With My Little Eye (19 page)

Embarrassed and amazed, I pulled the hand away. ‘Have a good evening.’

Two old friends are driving us back, far too late for me, from a dinner party in Stoke Newington. Ted always takes ingenious shortcuts, away from main roads and often down some street that is little more than a lane or through some mews with the cars parked on either side leaving little room for a passage. Cynthia is always telling him that his shortcuts are, in fact, longcuts.

The two women in the back are talking animatedly. Ted is too absorbed in finding his route and I am too tired to talk. I stare at the road glistening from a recent shower. Suddenly I think, with an extravagant leap of hope: Is this really
happening
? On such a journey it should be only the road, winding through the tunnel of my little eye, that I am seeing. But now I can see the pavements on either side and the people, often with open umbrellas, hurrying along them. Perhaps I have imagined it? I say nothing to the others. But I remain excitedly buoyed up by a secret hope.

Two days later I call to see Dr Ireland about the possible side effects of the statin that I must now take. Handsome, decisive and vivid, a lesbian I should guess, she is a new and revitalising acquisition to a previously tired practice. For some reason she has always seemed to be genuinely interested in the case of this ancient man who, like many other ancient men, has suffered a stroke. I tell her of my experience in the car.

She gives a sad, wry smile and shakes her head. ‘I don’t want to raise your hopes too far. That’s a common phenomenon. In the dark the pupil widens and your range of vision is then temporarily extended. There is no neurological change – no change in your brain, which is where you have your lesion. You must ask Dr Szymanovski when next you see him. But that’s my conclusion. I’m sorry. I wish I could be more encouraging.’

It was my birthday. There had been no letter or card from Laura and all through the day I had waited, with mounting anxiety and despair, for a telephone call. In those days
international
telephone calls were cripplingly expensive. But surely to wish me happy birthday a woman as rich as Laura could make one?

Eventually it was I who called her.

‘Happy birthday, darling!’ she cried out. ‘I was just about to ring you. Don’t forget the time difference! I had to take Mark for some more tests. We’ve only just got back. Most of the time we were just waiting around. He hated that. You can imagine.’

‘I thought you must have forgotten.’

‘Don’t be silly. I’d never forget. You got my card and the cheque, didn’t you?’

‘No. I’m afraid not. When did you send it?’

‘Oh, more than ten days ago.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure. It’s those wretched Japanese posts.’ The posts in Japan at that period were as erratic as in England today. ‘So many of my letters seem to get lost. I think that I’ll have to register them.’

It was only much later, when, unable to sleep, I was sitting out in the garden in the dark, that I began to think about all those lost letters. Had she ever really sent them? Yes, she must have done, if she said so. She was someone who had an almost pathological hatred of lying. Had she been able to lie more freely, perhaps our relationship would have been more secure. Then another thought came to me: Might Hiro, picking up the letters when I was out of the house on one of my many
expeditions
, have destroyed them or hidden them?

Next morning, as I tried to eat my solitary breakfast, I
surreptitiously
glanced at his face each time that he appeared, in the absurd hope that somehow I’d find the answer to my
question
written there. But of course it wasn’t. As always, the face
that I was constantly bewildered and troubled to find so
beautiful
betrayed absolutely nothing.

‘Have you given up working for Mrs Kawasaki?’

‘Sorry?’

I repeated the question.

Although it was such a simple one, Miss Morita took a few seconds to answer. She put a hand to her chin, stared out of the window, and opened her mouth and then shut it. Finally she said in a stony voice, ‘Yes. I have given up.’

‘Why was that?’

Again she hesitated. ‘Mrs Kawasaki is a good lady. Very kind. But Dr Kawasaki …’ She pulled a face and gave a little shudder. ‘He is bad man.’

‘
Bad
?’ I was astonished. ‘Why is he bad? Has he been unpleasant to you?’

‘You do not know?’

‘Know what?’

‘His story.’

‘He’s always struck me as intelligent and charming.’

