With My Little Eye (13 page)

‘I can’t eat anything after that.’

‘Of course you can.’

She bit her lower lip. ‘I can’t go into that kitchen. Never, never again.’

‘Don’t be silly. You remember what Katinka told us –
cockroaches
are a way of life in Japan.’

‘Stupid cow! Well, it’s not a way of life I’m prepared to adopt.’

After we had retreated into the sitting room I had poured her a stiff gin and tonic. Now she held it out, wordlessly, for a refill.

‘Do you really want another? Wouldn’t it be better if we had some dinner? Not here, if you’d rather not. We could go to that little sushi place up the road.’

‘
Sushi
! Not on your life!’

‘Well, there’s that restaurant opposite to it. People say it’s OK. Nothing special, but OK.’

‘Oh, all right. But I must have another drink first. We’ll have to take Mark.’

‘Yes, of course. It’s not far to push him.’

Mark was a success with the elderly woman who waited on us. She spent so much time cooing and chattering to him in Japanese that it was a long time before she brought our simple order of chicken curry and rice. Laura, head supported on hand, hardly spoke. Soon I too lapsed into silence.

‘There are too many flies in here,’ she suddenly announced.

‘There are too many flies everywhere in Japan at this time of year.’ Suddenly I felt exasperated.

‘Haven’t they heard of fly papers?’

‘Evidently not.’

When we walked out of the restaurant, pushing the pram together, it was into an exceptionally beautiful night. A strong breeze had arisen, causing the trees on either side of the lane to rustle and creak. I tilted my head backwards. The whole sky was crammed with stars, unbelievably many. Now Laura looked up. She was as dumbfounded as I was.

‘I’ve never seen a sky like that.’

‘Nor I.’

Our hands touched on the handle of the pram. Then she raised hers and put it over mine. I was astonished by how cold it felt. It seemed to me that, once again, she had emerged from another of her moods of extreme desperation.

The next morning Miss Morita arrived to take away some
typing
that I had set aside for her. She stood in the doorway of my eyrie while I searched for the sheets of paper and sorted them numerically. I have always been an untidy worker. Usually I’d have urged her to sit down – something that she would never have done on her own initiative. But now I deliberately refrained from doing so. I wanted to be free of her presence, so gentle and modest and yet so intrusive. For someone to demand more of a friendship than I am prepared to give always gets on my nerves.

‘Thank you.’ She gave her usual bow, little more than a slight inclination of the head. Her feet in their flat-heeled brogues were almost touching, her gaze was lowered. Then she looked up. There was a disconcerting pity in the wide-spaced eyes behind the gold-framed spectacles.

‘Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow?’

‘Let’s take a rain check. I’ll call you. Or vice versa.’

‘Rain check?’

‘We’ll see how things are going.’

She nodded. Then she had left, swiftly and silently.

After a few minutes the door opened again. It was Laura. She walked decisively to the chair opposite to my desk and sat down in it before speaking. ‘I must talk to you.’

‘Yes, of course.’ I pushed the blotter with my work on it away from me. ‘What is it?’

‘I’ve come to a decision.’

I already knew, God knows how, precisely its nature. ‘Yes?’ I shifted in the chair. Suddenly I felt not merely a mental
discomfort
but also a physical one. There was an ache in my shoulders and my head seemed too heavy for my neck.

‘He’s had another upset. We can’t let them go on.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll telephone Anson.’

‘Later.’ She leaned forward. ‘Listen to me.’

‘Yes? I’m listening.’

She tilted her head as though straining for a prompt
inaudible
to her. Then she said, ‘I must go. He and I must go.’

‘Go?’ But I knew exactly what she intended.

‘We must get out of this bloody country. Or it’s going to kill us. Both of us.’ She stared at me and I stared back. ‘I don’t know what you want to do.’

‘I can hardly go now. My scholarship still has more than six months to run. It’s a great opportunity. I can hardly throw it up.’

‘I thought you’d take that line.’

‘It’s not a
line
. It’s common sense.’

‘And you mustn’t let your wife and son get in the way of that common sense?’

‘Couldn’t you stick things out for another two or three months? After that it’ll get cooler and –’

‘You don’t seem to be able to get it into your head that our son is
ill
.’
She repeated it even more vehemently. ‘
Ill
! You’re so besotted with your life here that that’s of no concern to you.’

‘Anson isn’t in the least worried. He’s told you that. Babies can get these things, then they get over them.’

‘But he’s been unwell for weeks! Or maybe you haven’t noticed that?’

