by Sarah Moss
‘It doesn’t matter.’
Papa would say, the painting is an object of beauty. It is about lines and curves, light and dark, colour. Just think about colour, Ally! Only the philistine mind goes running to names and places. She looks again, notices the way the damask pattern on the window’s curtains changes where the sunlight grazes it, notices the daring composition in which the curtains, the sofa and the window frame a sky which occupies half the picture but is empty and pale, only the source of the light flowing into the painted room. Papa is right; May is only part of the furniture here, another object on which light falls. She cannot remember ever seeing a painting of a sleeping man.
‘Would you like to see the others?’ asks Uncle James. ‘There are two more recent ones.’
No, she thinks. But Uncle James is already lifting the Aubade off the easel and uncovering another of the paintings stacked against the wall.
‘There.’ He whisks off the blanket with a flourish. ‘Harmony in Red. Isn’t it extraordinary?’
It’s the same sofa. The same yellow. Despite the title, there’s little red. And the girl is about the same age, but this time she lies propped against the sofa’s arm, her head back to expose a slim white throat and raised collarbones, one arm lying along the sofa’s back and the other hanging at her side, as if she’s sated and tumbled. Dark hair is falling out of a low chignon, and she seems to be wearing a nightdress or dressing gown, some pale froth of skirt thrown back over her legs and apparently held down by a swathe of red silk. A red fan lies discarded by her feet, and there appear to be items of clothing scattered on the floor. The light is dim; evening or lamplight.
‘Beautiful. He’s going from strength to strength at the moment. Astonishing work. And beginning to find favour, you know. He’ll get a lot for this.’
Ally swallows. ‘Who is she?’
‘Who? Oh, the model? Someone’s daughter. He’s very taken with her. She’s the subject of the other one as well. But look at the composition, the shape of the skirts and the sofa.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘They are very striking.’
Uncle James wants to take her to a tea room on the way home. Aunt Mary will like it, he says, to think that she has had a treat, and she still looks cold; he is worried that she will take a chill if she does not have something hot before they walk back. She remembers tea rooms with Aubrey, his manifest pleasure in icing and whipped cream and the ceremonies of teapots, cake stands and doilies. She does not want to go back, to cross the carpet under the gaze of ladies in hats, to sit stiff-backed awaiting the services of thin girls in black dresses and lace aprons all for a cup of tea and a bun. Uncle James is too kind, she says, but unless he himself has a particular wish for a tea room she would rather go home. But the cold, he says. But he would like to give her tea. She does not say that he will be giving her the tea wherever she has it, that her food and drink and shelter come from him as they did for many years. She would like to take tea with Aunt Mary, she says. She bites her lip.
He glances down. ‘Of course, Ally. I dare say you will want to talk to her about your sister.’ He squeezes her arm. ‘I should have thought of it that way. And I will take you both to tea another day, perhaps when you go to the sales.’
She has no intention of going to the sales. Unless, of course, Aunt Mary should want a companion; with no work to do, she has no longer any reason to avoid such outings.
‘Thank you, Uncle James.’
‘Nonsense, my dear. Let’s take you home.’
Uncle James, who rarely takes tea himself, sees her in through the front door and then leaves for his club. As if she were a child, as if she had not for many years lived in this house and made her own way to the hospital and around London at all seasons and hours. After all, she still has her door key. Aunt Mary tries to help Ally take off her coat and bustles her back to the fireside. Here again, the same velvet under her behind, her feet in the same place on the carpet. Her fingers begin to tingle in the warmth. She needs to go somewhere, do something. She does not know how Aunt Mary bears her narrow round, the endless ceremonies of meals and dressing and passing the time in between. She has forgotten how to tolerate kindness, she thinks. Only cruelty feels real. Aunt Mary crosses her feet on her footstool and takes up her embroidery.
‘And so you saw the painting?’
Ally nods. ‘I had seen it before. I’d forgotten. It’s very beautiful. An excellent composition.’
Aunt Mary looks up from her stitching. ‘Oh yes, I dare say.’ The needle begins to flash again, etching a green line in the space between her lap and her face. ‘And the subject?’
