The Painted Cage

by Meira Chand

  And yet, had she been free of the impediment of guilt, had Guy even been her husband, she knew he could never bring her the pleasure Reggie had once given her. Guy le Ferrier was innocuous as a lover. This knowledge surprised her in the very midst of things. He made his way about her body without any of Reggie’s commitment. He was lacking in lust, in carnality. She felt restricted by her clothing, she wanted to be naked as she always was with Reggie, freed to the awareness of her own body. Now her corset jabbed her painfully; it seemed the maximum must be achieved with the minimum of disturbance. Upon her body Guy’s hands were pleasant, light, even polite, but never discovered, were never enough. He seemed to need from her in all relatively little. He was without urgency, without passion, her body hardly registered him. And in that moment when, without a sound but the rhythm of their breathing, she crossed that one line in time and fact she had waited to cross, she was surprised at the banality of experience, of its nothingness and its disappointment. She was filled suddenly with a new respect for the Reggie she had known in the beginning, long ago.

  She lay beside Guy afterwards on the hard and filthy floor, trying to observe her new self and the difference in her life. There was nothing to see or feel but numbness. For an instant time had stopped and stretched in discovery, as it had for the sparrow who still flapped in terror against the walls. She was an adulteress and felt nothing. All she sensed was astonishment at the apathy of Guy le Ferrier’s lovemaking. He seemed an insubstantial caricature of the image he projected. She looked at his handsome, effeminate face and wondered suddenly if he might not be more inclined to men. She wanted to laugh, for it struck her suddenly as ironically funny. Instead, she stood up and began to dress.

  Later, when they were ready to leave, he said, ‘You must go first, as usual. We should not leave together.’

  She nodded. He suggested no next meeting. Instead he turned to her lazily as she reached the door and said, ‘Next week I leave Yokohama. I’ve been transferred to Tokyo.’

  *

  She was glad he was gone; it was good. She could never have faced him again, for a sense of her own vileness overcame her. It blighted all vision. It was a wilderness and she was lost. Mabel could not understand it. She crossed her ankles unfemininely upon a chair in her conservatory, smoking a secret cigarette in a long ivory holder.

  ‘But there was really nothing to it,’ she remarked. ‘You’re all worked up for no reason. It’s my guess that baby is making you guilty. Thank the Lord I’ve never had children.’ Mabel flicked ash into a flowerpot. ‘You surely know, just as this is the Age of Progress, it’s also the Age of the New Woman. You’ve a right to some things for yourself nowadays. I’ve a mind not to let you here any more until you change that long face,’ Mabel scolded.

  ‘It’s easy for you,’ said Amy.’ ‘You’d have turned the snake out of the Garden of Eden rather than go yourself.’ She had brought Cathy with her to Mabel’s and held her on her lap.

  ‘Oh my, now watch your talk,’ laughed Mabel.

  Amy turned Cathy’s face from the cloud of smoke about Mabel and hugged the baby tightly. Mabel was right, she had only to look at Cathy to be overwhelmed by guilt. What kind of a mother was she, to behave as she had with Guy? Cathy gurgled at a Persian cat dozing between the plants. She stared up at Amy, full of an innocence that seemed superior to any knowledge. Amy kissed the baby to comfort herself, holding her up so she could flex her small legs. She would soon be five months old.

  ‘She’s going to walk early, I’m sure,’ Amy said.

  ‘Hand her to Rachel,’ Mabel demanded. ‘It’s impossible to hold a conversation with a child about.’ Amy did as she was told, reluctantly.

  ‘Now,’ Mabel rearranged herself, recrossing her ankles on the chair before her. ‘First things first. I don’t reckon there’s been any wrong done. Next, I think it was all mightily funny. Why didn’t we guess the truth about him – he’s pretty enough to be a woman.’ Mabel threw back her head and laughed. Amy smiled half-heartedly and Mabel gave her another shrewd glance.

  ‘The Lord knows I don’t care especially for the Devil, but whatever those old Bible thumpers may say, it does no harm to take a little of the pleasure God has spread around. I remember once feeling like you, but I’m reconciled now to enjoying life,’ Mabel decided. ‘Patrick insists I feel no guilt about my little amours. And after all, no man ever feels guilty and they’ve the learning of hundreds of years. We women are starting out late, we’ve no practice in not feeling guilty.’ Mabel began to cough at a mistaken inhalation. Amy jumped up, slapped her back and offered the remains of a cup of cold tea.

