“Just hang around for a few weeks, feel yourself into it.”
I remember that when he trundled this sentence out, I began to sweat. I moved my hand and left a palm print on the cover of my notebook. My guts started skipping, and I got mad. Cunliffe was sitting there taking little popping puffs on his cigar. He’d got no right to flick Japan at me nonchalant as a piece of ash. My life was in perfect order. I had not given a moment’s thought to being in Japan since Tyler Peer was posted there, and it was clear that there was not anything on earth I wanted more than to go to Japan. It was the only thing I’d ever wanted. All my life I had never wanted anything but to go to Japan. Alone.
So I refused. I told Cunliffe that I had no organizational skills whatever and was unteachable, In fact, I probably could not organize my itinerary and would get lost in the back streets of Nagoya. I suggested he send one of our new fags in Design Print, who are extremely well organized. (I didn’t call them fags to Cunliffe; that’s what I call them in my letters to Malcolm.) No, not me; I was the wrong choice altogether.
Look, I don’t understand the workings of the human mind and I have no intention of finding out about it. I think there are those of us who have a positive obligation not to be psychoanalyzed. I don’t think artistic theory should be put into words because it turns art into something else, and I don’t think the subconscious should be untangled for the same reason. The subconscious is a tangle; that’s its nature; leave it be. All I know is that from the moment Cunliffe waved his magic Schimmelpenninck I began saying one thing and doing another, announcing plans I had no intention of carrying out, and doing other things several seconds before they occurred to me. All I know is that in the space of the phrase “feel yourself into it,” I made some sort of decision deep in the layers of my nerve; some sort of decision came into being full grown like Athena from the head of Zeus. But I was unable to act on it because I did not inform myself of the decision. I went, you may say, to superhuman lengths to keep myself from knowing, and maybe I had good reason. Every time I have faced a dilemma straight on I have opted out; every time I have made a deliberate decision I have rescinded it. Maybe I wanted to be gone before I admitted I was going.
So I told Cunliffe, “I’m afraid it’s out of the question. Send someone else.”
Cunliffe, as I might have expected, tried to get Oliver to convince me to go. Oliver, as I had no reason to expect, tried to convince me to go. I had already determined to go and so I declared it impossible. Oliver was appalled at the notion I should go and so he insisted that I should. We had some peculiar conversations.
“I won’t be able to finish the spring line if I do.”
“The company’s taken that into account or they wouldn’t have asked you. Obviously Cunliffe thinks this is more important.”
“But what about me? What about what I think is important?”
“Nonsense. It’ll give you a whole new set of ideas.”
“I don’t want a new set of ideas.”
“You’re completely irrational.”
Actually, I wasn’t irrational at all, I was just lying. Oliver was the irrational one, and he was lying too. The conversations got more and more peculiar without ever turning into quarrels. On the contrary, we began to slip back into a kind of urgent bantering we hadn’t used for years.
“I can’t leave the house to run itself,” I said one night when I was standing at the kitchen sink. Oliver was forking out an olive for his martini.
“Whatever are you talking about?” he twitted me. “The house has run itself for years.” And he jabbed my belly playfully with the fork. It left four small perfect puncture marks that I treasured until they faded two days later. It occurred to me a long time after, that Oliver had poked me with a fork to see if I was done.
“I’ll give it some thought,” I said.
As soon as I said this other things fell into place. Jill was invited to spend the summer vacation in La Jolla with the Jeromes. (We never made good our promise to take Maxine anywhere but the Jeromes don’t give a damn, they’re Californians; they have no European sense of social exchange as an exchange.) I didn’t want to be separated from Jill for another summer, but as Oliver pointed out, if I took an extra two weeks with her in Japan she could fly on by herself to Los Angeles and return to London with the Jeromes, around the world in seven weeks and a lot of money of which, again, I have got more than I can put to use. Jill was dazzled by the idea of going around the world, which nobody else at St. Margaret’s could lay claim to.
