by Nigel Barley
The man smiled and tucked the envelope carefully away in a cheap wallet and stowed it in the bottom of his bag.
‘In three months, if we are spared, I will send another payment but I am getting old, it is far, I may send someone else. Don’t worry. You will know them.’ He walked slowly away without further ceremony or even a backward glance. Pilchard had the odd feeling that he had just sold his soul to the Devil. A silly fantasy! Reality lay in the roll in his pocket that he fingered lingeringly and translated, in his mind’s eye, into a wealth of bully beef and eggs frying in luxurious fat-splatter. This was a real life-saver, incredible good luck. And why not? After all a black cat had just crossed his path.
* * *
‘This is Orphan Annie broadcasting to all my little orphan friends—I mean enemies—in the Pacific. Do you feel hated tonight? Are you worried about your wives and sweethearts back home? Don’t be. You can be sure they are being taken real good care of by the non-combatants and those lonely young foreign workers with their big blue eyes. For‘any boneheads from the American South, well the news is, it’s true what they say about Dixie and the big black boys down there are being real friendly to all your gals while you’re away so they’ll hardly be missing you at all …’ They were in the sitting room of the Cluny Road house, a room too small for social comfort, tuned to ‘Tokyo Rose’, or rather any one of the dozen women who broadcast in English for the Japanese radio. The sound swelled and throbbed but could barely be heard over the pinging calls of frogs outside, excited by recent rain and eager to share their own southern comfort. Of late, reception had been poor but no one listened anyway until the evening, when radio waves zithered off the ionosphere to give a better signal. Whatever the reception, the Professor would allow no other station to be listened to. Having the wireless ostentatiously tuned to NHK was as necessary as the Emperor’s photograph hung on the wall, an obligatory pinch of incense flung on the altar of conformity. To have a radio at all was anomalous, due to this being registered as a Japanese household, and listening to All India Radio was punishable by death. As a precaution, the tuning knob had been removed so that only permitted listening was possible.
‘Couldn’t we at least have a local station. It’s not the childish propaganda I object to so much as that dreadful American music,’ whined Catchpole. ‘It’s all right for you, Pilchard. You are not musical and therefore feel no pain. Do you suppose anyone here could afford to buy some new records? I’m sick to death of ‘Begin the Beguine’ with the scratch at the end and side four of ‘Madam Butterfly’. Even having side three would be a change or waiting for the scratch in a different place. They have plenty in the market. Looted of course.’
The question was directed at Pilchard. It was understood that the Professor was Nelsonically deaf to any remarks made in English in this room. Pilchard’s sudden rush of wealth had not passed unnoticed though he was careful to drip-feed it into the general economy of the Director’s household. In the world outside the Gardens, after the first year of the occupation, food was only distributed by the official monopolies for the first twenty days of every month and thereafter people had to survive on fresh air and their wits. Only employees of Japanese companies, the butais, had access to extra supplies, much of which ended up on the black market, but Pilchard’s white face stuck out far too much for him to dare go near it. Inflation raged through the city like a fever and he had to rely on Ping and Pong to buy for him, expensively and at largely theoretical risk of their own lives, so that the money went nowhere near as far as he had hoped. Their regular contact was a member of the police auxiliary, a ‘three-star-man’, kept honest by the fact that he was also a cousin, who delivered straight to the Gardens. Pilchard had finally become carriage-trade. Catchpole, as ever sharp-eyed for advantage, had picked up on the new state of affairs at once, while the Professor was moved to surprised tears at the sudden appearance of two priceless pickled plums, one evening, on his dinner plate but knew better than to ask any questions.
‘I cannot stand records,’ interrupted the Professor, looking up from his Syonan Times, ‘any records. There is too much sadness about sitting in the tropics at night listening to gramophone records of far away. The wireless, for some reason, is quite different. The wireless is in the present tense—as you would say—the gramophone a quotation.’