For a while we tussled, like two wrestlers growing
simultaneously
more and more aggressive and more and more tired.

Then, decisively, she ended it all. ‘It’s no use going on with this. Mark and I are going to leave just as soon as we can arrange it. I don’t expect you to move out of here. You can stay on. I’ll go on paying the rent and you can keep the Caddie. I’ll
even go on paying your Miss Morita. When your scholarship has run its course, we can then decide what to do next.’

In recollection, my emotions at that moment continue, even now, to puzzle and shock me. I was horrified; I was consumed with grief and guilt. But at the same time I also felt, as at the sudden easing of an intolerable toothache, a profound relief.

Since Laura has to go out to do her twice-weekly stint of
voluntary
work at the local Oxfam, I have volunteered to do the day’s shopping.

‘Are you sure that you can manage on your own?’

‘I must manage on my own. I must learn to manage.’

‘But I could easily do the shopping on my way home.’

‘When you’re hungry and tired of dealing with all those balmy people in the shop? No. Certainly not. In any case I must get out. Particularly on a spring day as beautiful as this.’

In the food department of our local Marks & Spencer I walk slowly and deliberately down the aisles, basket in one hand. Regularly I turn my head from side to side, so as to avoid colliding with anyone or anything. At one moment I all but trip over a basket abandoned by someone under the frozen food cabinets. At another moment I narrowly avoid walking into a woman who, swinging her basket, has pranced round a corner.

It is as I emerge through the swing doors that, failing to make those regular turnings of my head, I walk into a burly, middle-aged man in trainers, and, hardly in keeping with them, a formal, shabby black overcoat reaching almost to his ankles.

In fury he turns on me, ‘Can’t you bloody well look where you’re going? Wanker!’

For a moment I think that he is about to punch me. Then, ends of the unbuttoned overcoat flapping, he abruptly turns away.

‘No, I can’t look where I’m going. I’m half-blind.’ I have to shout the last words since he is striding so quickly away from me.

He walks on a few steps. Then he sweeps round and hurries back. He raises an arm. I think, curiously without any feeling of alarm: Now he’ll hit me. But instead he merely touches my shoulder. ‘OK.’ He repeats it. ‘OK.’ Then he strides off to be almost immediately lost in the crowd.

On the way home I puzzle over the dissyllable. Had that OK
been a statement (‘Well, now you’ve learned your lesson not to mess with me’) or an interrogation (‘No hard feelings, right?’)? The more I think about it, the more it seems to have been neither of those things. It is like some password that I have either never had revealed to me or else have forgotten.

As I trudge home, the straps of two heavily loaded canvas shopping bags biting into my palms, I have a feeling of unease. Suppose I again meet him some time, somewhere? Will he recognise me. If so, how will each of us react?

The departure of the Swissair plane had been delayed. Laura, stretched out on a leather-covered sofa, and I, perched on the edge of a tubular steel chair, were smoking in a strangulated silence in the first-class lounge. There was not a single other passenger waiting with us.

Laura leaned forward and stubbed out her half-consumed cigarette in a vast, hideously ornate crystal ashtray. She swung her legs off the sofa and, hands dangling between them, she stared at me. I blew out one perfect ring of smoke and then another. It was a trick that always amused her, but now she had either been unaware of yet another repeat of my silly little performance or had decided to ignore it.

‘I hope everything will be all right.’

‘It can hardly be that without you.’

‘Oh, you’ll manage. Selfish people usually do – and you’re no exception.’

‘Why not try to be nice to me?’

‘Well, how about this? I rang Mrs Kawasaki at the hospital and arranged with her that I’d pay the rent by banker’s order. So you’ll have no worry over that.’

‘That’s very kind of you. Thank you.’

‘Her son is about to arrive. So it looks as if things must be bad. I’m sorry to miss him. I’d like to have seen what he’s like.’ Then she resumed briskly, ‘I’ve paid Joy up to the end of the month. But I’ve told her that you may not need her every day – or so late in the evening – and that you’ll let her know about that in due course.’ She reached for her bag and pulled out an envelope. ‘And here’s some spending money. I know that you’re used to your little extravagances and that that precious
scholarship
doesn’t go all that far.’

I hesitated and then took the envelope and stuffed it into the breast pocket of my khaki safari shirt. ‘You’re being very
generous
. Thank you.’ I felt humiliated and wondered if that was what she had intended. ‘Ring me as soon as you get home.’ I
looked down at Mark asleep in his cot. ‘Poor little chap. Twenty-two hours is a long time for him.’

