It was the way our day in the Blue Mountains finally came to an end.
MRS BENNETT AND THE BEARS
The first time he tried to phone there was difficulty getting through. Ten minutes later the line was clear as glass. Jackie picked up the phone and shrieked, ‘Edward!’ She raised her hand to hush the women at the table behind her, on the other side of the two bottles and the plates with their scattered shells. ‘Have we had a night, believe me!’ Jackie said.
‘Who’s there?’ Edward asked her.
‘Your sisters,’ Jackie said. ‘Who else?’ And Shirl called over his wife’s shoulder, ‘Ask him how the little Nip ladies are!’
Edward was fifty-six. It still surprised him that he was in Japan at all. The director had come through into the smallest of the three divisional offices and said, ‘We have to send somebody up there, and I’m damned if I want to face that lot again. Intestines of sea-slugs for breakfast. Not on your nelly.’ He turned to Lucy, the administrative assistant, who sat a few feet from Edward’s desk. She laughed and knew exactly what the director meant. ‘Emetics aren’t in it,’ she said. ‘So I’ve heard.’ So Edward had said all right, he’d go then, it was about time he took one of these information jaunts. Making it sound casual. In fact he had felt—not his word, true, but one that Jackie had used on his behalf—he had felt more than a tad excited at the prospect. A conference in Sapporo on the care of the aged may not sound quite the most exciting assignment, but Japan, after all …
He would not have admitted it to a soul, not even to Jackie, but when he thought of the place it was pretty much what his father would have thought. Which meant, seeing Dad had never been closer to the war than training on Motutapu, it was a view based almost entirely on the movies. The deck of an aircraft carrier far below with a pilot’s face smooth as butter, a white scarf fluttering from his throat as he tilts and aims dead centre. A sword flashing down above a bowed neck. Less nasty things, of course. Olympic gymnasts arcing back from the rings, rice rolled in seaweed, a woman with her face whitened with flour. Yes, he was glad he said he would go. Jackie and his sisters thought it an absolute scream, Edward off to Nippon at his age when he’d hardly been out of the North Island! Shirl, who always talked to him as though he were on the end of a distant telephone call in any case, now clinked the bottles behind his wife’s head and called down the thousands of kilometres, ‘Tell him just listen to what he’s missing!’
Edward put down the receiver and stood at the window, fifteen storeys above the long artificial lake. Scullers in bright jackets sliced the dark water, their wakes spreading out and intersecting. It was his first time away from home for years. And if what he now felt was loneliness, then that was all right too. But it was a strange feeling. Then he stepped back to the window, startled. A large wide-winged bird, a hawk it must be, swept in to within feet of the plate-glass he stood at. It was the air currents, he supposed—the warmth from the huge hotel that towered where natural cold should be, and the birds rode the comfort of it. Or perhaps that had nothing to do with it. He turned and went to the sofa in the most luxurious room he had ever spent a night in. They told you that, didn’t they, that Japan was luxury. Billy Collett in Policy had said to him before he came up, ‘I’ve been there three times and I don’t pretend to know the first thing about the buggers. But they do know what a hotel is. You’ll see that soon enough.’
He sat and took off the new shoes he had bought for the conference. He had not liked it when he phoned just now. He had not liked hearing his sisters—Bernice who was married and Shirl who was divorced—both trying so hard to show what fun they were having. Perhaps they were. Perhaps they were as happy as he and Jackie were most of the time. He had been elated all day, and the phone call made him feel so flat. Visiting the hospital especially, now that was something. The quality of the place, so much finer than anything he knew at home. He had taken careful notes. The young caregivers who trained for two years and wore long blue aprons as they moved cheerfully among the aged patients—their good humour and dedication that so struck him. The few old people who tried to speak to him and shook his hand. The large Impressionist prints on the walls, the cages of bright singing birds. He had talked with a physio from Christchurch, brought up here for a year to work with local staff. The young woman told him not everywhere was like this, of course, but there was nothing back home to touch it either.