  ‘Well, have you nothing to say?’ Mabel asked when she stopped coughing. ‘I can’t bear it when you sit silent.’

  ‘I can’t help feeling as I do,’ Amy said.

  ‘But nobody knows except you and he, and me of course.’ Mabel was incredulous.

  Through the open doors of the conservatory Amy followed Rachel’s progress across the lawn of Mabel’s rose garden. Over her shoulder Cathy’s small head was upright and inquiring. At the sight of the child she was flooded once more with a sense of her own wrongdoing. Nothing seemed to help. There was no going back over that bridge so wantonly crossed. She felt naked as a blindworm, alone and afraid at where she had brazenly positioned herself. And yet beneath the guilt in some strange way a valve had opened up, freeing her to herself.

  ‘I’ve always taken comfort from Patrick as regards a recuperating heart,’ Mabel stated. ‘He sees I take quinine and iron tonic, dark red bitters and iodized sarsaparilla. I suggest you do the same. Valentine’s meat juice and Brand’s essence of chicken are wonderfully fortifying. Get plenty of rest and go to bed early.’

  ‘You make it sound like convalescence after an illness,’ Amy interrupted.

  ‘But, sweet child, so it is.’ Mabel was emphatic. ‘Soon we’ll go up to Miyanoshita and sample the waters there. Those hot baths like the Japanese take do wonders for the soul.’

  ‘Whatever would I do without you?’ Amy mocked. She had lost the wish to see Mabel. She preferred to stay at home, examining her vileness as she would a disfiguration.

  ‘We all have to find our own way through these things,’ Mabel said. ‘It would do you more good to get out and about.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t,’ Amy shouted.

  ‘All right,’ said Mabel. ‘Don’t shout at me.’

  *

  Reggie was pleased. He took the change in Amy to be the result of his own forceful administrations. He had brought her to heel as intended. If he wished to believe that, thought Amy, she would not disillusion him. She secluded herself with Cathy, sang and played with her. The involvement in the baby’s life was a comfort in itself. She grew calmer, the spectre began to fade. But she found she was marked by what she had done in some invisible way. Her life seemed too narrow to be endured.

  ‘Oh, come, come,’ said Mabel in her conservatory, picking at a tiger lily. ‘It’s just the time of the year. It’s these dreadful summer rains, the horrid humidity of the Bluff. Yesterday I found mould on that Mexican saddle Douglas gave me. It had hung too long in a corner of the stable and needed a change of air. And it’s the same with you. We must go up to Miyanoshita when the weather clears. It’s horrid now on the Bluff.’

  And horrid it was. The houses of the Native Town no longer lay open to the view of bright mornings. Windows were shuttered against the rain, blinding the rickety houses in that quarter of the town. On the Bluffs maids crept about waging battle against the mildew, slipping boxes of live embers into cupboards and closets. Down in the Settlement roads became streams paddled by drenched creatures under dripping umbrellas. The sky hung blackly over the Bluff, full of hot rain and stored-up thunder. And after each deluge the sun appeared to beat as in Sungei Ujong. As there, the damp was everywhere, green and mouldy, creeping between the fingers of gloves or upon the toes of shoes. It erupted on walls and devoured lace gowns, respectful of nothing. At the end of May Mabel had insisted t
hey solder down in stout tin trunks all their evening dresses and pretty things, and wear pongee and crêpe for the next four months. There was no other way to rout the plague. Any items left limply in the wardrobes of the Bluff were adopted by maids with a sense of mission, and laid out to bake upon balconies whenever the sun appeared. At last the rain ceased and an unrelenting sun dried the damp and shrank the wet earth, fading curtains and chintz. It suffocated rooms and burned through parasols. Between rain and sun there seemed no way to win in the short, fierce Japanese summer. And with the sun the Settlement was suddenly redolent with the odour of burning tea as the drying and packing firms entered their busiest season. Residents susceptible to migraine quickly fled the town.

  ‘Now we must go to Miyanoshita,’ Mabel announced, holding her head, sickened by the vicious smell, ‘before we roast to death or suffocate from this tea.’ Preparations were made and Reggie, who could not leave the club, promised to come at weekends. Everything was packed in basket boxes secured by leather straps. These would be carried on the backs of coolies during the climb up to Miyanoshita.