‘Well, at least we’ll have plenty of room – and plenty of attention. It looks as if we’re going to have first class to ourselves.’

At the barrier I moved forward, intending to kiss her
goodbye
. But she turned away, to say something to the stewardess beside her, who had volunteered to carry Mark aboard in his cot. Finally she swivelled round to raise a hand in brief farewell.

I felt both rage and grief as I watched the virtually empty plane gather speed down the runway. Then, though surrounded on all sides by hurrying people, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the sense of my total isolation. Tears began to force
themselves
up, like violent, agonising spurts of blood from some deep wound within me, to fill my eyes and trickle down my cheeks.

Without any of Laura’s adroitness at handling the Cadillac, I had deliberately placed it at the far end of the car park, since it seemed that there it would be least likely to get hemmed in by other cars. But one inconsiderate driver had parked a van closely behind it and another a battered Wolseley saloon even more closely in front. Swearing under my breath (‘Cunts! Fucking cunts! Oh, shit!’), I clumsily manoeuvred the Cadillac back and forth. Then I felt a violent jolt and heard the screech of the brakes that I had hurriedly applied. I jumped out, the engine still running. The bumper of the Wolseley had a dent in it. One of the headlights of the Cadillac had been knocked askew and been smashed. The broken glass crunched under my boots as I moved closer to inspect the damage. I knew, from past experience, that to replace the smashed headlight would cost a lot of money. Most likely the spare part would have to be cannibalised from a similar prehistoric animal consigned to the morgue of a junkyard.

I climbed back into the Cadillac and rested my forehead on the wheel. This time my tears were not silent. I bawled noisily while thumping the wheel with my open hand.

Joy arrived not early enough to prepare breakfast for me but so late that I had all but finished what I had prepared for myself.

‘Good morning.’ She did not smile. Her face was so rigid
that it struck me, in my then paranoid state, as cruel and
gloating
. She made no apology for her lateness, but merely went on, ‘I’d better start on some cleaning.’ So fragile was my mood that I at once assumed that she was implying that I had made such a mess of things that she had better start at once on the task of cleaning up as much of it as she could.

Up in my eyrie, I tried to get on with the article that had already taken up so much of my time to so little effect. Then, giving up, I merely stared out of the circular window at the rooftops below me. A huge vulture, ominously low, was circling them, eventually to descend in leisurely, clumsy arcs and
disappear
from sight. It would be another scorcher, I realised. I’d be suffering the scorcher alone.

I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs. It could only be Joy. She was breathless when she entered. I often wanted to tell her that she ought to lose weight but always restrained myself. It was the sort of thing that Laura could have said without giving any offence. I couldn’t.

‘I’d like to show you something,’ she announced between gasps, one hand to heaving bosom.

‘Yes?’

‘Perhaps you’d come with me.’

I followed her down the stairs. I could smell her sweat, like the odour of an overripe guava. The Japanese are so sensitive to the body odours of Westerners. How could that Japanese
husband
of hers have ever come to marry her, let alone copulate with her?

She preceded me not down the corridor that led to Laura’s and my bedroom but along another, narrower one. This led first to a guest room and then to a room crammed with junk abandoned in it by previous tenants and perhaps, before that, by Mrs Kawasaki’s son and his family. She jerked open the door, which emitted a snarl at the violence done to it, and announced, ‘Look what’s happened!’ Beyond all the discarded objects – two massive cabin-trunks, a trestle sewing machine on a square table, some broken chairs, books saturated with dust, old, tattered curtains spilling from a cardboard box – there was a row of built-in cupboards. She approached one and pulled open its door. ‘Look!’ She sounded not regretful or vexed but triumphant.

The first thing that I saw was a glittering river of sequins, as the early morning sun slanted down through the usually bolted window, now wide open, on to one of Laura’s evening dresses.

‘She’s left all these lovely frocks of hers. What made her do that?’ She turned to me, like a prosecuting lawyer cornering the defendant.

‘I suppose she was in such a hurry she forgot them.’

‘What are we to do with them?’

‘Well, she has so many clothes – not only here but at home – that she won’t be in desperate need of them. So we’d better leave them until I can take them back with me.’

‘But it’ll ruin them to hang there in all this dust and dirt.’ She looked around her with disgust. ‘Oh, poor dear, she can’t have been in her right mind, that’s for sure. It’s not like her to have been so forgetful. Is it?’

‘No, it certainly isn’t. But she had so much to do before her departure.’

