train. I didn’t get to the shop until ten.

  20

  17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama

  June 9th, 1923

  Armand has sent me all my letters to Marie, which makes me sad that I have kept none of hers. He has not told me what she died of, but I think I can guess since he says she was ill for more than a year, refusing to leave him alone in Bangkok while she returned to France for treatment. Perhaps she was afraid of surgery. More likely she knew that it would do her no good in the end. Her last letter to me was only four months ago, but there was no mention of illness in it, though perhaps I should have read through the lines of her complaint about Bangkok’s endless, humid heat, and how she longed for that holiday in Japan. She was seven years older than me, which would make her forty-seven.

  I used to think of Marie as a woman who had everything, particularly when I heard from her during my first years in Tokyo. Her every word came from another life which seemed to be at the core of what was happening in the world, while all that was happening to me was sore feet. If ever there was someone cut out to be a successful Ambassador’s wife it was Marie, wit, charm, great power over men, and I know well from what she said to me in Peking, and from her letters through the years since, that this was what she wanted above everything. Armand, at fifty now, is not the French Ambassador in Bangkok, and in all their postings Marie must have had to play second fiddle to some woman with probably half her talents. I am sure this has been a great pain to him. He had money, and social position, but lacked the drive which pushes you to the top in the diplomatic service, or anything. The fatal flaw there, if it is a flaw, was that he wanted a role in life not for his own sake, but for his wife’s. At heart he was a botanist.

  What will he do now? He will still be thin, with those sinewy arms in which you could almost see the bones under the tendons stretched over them. For me he had gentle kindness. I’m sure that when I knew them he had never looked at another woman as he looked at his wife, that extraordinary concentration of love down a long dinner table. I can’t believe that there was ever, for him, a Siamese girl in a little house up a side street, but I could be very wrong here. I remember the Swatow Consul’s wife saying that Western widowers in the Far East soon marry again. It will be a curious little shock if I hear of Armand doing that.

  When, like Marie, you have no children you pass so quickly into oblivion. I believe that this is the one thing that really terrifies a Japanese, man or woman, the idea that when they die there will be no children to say prayers at the family altar to their departed spirits. That great sceptic, Kentaro’s relative and spy, Assistant Professor Akira Suzuki, believes in nothing that cannot be logically demonstrated, but I am certain would still be horrified at the idea of no ceremonial period of mourning, plus the prescribed prayers, after his body had been cremated. I must say that he has taken out pretty good insurance against this happening, three boys and two girls, all being raised in strict patterns of western philosophical enlightenment, but at the same time undoubtedly being trained to do their traditional duties towards the family dead. This is somehow basic to their national ethos, like cricket to the English, and as totally incomprehensible to anyone not raised within the mystery.

  I wonder if Tomo, now almost certainly betrothed, at least, to the daughter of his adoptive parents, would pray for my spirit if he was given the news of my death. He might, I suppose. There is one thing, however, about which I can be quite certain: Jane Collingsworth has been brought up without any instructions to decorate her evening prayers with a request for God to bless Mummy.

  17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama

  June 11th, 1923

  It must have been rereading all those letters I wrote to Marie which has sent me back to my notebooks. I have always been a little superstitious and there is no doubt that her death has made me uneasy, as though it was a reminder, not only of what a long past I now have, but also how easily everything I have worked for could just be written off overnight.

  I am not going up to Tokyo today. Emburi San can look after things perfectly well, as she told me quite emphatically over the telephone. Sometimes I think she could run the business better than I do, and in a number of ways is far more contemporary. I find the postwar fashions hideous, one of the worst periods for sheer ugliness in women’s dress in history, these up and down lines, too short skirts, and the waist hung on the hips. Now as never before clothes are designed by men who hate women. Emburi San tries hard, but I find it almost impossible to dress Japanese even in careful adaptations of these fashions. For one thing, women here were never meant to show those legs sat upon from an early age, for another they almost all have long backs, which puts the new waists on them not much above where the knees would be on a tallish Western woman. If things go on like this I’ll be back to dressing court ladies in floor-sweeping gowns and cartwheel hats decorated with ostrich feathers.

  Having a day off in the middle of the week when I am not ill is a strange feeling, I don’t quite know what to do with my morning. I thought about telling Komoro to get out the Dodge and drive me down over that rutted track to Kamakura, but I don’t really want to sit alone on a beach in this heat eating sandwiches or to
lunch with the foreign sahibs in the hotel. If he hadn’t been in Shanghai Peter would have come with me, delighted at this sign that I am beginning to take things more easily. I wonder if I am, or is this only a brief departure from norm?

  I am just in from a garden that has only one thing wrong with it, a backing of kiri trees as a windbreak which makes it too hot in weather like this. Otherwise it gives me more pleasure than the house. It is exactly eight years today since I first saw the place and knew at once that this was where I was going to live. Peter says I won’t marry him because I couldn’t bear to have him in here messing it up, and it is certainly quite true that I would never contemplate moving into the thing he allowed a half-American, half-Russian architect to erect as a monument to the Nasson money. There is also the fact that I really have quite enough of Peter as it is, with him as the man next door.

  This garden really isn’t mine at all, restored by my money, yes, but it is still six-eighths the possession of a good many generations of my predecessors who, being Japanese, still haunt the place for two weeks every year at the Festival of the Obon, led by poor Mrs Misune who slit her wrists. Another eighth goes to Sato the gardener, leaving the last eighth to me, my portion shared with Saburo the cat without a tail I got to deal with the rats and who has stayed to deal with me. I am a forty-year-old spinster with her cat, if someone with my past and present can hope to be so classified. The British Embassy certainly hasn’t got around to awarding me that status and now, on account of Peter, won’t ever do it, leaving me barred from those receptions which are quite celebrated in Tokyo, all of them watched over by a portrait of King George the Fifth, and attended only by those who cannot find a decent excuse to stay away.