Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  And so the years passed. Good years. In every other way Anna was a delight and the week each month we spent together was heaps of fun. Of course we quarrelled on occasion, but never for long, except for one momentous occasion I will mention later and which, surprisingly, had nothing directly to do with the Grotto of Knot, which was how I had amended the expression.

  Relationships, let alone with the kind of complications Anna and I faced, are hard enough to sustain and it was difficult to believe that twenty years had passed since we’d been reunited. I don’t know how this is going to sound, but the sex thing and the addiction to heroin we somehow eventually managed to put aside. She controlled her habit so discreetly that I was almost never aware of it. If you’ll forgive a bit of a lecture, the popular conception that heroin leads to physical ruin simply isn’t always correct. Alcoholism is infinitely more dangerous to health than a well-managed addiction to good-quality heroin. The complications with heroin are caused by social factors. If it were as readily available as tobacco, and had similar quality controls, it would have a far less disastrous effect on community health and bring about fewer tragic repercussions.

  Life is about making accommodations and Anna gave me more, much more, than she denied me. She could afford her habit, she didn’t inject and she acted with the utmost discretion. I tried to be equally discreet about my physical needs, and the various island liaisons I enjoyed over the years were never mentioned between us. For my part, while I found that they were not emotionally fulfilling, nor provided the intimacy I desired, I tried to make up for my lack of closeness and commitment by being generous to each of them in other ways. It was a peculiar situation: I wasn’t cheating on Anna yet I didn’t think of myself as entitled to look for an alternative to her. I never entered a room filled with eligible women, say at a party, and told myself, ‘Maybe tonight I’ll meet the complete woman with whom I can share the remainder of my life.’ I had only ever truly loved two women: Anna almost from the moment I’d set eyes on her, and Marg since a brief and passionate encounter during the war. I couldn’t bring myself to imagine a third who might possibly replace these two in my affections.

  I guess if friends had known about Anna and me it would have seemed pretty bizarre, but I saw very little to envy in the enduring conventional marriages I observed. Many seemed pretty dull and mundane. They were settled at best, most couples in a rut but reconciled to their lot: the devil you know, some companionship better than none, separate lives lived out under one roof, not sufficiently bad for a divorce, staying together for the children. And when the children had finally flown the coop, career prospects were limited, jobs routine, retirement ten years away, bowls, bingo, barbecues, boats and too much booze. There was nightly snoring, and weekly sex on a Saturday, or even worse, the mandatory birthday and Christmas naughty – Oh, Gawd! Here he comes, his little willy trying to stand to attention. It must be Christmas morning, or has he remembered it’s my birthday?

  However, as so often happens in life, you turn a corner, all unsuspecting, to discover your world has changed. Five years after the death of her husband, Marg was a regular visitor at Beautiful Bay, staying several days at a time. At fifty-four she was still a magnificent-looking woman, and to my mind still dead sexy. In the mathematics of love, a forty-six-year-old male and a fifty-four-year-old female form a better ratio than an eighteen-year-old male and a twenty-six-year-old female, which is how old we were when we first met in Fremantle.

  One moonlit night at Beautiful Bay when Marg had been visiting and when, unusually for her, she’d had two or three G and Ts beyond her usual limit, she’d turned to me and said, ‘Nick, how are things with Anna? Did you ever sort out the problem?’

  In all those years she’d never brought up the subject of Anna’s visit to the gynaecologist, a tribute to her discretion, but now the gin and tonic had done the trick.

  I pretended not to understand her question, playing the dumb male. ‘What problem were you referring to, Marg?’

  ‘Nick, don’t take me for a fool. Her vaginismus of course!’

  ‘Oh, that,’ I said, still pretending innocence. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Yeah? What does that mean?’

  ‘Yeah, she still has it,’ I admitted, taking a sip of Scotch.

  ‘And you? How do you manage?’

  Marg had her eyes fixed steadily on me. She may have been a tad inebriated but it was the old Marg interrogation technique that brooked no platitudinous replies. She still had the ability to make me feel like a schoolboy caught with a mouthful of stolen pie. ‘I . . . er . . . have several generous female arrangements.’

