With My Little Eye (6 page)

‘Coffee? She’s even thought of that.’

‘Not now. Later. I know what I want now.’ I rolled over on to the rug, so that our bodies touched. I put out a hand and slid it under her cashmere skirt. The skin was even softer and the hair silkier than the cashmere.

‘Please! Anyone might come.’ She made a half-hearted, unsuccessful effort to push my hand away. ‘Hey! Stop!’

‘Have we seen anyone so far?’

‘Well, no. But one can never be sure –’

‘To hell with anyone!’

She laughed, ‘Yes, to hell with anyone!’

Perhaps because, for all our protestations of not caring a damn whether anyone saw us or not, we were nonetheless apprehensive, it was all over in a few minutes. Gasping, I rolled off her. She was buttoning up her blouse. Then she cried out, ‘Oh, you’ve torn off a button. Do look for it! I’ll never find another that matches.’

I was about to do what she asked. Then I saw the grey, hunched shape of a monkey – again that old grandmother, I decided – high, high above us. A branch stirred and another, smaller monkey came into view, head cocked as it peered at us with melancholy, appraising eyes. The trees, I realised with amazement, were thronged with monkeys. I pointed. ‘Look!’

Laura laughed. ‘Well, without our realising, it wasn’t
anyone
who saw us. It was the whole monkey world and his wife.’

‘Perhaps they’ve learned something.’ I pointed again. I had
suddenly noticed that just above us one of the monkeys was masturbating with an intense, absorbed expression on his face. ‘Perhaps that old boy has learned that there are more
interesting
and enjoyable things to do than wanking.’

It was a long walk, in virtual silence, up to the temple. We had already realised that it must have been abandoned when, from a distance, we saw that every window was shuttered. Slowly we approached the barbed wire that trailed, a rusty metal creeper, up and down, hither and thither. A huge cat, with a bedraggled black and white coat and one ear missing, was lying on the sagging, soggy thatched roof. As we gazed at it, it leapt up, back arched, gave a hoarse growl and bared its fangs. Then it shot off, out of sight.

Far off we thought that we heard the sound of water
dripping
. Perhaps a spring was near at hand? We tried to locate it but eventually gave up. There was a musty smell everywhere, such as one finds in a room kept locked for many years. It was curious that, out there in the open, with a breeze blowing, it should be so insistent. Suddenly and simultaneously we both turned away and began to hurry back down the mountain.

After we had descended for a hundred yards or so, the
previously
oppressive atmosphere thinned and lifted. Laura began first to hum and then to sing the Japanese song,
Sakura
, that Joy would often sing to Mark. When Laura sang it in her small, absolutely accurate voice, it always sounded sweetly seductive. Was it because I disliked Joy that, in startling contrast, her rendition of it so often seemed to me harsh, even menacing?

Laura broke off from her singing. ‘What a lovely walk!’

‘Lovely.’

‘I’ve put out the drinks,’ Joy told us, after we had found her with Mark in the nursery. ‘He’s been as good as gold, an
absolute
angel. Haven’t you darling?’ She got to her feet from the wicker rocking chair on which she had been perched by the cot. ‘I didn’t put out the ice. I wasn’t sure when you’d be back.’

‘Oh, I can get that.’

The postman had delivered a wodge of letters, fastened with a wide, red rubber band. I read them in turn and then threw them across to Laura. She read them far more slowly than I had
done, perhaps because she was far more interested in their
contents
. Each of us sipped at a Japanese vodka and tonic.

‘She’s forgotten the olives,’ I suddenly realised.

‘Odd of her to forget anything.’

‘I’ll get them.’

My calves ached from the walk as I padded down the
corridor
to the kitchen, in the slippers into which I had at once changed on our return.

Joy looked up as I entered. Spread out on the large,
rectangular
kitchen table, its wood scarred here and there as though it had been attacked with a knife, lay the tartan rug from our picnic. Her gaze went down from me to it. She raised an edge of it and stared intently, lips pursed. There was a stain encrusted there. She might have thought one of us had
accidentally
dropped a dollop of mayonnaise and had then tried
ineffectually
to wipe it off. She might have thought that one of us had splashed on to it some of the milk that she had included for our coffee. But I knew, with absolute certainty, that she had thought neither of those things. As soon as she had seen the stain, she had realised its origin.

