by Meira Chand
‘Oh she’s a difficult woman, my sister. I’m not disloyal, I’m just stating a fact. I can understand what she’s put you through, I’ve had my own collisions with her, and I’m just a sister, not a daughter-in-law.’ Yoko chuckled to herself.
Kate realised, sitting with Yoko, that it was the first time they had met alone, in all the months Kate had been in Japan. Each time she had seen Yoko before had been with the rest of the family. Looking at her now she thought how different and yet how great was her resemblance to Itsuko. With no more than a slight inverted twist, Kate could imagine Itsuko a greater sensualist than Yoko. For she was just as much a creature of instinct, at the mercy of her sensual nature. Finding no outlet this energy petrified in Itsuko, but the power that filled her was that same dark secret force that moved Yoko along her dissolute way. The coldness Itsuko showed her sister was not only harsh convention, but also vindictive jealousy at Yoko’s promiscuous ways.
All this Kate sensed, as she watched Yoko chat about trivial things. And she felt the same envy stir within her that she knew must stir in Itsuko, or in any woman caught and held within herself by social rigidity. She looked down into her coffee cup, at the thick sweet lid of cream and knew she must find some way to hang onto her sanity, and a wider view of things.
‘I’ve always admired you. You’re brave, to live as you do, divorced and with a career,’ Kate said, wishing to develop the bond between them.
‘I’m not like my sisters, they’re pre-war women. In the old days a woman belonged like a piece of baggage to the family she had married into, even her children were not her own possessions but could be taken away by a mother-in-law. I don’t find it hard being a divorcee. I can tell you it’s better to have been married and divorced here, than never to have married. If you’ve married people know there is nothing wrong with you. If you’ve never married they presume it’s because of physical or mental faults. I’m happy. I have friends, I have my work, I travel. I enjoy myself.’ She smiled and shrugged, sipping contemplatively at her coffee. Taking out a cigarette, Yoko lit it with a small gold lighter.
‘You know, I admire your independent ideas. Don’t take any notice of Itsuko, you come from a different world. I know,’ Yoko laughed.
It seemed to Kate that she and Yoko had changed places. Yoko had escaped her mould, while Kate lay trapped within it.
‘I’m sorry,’ Yoko said suddenly, licking cream off her upper lip. ‘I’m sorry things are so difficult for you at this moment. Itsuko told me on the phone. It’s a pity Jun didn’t rid himself of Chieko before he met you. We hoped she’d keep quiet. I expect it’s a shock. Chieko is from the past, you must realise that. I’m sure he wouldn’t look at her now. But it’s a difficult situation for you. The child complicates things so much. I can’t understand how Jun allowed himself to be trapped like that. Some women will stoop to any trick. She was the wrong type to get involved with.’
Kate held the creamy coffee on her tongue and felt it turn thick and sour. She lowered the cup slowly to the saucer.
‘I don’t understand. What ... what child?’ She managed to ask. Yoko clapped a hand to her mouth.
‘Didn’t you know? Didn’t you know about the child?’ She demanded in embarrassment. Kate shook her head.
In the room the buzz of conversation sounded suddenly unreal. Everything seemed to have stopped in Kate as it had at the moment she saw Chieko. Yoko was speaking again but Kate hardly caught her words.
‘... well it’s best then, best you should know. I’m glad it came out. You should talk to her. Have it out. I would. She lives near here, Jun rents a place for her, I often pass it. I’ll show you.’
It had rained while they were in the coffee shop, the roads were wet. Yoko produced an umbrella. They walked through the arcade of fashionable shops in Sentagai, busy shoppers and passed under a railway track and the thunder of trains. Kate walked as if drugged, she felt so tired she wished to lie down there on the pavement and sleep, and never wake up again.
‘There.’ Yoko pointed to an apartment house, hemmed in between a hairdresser’s and a bookshop. ‘The fourth floor, those windows there. He pays a lot of rent. This is a fashionable area.’
Kate stared up at the fourth floor windows, as if in a dream.
