by Meira Chand
Yokohama was also a town of committees, whose work was constantly to sift and reject. Reggie shook with apprehension about his application to the club. He had already been tested in numerous ways. Within the all-male preserve of the club he had been plied with drink to see how he held it, he had been commanded to tell his best jokes. He had been watched to see his effect upon people, his manner of holding a hand of cards, his expertise at billiards. There were certain eyes in certain faces which he knew watched him all the time, waiting for the moment when he might destroy himself. He became nervous and could not eat or sleep. A single blackball from the club would snuff out further thought of a career in Yokohama. Life in the town was like progress up a slippery pole or across a knotty chessboard.
This fact, and the desirability of success, soon became apparent to Amy. Mrs Easely arrived, all plump efficiency and a bustle of small, deft hands.
‘You’ll love the shops here. Did you get a glimpse of Main Street? Everything you would find at home. It doesn’t seem possible, when I think back, how we ever survived here before. Now, my dear, if you need clothes don’t go near the Chinese tailors. They hunt you down and pester. Stick to the imported cutters at Lane Crawford’s and Nozawaya’s. And if it’s shoes, insist on imported leather, even at double the price. Local leather is poorly tanned, spongy and lifeless, quite horrid. Although we did make do, for years and years of course.’ Mrs Easely sighed, surprised at all she had survived.
Mrs Easely was proud of Yokohama and anxious to show it off. She suggested they exclude the Native Town, which Amy had already seen. ‘One feels more at home,’ explained Mrs Easely, ‘in those parts of town that are one’s own and under civilized rule.’
They drove towards the green hump of the Bluff and crossed a canal that Mrs Easely said had been dug by the Japanese around the Settlement, to contain and cut off early foreign arrivals. From its beginning, Mrs Easely said, Yokohama had always been two towns: the Foreign Settlement and the Native Town.
‘Now we can come and go from one part to the other, and travel twenty-five miles beyond Yokohama without the need of a passport. We’ve come a long way in thirty years. In the beginning the Japanese hated us and tried to get rid of us. You couldn’t walk out without fear of vicious samurai. They wanted to pen us in, like they did the Dutch on the island of Deshima in Nagasaki Bay. Penned them in quite literally, my dear, for two hundred years. They built the Settlement for us, you know, when the treaty ports came into being and they saw we had to stay. They dug the canals to cut us off and posted guards at every bridge. They erected a lot of strange houses, neither Western nor Japanese, but an approximation of the two, for they had no idea of our architecture. And there we had to live. That was all down in the Settlement. It wasn’t until ’67 that they opened the Bluff for residence. We all moved there then, leaving the Settlement as a business place. For years we had troops upon the Bluff, British and French, to protect us against hostilities. But the troops have gone, the Japanese accept us as best they can, and from a rough town we’ve established what you see today.’ A breeze blew about them as they rattled along; the straw mushroom hats of the runners bobbed between the shafts.
‘Life was different in the old days,’ Mrs Easely continued, her tone wistful. ‘We were all working hard to establish Yokohama. We were less conscious of class distinctions. Today nothing but money talks. We’re no more than two thousand on the Bluff, but you’ll not find a community more rigid in discrimination. It can be difficult for the newcomer. In our affluence we’ve disregarded the moral tone of our town and concentrated on expanding its pleasures. It’s a town now to soften the spirit,’ Mrs Easely said, turning her head, her eyes assessing. Amy took refuge in adjusting her hat. The look she saw in Mrs Easely’s face was the look she saw sometimes in her parents’ eyes or recognized in missionaries.
‘Our great worry has always been our seamen. To give them an alternative to the vile temptations of Yokohama, we formed the Ladies Benevolent Society and established a Temperance Hall and Sailors’ Mission. There we have bagatelle, draughts, dominoes and a reading room. In the first year two hundred signed our pledge book,’ Mrs Easely informed her.
Amy thought of the difficulty Mrs Easely might have in turning Reggie’s attention from drink to bagatelle. Thank goodness, she thought, concealing her relief, she had arrived thirty years too late to see the founding of Yokohama. The runners slowed down, panting hard, pulling the rikishas up a sharp incline. Other men joined them and pushed from behind.