Ally looks away, not into the flames in the grate but out of the window, where the fog may be thinning a little and a cart rumbles in the street. ‘The subject is sleeping. She could be anyone, any girl with hair to match the sofa.’
The thread tautens, dives, tautens. ‘Is that how it was, Ally? Hair to match the sofa?’
Ally shrugs. ‘We knew that, Aunt Mary. We lent our bodies to Papa and Aubrey as others lent props and costume. That was all.’
But we did not choose it, she thinks. Our bodies, our images, were taken because we were in no position to give, because children do not, in the end, own themselves. We were posing for Papa and Aubrey almost before we understood how to keep still. How to obey, how to hold our limbs as we were asked to do, how to see our bodies as if we did not inhabit them.
‘I understand he has a new model now. Mr. Casey’s daughter. Rebecca, I think. I hear he takes her to tea every Wednesday.’
There is a slight sound as the needle punctures the stretched canvas, as the thread glides through the hole.
Ally swallows. ‘He used to take May to tea. Well, and me.’ Until I got too old, she thinks. Until I was becoming a woman. And when May was becoming a woman, when he didn’t want to paint her or take her clothes off and photograph her any more, he sent her off to drown in Scotland. No, this is not fair. Aubrey’s last painting of May shows some teasing appreciation of her maturing body, of the curve of her behind and the rounding of her thighs, and no-one could have known how the Scottish journey would end. It was an accident. Blaming Aubrey is a way of making meaning, of believing that May died because someone intended it rather than because people die at all times for no reason. May died because a storm came up and she was there, as many have before her and will again. And Aubrey gave May an extraordinary silk shawl on her last night at home, a wildly extravagant present to a young girl. He had not lost interest in her.
Aunt Mary holds her embroidery to the fading light from the window. ‘I dare say it is all quite harmless.’
It is a question. The fog dims against the glass; soon the lamp-lighters will come and Fanny will close the curtains and light the gas before she brings the tea-tray. A coal falls in the fire.
‘I cannot say, Aunt Mary.’
There was harm. Harm was done. She leans forward to hold her chilled hands to the fire, to feel the blood bloom against constricted vessels.
A KNIFE LIKE A SHARD OF LIGHT
He dreams again of falling. He leans as he has often done on the parapet, taking pleasure in the explosion of waves against the stone tower a hundred feet below. The Atlantic hammers on the granite blocks and foam leaps high, but under his feet the structure stands firm. He looks down and then something happens, something breaks, and there is time to feel falling, to know his own end, to regret, before—
He wakes always now a few minutes before the gong sounds and the chanting begins. He lies breathless, sweaty, but knows that in a moment his bones will ring in darkness with the morning prayer. He remembers the foxes again; a more superstitious person, a Japanese person, might imagine that they haunted him, that they had crept along in his shadow, when his clumsy foreign gaze was distracted, and glided now low through the house by night, shaping his dreams. If spirit foxes can travel by train, will they also board the ship w
ith him?
The sound comes.
The air and the earth reverberate. The voices rise. Somewhere very near, over a wall or behind a gate, there are men who spend their lives in beauty, shaven-headed boys growing up in the service of silence. And he is not dead. He has not fallen, not yet, and there is another day beginning. As always, he lies still while the sound pulses through his ribs and his skull, and then he sits up, hugs his knees in the dark. Behind the shutters, the sky will be paling; another day closer to leaving Japan.
Makiko must have just slipped back to the main house, because he burns his fingers on the teapot and steam rises when he lifts the saucer-lid of the cup of miso soup. Cubes of tofu bob above the green seaweed and in the other bowl his rice is topped with a fried egg. He tucks his feet under his knees and edges forward to the table, pours tea and sips his soup while the tea cools. He is glad to be without witnesses while he eats an egg with chopsticks. He should write to Ally, try to tell her about Kyoto in the snow, about days that begin with ringing in the dark and with green tea in a grey bowl. He must take home some green tea but he knows it won’t taste the same on the other side of the globe. He might write to Makoto: I must thank you again for your hospitality and for the privilege of your introduction to this beautiful country. I hope the new bridge progresses? He should write also to his mother, and probably to De Rivers who will like to have a description of the workshops where his acquisitions, his silks and his inlaid wood, are being made. Beautiful girls bow over their work as delicate fingers coax gold thread through the bright satin. But it is men, so far, who do this work, men with stooped shoulders and hands stained and calloused by years of stitching and dyeing.