When I allowed myself to see it this way I also saw that, our precarious cold war having been shot to hell by Cunliffe’s suggestion, I would be better off out of it in Japan. Six weeks off, I said to myself; it seemed to me I was due for six weeks off. It’s true that I found myself packing objects of personal value and no conceivable use to a tourist—Jill’s silver baby spoon, for instance; Frances’s sketchbook—but I took them out again. It’s also true that I engaged in an extensive discussion of Japanese divorce with one of the Utagawa overlookers. But then I read up on bonsai and ukiyo-e; evidence, merely, of avid tourism.
It’s more difficult to explain why I went to Dorsetshire. I had wanted to do so for two years but had lacked the energy (courage is only the energy to do what you prefer). Now the velleity became a necessity, as if I knew my plane would crash and I would have no other chance, and I said I had to go to London to do some shopping for my trip. I dare say this constitutes a lie in the old style but, as I say, it no longer seems a significant sort of lie.
So I made a shopping list, filled it in a morning and caught the stopping train for Bly. And I visited Frances in the bracken of Dorset, in the black brick hospital called the County Home, in the grease-green minimum-security ward called Recreational Therapy, which reminded me less of Bedlam or padded cells than it reminded me of the basement hall of the Long Beach Methodist Church where once a year I went with my mother for the ecumenical conference of the Women’s Society for Christian Service and where my mother, speaking for the Baptist delegation—my mother, who believed that Nazarenes were poor white trash and Seventh-Day Adventists had runny brains and Catholic priests performed unnatural acts upon novice nuns by holy candlelight—spoke with tears in her eyes of the oneness of God and the brotherhood of all Christian souls, everywhere.
It is clear that they are better equipped to deal with Frances’s illness here. She sits at a long deal table among a dozen other docile women, making little turkeys out of shells. The women who are not sitting at the table sit in chipped wicker chairs with a look of captive distraction, nursing chips of wicker with their fingers. The women who sit at the table display intense concentration, but their movements are too slow. One woman lifts a strand of string and lays it over another strand of string as if this were a movement of surgical precision. There is a smell of disinfectant mingled with whatever it is that disinfectant abrogates: infection, a deterioration of disused cells.
Frances sits at the table. She is still skin and bone but she is not muscle or sinew or tendon. She is not nerves. She is wearing a clean white shirt with a peter pan collar and an alice band of macramé. Her hair is down to her waist and her skirt is above her knees, and the veneer of childlike sweetness sits strangely on facial bones gone brittle to the marrow. The hand that she put through the window is puffy around the jagged triangle scar, but there are no fresh cuts.
“Hello, Frances.”
“Hello,” she says. She seems not to know me and for a moment I don’t exist; but when she recognizes me it is without surprise. She says it’s nice of me to come and offers me a seat. She introduces me to the women at her table, who look up from their baskets and their pot holders and say hello, hello, it’s nice to meet you, and look down again. She shows me the things she’s making, little turkeys with a periwinkle for a face and clam shells for a tail, on pipe cleaner legs stuck in a shell-encrusted piece of cork.
“See this one?” she asks, and puts another, identical, beside it. “See this
one?” and takes another from her box. “Gobble-gobble, gobble-gobble. This one has a broken tail.” I admire them, one after the other, perhaps a dozen, and then she pulls her box of shells to me and invites me to look at the shells. The Rubigo has been used in the conference room of the new Libyan Embassy in London and in air terminals in Dar es Salaam and the Seychelles. Frances treats me as indifferently as if I had visited her yesterday and the day before, although her focus seems to settle at my ear.
“They get them in Weymouth on the beach, and when we’re done they put them in a shop.”
“How have you been, Frances?”
“Well. Well. We get to spend the money at the commissary.”
“We miss you at the mill. There have been a lot of changes since you left.”
“Have there? We have a new shuffleboard, but I haven’t been down there.” Having said this she glances at me suspiciously, once, then alters the look to a dazzlingly empty smile. “Turkeys say gobble, but we gobble them,” she says, and laughs cleverly.
“Do our parents come to see you much?”
“Sometimes. Do you see how the whole periwinkles make a butterfly? Their real name is coquinas.”