  ‘Several?’

  Generous female arrangements? Jesus! I winced inwardly at the clumsiness of my answer. ‘Marg, I’d rather not —’

  ‘How many?’ she asked. ‘Two? More?’

  ‘More, but not in the same place . . . not here, living on the island,’ I said, feeling foolish. Now that I was being questioned it seemed a bit boastful, but it wasn’t, nor was it (what’s the latest term for a testosterone-loaded sexual athlete?) macho! That wasn’t at all how it was. Or how I felt. The number, I often reminded myself, was for my own safety, to stop me doing anything foolish, like committing myself when I was already committed. I’m pretty easy to force into a corner when it comes to women. I love the female gender for its own sake and their peculiar logic invariably defeats me. But how could I explain all this to Marg?

  She suddenly dropped her gaze. I became conscious of her breathing, her splendid bosom moving – ‘heaving’ is the usual unavoidable expression. ‘It’s been five years since Rob died and I am no longer the admiral’s wife, I’m Marg Hamilton again.’ She looked up directly at me. ‘Nick, you are the only other man I’ve ever loved, still love, care about,’ she corrected quickly. ‘I don’t want to interfere with you and Anna. That’s special.’ She paused, grinned, swept back her hair with a defiant swing of her hand. ‘But I don’t think I’m over the hill and five years is simply too long!’

  Drunk or sober Marg never let innuendo stand in the way of making her meaning clear. I was being propositioned and how I answered would affect our future.

  The two of us together again in an intimate way had obviously been playing on her mind for some time, as, I confess, it had on mine. While I had been absolutely circumspect and had never brought up the possibility in the years after her husband died, I’d often enough lain in bed when she visited Beautiful Bay and thought of her sleeping two bedrooms away and had real difficulty restraining myself from getting up and tapping lightly on her door. I had never stopped desiring her and now I found myself lost for words.

  ‘Marg, this comes as a bit of a surprise,’ I ventured, stalling for time.

  ‘Nick, don’t talk nonsense, it’s been on my mind and yours ever since Rob died. I’ve admired your restraint.’

  ‘Even if that’s true, and I don’t deny it, it’s still . . . well, it’s bloody awkward.’

  ‘Of course it’s awkward!’

  ‘It’s being, well . . . duplicitous.’

  ‘You mean unfaithful to Anna? What about the other women, your scattered regulars? What do you call that?’

  ‘It’s hard to explain. They ensure that I’m not unfaithful to Anna.’

  Marg threw back her head and laughed. ‘A second is duplicitous, five is safety in numbers? How very male!’

  ‘Okay, would you like to be the sixth?’ I asked suddenly.

  Marg looked horrified. ‘Of course not! I don’t wish to be a member of anyone’s harem!’

  ‘See what I mean? I do not love them and they always knew it was an arrangement, one that benefitted all of us. That’s pretty crude, I admit, even unfair. They are not harlots and probably deserve better. Anna knows about it without my being explicit.’ I was getting in deeper and deeper and, I daresay, wasn’t all that sober myself. ‘Besides, with the impending Japanese trip I ended all of those “liaisons”, call them what you may, several months ago.’ I didn’t add that this parting
of the ways was much to the tearful and confessed disappointment, even chagrin in two cases, of these lovely and certainly blameless women, each of whom knew of the existence of the others. Nor did I add that in the islands my behaviour was considered neither unusual nor reprehensible. The ability of the white man to justify scattering his seed around the South Seas is the stuff of legends.

  Marg had the grace to pull up at this stage and stop what was obviously a conversation that could only end in disaster. ‘So, it’s just you and Anna again. Is that what your trip to Japan is all about?’

  This was a perceptive and difficult question. While Marg had some knowledge of Anna’s past under the Japanese, she didn’t know the story of Konoe Akira and the murder of the kempeitai colonel Takahashi. All I’d ever confided in her was that Anna had been a prisoner in a comfort women’s establishment named the Nest of the Swallows and that her vaginismus was a result of the trauma she’d suffered under the Japanese.