Tatsuo is taking him to a market today, a place where second-hand goods are sold. De Rivers wants a chest or a cupboard, something he can use to hold the carved toggles and medicine boxes Tom is to buy. None of your modern rubbish, he says. Something really old, something that was sitting under one of those curved roofs when the country was still closed, something that belonged to one of those samurai lords with two swords and a topknot. Tom has already explained, more than once, that ancient Japanese furniture is a contradiction in terms, but it’s not what De Rivers wants to hear. I hope you do not mean to suggest that the inducement you have been offered for this work is insufficient, and look forward to hearing that my orders have been fulfilled. Tom is not without hope that he may find a chest, and understands exactly why someone would want to fill it with the toggles meant to fasten a purse to the wearer’s clothing. Although he has noticed an almost complete absence of personal mannerisms, of fidgeting, in the Japanese, the toggles seem conceived for fiddling and stroking, for touching as a man might finger his keys or the small change in his pocket. They are palm-sized, made always of cool and shiny wood or ivory, and shaped as amulets or familiars, small animals or homuncules, occasionally lucky beans or fruit. As Japanese men assume Western garb, there is less call for such devices. He has so far refrained from buying anything for himself, not wanting a part in De Rivers’ greed, not wanting to behave as if Japan is something that can be bought and taken home in the hold of a ship, but there is great attraction in the idea of walking the streets of Falmouth and London, sitting in his chair at home, with a netsuke in his pocket. Since he must indeed return.
The soup has cooled while he did his best with the egg. He tries to drink it, but the lukewarm salty fluid reminds him too much of having a cold. He pours more tea and sips: it has brewed too long and turned bitter. Tatsuo should be here in a moment, but he will start his letters while he waits. No point in sitting idle in an empty house.
The sky has cleared, and sits like a blue bowl upturned over the mountains ringing the city. Black cobbles are beginning to show through the snow like rocks breaking the surface of a pond, but the swooping roofs and tiled walls are still quilted white. As they walk, the sun comes over the mountaintop, plain and swift as the turning tide, and before his eyes shadows form and strengthen on the ground and the ice crystals begin to sparkle in the snow. He screws up his eyes; it is too bright.
At first the streets were quiet, shutters still closed and only a few men hurrying, collars turned high and footsteps muffled by snow, their wraps blots of indigo in a black and white scene. Now there are pairs of women under the paper umbrellas and the occasional bundled child holding its mother’s hand, and then squealing and two small boys conducting a snowball fight across the street, getting in the way of an elderly woman shuffling cautiously down the middle where the snow is thin. He has not seen much play, he thinks, or at least not much of what can be recognised as childhood.
‘Tatsuo?’ he asks. ‘Do the children play sports here? Ball games, races?’
Tatsuo checks his pace. ‘It is a new thing in the schools. They make exercises, to build strength.’
Of course, sword-fighting, wrestling, the traditional ways that must be upheld in the face of change. ‘But for fun?’ he asks. ‘For pleasure?’
Tatsuo shakes his head, uncomprehending or perhaps pushed beyond what he can explain in English. Tom misses Makoto.
There are more people, and then more again, and they turn a corner and the street ends in stairs running up to a great gateway, its canopy seeming heavier than the wooden poles could support. Those immense roofs are hollow, he knows, and lighter than they look, but even so in an earthquake one would not want—
‘Through here, please,’ says Tatsuo.
‘Here? Isn’t this a temple?’
Tatsuo bows. ‘Buddhist temple. Yes. This way, please.’
Everyone is going this way. Tom joins the crowd, behind a family with an infant riding in a pouch on the mother’s back and two older children walking either side of their father, holding the man’s hands and looking up into his face as he speaks to them. He does not remember his own father, cannot conjure a memory even when his mother insists that he must recall the stories his father used to tell him and the songs his father taught him to sing. His mother does not speak of his father’s death. It was quick, she said once. He went fast. Tom has always assumed, been allowed to assume, that it was an illness, a fever, that took his father. The Japanese father rests his hand on his son’s head as they walk.