He returned to the window and placed his forehead on the cold glass. The air outside was grey; lights twinkled in moving streams on a distant motorway. Another of the large birds swept in. It levelled out and hovered so close to the glass that the darker markings of the feathers stood out as clear as writing. Then the bird tilted and flowed down towards the sheet of now blackened water.
The phone shrilled on the bedside table. Mr Tanaka said he would be in the foyer tomorrow morning at eight o’clock; would Edward be so good as to meet him there, promptly? Seeing it was their free day. Mr Tanaka was youngish, handsome, connected with a string of hospitals. He had given a paper on financing care for the aged. He referred to flowcharts and the economies of several countries. He said, ‘What we do for them today we do for ourselves tomorrow.’ He would drive Edward to the country to see the bears. And Mrs Bennett, he said. She had been a student with him and now lived in Sydney—perhaps Edward had met her already? He said he thought so. A tallish woman with high-piled hair, she must be the one Mr Tanaka meant.
He was quite wrong. Mrs Keiko Bennett was—well, dumpy, Jackie would have called her. Her hair was short, with a shiny fringe across a roundish, middle-aged face. She spoke English and once had an Australian husband. She smiled when they shook hands. She was the first Japanese he had met in two days who did not bow and make him feel the awkwardness of his body.
Mr Tanaka sat in the front seat, next to the driver. Edward and Keiko—she asked him to call her that—sat in the back. We are like a bridal party, Edward thought, these white antimacassar things across the seats, the lacy fringes, the white gloves the driver wore. Keiko broke the ice. She said, ‘I have never seen the bears either.’ Mr Tanaka told them the animals they were going to see were called higuma. For all other bears there was a different word. This was only for those in Hokkaido, which were almost the biggest in the world.
It surprised Edward that he did not feel awkward with her, not in the least. Women, as Jackie sometimes teased him, were hardly his thing, were they? ‘Forty before he tried one!’ she said once to Bernice. And Bernice had slapped her hand and said, ‘That’s my big brother you’re talking about, you wicked widow!’ Later Edward told her, ‘I wish you wouldn’t joke like that.’ It made him look, well, stupid, didn’t it? Then Jackie lifted her cashmere sweater and crushed him in against her breasts and tousled his hair and told him there, if they couldn’t joke among themselves, the family, then who could they joke with? She had held him so tight her nails hurt his shoulders. She called out, ‘My God!’ and when she got her breath back she said, ‘Doesn’t that tell you something, now, doesn’t it?’
Mr Tanaka said a friend of his was once playing golf not far from the hot springs where they would park the car and take the funicular several hundred metres into the densely wooded hills. His friend was teeing off when a cry went up along the links. A bear had come out of the woods and was ambling along the course. Players ran in all directions, tossing their American clubs and their expensive Italian leather bags all over the greens.
Keiko laughed for the first time and Edward thought, how good that sounds when she laughs. Her face was lit with the thought of it—the running golfers, their dignity dropped as quickly as their number eights, and the slow, lumbering, casual beast. Her teeth were even and small; she looked ten years younger when she laughed. Edward was laughing too. She held his glance when he looked across at her. And then he remembered she was Japanese, and how foreign she was, after all. How foreign their whole excursion was. But there was a warmth between them.
It was two hours later, after they had eate
n buckwheat noodles off heated black tiles, and Mr Tanaka had dropped them at the funicular, whose small red cabin gently swayed them away from the dock and out over the steeply ascending forest. Keiko pointed to where the sun broke from the afternoon rainclouds and the distant sea flashed out its great sheet of foil. ‘See that, Edward?’ she said. And when they were through the gates of the park she said, ‘Here, hold your hands like a cup.’ She poured the round toasted pellets from the bag she had just bought. She tilted the bag and steadied his own hands with one finger. It was as natural as a mother doing it to a child. But her touch surprised him, and pleased him greatly, and she smiled when he looked at her.
They walked in silence to the parapet and she said, ‘Ah!’ as she looked over. ‘You think so too?’