Again she hesitated, staring out of the window.

‘He was in prison. Six, seven years. Then he goes to Brazil. He cannot find work in Japan.’

My amazement intensified. ‘But what did he do?’

At first reluctantly, with many hesitations, and then made voluble by her indignation, she told me the story. During the war years, Dr Kawasaki, a dermatologist of international
reputation
, had been researching the effect on the skin of poison gases that might possibly come to be used in the conflict. At the same time he had also pursued his own researches into possible cures for leprosy. For the tests carried out in his laboratory he had had the use of enemy prisoners of war. None of them had died as a result of his tests, but many of them had suffered horribly.

‘I can’t believe it. He seems to be such a civilised and humane man. How is it possible?’

‘It was possible for many such people.’

By a coincidence I was walking down the lane the next day when Dr Kawasaki was getting into his car. I pretended not to see him but reluctantly halted when he called out my name and
got out of the car to speak to me. ‘I have that book for you – the one I promised. I’ve found it. It’s not a good translation – made before the war, too literal, too ponderous – but it still gives some idea of Soseki’s greatness. Wait a moment, I’ll get it for you.’

I waited, although my first impulse was to hurry off. Amazingly agile for a man of his age, he took two jumps as he ascended the steps and another two when he came down them. He held out the volume with a smile. ‘Tell me what you think of it.’

What I thought of it would hardly have been welcome to him. How was it possible that a man with such a history should have previously described to me a book as gentle, humane and compassionate as Soseki’s
Kokoro
as the greatest of Japanese novels?

Night after night, I try to recover those hours. Gradually in the murky bath of memory, sepia shadows of the photograph seem to emerge in disconnected patches. I see the museum, a
spectacular
building, all soaring glass and steel, at the end of a wide driveway flanked by cypresses. It is the creation of Mr Yamamoto, that billionaire collector of
ukiyo-e
whom I met so many years before. He financed the extravagant building and its park, and bequeathed to it his unrivalled collection of
pornographic
prints. It was he who, with all the generosity of a Getty, financed the purchase of all the other objects – works of art, photographs, films, condoms of every sort and period,
instruments
of gratification however crude or cruel – that are now stored in his Museum of Sex. It is extraordinary that a man seemingly so correct and austere should have decided to be remembered by such an institution.

I see him in his wheelchair. Since he was some years older than myself when first we met, he must now be in his nineties, even nearing a hundred. He is hunched, crooked hands clasped over a belly alarmingly large for someone otherwise so
emaciated
. His voice at first is faint and hoarse. But as his always silent attendant, a young man in a dark-blue uniform, followed by three of the obsequious curators, pushes him around from exhibit to exhibit, it grows stronger and stronger. He is
particularly
eager to tell me the story of one exhibit: a police
photograph
of a demure-looking little man of indeterminate age smiling at the unseen photographer. In a basement Tokyo room this machinist employee of a small shirt-making company had murdered a number of either professional or amateur
prostitutes
. He would carefully scalp them with an old-fashioned razor, and then himself wear their hair. That was all, Mr Yamamoto explained: the murderer did not rape the women. Briefly to wear their scalps in the privacy of his basement was all that he wanted.

I was amazed by the unemotional way in which he described
this and other horrendous aberrations to me. I was also amazed that Miss Morita’s response was equally unemotional. At one point – yes, I remember that clearly now – the attendant removed from a display cabinet an eighteenth century dildo carved from wood cracked and blackened from age and handed it to the old man. For a while he stared down at it and then without a word, he passed it to Miss Morita. Impassively she looked at it. She handed it to me. Involuntarily, with a feeling of disgust, I thought of all those orifices of long dead people into which it must once have been inserted.

We are entering another room. There is a huge television screen at the other end of it. He points to a chair …

It is there that the negative in the murky bath of memory refuses to yield any more. There is a shiny black, irregularly shaped stain at its centre.