Catchpole was watching Pilchard. Previously, by mutual consent, their paths had barely crossed. Now, suddenly, moon-faced Catchpole swam into his orbit, by accident, a dozen times a day in the Gardens. A few days ago, Pilchard had even been invited—absurdly—to Catchpole’s bachelor room as if they were undergraduates together, about to have an earnest conversation about god or play chess far into the night. He half-wondered whether Catchpole would abandon the wig in his room, as women did the veil, but no. In the centre, stood an ancient iron bedstead whose resentful springs clinked like chain mail. The space around the bed was stuffed with useless loot, grabbed, with greed and no forethought, from the other houses in Cluny Road in the early days when their owners had been marched off and before they were taken over by Japanese. A radiogram with no plug was heaped with assorted dressing gowns on tangled coathangers. A worthless trombone, snapped in the middle as though by an infuriated practiquant of the instrument, leant drunkenly in one corner, while, in another, stood a pile of—surely almost priceless—dry batteries for the electric earhorn. There, Catchpole had perched awkwardly—as though incubating an egg—on a Regency-style striped banquette with lions’ paw feet and plied him with Japanese plum brandy that tasted like alcoholic seawater and left a ring round the inside of his mouth rather like a greasy bathtub.
‘I can’t help noticing, old man, that you’re a little more flush these days. As senior curator, I think I should know where it’s coming from. When all’s said and done, we don’t want the Japs getting interested do we? Bringing us into disrepute. After all, when you turned up here, you hadn’t got two cents to rub together and we took you in, you know. And it’s only thanks to my quick thinking, as senior curator, that the governor authorised this whole arrangement.’
‘Senior? You’re not senior to me.’
‘In terms of years of service, I have seniority and it’s my right to know …’
‘Perhaps Captain Oishi is paying me for his botany lessons. He comes to the Orchid House most days as you know.’
‘Then that money should come to me as senior curator.’
‘Oh. Go boil your senior head, Catchpole.’ He bit back on mentioning the wig to be removed before boiling. It was such a bad example of its kind that it was an insult to the intelligence of those about him, not just in the texture but the implausibly youthful colour.
‘Well. Really. I’m afraid that’s going on your file.’
‘To all the boys in Burma, they call you “the forgotten army”. Well, I haven’t forgotten you and nor have your Japanese chums. They think of you all the time and you’ll be hearing from them real soon. In the meantime, here’s a record that maybe sums up how you all feel in the East, before the big attack that’s coming. Are you ready for a devastating assault on your morale?—Hoagy Carmichael sings you all Hong Kong Blues. Now don’t any of you boys go kicking ole’ Buddha’s gong.’
There came a knock at the door and there was smiling Captain Oishi, not kicking any gongs today but bowing and sensei-ing to the Professor. It was true that he passed through the Gardens on most days, sometimes stopping for a chat or a game of chess with the Professor, sometimes asking about plants, mostly just waving as he strolled lightly through. Evening visits to the house were rare. ‘Hi guys,’ he called in an American twang. Perhaps he, too, had been listening to Tokyo Rose. Pilchard stood and offered tea made from twice-used leaf, leaving him and the Professor to work their way through the minuet of whatever courtesies and nodding deference were demanded by the ways of the mysterious East. He had been experimenting with teas from the leaves of various plants about the Gardens. Bougainvillea tasted better than hibiscus but stripped the skin of
f your tongue. Oishi accepted the tea, sat down on the worn moquette, leaned forward with his hands on his knees and sighed contentedly, his face aglow, more beautiful than merely handsome.
‘I have had some good news. It seems I may be going home soon.’ He blushed.
Catchpole scowled enviously. ‘Lucky sod!’. The Captain smiled wanly. ‘To Tokyo?’
‘Kyoto. It seems the General has been recalled. It is a political thing of the government. There are many groups within the army and one of them has risen. He has been ordered to return.’
‘To Kyoto?’