She sighed. ‘Well, I’ll see to them. I don’t want them to come to any harm.’ Quite how she was going to ‘see to them’ she did not indicate.

I noticed a guitar propped in a corner and reached for it. I plucked one string, then another. The sounds had a plangent sadness for me at that moment. To whom could the instrument have belonged? And why had it been abandoned?

Shaking her head in what appeared to be disapproval, Joy walked over to the cupboard, its doors still open, put in a hand and raised the skirt not of the sequined frock but of another one, pale blue and made of the softest cashmere. Laura had worn it, only recently purchased, on the plane out, and then with her usual capriciousness had never worn it again. Joy raised the skirt and rubbed her cheek against it, like a cat voluptuously rubbing itself against its owner’s leg. Her
expression
was remote and dreamy. I might not have been there. ‘So soft. It might be silk.’

As we descended the stairs, she once more ahead of me, she turned her head to say over her shoulder, ‘Oh, there’s something else. I almost forgot. There’s
this
. What d’you think we’d better do about it?’

‘This’ was a huge pink rabbit that, during the first two or three days of our stay in the house, Miss Morita had brought as
a present for Mark. After Miss Morita’s departure Laura had picked it up and stared into its glass eyes in hostile
confrontation
. Then she had thrown it across the room on to one of the two sofas. ‘What a ridiculous present for a baby!’

‘He may like it when he’s a little older.’

She had crossed over to the sofa and had retrieved the rabbit. She had squeezed it. ‘There’s something hard inside here.’ Her hand had explored further. ‘I can feel some wire. It’s unsafe.’

I had not seen the rabbit again. Now Joy was picking it off the lacquer chest where she must have left it before coming up to my study. ‘I found it in the bottom of your bedroom
wardrobe
. Where madam kept her shoes.’ Cradling the object like an unwanted illegitimate baby in her arms, she looked down at it. ‘It’s
ugly
, isn’t it? I think that Japanese woman, that Miss Morita, brought it. People who don’t have children never know what’s suitable for them.’ She turned to me. ‘So what shall I do with it?’

‘Oh, put it with those dresses.’

‘You’re not going to take it back to England with you?’ She squinted angrily at me.

‘I doubt it. Let’s see in due course.’

It was, strangely, on my second night alone, not on the first, that I felt the full, shattering impact of Laura’s and Mark’s absence. Bicycling away soon after five, Joy had left me what she called ‘some cold cuts’. Undressed, limp lettuce leaves and unpeeled and uncut beef tomatoes accompanied the slices of spam, chicken, and lamb that must have been in the refrigerator for a considerable time to be so dry and stringy. A half-empty jar of mayonnaise stood beside them. They were all far below her usual standards. So, too, was the pot of yoghurt with its synthetic mandarin flavour and cloying aftertaste of
aspartamine
. Was this her way of indicating that she really couldn’t be bothered to take any of her usual pains with what I ate? I left most of the ‘cold cuts’ and half the yoghurt – partly because I would have had no appetite even for food far more acceptable and partly because I wanted to reciprocate her tongue-out
gesture
with one of my own.

During the summer the garden retained its heat long after the setting of the sun. But today a strong breeze had made it
almost chilly. I walked over to the pond and stared into its dim depths. There was no sign of a carp. Were they all sleeping or had all of them died? Restlessly, I sat down on a wicker chair and then at once jumped up and walked over to the persimmon tree. The failing light had drained the still unripe globes of fruit of their usual brilliant colour. They hung there motionless like small, extinguished lanterns. All at once I could hear a bird singing from Mrs Kawasaki’s garden next door. The racket (that was how I thought of it at that moment) eventually got so much on my nerves that I had just decided to return to the house when abruptly it stopped with an unseen susurration of foliage.

I felt an upsurge of longing for some company. But though I had made a number of Japanese friends, this was not a country in which, uninvited and unannounced, I could call on them in their homes. I might have called on Mrs Kawasaki on some pretext, but the house was dark and she was back in hospital. Rex was always glad to see me; but whenever we met, his
strenuously
over-friendly, slightly flirtatious manner seemed to be saying, ‘Yes, I know you’re not queer but I really rather fancy you.’ The result was that, even when other people were present, I felt uncomfortable in his company. The Ansons lived far off and there were always those children, even late in the evening, with their boisterousness, cheekiness and even an occasional rudeness that their indulgent parents regarded as a joke. Katinka’s establishment up the road? She would be too busy. And the Shotts would be too boring. If I were to arrive so late to see Miss Morita, her ancient, ailing mother would certainly be outraged.