  They took the train to Kodzu and from there a horse tram to Yumoto, which clung to the foot of the hills. They were a sizeable party. There was Amy, Cathy and Rachel, the amah. Enid Desmond was with her husband, who would return to his office in a few days. Mabel was alone; Patrick was in Singapore on business and Douglas unable to leave his work. Rowly Bassett and Dicky Huckle joined them at Kodzu from Atami, after sampling the burning geysers there. Ada was already in Miyanoshita. It was rumoured that Guy le Ferrier might also come from Tokyo. Amy prayed for him to be detained; she did not know how she would meet him again. From Yumoto they went up in a variety of ways, in rikishas or palanquins called kago, in deep wicker ‘Hong Kong’ chairs carried upon the shoulders of men, or, if they were able to, on foot. The climb was steep, ascending quickly to 1400 feet, beside them the shallow Hayakawa River tore down to the plain. It was silent but for the river, the calls of birds and a ceaseless orchestra of crickets and cicadas. The wooded slopes closed in about them, trapping the heat. A faint mist was caught by the pine tops and gathered about the pleats of mountain ridges, unfolding one upon another as they followed the curling path.

  Mabel rode in a Hong Kong chair at the head of the party in a position of natural supremacy, high above the muscle of four men. Enid and George Desmond chose rikishas, with one man each to pull and two to push. Amy was frightened when she surveyed the angle of ascent. She put Cathy and the amah in a palanquin behind her own. The kago she thought looked comfortable. It was a basket litter slung between poles, carried by two men, and appeared safer for the climb than the unbalanceable rikishas with their overgrown wheels from which she might be pitched out backwards down a precipice. But the kago swung about alarmingly; it was too short to lie down in and too low to sit up in, and the roof along the carrying poles, weighted with the property of the coolies, knocked her head at every trot. Luggage went up on the backs of men and grew enormous upon their shoulders. Rowly Bassett and Dicky Huckle said they would go by foot. But Rowly soon puffed and wheezed, sweat running down his arms and dripping from his dimpled hands. A rikisha was sent for to carry him in. Dicky walked on alone, catching up with Amy and keeping pace beside her, his chatter as constant as the cicadas in the trees. He told her of the famous geyser of Atami, which burst up in the middle of the village with a roar of sulphurous fumes. The little hotel had been charming, and the Western food not bad.

  ‘But the menus, oh the menus. I have kept some. We were served, believe it or not, currots soup, praised oeufs, devil sauce, fish squeak and dam pudding.’ Dicky was full of glee. Amy laughed.

  ‘What is it there, come and tell me too,’ Mabel ordered, leaning dangerously out of her Hong Kong chair.

  ‘And us too,’ shouted Enid, her voice breaking as the rikisha hit an unwieldy stone. Amy looked anxiously back to Cathy in the kago behind, but Rachel held her securely. She relaxed and returned her attention to Dicky.

  ‘And don’t forget the eclairs ala oujam, the boiled sponge and the dournat. I suppose that was doughnut. I cannot decide – it tasted and looked so strange,’ Rowly Bassett yelled from his rikisha at the back of the procession. His runners laboured bravely beneath his weight. The whole party convulsed with laughter; it filled the narrow valley, echoing back to them. It could not be pleasanter, Amy decided; there was always fun with Mabel’s group.

  Soon they arrived at Miyanoshita, bursting out of the woods onto the road into the village, high above the valley. The Fujiya Hotel was a spacious, white weatherboard structure arranged for Europeans. Its gardens were immaculate and split steeply down the hillside before it, half Japanese, half English. There were shady trees to read beneath and a white fence about it all. Narrow mountain streams flowed through the garden about rocks and pools of carp. The air was cooler than the plain, the green vista cooler still, falling precipitously away from Miyanoshita. The rooms of the hotel were Western-style, with open verandahs and wide views down the valley to the faint horizon of the Pacific beyond Odawara Bay. The waters for which Miyanoshita was famous were piped into the baths of hotels and inns through a network of bamboo pipes running along each road. The hotel was already full; as expected the men were accommodated in the bachelor quarters, a block of low Japanese buildings in the garden, opened for such emergencies.