‘Oh Look, there they are,’ Yoko said pointing across the road.
Chieko rounded a corner, and crossed the road. A child of three or four walked beside her dressed in brown shorts and a pale blue school smock, a green handkerchief pinned to his collar. A yellow satchel bumped upon his back. He walked along, talking earnestly to Chieko under the umbrella she held above them both, stopping sometimes to hump the satchel higher on his shoulders. His knees were knobbly and his ears large like Jun’s. But for the rest the child seemed all Chieko. Yoko pulled Kate into the narrow entrance of the bookshop as Chieko and the child walked towards them and then disappeared into the block of flats.
‘Lets go,’ Yoko said, pushing Kate forward. ‘Shall I come home with you? You’ve had a shock. I’ll get a taxi.’ She hailed a passing vehicle that drew up beside them.
‘I’m all right. Don’t worry.’ Kate insisted, shutting the car door firmly upon Yoko. As the taxi pushed forward Kate turned to the window and saw Yoko close her umbrella. The rain had stopped.
15
She could not bear to go straight home, but walked down to the little shrine beside the waterfall a distance before their house. The autumn dusk held a touch of death and dampness. Japan lived closely with its spirits, and these she felt about her now in the trees and in the weathered wood of the old shrine. In the courtyard stone lanterns stood amongst ginkgo trees, stone lion-dogs guarded the shrine, and in the distance the sound of the waterfall cascaded heavily after a night of rain. The murmur of the water washed through her, reminding her of how long she had listened to its constant whispering. Now she was so used to it she hardly heard it.
There was no more anger; there was nothing in her now but tiredness. Returning to the house she pulled back the sliding doors of the lounge, opening the room to the garden. Darkness thickened in the trees, the sky had faded to a bluish light. Lamps came on in the neighbour’s house, a church bell sounded from the town, there was the smell of fish being fried. Rocks and stone lanterns in the garden absorbed the shadows and grew mysterious. No natural spontaneous growth was allowed.
In a Japanese garden; there was never a large shady tree to sit beneath, as there had been in the gardens of her childhood. Here, beautiful though they were, gardens were for observation, not participation. Trees were not allowed to grow in an unrestrained way. They were cut and pruned and chopped about, discipline was applied to them each year of their sprouting life, until they no longer ignored authority but conformed to a short and powerful shape, where all energy was held within strong and obedient forms. It all followed the Confucian philosophy of devotion to duty. Such discipline was seen as the road to spiritual growth, as in the physical disciplines of Zen, or in the arts, or human relationships.
In the dusk the sky had became a deep luminous blue, as it folded to the night. Dogs began to bark, a moth fluttered in. Soon the glass of the window reflected only her own face and the light in the room behind. She felt she understood nothing any more, and closed her eyes, waiting for Jun.
‘Kate,’ he had said, laughing. Laughing. ‘Kate, what’s wrong?’ He took her by the wrist and pulled her against him. ‘What is it now? I thought it was over, understood. We talked last night.’ The words came out of her then.
‘There’s a child, isn’t there? I’ve seen him.’ The words echoed through her.
He released her, stepping back. The room became very still, the silence flowing between them.
‘Tell me about this child. Don’t you see that you must tell me? I don’t understand you.’
‘I didn’t know how to tell you. I hoped you need never know.’ The words sounded hollow and inadequate. There was no way to predict now what she might do.
‘Don’t you see tha
t you should have told me before, in the beginning, before we married?’
‘I was afraid you would not marry me.’ He could not find the words he wanted, words to calm, words to obliterate, words to diffuse the truth. There was no way to avoid now the ugliness of the situation. In the face of truth there was nothing he could say.
‘But don’t you see what you’ve done? If you had only told me before there was a chance we could have found a way. Oh don’t you see, don’t you see?’
He remembered her hysteria the other night and became frightened for her now. But she did not resist when he placed his hands upon her and pushed her down gently into a chair. He opened a cupboard and poured neat whiskey into a glass and steered it to her lips, then sat beside her, rolling his own glass back and forth between his palms.