‘Yes,’ Edward said, ‘yes.’ He did not catch what word she had actually said. But yes to whatever it was, for when he looked down and saw the bears he felt the catch in his breath. They were magnificent and poised and huge. Directly beneath him one hoisted itself up from where it rested on all fours. It rose and expanded and its sheer presence came up to him with the rough, tangy stench of the pit. It held up a soft black paw beneath the sheathed curve of its claws, a kind of benign, slow, imploring wave as he threw pellets down to it, then the quick easy movement of the massive head as it snapped at the flying scraps of food. There were dozens of them in the huge concrete pit. ‘See the necks,’ Keiko said. Her hand lifted, then fell back beside his own on the iron rail in front of them. She meant the wounds slashed in long red trenches on the shoulders and chests of several of the bears. ‘They fight because of the space.’
They watched for almost an hour. Edward said, ‘I feel like a child, watching these.’
‘They would kill you like that,’ Keiko said. Again her hand raised slightly and fell back to the iron bar. ‘They are very beautiful and they would kill you like that.’ And they laughed together, although there was no particular reason to. Then she looked at her watch and said, ‘The Japanese are never late.’ And as if to place herself a little to one side, she smiled at Edward and told him, ‘I have been in Sydney now for as long as I was Japanese.’
Mr Tanaka’s driver asked if they would like to sit in the car or walk a little while they waited for their host to return from one of his hospitals down the road.
‘We’ll walk,’ Keiko said. They walked for ten minutes, passing beyond the public buildings to a small park and a few trees. The first drops of rain were sudden and big as coins. The downpour pinged off car roofs and hissed on the open ground. Edward put on the light raincoat he had carried all afternoon. ‘Mr Tanaka will drive down this way,’ Keiko said. ‘He’s bound to.’
Edward held open the sides of his raincoat in what he knew must seem a comic enough gesture. He said, ‘I’m afraid there’s nowhere else.’ The woman stood in close against him. She put her hands just above his own and drew the coat as best she could in front of both of them. The rain ran behind Edward’s glasses and inside his collar. He could smell the rain on Keiko’s hair. She stood close against him, her head beneath his chin. She laughed and her hair moved against his throat and she said, ‘We must look very strange.’ It was only a minute. The black car eased down the street towards them. The driver’s whitegloved hand rose and beckoned them to the kerb. That was all there was. They had stood in the pelting rain, their bodies close, as at ease, Edward thought, as he had ever been with anyone. ‘Thank you,’ Keiko said. Then they scrambled into the car.
Keiko rubbed her face and her hands with a towel Mr Tanaka handed back to her. She then ran her fingers through her hair and held the towel towards Edward. Mr Tanaka and the driver were highly amused. As they dropped Edward back at his hotel Keiko touched his hand and said, ‘Next time an umbrella!’ He stood at the hotel entrance and raised his hand. She waved back from the other side of the rain-dotted window. She was leaving the conference early, to visit a sister at Kyushu. She kept her hand flat on the window until the car turned into the main road.
Edward sat in the huge lobby, where a man in a white suit played a grand piano on a dais between ten-metre artificial palms. High above, in the fifteen-storey atrium, life-size models beneath brightly coloured hang-gliders swooped forever in the same place. He ordered a brandy and watched the capsule-shaped lift, beaded with tiny lights, run up and down the enclosed wall of the hotel. He knew Jackie would phone his room as arranged at six o’clock, but he preferred to sit down here.
He knew it was love, and knew it was absurd even to use the word. He knew that in a day, in two days, this elation would pass, and he would never know it again. Never. She had felt it too. Pressed against him. Laughing. Knowing as well as he did that it was a splinter of time that never should have occurred, a pure gift. He took a mouthful of brandy and held it without swallowing, prolonging the pleasure of its taste.
Twenty minutes later he signalled to the waiter for another drink. He smiled at the young man in a strange operatic uniform who carefully set the balloon glass on a coaster. Edward would have liked to joke with him, but he knew he did not have the knack for that kind of easy rapport. He thought how he would tell Jackie about the conference, about the marvellous geriatric baths he had seen yesterday, for example, whose sides rose from slots in the floor to the level of a metal stretcher wheeled above them, the bath literally coming to the patient. He could hear himself saying it: ‘Geriatric care we’ve never dreamed of at home.’ And Bernice rolling her eyes and Shirl passing another glass of pinot all round and Jackie joking, ‘You don’t have to be so interesting, pet.’
