With My Little Eye (3 page)

‘Well, have a good time! We’ve just had our daily airing.’

As we approached the wicket gate on its creaking hinge, we heard the man’s voice from behind us: ‘Hi there! One moment!’

‘Yes?’

The couple had turned back from the door and were now once more approaching.

‘I meant to say,’ he began. ‘Katinka has just told us. You’re going to view Mrs Kawasaki’s house?’

‘It’s just beautiful,’ his wife put in.

‘One of the most handsome in the whole city,’ he confirmed.

‘When we first came here – oh, some years ago now – we stayed there for some months. Large rooms and many of them. A huge, really
huge
terrace.’

‘And a real yard. Not the usual poky little Japanese one,’ he took up. ‘There’s this persimmon tree …’

‘But sadly we had to leave and come here. We just couldn’t afford it. Mrs Kawasaki was charging us far too little and so we couldn’t really complain when she said she was going to have to up the rent.’

The old man pulled off his cap to reveal a fringe of grey hair circling a creased area of baldness never before revealed to us. The action suggested a suddenly achieved intimacy. He raised a hand and scratched the scalp vigorously, almost viciously.
‘We’re retired,’ he said. ‘I was in the army commissariat here during the occupation and it seemed a good idea to stay. We had fallen in love with the people and everything was so cheap. But things that once seemed cheap no longer do so when you’re living on a pension.’

‘We were so happy in that house. It was like a palace to us.’

‘Even though it was, well, kind of sombre.’

‘Sombre?’ The word surprised me. In Kyoto nothing at that time seemed sombre to me. Everything was so vivid and so ravishing. The cherry trees in blossom on either side of the unpaved lane that led from the boarding house to the main road seemed to have been covered in a sudden fall of snow. The light glittered off their branches. The sky at that particular hour of the evening was cloudless and clear, with the sun – half of a huge orange disc – about to disappear beneath the far, misty horizon.

‘Yeah. Well, I don’t how to explain it. We never really felt at home there.’

‘No, it wasn’t exactly
homey
there. Maybe it was too grand for us really to feel at home there. But we loved it, we just loved it. We’d never lived in that sort of house before. And we never will again, that’s for sure.’

He thrust out a hand. ‘We’ve never learned each other’s names. I’m Erwin. Erwin Shott. And this is my wife – well, you already must have guessed that – Lucy Shott. And you’re …?’

I told him, stumbling over our names as, oddly, I so often do when asked for them.

‘Well, it was nice to talk to you,’ Laura said. ‘We must push on, I suppose.’

Mrs Shott stooped over the pram. ‘She’s just gorgeous!’

‘Not she,’ I corrected. ‘He. Mark.’

‘Oops! At that age it’s
so
difficult to tell … Oh, he’s
so
cute.’

‘We always wanted a baby of our own,’ the man took up. ‘We tried and tried.’

The woman sighed. ‘We decided that that was God’s will.’ She sighed again. ‘Well, He’s given us so many compensations. We must just be thankful for all of those.’

Laura, with her usual impatience, put a hand to the pram. ‘We must push on I’m afraid,’ she repeated.

‘Sure, sure!’ That was the man. ‘Push away!’

‘And don’t forget to tell us how you get on with Mrs Kawasaki,’ the woman called out. ‘She’s such a fine lady. You’re really going to like her.’

‘Of the old school. One of those samurai families. Now don’t be intimidated! Tell yourselves you’re just as good as she is. And don’t forget to give her our – well, not love – respects.’

Their upper stories viewable from the road but their ground floors invisible, the two adjoining residences (that grand word, used by Katinka, seemed appropriate) would not have looked out of place in Brighton’s Dyke Road or London’s Bishop’s Avenue. Mrs Kawasaki owned both. Her father had built the first of them for himself and his family in the immediate
aftermath
of World War I. She had built the second for her son, her only child. It was in the first of these that she now lived with an elderly maid and occasionally a lodger or two, always female and usually American. There was a high wall around both houses and a low wall between them. The lodgers had their own side entrance and used what had been the servants’
staircase
in her father’s time. She was clearly a woman who both valued her own privacy and respected that of her tenants.

We had thought it odd that, when I had spoken to her on the telephone, she had instructed us in her piping child’s voice not to ring the bell of her own house, but to go to the entrance of the other one, where she would be outside waiting for us. Why wait for us outside? As we approached down a long,
narrow
lane, we saw far off the diminutive figure standing
motionless
in front of the embossed arch of a wooden door set into the forbidding wall. Sunlight glinted on the bunch of keys that she was holding out in one hand, as though even at that
distance
she were already proffering it to us. She was wearing a brown, near-black kimono with an
obi
almost as dark, and
elaborately
embroidered brocade silk
zori
on her tiny feet. Her hair, which must have been dyed, was so black and stiff that it might have come from a horse. During a subsequent conversation that we had had with him, Erwin Shott had described her as ‘a Japanese of the old school – and all the better for that.’ Now we at once saw what he had meant.