‘Kate ...’
‘Don’t you see,’ she began again. ‘Our relationship is a lie, and has always been with this secret behind you. Everything I thought we had, has in fact never been.’ She spat out the words and he hung his head, unable to look at her.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ The phrase fell foolishly from him.
‘Kate ...’
She took no notice as she packed a bag, not daring to look, knowing his pleading might even now draw her back to him
‘I cannot stay, I must be alone, I must think. I’m so tired and confused. I shall only be at the Baileys’, so there is no need for you to worry. But don’t try to come there, to bring me back. I must think, You must give me time.’
She looked back once from the gate and saw him standing in the doorway, silent with the guilt and shame of it all. She willed herself to shut the latch and turned quickly down the hill, looking for a taxi.
16
In the Baileys’ home the sumo wrestlers faced her from the wall, the familiar candlestick lamp and the kai-oki box with its thick, green tassels sat squarely on the table as before. Only she was changed. Paula put a hand to her mouth to hide her shock when Kate explained that her life was wrecked.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh.’
Pete stood silently beside his wife and shook his head in disbelief.
‘It’s something that happened in the past that I have to learn to live with. But I just cannot find a way,’ Kate said despairingly.
‘Of course you can’t,’ Paula murmured.
‘You can stay here as long as you want, you know that,’ Pete told her in a low voice.
‘Yes, I know, that’s why I came. Who else could I have gone to? I’m just sorry to place this upon you both,’ Kate replied conscious t of how her personal void involve them.
Paula moved closer and put a comforting arm about her. In his usual rational way, Pete sought as ever to be fair. He could not believe the worst of Jun, he liked him as a man.
‘I’m sure Jun faces a terrible dilemma in himself. I can understand why he couldn’t face telling you.’
‘He should have been honest,’ Kate said fiercely, the words knotting in her throat.
‘There’s no excuse for him.’ Paula drew herself up in defence of Kate.
Soon they stopped the pointless discussion and let her go to bed. It was as if she was physically ill, too weak to remove her clothes. And when she lay down, the sleep she thought would overwhelm her did not come. There was a sudden breeze outside and the sound of rain again upon the glass. The room was dark, from downstairs came the ring of the telephone and sounds of Pete and Paula moving about. Beside the bed the luminous hands of a clock moved smoothly through the night.
‘I did not want it to happen like this. I never wanted to hurt her.’ Jun’s voice was hollow on the phone as he spoke to Pete. ‘I was trapped. I didn’t know how to tell her. It was like another life; how can I expect her to understand? I just hoped she would never know. Is she all right?
‘Whatever she decides, you must give her time,’ Pete advised.
The days spiralled in tight about Jun. Wherever he looked he was thrown back upon himself. It was the waiting that was hardest, alone, locked into a disaster of his own making, he told no-one, least of all his mother. He hoped within a few days Kate would return, then he stretched the days to a week. And the worst was that within all this a need for Chieko filled him in a shocking rebuttal of sombre facts. He was torn with the need for both women, for different things within each one. His desire for Chieko could melt his bones. Yet, when he contemplated the choice to be made there was not the slightest question. There was nothing more he wanted than Kate, nothing he wanted to regain more than her love and respect. He did not see Chieko, she did not ring him.
It was Fumi who first came to know. She worried quietly at her crochet and worried at the stove above the steam of piquant soup or apples in a pan. Kate was not there. Fumi had phoned and phoned, and paced about the garden of Jun’s house, peering through windows into dark interiors. At first she thought Kate was out and busy, but with each day her fear grew, as did her intuition before a wall of silence. Nobody said anything, but there was an edge of energy in her sister that Fumi had observed before at times of malicious satisfaction, or the completion of some inner puzzle. It was something felt, as faint as that, but she knew her sister well. And Jun when she saw him or questioned him, sank into silence. There were tensions, she could feel them, dark and brooding. It was soon apparent what was amiss. The daily help, taking a wrongly delivered letter down to the main house, confided in Hirata-san the maid, who confided in Itsuko and Fumi the next day.