The woman sitting next to her, a plump woman with her cardigan buttoned wrong, whose left cheek collapses every few seconds in a tic, leans toward me over her box of shells and confides, “Frances is the best. She does the best,” to which Frances replies, “Now, Minnie, that’s not true,” which may represent a pathological inability to receive a compliment, but if so I have seen many pathologically incapacitated women who hold jobs and raise families and make speeches at ecumenical conferences of the Women’s Society for Christian Service.
“Minnie is good too,” says Frances.
She shows me around the dining hall, the porch, the commissary. Her conversation is less erratic than most of the conversation I run into in a working day. It deals entirely with the hall, the porch, the commissary.
“Do you ever hear from Dr. Holloway?”
“No, no, I have Dr. Revier now.”
“And do you like him?”
“Her. Everybody likes her. This is where they keep the magazines.”
I see where they keep the Ping-Pong nets, the playing cards, the glue and the construction paper. I see where they sit for breakfast, tea and television. I see the pot holders they make, the macramé plant hangers, the clay ashtrays, the samplers, the baskets, the cushion covers, the oven gloves, the earrings, the tote bags and the toilet roll covers crocheted in the shape of poodles. I see three dozen objects for which Mrs. Lena Fromkirk would denude her pension book. I see everything there is to see, and I see no screaming, keening, rocking, urinating, murder, rage or anguish. The nearest thing to horror that I see is a woman with a tic in her left cheek. Truly, Mrs. Marbalestier, the public has a distorted impression of these institutions.
“Do you ever paint, Frances?”
“I do the turkeys. They get the shells from Weymouth, from the beach.”
When I have seen everything there is to see she walks me to the door. But she will not come over the threshold onto the screened porch, and I do not realize this until I have continued on out to the steps and turn to see her hovering back into the green shade of Recreational Therapy, and I hang there a moment not understanding until she pitches her body clumsily forward in the doorframe and contracts immediately; and then I close the screen door and go back to her and say it was nice to see her and she, shying back from the doorframe rolling clumps of her skirt in her hands, says how nice it was to see me and won’t I come again.
“We miss you at the mill,” I say deliberately. “And if you ever feel like coming back there’ll be a place for you.”
“Thank you,” she says nervously, seeing that I have seen that she will not come from the room. Then making her first and only effort toward me—they will have to inject her when I am gone—she says, “It would be hard to leave here now.”
“But if you do.”
“I like it here,” says Frances. “I have so many friends.”
Leaving me, I suppose, exonerated. Free to board an Aeroflot for Japan.
19
THE WHEELS HAD NOT yet lifted off the ground when I began the luxury of being alone. You understand that the company of a nine-year-old is no impediment to solitude. Adults and very small babies bind you with demands like wires, but a nine-year-old is private, malleable and self-sufficient.
And yet that first day I was afraid of her. I had not been alone with her for so long. I had never been alone with her for two weeks, never in a foreign place. I was afraid that she would dislike me, that I would dislike her. She had undergone radical transformation in a barber shop a couple of days before, having decided that braids—“pigtails” she called them with her face screwed up—were not suitable either to going on ten or to California. Her hair had been cropped to the nape and suddenly tumbled and swung. She had always tossed her braids; now the toss was weightless, and from time to time she took a stance charged with incipient adolescence that alarmed me.
If Jill found the Russian hostesses harsh and clumpy it is because they were harsh and clumpy. It is my own inverted bigotry that generalized her displeasure into an attitude toward foreigners. Nevertheless it made me nervous. I entertained her with a few inspiring stories of the 1919 revolution that have stuck with me ever since Jay Mellon first revealed that underside of possibility; and got her to taste caviar, on which of course she gagged.
“Try the black bread, Jill.”
A model of obedience, she tried it. A model of judgmental tact, she hid it under the paper napkin. At the layover in Moscow two different passengers came to our table to compliment me on what a splendid passenger and lady my daughter was. Clumsily, on the Moscow-Tokyo lap, I tried to interest her in a free copy of Pravda, the front page of which featured three cranes and a construction worker. The front page of the Moscow News had a picture of two surgeons in the new premises of the A. V. Vishnevsky Institute of Surgery. Hell, it’s not my fault if the Russians let me down. Jill read a comic book and I read Yukio Mishima: “And little wonder, because at no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it. This is what makes travel so utterly fruitless.”