‘To Tokyo. For the moment I am to remain behind with my squad and act as liaison officer with the new commanders but it cannot be long before I can go home too.’ Pilchard was suddenly puzzled to realise that he would miss Oishi, his youth and innocence, his … neoteny. Instructing him in the orchestration of orchids filled some sort of need. The Captain drank without using the handle and set the cup back primly on its saucer, made it look barbarous in such delicate hands. In a time where everything was chipped and broken, he was still shiny and new, fresh and crisp from the box. There was something wonderful about the way Nature just kept wiping the slate clean of all the dirt and scratches and starting again from the original design with each gleaming, unscathed generation. Perhaps age brought paternal longings to us all.
‘Maybe they want to make him Minister for War.’
‘The telegramme made it clear it was disgrace not honour. Yet it will be so good to return home. It will be—as you say—hunkydory. Before I was chosen to fight for my nation, I had never even left Kyoto and seen the capital. My mother did not wish it. The war, for me, has been a very interesting experience. It is most fortunate. Otherwise I might never have learned to propagate orchids.’ They looked at each other blankly, wrong-footed by the innocent understatement. The broadening of Captain Oishi’s experience from human to plant nursery scarcely seemed a reasonable justification for all the mess and inconvenience the entire world had been put to. ‘My only concern is that the General should not be dishonoured. His was a great victory. The army should be grateful to him.’
The Professor snorted. ‘It is always a mistake to think of an institution as a person, Captain. Armies have no feelings. Armies cannot be grateful any more than can universities.’ He bit down bitterly on his pipe, as if grinding on an old personal resentment. ‘Both are just ill-calibrated machines for crushing people without feeling.’ Said fiercely. ‘That is why I prefer volcanoes to armies. Volcanoes have souls. I have reached the age where I merely wish to live quietly on the slopes of Mount Fuji and read her changing moods.’ The Professor puffed his pipe volcanically, then, as if it followed logically, ‘Who is to be the new commander?’
‘It is not yet known. The politicians will decide. We must respect their choice.’ He lowered his head reverently. Now it was Pilchard that snorted. Oishi looked up, astonished. ‘You do not like politicians, Dr Pilchard?’ He shrugged. ‘Are they not important?’
‘Something can be important without being in the least interesting. Politicians are like drains, sadly necessary but unglamorous. They should do their humble job without bothering the rest of us. And every so often, the system breaks down and then you have to take notice because there is a terrible stink of leaking corruption and then you clear the whole lot out and start all over again.’
The Professor chuckled. Captain Oishi looked from one to the other, shocked.
‘I think you two are growing too much alike.’
The Professor smiled across at Pilchard. ‘Perhaps. When the name is announced, we should hybridise a new rose—something big and floppy with a nice smell that would hide the stink of the drains—a very vulgar tea rose—and call it Tokyo Rose, or some such nonsense, and send it to the new general. These days you cannot have too many friends. Armies may not be grateful but generals can sometimes be.’
‘Right Professor.’
‘And now …’ Captain Oishi turned in his chair, ‘… please to explain, Dr Pilchard, what is this place I have heard of called Gracie Fields? Where exactly is it? Is it a green and pleasant place?’