  The first thing was to have a bath. Out of respect for Western mores the bathrooms of the Fujiya were not the gregarious, communal affairs of the Japanese; privacy and decency were upheld. The water felt alive, flushing the body of fatigue. Amy slept early, hoping Guy le Ferrier would not appear to disturb her.

  The next morning Mabel was out of sorts after a sleepless night; and refused to leave her bed. Nothing was to be seen of the men. Ada and Enid had walked into the village. It was early; the sun was already hot but devoid of Yokohama’s humidity. Amy had brought her Murray’s Handbook, which informed her that the hill behind the bachelor quarters, Sengenyama, was worth a short climb for its splendid view. She set off on a path behind the hotel. On the verandahs of the bachelor quarters the men still lazed in pyjamas behind newspapers and drinks. A steep slope of woods enclosed her suddenly, dark and cool, full of the sound of waterfalls. There was the perfume of pine needles and dank, rotting leaves. The path wound up steeply, and she slipped sometimes on the roots of trees snaking underfoot. She was agile and determined, used from childhood to wandering the woods of Cranage; it was as if she were a child again. Happiness filled her.

  Murray’s Handbook said there was a deserted tea house some way up from where she could find a view. She pushed on; her legs ached, her muslin blouse stuck wetly to her. Mabel would think she was mad, scrabbling about like this. Amy laughed. The path followed a brook and brought her into a grassy clearing. The sun beat upon her again; it was silent and deserted. She threw herself down on the hot ground beside the stream, breathing hard. The sun burned her eyelids, spreading through her veins. After a while she sat up, pulled up her petticoats, took off her shoes, peeled down her stockings and sank her feet into the stream, wriggling her toes in the coolness, delighted. She lay back again, her face to the sun, her feet still in the water, her skirts high above her knees. Her skin felt hot and dry, but she did not care. It was wonderful. She closed her eyes again, happy in a way she could not remember in the last few years.

  The noise of movement penetrated slowly; she took no notice until it came again. She sat up to face a foreign man, crouched, half-hidden behind a clump of shrubs. She pushed down her skirts in horror. The man looked at her without concern. A pipe curled down like a long brown tongue from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Ligularia prewalskii. Saxifraga. Clematis Williamsii,’ he said, taking the pipe from his mouth. Amy looked at him blankly. Was the greeting Polish or Greek?

  ‘What?’ she said, forgetting all manners. She recognized the man now. Mad Mat, Matthew Armitage. How long had he been here? Had he seen her take off her stockings? Distress flamed in her at t
he thought.

  ‘Clematis Williamsii,’ Matthew Armitage said again. ‘A native of your part of Yokohama, grows well upon the Bluff. Named after C. Wells Williams, Perry’s interpreter, who discovered it. He slipped off ship in 1854 for a stroll upon the Bluff – no houses then of course, wild as you could wish. He found it along with two unknown species of fern. Capital botanist, Wells.’ He spoke through his pipe, pointing to a mass of creeper growing up a tree trunk.

  ‘Saxifraga.’ He held out a stemful of small white flowers to her across the narrow brook. She reached forward and took it in confusion, feeling trapped and ridiculous, her feet still in the water, her skirts now wet and bedraggled about them. She had quickly pushed her stockings out of sight beneath her. She looked down at the flower in her hand.

  ‘Large herbaceous genus. Three hundred and seventy species of considerable diversity. Lime glands on the leaves of some secrete deposits of dissolved calcium.’ He pointed his pipe at the plant she held. ‘You will notice that one or more petals on each flower are longer than the others. Discovered in Japan by Robert Fortune in 1862. Sometimes found in British gardens.’ He offered her next a purple daisy. He knelt on one knee, an alpenstock in one hand, a canvas bag on his back, a red scarf about his neck.

  ‘Callistephus chinensis, Chinese aster. Introduced into England and the Physic Garden in Chelsea in 1731. Have you seen the Physic Garden?’ She shook her head at his question. He looked disapproving, she remembered how he had found her lacking before in Theatre Street.

  ‘I’ve never lived in London. How would I know the Physic Garden? I was brought up in Somerset,’ she said resentfully. As in Theatre Street it was a strange conversation, throwing her into the middle of acquaintance without a formal introduction.