‘They call this road the Jizozaka hill. These poor fellows hate the climb, yet they have to haul us all up here so many times a day,’ explained Mrs Easely. The carriages tilted precariously, Amy gripped the side. The road snaked up between houses and shops and foliage. They pushed suddenly round a last dark curve and burst out upon the Bluff.
Amy knew at once she had left Japan; she had entered another world. An invisible door had closed behind her.
She seemed suddenly near the sky. All about her was light and careful, artful greenery. It was Bournemouth, transported and touched by the hand of God. There was a feeling of omnipresence upon the Bluff. They drove along the crest of the hill, along a narrow, twisting road of panoramic views. At each curve the ground seemed to fall steeply away. The sky surrounded them, wide and bare, pressing about them. The sea stretched far below, broken by the sails of junks and fishing boats gliding imperturbably. It was the most breathtaking place Amy had ever seen. She felt she looked down upon the world from here, between mortals and celestials, a mediator between the two. Anyone on the Bluff must be forgiven, thought Amy, in feeling superiority their natural right.
The sea dissolved into nothingness across Mississippi Bay and the Gulf of Yedo. Landwards, purple hills unfolded in mist. They rounded a curve and far away Amy saw unexpectedly Mount Fuji, pale and serene. The shock filled her with unease. While looking down in arrogance upon a lowly world, she too, it seemed, was silently observed by something beyond tangibility. Mount Fuji waited, intractable as an oracle – for what, she did not know. The sea appeared now menacing and the beauty about her turned in upon itself, turned in upon her too. For a moment she was frightened and quickly gave her attention to the stuccoed illusions of the Bluff, whose creators had glibly reconciled all that was irreconcilable.
Every style of architecture but Japanese was upon the Bluff. Great red-brick châteaux stood by clapboard frame houses of New England vintage. Porticoed mansions of stone and houses that combined a little of all had sandwiched between them bungalows from Raj-ridden India. From the narrow road on the crest of the hill streets fell away at the perpendicular. Long flights of crumbling steps connected lower and upper roads on the side of the hill, roads overhung by semi-tropical flora and great spreading, flowing trees. Houses were arranged in terraces and retaining walls of madrepore held the gardens in place. In their interstices grew flowers and ferns, lining the road beneath privet hedges and azaleas. These charming, lazy, flowery lanes with their precipitous dwellings of fantasy and aspiration were as cosmopolitan as their residents, German, Spanish, French, Scottish, Russian, British, Portuguese, Italian, Swiss, Scandinavian, Austrian and American crowded together upon the narrow Bluff. Initial American diplomacy had left its mark upon Yokohama in Mississippi Bay, Perry Island and Cape Saratoga, but the English by their very numbers had long since instructed the movement of the town, laid down the rules of manner. Tea was at four and dinner at eight, and at midday they ate not luncheon but tiffin. Of chits and blackballs Amy already knew. The St George’s Ball outclassed by the sheer amassing of funds any other national event. The LLT & CC, and YCAC, when decoded became the Ladies’ Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club and the Yokohama Cricket and Athletic Club, but kept with their permanent abbreviations a pervasive British flavour.
On the Bluff the grey drabness of the Settlement was far away, but the wish Amy had felt on her arrival, to extract from the scene all Japanese faces, had here been put into practice. There was no mingling with the native
beyond the employing of servants. Homes, churches, theatres, schools, all entirely of foreign architecture, held customs, languages and inflexibilities brought intact across the sea. Those who stayed long enough died and were buried in the Foreign Cemetery, their stones terraced down a windy hill, to gaze homeward in vain forever. Above them the romance of the Bluff revolved on. Few people escaped its fantasy, but like all Edens it catered to a privileged few.
‘The main thing, my dear,’ Mrs Easely advised, ‘is to join the LLT & CC, although it is not easy. Then there’s the Ladies’ Benevolent Society, the Amateur Dramatics, the Literary and Musical Society, the Cinderella Dance Association and many more. Now look, that’s the Negishi racecourse. We’re all very keen on the races here.’ The course was magnificent, nonchalantly sweeping the crest of a hill, commanding more panoramic views.