  ‘Marg, you were instrumental in having Anna see a psychiatrist several years ago. She’s seen several since. You also know it obviously hasn’t worked. There is a Japanese general who had a major influence on her, not a good one, I might add. It was he who introduced her to kinbaku, the Japanese art of bondage. It has been suggested . . . no, that’s not entirely true . . . we have come to hope that by confronting him there may be a resolution.’

  ‘A cure?’

  ‘Well, who knows, perhaps the beginning of one. By facing her demons there may be something tangible to work on.’

  ‘So you’ve decided to be celibate?’

  ‘I feel that she should know that I am no longer living a compromise, even one that is relatively harmless and would never challenge our relationship.’ How pompous this all sounded.

  ‘And you’ve told her this?’

  ‘No, of course not; she would be put under additional pressure. It’s something in my own psyche, knowing that I’m not having a bet each way. I don’t need to tell her.’

  ‘So you’re saying if you and I . . .?’

  ‘Marg, you know how I feel about you, always have, probably always will. I’ve never quite recovered from you and Rob Rich, and that’s the problem. An affair with you right now – if Anna were to find out – would be a disaster. Japan may work, it may not, but if she were to find out we were having an affair, then any chance she has of living a normal life, of being cured, would be gone. And as you know, Anna is an extraordinarily perspicacious woman. She knows how I feel about you; she’d know it wasn’t like the island women. She’d understand at once that you would be competing with her for my love and affection and she’d consider you had the advantage over her. I can’t let her feel that. It would be terribly cruel, terribly destructive.’ I knew I was rambling on, over-explaining, saying too much, but nevertheless I added rather sanctimoniously, ‘She knows there has been nothing between us since Rob’s death and that’s important to her as we are about to embark on our first trip to Japan.’

  Marg may have been a little sozzled, but her good mind was still working. ‘And you’ve discussed all of this together?’

  ‘All of what?’

  ‘The reason you’re going to Japan. The hope for a cure?’

  ‘Obliquely, yes. Ostensibly we’re going to Japan to buy a freighter. She’s coming along for the ride, so to speak. The other is not something you can discuss in much detail. It’s not like going to Lourdes and expecting a miracle cure; no psychiatrist she’s seen will venture an opinion. It’s all happening in her head. Our heads.’ I shrugged. ‘I have to play my part as well.’

  Marg rose and put her half-finished gin and tonic on the rattan coffee table. ‘It’s high time I went to bed,’ she said. Then she came towards me, stooped and kissed me lightly on the forehead. ‘I’ve always loved you, Nick, almost from the first moment I set eyes on you, a sunburnt, barefoot, unshaven, long-haired boy in ragged, dirty shorts, without a shirt, who had sailed virtually single-handed across the Pacific Ocean to escape the Japanese.’

  I laughed. ‘Marg, you’re being overly romantic. As I remember, I’d showered, shaved, and changed into clean gear. We first met upstairs in an office building in Fremantle where I was waiting to be interrogated by that dreadful little Australian Customs bloke, what was his name?’

  Marg laughed, remembering. ‘Mr Henry.’

  ‘That’s right, Mr Henry, who thought I might be a Japanese spy cunningly disguised as a six-foot three-inch, blue-eyed Australian. You were there supposedly to take notes. You were simply gorgeous, wonderful breasts, long legs, you wore a blue cotton dress and your hair was in a bun as if you were trying – unsuccessfully I might add – to look plain. You were sexy as hell and, I knew, well beyond anyone I could ever aspire to kiss, not that I’d dared to dream.’

  ‘That’s not where I first saw you,’ Marg persisted. ‘When you docked in Fremantle you were met by the police and Lieutenant Commander Rigby as you stepped off your little yacht, Madam Butterfly. You may not recall, but as a matter of routine an official photograph was taken for our Naval Intelligence files. It arrived in my in-tray a couple of hours before your interrogation took place. An eight by ten black-and-white print, but that’s all it took. I knew then that I had to have that cheeky grin all to myself.’