Hiro handed me the chocolate cake that he had spent most of the morning baking and icing.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to come with me?’ I was on my way to a bring-and-buy sale at the Anglican Mission.

He shook his head. ‘Too busy. Sorry.’

‘It might be fun.’ But of course it wouldn’t be. I’d have liked myself to be ‘too busy’, but overburdened as I have always been, by a sense of duty, I felt that I must be there.

He shook his head again. ‘Thank you.’

The whole small foreign community, most of them not Anglicans and some of them not Christians, seemed to have turned up. A surprising number of Japanese women, constantly smiling, were in charge of many of the stalls. One of them took the cake from me with delicate fingers and eased it out of the box on to a plate. She backed away from it in admiration. ‘
Beautiful
!’ A woman beside her at the counter then cried out my name in seeming rapture, arms extended. ‘Thank you, thank you!’ How did she know my name? I had no recollection of that round, genial face, with its slightly protruding teeth and dark, somnolent eyes.

The Shotts approached. ‘Hi!’ he called out. He had a cigar in one hand and now raised it to inhale deeply and then to puff out the smoke into the still air.

‘Good afternoon.’ Mrs Shott was in a loose white blouse, worn outside an ample custard-coloured skirt with an irregular pattern of green and blue starfish on it. ‘We gather that poor old Mrs Kawasaki is on the way out.’

‘It looks like it, I’m afraid.’

‘What news from back home?’

‘Nothing special. Mark goes on having tests. Even the doctors at the School of Tropical Medicine are puzzled.’

‘And the houseboy? How is that working out?’

‘Oh, fine. You must come round soon to sample his cooking.’

At long last I somehow managed to get away on the pretext that I wanted to refill my empty glass with lemonade. From time to time other people, some vaguely known and some known not at all, chatted to me. They talked about the heat, the renewal of the security pact between the United States and Japan, the education of their children and the increasing
difficulty
, as Japan became more and more prosperous, of finding domestic servants.

‘Ah, there you are – alone and palely loitering. I was
wondering
if you would turn out or not. Well done!’ It was Rex, clutching a pottery bowl to his chest. ‘Look at this! Talk about serendipity!’ He held it out to me in both hands.

‘I like it.’

‘I should jolly well hope so. Do you know who this is by?’

‘Not a clue. Has it got a mark?’

‘Nope. But I have a hunch. I’ve become interested in modern Japanese pottery since I came to live here and I’m pretty certain this must be the work of Kawai Kanjiro. Heard of him?’

I nodded. I could hardly not have done.

‘The best living Japanese potter – with the possible exception of Tomimoto. I’ve met the old fellow once or twice. Sweet old thing. Not that one ever gets much out of him.’ He held out the bowl again. ‘I’ll show this to him. Get his confirmation. If it
is
his work then it must be worth a pretty sum. And I picked it up for two thousand – two quid. Think of that!’

‘Wonderful.’

‘Wonderful indeed. I’ve just got back from Tokyo. Strictly on business.’ He winked at me. ‘Life is fabulous there. It makes one realise how stuffy it is here. What are you going to do now? I’ve had enough of all this.’

‘So have I.’

‘Why don’t we go somewhere for a drink and a chat?’

‘Well, I …’ I thought of Hiro, who would have my solitary, carefully prepared dinner ready for me at exactly eight. He hated the food to spoil in the oven. Then I told myself that this was ridiculous. I had come to think too much of his
convenience
and too little of my own.

‘Oh, come on! I want to show you a little bar that’s a
favourite
of mine. You need taking out for yourself. You need shaking up.’

I felt, though I did not say so, that at that moment I was so brittle that any shaking up might only cause every bone in my body to snap.

The Cadillac and his Standard Vanguard, provided by the British Council, were parked near to each other. ‘I sent the driver home,’ he explained, as he wrapped the bowl in a rug and placed it on the back seat, muttering, ‘Mustn’t break that,’ more to himself than to me. ‘The bar’s not far from Hyakuman Ben. You know that, I imagine. I’ll wait for you there and you can follow me for the rest of the journey.’