Jill fell asleep while I drank vodka and puzzled over this passage. I turned on it the full illumination of my open mind, and found it pretentious Oriental crap. It had nothing to do with any journey I ever took in my life, all of which I possess in patterns of memory as coherent as a piece of cloth. “After that there remains only the journey itself … the process through which we lose our ownership of it.” It made no sense. I puzzled over it, fuzzily, until I also fell asleep.
And waked to the flat glassy sea at the flat shore of Tokyo, which was suddenly familiar, though I don’t know why. It was recognizably Japanese, as if I had always associated a flat sea at a flat shore with Japan, and had not known it. Minute white triangles of sail drew paths across the waves. We were both moved, and groggy with overeating, motor noise and sleep, as we alighted to be impounded at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport.
We did not have smallpox vaccinations. East Anglian had left the arrangements to me, and I had not checked. In twelve years as a foreigner abroad I had not needed a vaccination, and it had not occurred to me. Jill was silently wild with accusation, but we were vaccinated, free, within two minutes by a minuscule airport nurse.
“If nothing worse than that happens to us,” I said, “we’ll be all right,” and ushered her on to Passport Control, where something did.
“I wish also please to see your visas.”
“What visas?” I asked stupidly, in the shock waves of Jill’s outrage, and then we were impounded bag and baggage. I explained, stoic in myself but feeling Jill like a turbulent eddy around me, that although we had American passports we lived in
England, and since the English do not need visas, it had clearly not occurred to the travel agent to advise me. Four small immigration officials shuffled our passports, debarkation cards and still-damp vaccination certificates, and photostated Jill’s onward ticket to Los Angeles. They took the name and address of Tyler Peer and photostated a letter on an Utagawa letterhead looking forward to my stay in Kyoto. Then they told us that we would have to stay in the Tokyo Haneda Hotel on the airport premises and return to the office at ten the next morning. I was, in fact, delighted. I would bathe and sleep off the jet fatigue, finish my book, send postcards, ease myself into the weeks ahead.
“Mummy, how could you,” Jill fumed. “Just like some stupid American!” and burst into tears. This confused the immigration officials, if indeed it didn’t make them suspicious. I apologized solemnly—solemn apology was something I had been briefed on—for our lack of vaccination, lack of visa, loss of the overworked officials’ time, loss of self-control in my daughter. Her tears, however, seemed to be an appropriate attitude toward the grave situation of having to spend the night in a hotel, and the official handed us back over to the stewardess, repeating seven times in askew English that we must be back in his office at ten the next morning. Jill cheered considerably when she saw that the hotel had a private bath, television and a swimming pool. Just like some stupid American. She had a cheeseburger and a Coke for lunch, while I, trying to make some unworthy point, ate raw fish.
The next morning we were documented and dismissed, and I began the happiest two weeks of my life. I understand that meaningless superlative will be the end product of the Western world, but I savor the phrase on my tongue and let it stand: the happiest two weeks of my life. For someone who lives alone my triumphs will not be explicable. I know I am a career woman who also manages a house and servants. That has nothing to do with it. I conducted us by monorail to the center of the city. I claimed my reservation, signed the register, and was given keys. I slept till I woke, or I asked to be waked at an hour of my choosing, and at that hour bells rang. I decided at ten o’clock to see the Asakusa Kwannon at noon, and if at noon I changed my mind I did not go there. I put my sole signature beside its replica on a traveler’s check, and a yellow girl gave me multicolored money in exchange. I tipped in restaurants. I put coins in vending machines and goods came out. I gave the names of streets to taxi drivers and alighted in those streets. I caused things to happen, do you see? I harmed no one, I engaged in exchanges convenient to all concerned, I did not manipulate anyone unless Jill’s acquiescence must be counted, but in such actions as I took I was nobody’s agent; wandering Tokyo was a transaction between the map and me.
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