They walked to the edge of a cliff for a vista of Mississippi Bay and its countless sharp green headlands. Then they drove on and Mrs Easely pointed out hospitals, churches, schools, the library and reading room, and the famous Gaiety Theatre. In the Bluff Gardens they left the rikishas again. The Gardens were situated on the summit of a southerly slope, a swathe of green English turf littered with passive amahs surrounded by golden-haired babies and children in sailor suits bowling hoops about the bandstand. Gravel paths and neat hedges traversed orderly plants and trees. They walked to a white criss-cross fence. The hill dropped away steeply in three descending terraces of tennis courts. The neat slap of balls and voices floated pleasantly up to Amy.
‘Oh, Enid,’ shouted a woman whose ankles could be seen below her white skirt. ‘Just look, you’ve done it again.’
‘That is Mabel Rice,’ Mrs Easely said. ‘You will be meeting tomorrow when you come to dinner.’
They returned to Mrs Easely’s home, imposing and comfortable, for refreshments. Mrs Easely advised about houses, explaining their dearth upon the Bluff. Amy’s thoughts were now only of how to move in quickly. The Bluff, she knew, had already received her; there was a change within herself. Something that had seemed to afflict her for months had suddenly dropped away. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement.
*
It was through Mabel Rice, met as promised at Mrs Easely’s, that life for Amy began in Yokohama. She saw Mabel first outlined against velvet curtains, as if positioned for a portrait, erect in silk and emeralds, admiring men about her. There was distance in her face, deliberate as a warning. She was put together fastidiously, with money and contempt. Her expression made everyone her audience. Amy was thrust into conversation with Mrs Cooper-Hewitt, whose husband had persuaded Reggie in Singapore to come to Yokohama. Mr Cooper-Hewitt had now returned and supported Reggie in the club. As Amy talked to Mrs Cooper-Hewitt her gaze wandered back to Mabel. She exuded the disdain of the crème de la crème on the balconies of the Grand Hotel. In twenty years she would be impossible, frightening many, fooling only herself, but at twenty-six, in Mrs Easely’s drawing room, her confidence was in proportion to her beauty and her wealth. People listened when she spoke; her voice had a broad, nasal twang that allowed British residents like Mrs Cooper-Hewitt to feel immediately superior.
‘She’s an American,’ Mrs Cooper-Hewitt whispered to Amy, a cosmos of ineradicable differences summed up in her distaste.
‘She’s very beautiful,’ said Amy, tired suddenly of the rodent-like eyes of Mrs Cooper-Hewitt.
‘But loud, don’t you think? That might be the kindest word for her and all her countrymen. She has been seen riding a bicycle in pantaloons. They have no heritage, no breeding.’ Mrs Cooper-Hewitt pulled in her chin, straightening vowels that might confirm her own pedigree. She looked, thought Amy, like a badger with her small eyes and widow’s peak.
‘Of course,’ continued Mrs Cooper-Hewitt sadly, ‘because of her money she simply cannot be ignored.’
Amy checked a pert reply in defence of Mabel Rice, remembering the importance to Reggie of the Cooper-Hewitts.
‘Let me introduce you to Mrs Figdor,’ Mrs Cooper-Hewitt said.
The woman beside her smiled, her teeth swelled like a wound in her face. ‘We’ve heard about you. I’m sure you’ll be happy in Yokohama. Our husbands have already met. We wish Mr Redmore good luck. Have you met Mrs Ewart?’ She pushed forward a mousy woman who barely reached Amy’s shoulder.
‘What part of England are you from, north or south?’ Mrs Ewart demanded in a defensive Yorkshire accent.
‘And this is Mrs Russell. Her husband is a barrister, the power in our community.’ Mrs Figdor gave a nervous giggle and stepped back to make room for Mrs Russell, a tall woman with a pinched face who did not attempt to smile.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said and relapsed into silence.
Mrs Ewart, Mrs Figdor and Mrs Cooper-Hewitt began to talk amongst themselves. Amy shifted from foot to foot, dry of conversation. She looked up with relief as Mrs Easely appeared and took her off to meet Mabel Rice.
‘You’re about the same age. It will be good for you to know her, although I must warn you she’s rather a character. There’s a bit too much of her for her own good. Don’t let her sweep you off your feet,’ Mrs Easely advised in the voice of a schoolmistress.
Mabel Rice smiled a mechanical smile loaded with brilliance and boredom. ‘I’ve heard about you.’
‘News of arrivals spreads quickly here. It’s horribly disconcerting. Everyone knows me and I know no one,’ Amy said as Mrs Easely left.