The gravelled courtyard between the gateway and the temple building is filled with canopied stalls, around which people cluster like rooks to trees. Tom turns to Tatsuo. The moneylenders in the temple, he thinks. Are Buddhist monks not sworn to poverty? Stones that are probably statues loom over the throng from square plinths.
‘This way, please. There is someone you meet.’
He glimpses pots set out on the tables, tea sets and sake cups. Above another stall, a purple kimono patterned with silver fish is raised in the sunshine and a blue one lies at its feet. There are painted scrolls, a mass of the indecipherable, and then what he triumphantly identifies as hair ornaments, the sort that waver like antenna above the lacquered perfection of blue-black hair. Absolutely not a gift for Ally, whose soft mouse hair is forever slipping over her neck and ears, escaping her plait and spreading across her pillow as she sleeps. He remembers it in his fingers, the warmth of her head in its roughness. He remembers lifting it to bring his lips to her neck. He will write to her about the hair ornaments. Light flashes from another stall, straight lines of iron and steel. Blades; swords and knives. He pauses, his gaze drawn to the edges in the cold sun. Wasn’t it only samurai who were allowed swords? He wonders where these have been, what hands wielded them. So sharp, Professor Baxter said, that you’d never know your head had been cut off. So sharp it wouldn’t hurt until later. A shiver traces his spine; bring on the modern age, he thinks. Hail progress.
Tatsuo is waiting for him. ‘All right? Here. Look. Kiyumizu ware. Very beautiful.’
Tom approaches. Rice bowls, if they are meant for any purpose, although it is hard to imagine anything so delicate subject to heat and spoons and chopsticks. A leaf pattern reminds him of the crimson and g
old on the floor of the mountain forest, winter bamboo is almost black against the bone-white china, the blossoms’ pink is so pale that at first he does not see it. A seasonal set.
‘These,’ Tatsuo says.
Not the rice bowls, obviously, on reflection, too useful for De Rivers’ interest, but a teapot and a set of bowls, thin as snail shells, grass-green and gilt. He bends to look: overlapping green bamboo, jewelled with bright birds and butterflies barely the size of a raindrop. The paintbrush must comprise no more than half a dozen bristles.
The stallholder says something. ‘You may touch.’
They don’t invite touch. It is their fragility that is remarkable, the evidence that something so brittle and thin, so fine in its miniaturism, remains capable of physical integrity from one hour to the next. He buys them, for De Rivers, and has them sent to the house. He buys three fans, and a parasol on which chrysanthemums seem to have fallen like rain. A lacquer tray, deep and shiny as still water, across which golden birds fly, and a matching box with tiny drawers that would hold stamps or, just about, cuff links. Then he goes back to the sword-seller and buys a knife, probably for himself, a knife like a shard of light against his thumb.
THE LILIES OF THE FIELD
The first snowdrops are in bud in the Square’s garden, a cluster sheltered in the rockery on a south-facing rise. There are leaf-buds swelling on twigs and birdsong in the air. In Cornwall, probably, there are already camellias and even the first daffodils, and still Ally is in London. Still she has done nothing. Aunt Mary does not understand, even Annie does not understand, that there is nothing restful in idleness. She reads, calling it ‘work,’ and she walks, calling it ‘exercise.’ She reads badly, distracted by the flight of a bird past the window, by the wind in the trees, the passage of carts and carriages, and when she looks back at the book she cannot remember the last five pages. The hours pass more and more slowly and the days faster and faster. Life could slip away, she thinks. In a few weeks there will be bluebells under these trees. She could find herself forty and then fifty, hiding between her qualifications the truth that she is no more than any other superfluous woman eating at the table and lodging under the roof of whichever man finds himself burdened by family obligation to support her. Ally closes her eyes and tries to draw a deep breath of the air, to catch, despite the smoke of a million coal fires, the exhalation of things growing and stirring in the earth. Tom will be home before they die again.