As at our telephone call, I was again surprised both by the childlike timbre of her voice and an American accent so
near-perfect
that one might have mistaken her for a Nisei. Later we would learn that between the wars she had spent three years in Seattle, as the ward of a childless aunt and uncle long settled there, and had attended an American college. Later still she would even show us and her two American girl student lodgers an album of photographs of a time that, we at once concluded, had been extremely happy for her. In all of them she was a pretty, short, plump teenager in Western clothes, often a
dark-blue
pleated skirt with a white sailor blouse above it. She was almost always smiling to reveal gleaming, overlarge front teeth.

She stood back, bowing slightly, to let Laura and me through the gate ahead of her. Having not yet become used to this convention of man preceding woman, I hesitated. ‘
Please
,’ she insisted. The child voice had suddenly strengthened and
deepened
. The forward tilt of her head and her sideways glance at me now projected a compelling authority. ‘Thank you,’ I
muttered
, and followed Laura, who had already passed through the gate into the garden.

‘Oh, what a lovely garden!’ Laura cried out. It was not the sort of cramped garden, full of dwarf bushes, irregularly shaped areas of sand and artfully matched and arranged stones to which we had already become accustomed on our walks around the city and in our visits to people to whom I had had introductions.

‘An English garden. That’s what I wanted. If you decide to live here, you’ll feel at home. Won’t you?’ Suddenly she glimpsed a shiny fragment of wrapping paper – perhaps from a cigarette packet, perhaps from a bar of chocolate, blown there by a gust of wind – on the perfect lawn ahead of us. With a shake of the head, clearly vexed, she hastened over and stooped to pick it up. She retained it in her small fist until we had entered the house. Then she murmured, ‘Excuse me,’ and briefly vanished, no doubt to deposit it in a dustbin. Later, we discovered that she had a mania for tidiness and order.

What we had not realised from our first view from the road was that, built on to this Western-style villa there was a low, Japanese-style extension, with paper shutters and a wooden veranda that ran its whole length. In front of the veranda there was an irregularly shaped pond, in which carp glinted
momentarily
and then vanished. Mrs Kawasaki began to explain this
juxtaposition of two such different styles of buildings. After her years in the States, she had become a lover of a Western way of life, indeed of everything Western. But she had also inherited from her father, a collector of Japanese art, a hoard of paintings and objects that she had decided must be displayed in a setting appropriate for them. In building the house for her son, she had therefore instructed its architect that, though it would be in Western style, she must have an annexe to it that was Japanese. When her son and his wife and children had eventually departed, she had then decreed that the tenants that followed them should not enter the Japanese annexe. This was because, even though everything of any real value had long ago been removed for storage in the family
kura
or godown, she thought it prudent to avoid any possibility of damage either to so flimsy a structure or to the artefacts and scroll-paintings that it still contained.

We were later to complain fretfully, as the summer
temperature
inexorably soared, of the thick carpets and heavy cretonne curtains, the cumbrous sofas and armchairs, and the four-poster bed in the main bedroom with its elaborate swathes of velvet and ruchings of net. But now there was genuine delight in Laura’s ‘One might be back in England!’ She peered at a foxed print of a Constable painting of Salisbury Cathedral on one wall and then turned her attention to an indifferent watercolour opposite to it, of cows out at pasture. Her delight mounted. Off the bedroom there was a dressing room. Perfect for Mark! There was even a washbasin in it. Oh, and there was a
real
bathroom – by that, she meant not a Japanese one, to be used communally, as at the boarding house, but one in which one could lie for as long as one wished, at full length, with high brass taps at one’s feet and a rusty shower contraption above one. And in the kitchen – look, look, there was a gas cooker and a
really
large sink! When she opened the door to the
downstairs
lavatory, she even peered into the bowl to announce
triumphantly
that the manufacture was English.

‘I could make this my study,’ I exclaimed in no less delight when Mrs Kawasaki ushered us into a small octagonal tower room at the top of the house. ‘Look – one can see Mount Hiei. Well – just.’

Mrs Kawasaki smiled. Unlike the young girl in the
photographs, smiling was something that she did not now do often. ‘My son used this room for his research when he lived here. He always said that it was too small. But he loved it.’

‘Is he a scientist?’

‘Yes, a scientist. Both a scientist and a doctor. He has made some interesting discoveries. His speciality is dermatology.’

Before that she had remained impassive and silent, only speaking when we put a direct question to her and then only perfunctorily. Pride in her son’s achievements had animated her.

Our inspection over, she looked first at me and then at Laura, head tilted to one side: ‘So – what do you young people think?’

‘Wonderful!’ Laura said.

I was no less enthusiastic. ‘Just what we’ve been looking for.’

‘Now you must go away and discuss it all.’ She gave another of those all too rare smiles. ‘It’s never good to rush into things.’

‘But we’ve made up our minds,’ Laura said.

‘Don’t you first want to …?’ Mrs Kawasaki looked towards me.