‘There are few worth knowing, far as I can judge, but that’s for you to discover,’ Mabel replied, her eyes sweeping over Amy.
‘You’re rather severe with them,’ Amy laughed.
‘So’ll you be soon. They may all be God’s own children, but you won’t find a stranger crowd. Likely as not you’ll be in need of some protection if you try and act partial to them.’
‘Oh,’ Amy was confused, unable to reply.
‘You’ll have to pardon my sharp tongue,’ Mabel said more kindly, her smile now showing quick concern. ‘It’s apt to run away with me. What I mean is that, there appears less wrong with you than anyone else in this room.’ Amy laughed and immediately warmed to her, seeing the awkward offer of friendship from the discerning Mabel Rice.
‘A sharp tongue,’ continued Mabel, ‘is the only thing that keeps me from stagnating in this lazy land. Japan’s a little place. But for my tongue I’d have been eaten alive by all the old cats in the Settlement. Now that’s a secret, so keep it under your hat,’ Mabel ordered.
‘Trust me,’ Amy smiled. ‘I’ve just escaped myself from Mrs Cooper-Hewitt, who anywhere else I’d avoid like the plague.’
‘What, that old Mrs Grundy with the 1860 face, braids of hair still over her temples in the old-fashioned way? If I’d known you ten minutes ago, I’d have come right across without delay to rescue you, poor child,’ Mabel announced and Amy giggled.
‘That woman with the protruding teeth laughs all the time she’s talking,’ Amy remarked.
‘Mrs Figdor is what you English call a “jolly little woman”, but I’ve been unable to find her frankness goes beyond the protruding teeth. I’m convinced she laughs to make her teeth look natural. Her husband is one of the port officers. And that Mrs Ewart doesn’t have the sense of a squeezed orange. But the Lord preserve me most of all from Mrs Russell.’ Mabel rolled her eyes.
‘But I like Mrs Easely,’ Amy said quickly, guilty with disrespect. ‘She has been kind to me.’
‘She can be a sourpuss when she wants,’ said Mabel, and Amy suspected that beneath her manner Mabel was not immune to disapproval. ‘She’s one of those women who make the truth sound so sarcastic it does more damage than a lie. Let me introduce you to my husband, Patrick.’ Mabel turned to an elderly man who had appeared at her side. He was tall and well-dressed with a grey vandyke beard. Although he was middle-aged his skin was unlined, smooth as his manner.
‘I did happen to note you talking to Mabel and I thought, there’s as lovely a woman as we shall ever reckon to see in the Set
tlement,’ he said in easy familiarity.
‘Don’t talk like that, Patrick, she’ll think you’re flirting and not stay my friend,’ Mabel scolded.
‘In America folks wouldn’t call that flirting, only paying a compliment where it’s due,’ Patrick apologized.
‘Then I shall take it as such, with thanks,’ Amy laughed, delighted at such casualness in relations. He soon left them, but Amy was pleased to find one more thing in common with Mabel – a difference in age with their husbands.
Throughout the evening they contrived to sit together. Amy wished Mabel would talk in a quieter way, for her voice echoed arrestingly through a silence; people turned their heads. Amy caught again that missionary look in Mrs Easely’s eyes, and saw the tall and dour Mrs Russell exchange a glance with Mrs Ewart.
‘Monotony is death, I think,’ said Mabel, playing outrageously for attention. ‘It is important to know how to live, really live. Let us be reckless, I said to Patrick, and die if we must. I would rather die of recklessness than boredom in Cincinnati,’ Mabel said, explaining how they came to Japan. It appeared that Patrick Rice was immensely rich and had recently ventured into a business in tea. Mabel herself was an heiress. This fact went before her in whispers to those who did not know, and in exasperation to those who deplored her. She was quick to enlighten Amy about herself, devoid of modesty.
‘Papa made a fortune in kitchen ranges, I’m not ashamed to say. But we’re now in the nineties, the Age of Progress. Everything’s changing, and Papa’s not one to be left behind. He’s now into mail order catalogues, a new thing in America. He’s going to end the age of rural isolation and take high fashion to the hinterlands.’ She had a way of talking that sliced off chunks of unwieldy life and pinched it into shape. Such power was deserving of respect.