‘I hear,’ said Itsuko coldly, ‘that she has left. Is this so? Answer me.’
She confronted Jun in the morning soon after he entered the house, to pick her up on the way to the office. She stood with her back to the window and the morning sun spread behind her like an aura. Beyond the veranda the garden filled the window. He felt as he had that dark night long ago when, on the edge of the moonlit garden, he had looked up at her in contrition, nine years old and shivering. ‘You are a Nagai, the eyes of the world are upon you.’ Her words came back to him again, words she had placed upon him as tightly as a skin. He hardly dared look at her now.
‘It is not her going that is wrong, but its manner and its timing. If we had sent her away it was one thing. That she has deserted like this is another. What will people say? She must be brought back at once and then later we can send her home, send her away. That will be different.’ Itsuko said angrily.
‘I cannot just bring her back, like that. There is no way she will come but of her own accord. It is all my fault.’ Jun argued in distress.
‘Fault? How is it your fault, except that you should have been more careful. It is too late to be concerned with fault, we must think about results. People will talk, what will it look like, what will they say? If your wife cannot live here, then that cannot be helped. Shikata ga nai. But I will not have her shame us like this.’
The light caught her unflatteringly and Jun saw at last that she was old and tired and intractable; she was caught in her own charade. It enclosed them both now, inescapably.
‘I’ll try,’ he promised, unconvinced.
‘There is another thing,’ she said harshly, picking up her briefcase. ‘I have had a phone call from the plant. Last night there was a break-in. They were after the blueprints of the new machine. The night watchman disturbed the thieves and they dropped the file as they fled. Whether they took any pictures, I cannot say.’
Jun took a step forward in alarm. ‘Tamura. It can only be Tamura.’
‘I told you he had not given up. We must be extra careful until that patent is through. But he didn’t get away with it.’ Itsuko gave a triumphant snort.
‘We must go straight to the mill. The police are waiting there for us.’
Jun nodded and followed her out, his thoughts divided and confused.
Kate did not know if she was more afraid of the doors that had shut around her, or the space that lay beyond. She was safe with the Baileys, and from the window of their Kitano-cho home, watched a world of colour and sound and life. Only s
he it seemed, was dead in a world of the living. She needed to sleep, and when she woke to the brilliant mornings, she needed to sleep again.
She tried to read the books on Paula’s shelves, but everything between the pages seemed to apply to her state in life. Everything seemed written by people who understood. The finding of this poetic understanding was more painful than the understanding normal people gave with their wholesome clichés. There were times when she could not bear Paula’s voice, bouncing along with careful inflexions of sympathy. She wanted to scream, but instead returned to her room. The days past slowly, she lost track of how many. She was here alone to think things out, but her mind would not move.
‘It has been almost two weeks. What can we do to help her? I’ve been thinking, Steve Lever in the office, who’s in charge of the heavy industries section, has a couple of clients arriving from Spain who can’t speak a word of English. He’s looking for an interpreter. The job is only for a few days, but will probably lead to others. I thought Kate could do it. It might put some life back into her, break the vicious circle of depression.’ Pete looked inquiringly at Paula, as she rummaged thoughtfully in a bag of wool for a ball of orange thread.
‘I hope we can persuade her.’ She squinted up at the light, threading a strand through a needle.
Kate sat in the garden with James’s kitten, a frail ball of fluff. It leapt suddenly from her lap to a windblown leaf, leaving her nothing but its vanished warmth. She stared at the empty cup of her hands. She could not sit around at the Baileys forever but could see no way to a future life.
Paula carried a tray of coffee over to where Kate sat in the garden. The breeze rustled through bamboos. The musical chimes of the waste paper truck passed by in the road outside, soliciting magazines, newsprint and boxes. Paula stirred the sugar in her cup and spoke her thoughts immediately. She explained about the job, and was surprised at the ease with which Kate accepted the idea.
‘It will get you out of this depression and help you pull yourself together. It will be for the best,’ Paula announced assuringly.