  ‘Marg, you’ve never told me this,’ I cried in surprise, knowing the immediate crisis between us was over.

  ‘See you at breakfast, Nick.’ She turned and left, then halted at the verandah screen door. Holding it open she turned again to face me. ‘When I might even show you the photograph. Goodnight, Nick, darling.’

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘Ask the stupid gaijin who insults us by bringing his whore and robbing us of a night out eating and drinking what type of vessel he wants to buy.’

  Fukuoka-san, Mitsubishi executive

  A CHILD DOES NOT judge the people surrounding him unless they affect him personally. I had spent the first seven years of my life in Japan, but I had forgotten the experience of day-to-day living, and besides, a great deal had changed since I had left with my father to travel to New Britain in 1935.

  Paradoxically, although Anna and I spoke the Japanese language with commendable fluency, we knew very little about the people. My knowledge was almost entirely based on my father’s reminiscences and his academic interest in Japanese culture. Putting it crudely, as an adult the closest I had come to the Japanese in any numbers was when they’d charged me in battle with fixed bayonets and, in turn, I had mowed them down with an Owen submachine-gun.

  Anna’s exposure to Japanese culture was, to say the least, problematic. Her mentor, Konoe Akira, had instructed her only in the things that interested him. These were mostly to do with how she deported herself, the niceties of language, her manners and appearance and the appreciation of art. The remainder of her experience had been deeply traumatic.

  Ours was therefore a mishmash of theory, practice and trauma and we may well have been better off starting from scratch with no knowledge whatsoever. Very little of what we thought we knew manifested itself in the Japan in which we landed in the northern spring on the 13th of April 1970, the same day that Apollo 13, on its way to the moon, developed a problem that seemed certain to result in the lonely death of its crew in space. The entire world was glued to their televisions as the crew prepared for the end. It seemed an inauspicious omen, for in a small way, Anna and I had launched ourselves into an alien environment where we too could very well come unstuck.

  At Anna’s insistence we’d ordered a limousine to take us from Haneda Airport to the new Imperial Hotel, one of the grandest hostelries in Tokyo and yet another Anna request. ‘Nicholas, for the sake of my self-confidence I must arrive in style. I will observe the courtesies they expect, I will not seem brash or demanding, but I will not bow to any man as a subservient being.’

  This was Anna-speak for a fearful inner disquiet. Outwardly there was almost no sign of the frightened little creature who still lingered within, the teen
ager who had faced the Japanese invaders alone and somehow survived but had never fully recovered from the experience and was again going to face her demons. Japan was to be a test for her, and my hope, of course, was that the ghosts that still haunted her from the past would finally be laid to rest.

  The Anna arriving in Japan seemed to exude natural confidence and poise. At forty-four she looked ten years younger and remained an astonishingly beautiful woman who, upon entering a noisy boardroom, would often bring it to sudden silence. Everything about her was understated, yet redolent of class. Her dress, jewellery, make-up and deportment all accentuated her natural beauty. She had perfected Konoe Akira’s concept of less is more, that one exquisite detail is more powerful than flashy ostentatious show. While she made no demands to be noticed, she simply couldn’t be ignored.

  However, I sensed that, while she had agreed with alacrity to accompany me, she felt deeply apprehensive about visiting Japan; it had been a decision requiring a great deal of courage. By insisting on all the trappings of wealth, she was, in effect, maintaining her distance. She had learned that an elegant and beautiful woman stepping from the rear seat of a Mercedes-Benz is not as accessible as one, equally elegant and gorgeous, stepping from a taxi, train or bus.

  We had entered a country where women had no presence or power. Japan had practised the diminution of the female for centuries and few heroic female figures had ever featured in its history. Despite the changing times, there had been little improvement in the status of the female sex, except perhaps in their appearance, where the deliberate constraints of the kimono had often been replaced by Western dress, including the miniskirt and platform-soled shoes, popular with bar girls and secretaries.