I trailed him down one dark alley and then another. Suddenly I realised that, though I had never before travelled along this route, we were not all that far from where I lived. The houses became smaller and the distances between them wider. The only light was what they and a large, low moon provided. We began to crunch over loose stones. There was a field with a narrow track running up one side. At its far end I could make out a low, thatched building with a scattering of cars around it and some bicycles leaning against it. There was a vivid electric sign of a rooster with, written above it in English,
COCK BAR
. For a brief moment I wondered if the letters
TAIL
had fallen off the
COCK
. Then I realised that the
COCK
and
BAR
were too near to each other for that to have happened.

‘This building was once a temple. So at first it was called Temple Bar. Then a new owner took over.’ Rex put a hand to the bead curtain and held it up for me to enter. The ceiling was high, with a single low-watt, unshaded bulb suspended from it to diffuse a murky light. There was one barman, an old man, in grotesque fancy-dress headwear that made it look, obviously in an allusion to the name of the establishment, as if a rooster were perching on his head. Six or seven people were seated at the bar on high stools, three leaning forward to talk to each other in low voices, the others silent. At the far end there were what I took to be three diminutive women in kimono.

The barman greeted Rex, who replied with a few words in Japanese – a language that, unusually for a foreigner, he had taken the trouble to learn.

‘An off night, I’m afraid,’ Rex said. Wriggling round on his stool, he pointed to a young man with the only attractive face to be seen. ‘Be careful of that one. He’s a little crook.’

‘I’m unlikely to have any dealings with him.’

‘Those three at the end are sister boys. Not my taste at all.’

‘Sister boys?’

‘Transvestites.’

‘And I’m even less likely to have anything to do with them.’

He laughed. ‘Yes, of course! I forgot. Is this the first time you’ve been to a place like this?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid to say. Or rather – yes, I’m glad to say.’

‘It isn’t always so sad. A few nights ago I found Charles Laughton here. In the company of a Japanese dwarf. Perhaps he has a secret thing about them. No one seemed to recognise him. Except me. I went over and told him I thought
The
Night of the
Hunter
a cinematic masterpiece. He just replied, “Oh, yes,” and turned his back on me.’ He broke off to call to the barman to order some sake. ‘You’d like it chilled, wouldn’t you?’

I nodded. ‘I hate these bar stools. They always seem even more uncomfortable than bar stools back home.’

‘That’s because Japanese bottoms are smaller and legs
shorter
… Tokyo was amazing. They cater for every conceivable taste. No feelings of guilt or shame. So sensible. Oh, I’ve just remembered to tell you. I met someone – a Frenchman – who knew your present houseboy. I can’t remember quite how the subject came up but he had this weird story. Apparently the Frenchman, who’s something unimportant at the Embassy, had a colleague there who was even less important. The colleague – let’s call him Monsieur X – had recently got himself a wife. The wife had to go back to France because her mother – or father, or someone close – had died. Monsieur X then picked up your houseboy – Hiro, isn’t it? – in some bar, the one, I think, in which I met his pal. Hiro eventually took up residence with Monsieur X. Then the day came when wifey was about to return. Monsieur X told Hiro that their affair must now come to an end, gave him some money and sent him packing. Monsieur X went out to the airport in his car and fetched his wife home. The couple approached the house. There, on the doorstep, was slumped what looked like a corpse. Guess who it was? Well, an ambulance was called and it took Hiro off to the hospital, where with the aid of a stomach pump and some other disagreeable things they somehow managed to save him
from death. There had been a note, written in French, lying beside the body. Monsieur X had slipped it into his pocket but Madame X somehow later got her hands on it. It made the nature of the relationship absolutely clear to her. She left Monsieur X there and then, on the spot, and of course the scandal was soon all over the Embassy – and, in the end, all over every other embassy. The last news was that Monsieur X, now without his wife, was a vice consul in Chad or some equally insalubrious hole.’