‘This is your number one enemy saying goodbye to all you little orphans. But don’t worry. There will be more of the same on the “Zero Hour” tomorrow night. Now it’s time for fighting news for fighting men. Goodbye to you all and be good …’
* * *
It was the sort of day you dream about in Singapore, where cold brings a similar blessing to sunshine in Europe and bears the same optimism within it. By some miracle, the usual steambath had been abruptly switched off, the windows flung open and the wonder of a cool wind blew through the Gardens, tousling the palms and rattling the blinds on the Orchid House and bringing relief to the whole sprawled and baking city. Only the heliotropic—and clearly endothermic—cat glared down resentfully from the rooftops and shivered in its ruffled fur. In the Orchid House, having worked the miracle of fertilisation with a deft flick of his pollinating paintbrush, Pilchard had collected the spores and was now preparing the medium in which they would grow. In the wild, the mortality of orchids was enormous and millions were produced with evolutionary indifference so that just one might survive—a little like humans these days, for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere had erased the difference between plant and Man. In the Gardens, orchids were spoiled brats, their every demand met with deference since their reaction to any small frustration of environment and schedule was to simply swoon and die. Spores contained very little food to enable them to survive and flourish and normally depended on the presence of a specific fungus to germinate and might even then take up to twelve years to flower. The Gardens had long given up the use of added fungus and now embraced a German technique of starting the embryos in a sterile glass vessel of agar jelly boiled in a pressure cooker. But each kind of orchid required magic additions—banana, coconut milk, pineapple juice, minerals, ammonia, caustic soda—a whole sorcerer’s cookbook of recipes that was one of the treasured and evolving resources of the Gardens and locked away in the safe at night. Without it, the calculations never worked, mere mathematical pi in the sky. Some horticulturalists, of course, refused to write the recipes down and took them sullenly to their graves while others gloried in their own intellectual fertility and covered whole chapters with their hocus pocus. Pilchard waved his glass stirring rod like a conjuror’s wand over the dog-eared, stained volume, its leather cover shiny with sweat and handling like a gaucho’s saddle. Some would call it filthy but he preferred to think of it as the ‘rich patina of use’ so treasured in the exhibits of the museum, as he grumbled through the book’s contents, seeking the right scribbled and blotchy section. Today’s unusually low temperature was a nuisance—orchid cultivators made as much deft use of a thermometer as gynaecologists—so he propagated slowly and pedantically in solitary and hushed sterility. And then, perhaps not surprisingly amongst all those fermenting, but unfeeling, uterine flasks, a bleak thought suddenly broke in of his absent wife, martyred by her own barrenness, and he sighed ‘Oh bugger, bugger, bugger!’ like a magic incantation.
He and Margaret had married as young, freshly qualified doctors setting out into the world as into a great adventure. Their pre-departure honeymoon had been one cold week in blustery Minehead where, on the beach, they had found a mine from the last war. He had quipped that it was just as well they had not gone to Maidenhead. She had been unconventional, uncompromising, free-thinking, -drinking, -smoking, with a heady air of the bohémienne, so that he had been shocked to find her maternal instinct so strong. For him, the lack of children was not a problem. He had no urge to reproduce. He had not yet grown up himself and you would have to be crazy or totally selfish to bring a child into a world like this. Colonial life, for a disgruntled and unfulfilled woman, offered few outlets so that her adulteries had seemed less a matter of the betrayal of their love than of her own unconventionality and thus herself. Her partners had been sadly predictable, the tanned tennis champion at the club, then a
flashy, white-toothed lawyer with plenty of money and a big car, so that he had felt pity rather than rage and that, of course, had been unforgivable. They had both taken to drinking too much, fighting too much, and their marriage had ended up—like their scotch—on the rocks. She had left on one of the first boats to Australia with no pretence that they would see any armistice or reunification after the end of the larger hostilities that had swamped their own. ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger!’
He felt the sudden awareness of another presence and stiffened, the hair standing up on his neck. The heliotropic cat? No. He looked around and there, in the corner, peered a face, a girl’s small face, glimmering though the foliage like a woodnymph. He blushed.
‘Do you always talk to yourself like that?’
She stepped out onto the bare, wet concrete. The closeness of the Japanese headquarters ensured that few women normally came near the Gardens. She was slight, elfin-faced, politely wide-eyed. Chinese. Maybe twenty. Maybe a little less. Ivory skin but wearing the sort of hideous, shapeless dress, gathered in ruffles at neck and wrists, that nuns made their charges wear, the tiny, yellow primulas of the material a mockery of prettiness that did nothing to hide her beauty, merely hung a theatrical curtain before it. Her hair was gathered together in a single, sex-defying plait as though she were the member of a no-nonsense hockey team and she exuded warm bunny-rabbit smells of young flesh that effortlessly overwhelmed the plant hormones boiling in the air. He was surprised to find himself so attracted, then told himself sternly that this was not a spontaneous reaction, just an old dog’s remembrance of an old trick. Down boy!
‘I was not talking to myself. I was thinking aloud.’