Of course he would never see Keiko again. That seemed not to matter. Her hair wet and scented beneath his chin, her hands resting on his where she held the sides of his coat together. They would never know about that. He would not even tell them about the bears that rose up as tall as in stories, their questing muzzles lifted, their eyes small as currants. There was no sadness in his thinking: this is the last secret I shall have in my life. He picked up the glass and looked again, up to the vast shadowy atrium, to the figures on the hang-gliders like high stalled hawks.
ON ANOTHER NOTE
Paris with someone you really want to be with, even in winter, when the sky is slate grey as though to match the sloping roofs and the trees have been sketched in, the bare bones of them, and couples huddle together against the cold as you first glimpse them ascending from the Métro—that’s one thing. You are warm just thinking of it. But to be there alone, things fallen through as we say, well Rachel couldn’t think of anything much sadder actually, yet she refused to let disappointment have the last word. And supposing you wanted to add to the irony, it had all been planned at the end of summer, when Ricky first knew about the Festival he would be covering in Cologne and it was simply a matter of returning home via St Germain where they were bound to hear some worthwhile jazz apart from anything else.
Rachel was the one who sat on her smartphone evening after evening, tweeting and Facebooking while Ricky lay on the rust-coloured settee, his eyes closed, the buds of his iPod making her think sometimes of an old man with a hearing aid. Thinking of that should have been amusing but actually it made her want to cry. And she told him so, which was a mistake. He liked to tease her for being sentimental. He said it was all those Beatles songs and the stuff she heard her father play when she was too young to do anything about it and now she could never shake it off. One never can, he said, once songs like that have burrowed into your little old heart. But then he kissed her and drew her down from where she wanted to get on with her tweeting and as the settee was far too narrow for two he knelt in front of her and put her legs to either side of him, which she didn’t really like, and made love to her like that. It would have been far better to wait until they were in bed, rather than her propped there like a doll. But the next evening when she followed up the BritRail website and told him about the Hotel d’Orléans and the deal with Eurostar, and that their Métro station was on the same line as Cité, which was the perfect place to start
exploring her favourite places, he said, without removing his earpiece, ‘You plan it, I’ll love it.’ That look on his face which amused her and melted her completely, the look of a boy who wants to concentrate and can’t quite manage, listening to her and smiling and his stretched hand on her knee beneath her skirt, and her thinking she had known from day one she’d never met anyone who needed music so much, needed it all the time.
It was ten years since she had come to London, getting away from a relationship in Auckland that believe her was worth getting away from, and six since she took the best job you could ever have, in the art library at the Victoria and Albert. Which was something of a joke, so far as she and Ricky were concerned. He knew as much about art as she did about jazz, but as he also teased her, get either of us up to scratch with what the other’s good at and there’s a lifetime gone already. And as he told her, ‘Liking what I like isn’t quite the same as liking me.’
What’s that phrase her mother used to use, ‘couldn’t get enough of someone’? His hair seemed burnished as she sat above him and he listened to music on the settee and she caught its sheen in the raw light from her desk-lamp. His whole body struck her like that. It seemed to glow from within. She remembered from the school chapel a long time ago, ‘My love, my dove, my beautiful one.’ It made him laugh when she said so.
‘It’s the Bible,’ she said, ‘in case you think it’s me.’
He asked her had anybody set it, bringing his head down so his lips touched the spray of freckles on her shoulder and his warm breath moving to her breasts, then their laughing together, his demanding, in what she called his headmaster voice, ‘Can’t you ever be serious about anything, girl?’
They were good at fooling together, although each of them had said at different times how they were not great ones for laughing with anyone else. She told him as they lay on her futon beneath her genuine Japanese prints, in her tiny flat five minutes’ walk from Marble Arch, ‘I am thirty-two years old and young for my age and rather hopelessly in love, although I fully expect it has no future.’
The Families Page 3