I had been silent throughout the telling of the story. I had also been increasingly appalled.

‘So that’s the tale of your Hiro.’

I was silent for a moment. Then I ventured, ‘I’ve often
suspected
that he might be queer. But all the time he’s been with me, there’s been no sign of it. Or of anything out of the ordinary.’

Even as I said that I thought of those evenings when, after I had retired to the bedroom, he would slip out on some
surreptitious
errand. I thought of that diagonal bruise on his back and the unconvincing reason he had given for it. I thought of the possessiveness that made him so offhand and sometimes even actually offensive to Miss Morita. And what about that sudden and strange disappearance of Bruin?

He shook a finger at me. ‘Be careful! Be very careful.’

I hardly heard the warning. I was still thinking of his story. ‘It’s odd. Isn’t it?’ I said. ‘To try to kill himself so publicly – to let himself be found not merely by Monsieur X but also by Madame X.’ Instead of ‘X’ I all but said ‘Daladier’. ‘That
suggests
revenge to me. He
wanted
a scandal.’

‘And got it! That’s why I say – be careful, be very careful.’

I eased myself off my perch. ‘I must be on my way.’

‘Already? I’ll hang on for a bit. One never knows one’s luck. I’m sorry it was all so dreary tonight. Do you think you can find the route back?’

‘Oh, yes. I’m not all that far from the house.’

Hiro had been waiting up for me. He came out from the kitchen to greet me as I entered the hall. ‘What happen, master? Wait! Wait! I get slipper.’

‘No, no. Don’t bother!’

He looked shocked at a solecism so unacceptable in a
Japanese household. ‘Please, master. You must wear slipper in house.’

‘No!’ I said it with so much force that briefly he cringed.

‘I have dinner in oven. Maybe very dry now.’

‘Sorry, I’m not hungry.’

‘But I have beautiful trout!’ He almost wailed it.

‘Yes, and I’m not hungry. In fact, I’m going to bed.’

I did not turn on the light in the bedroom. I went to the window and stared out into the moonlit garden. Everything looked disturbingly weird, as though made of metal and glass. I thought: You must get rid of him. You must find some
face-saving
pretext, however implausible, to get rid of him. But then I realised that I did not want to get rid of him. I needed him in the house. More important, I wanted him in the house. Even now I am astonished by both the suddenness and the strength of an attachment of a kind that I had never known before and have never known since.

I began slowly to take off my clothes, dropping them on the floor. I knew that next morning he would pick them up, carry off those that needed washing and fold away those that didn’t. I picked up the pyjamas, meticulously ironed, from the pillow of the turned-down bed. I looked down at the pyjamas; then I tossed them across the room on to an armchair. Naked, I
clambered
on the bed and stretched out on it. I was waiting. I hardly dared to think for what.

During those days an unaccountable restlessness would seize me, usually in the evening when I had had my dinner and was either preparing for bed or actually in it. By then Hiro would have usually vanished on one of his mysterious errands. I’d pace the bedroom or wander about the house. Sometimes I used to venture into his bedroom, now picking up some trivial object – his comb, a used handkerchief that he must have dropped by accident, a letter that, since it was written in Japanese, I had no way of reading, on one occasion a crumpled ball of tissue that I first unfolded and stared at and then slowly raised to my
nostrils
and sniffed – and now merely standing in the centre of the room and looking slowly around it as though in increasingly frantic search of something invisible to me. Sometimes I used to go out into the night, wandering haphazardly.

On one such night, taking now one turning and then another at random, I suddenly realised that there, ahead of me, was the low thatched building, once a temple, that housed the Cock Bar. I could just hear, coming from within, the hiss of an ancient recording of a nasal voice singing a jaunty, regretful ditty. I strained to make out what it was. Then I realised that the performer was Noel Coward, of all unlikely people, and that he was singing ‘Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs Worthington,’ of all unlikely numbers. I guessed that Rex must have presented the record.