Laura shook her head decisively. ‘I know my husband feels as I do. Don’t you, darling?’

‘Yes. Yes, very much so.’

I guessed that, despite all her years in America, Mrs Kawasaki was surprised that it should be the wife, not the husband, who was the first to announce a decision as important as this one.

‘I don’t know if Mrs Katinka has told you the rent?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I answered. ‘Well, an approximate sum. She couldn’t be exact, she said.’

Now Mrs Kawasaki named the figure. It was marginally less than Katinka’s. ‘That’s expensive, I know. But houses like this are not common in Kyoto. Western-style, many rooms,
furnished
, a big garden. A good district. The last tenants – they moved out two weeks ago – were the director of the American Hospital, Mr Anson, and his family. They didn’t want to move. But the board decided to build a director’s house in the hospital compound.’ She smiled. ‘It’s a smaller house than this, much smaller.’

‘Oh, blow the expense!’ Laura laughed. ‘We so much want it.’

‘You’ve decided already?’ Mrs Kawasaki was astonished.

Laura laughed again, this time throwing back her head. ‘When can we move in?’

It is curious that, washed up in this wasteland by my stroke, I should spend so much of my time thinking of that long-ago seven months in Japan. On the map of my life whole areas of the past are blurred and faded. But that brief period is clear and bright in every detail. It is as though the tunnel vision of my memory is now focused constantly on it. I even have chaotic and frequently disturbing dreams of lurid fragments of it
jostling
and jangling against each other.

Although it is midday I have just had such a dream. Now it has been abruptly ended by Laura’s arrival. She has brought some Scotch eggs and two meringues, prepared by her with all the professionalism that she brings to every task. There has been a problem with the boiler. What is the use of a service contract if no engineer is available for five days? It keeps cutting out and she has to keep restarting it. She is indignant. People highly efficient themselves are always infuriated by inefficiency in others.

No, I can’t possibly eat another Scotch egg, I tell her,
delicious
though they are. Lying like this, immobile except when I totter to the lavatory – mercifully I do not have to rely on bottle and bedpan, like so many of the other patients in this ward – I eat not from hunger but out of boredom. She swings round to face the bed from which the emaciated old man vanished
yesterday
, in a wheelchair propelled vigorously forward by the cheerful black porter who has repeatedly taken me in the same wheelchair to this or that scan or test. As the chair accelerated down the ward, the old man was still calling out in terror and despair ‘Mum, Mum,
Mum
!’

A young Italian – a student at a language school, he has told me – now occupies his bed. He never reads or watches the
television
suspended above him, but spends most of the time either sleeping or staring up at the ceiling. So far he has had not a single visitor. Laura holds out the box of Scotch eggs to him. ‘Would you like one?’ He gives a weak, apologetic smile and
shakes his head. His chin is dark with stubble and his hair is overlong and unbrushed. ‘They’re good. I promise you. I made them myself.’

Reluctantly and awkwardly he puts out his left arm. It is shaking violently, whether because of his stroke or because of stress I can only guess. The other arm is limp. He opens his clenched fist, takes one of the Scotch eggs and raises it to his mouth. He takes a small bite, masticates for a long, long time and swallows. He puts his head back on the pillow and again stares for a few seconds up at the ceiling. Then he turns his head and slowly smiles. ‘Good‚’ he says, more in relief than in pleasure. He is still holding the rest of the Scotch egg.

She begins to talk to him, eager, sympathetic and
encouraging
. Slowly he responds. His eyes brighten and he even laughs from time to time with what strikes me as genuine amusement. Once again I admire her for this ability, totally lacking in myself, to achieve an immediate intimacy with strangers, often of a different nationality or, as now, far younger than she is.

Then he tires. He has spoken to her of his bewilderment when he woke up one morning to find that he was incapable of moving his right arm or his right leg; of the arrival today or tomorrow of his older brother, who will take him back to Italy, to the family home in Modena; of his English girlfriend, who has not been able to visit him because she has a heavy cold and does not want to infect him or the other patients. Now he closes his eyes. ‘Poor chap‚’ Laura says, as though he were not lying there so close to us. ‘It’s horrible to be ill in a foreign country. One should always be ill in one’s own language.’

That, I know, is the reason why, having been consulted as to whether I should stay on in the Japanese hospital or be flown back to England, she opted for the second course, even though she had been warned that it carried a risk.

As she stoops to her large bag to reach for her knitting, I say, ‘I wish I knew exactly what happened.’

‘But you do know. What more is there to tell you?’

‘No, no, I don’t know. I know what you have told me and what Miss Morita had told me. But I can’t
see
it – in my memory, I mean. It’s not part of me, it’s outside me. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? When Miss Morita told me
the circumstances, and when you now tell me, I hear what you’re saying but there’s a … a blindness …’

All at once, like the Italian in the next bed, I feel exhausted. I find myself wishing that she would go. But as soon as she has gone, I shall be wishing her back. It’s always like that.