She looked at me with a mixture of disdain and disgust. Then she let the rug slip from her strong, competent hands as though it were something contaminated and contaminating.

The comatose man, usually seen through my little eye as no more than a gleaming, yellow forehead and a straggly beard, vanished two nights ago. Was his corpse trundled off in the early hours without any of us realising it? Insomniac that I am, how could I not have noticed?

‘Excuse me – what’s happened to the old boy opposite?’

Usually the small Filipino male nurse, with the shaven head and the delicate hands, is willing to respond to my questions, albeit sometimes with a pursing of his fleshy lips. But on this occasion he pretends not to hear me. Perhaps he is scurrying off on some vital errand. Perhaps ‘dead’ is not a word that he can volunteer.

Later, in the evening, the jolly West Indian porter wheels in a middle-aged man with the red, swollen face of a boozer and a salt-and-pepper moustache that dangles like some exotic creeper over the balcony of a mouth too full of prominent teeth. The man trips as he struggles out of the wheelchair, the porter and a woman whom I assume to be his wife supporting him one on either side, and all but topples over. ‘Oh, fuck! Bloody hell!’

‘Shh, dear!’ Unlike the man’s, the woman’s voice is what a snobbish friend of mine calls ‘pish’ – by which she means ‘not quite posh’. The man’s is irredeemably pish.

Now the woman is again here, soon after we have had our breakfast trays removed, with a large bunch of arum lilies.

The man peers at the flowers. ‘Ask the nurse for a vase for those. They’ll give me an asthma attack as like as not.’

Perhaps, since his voice is so strident in this place of
mutterings
and whisperings, a nurse has overheard him. At all events one has appeared. ‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid we can’t have those in here.’ To disclaim any personal responsibility she adds, ‘There’s a rule about flowers.’

‘Bloody hell! There seems to be a rule about everything in this bloody place.’

In what appears to be a sudden attack of fatigue, the woman sinks down on the end of the bed, the flowers resting on her knees. I now notice that, though otherwise drably dressed, she is wearing elegant, extremely high-heeled shoes, with straps over the insteps.

‘Put those bloody flowers somewhere, why don’t you?’

She places them on the floor. Briefly she closes her eyes.

‘Perhaps Cathy can do with them,’ he continues. ‘They’ll cheer her up in that hole of a flat of hers.’

‘Why she ever moved there beats me.’

‘Well, it was bleeding Clive that wanted that, wasn’t it?’

Can it be Cathy who later comes to visit him? And is she his daughter? A back-view of her blazing bush of red hair, clearly dyed, makes her already large head look like a chrysanthemum on the stalk of her long, thin neck. She sits on the end of his bed, one bony leg crossed high over the other. ‘I could do with a fag! I could really do with a fag!’

‘Don’t keep saying that! You’re already setting me off!’

Once she has gone, carrying the flowers with her, he badgers the nurses. ‘Hey! Darlin’! Hey! One more moment!’ he calls out to one as she passes. I feel a cruel satisfaction as she ignores him. ‘Fuckin’ hell!’

His dinner is brought to him by one of the two Polish
helpers
, sisters by the look of them, who first wheel in the trolleys and then dash around with loaded trays.

‘What’s this meant to be then?’

The Polish girl is not sure if she has understood or not. She frowns. ‘Cod, I think maybe,’ she eventually replies in her
heavily
accented English.

‘Codswallop!’ She has no idea what he means. She doesn’t want to know. She scurries off.

Suddenly he is aware that, instead of getting to work on the tray already set down over in front of me, I am staring at him.

In a challenging voice he calls out, ‘Everything all right with you, Granddad? What do you think of this grub?’

‘I’ve seen better.’

‘You can say that again!’

‘Have you visited Byodoin Temple?’ Miss Morita asked, pulling off a kid glove and setting it down carefully on the table at which I had been working in the garden, beside the other that she had already removed.

I shook my head.

‘Very beautiful.’ She twitched at the gloves until, untouching, they lay in perfect parallel. By then I had already noticed her obsession with symmetry.

‘If it’s fine, we thought that we might go tomorrow. It’s not far, is it?’

‘No, not far. It was in this temple Gen-Sammi Orimasa
committed
suicide in’ – she put up a hand to cup her mouth and gave an embarrassed giggle – ‘oh, I forget! I am stupid! Maybe eleven eighty, eleven ninety. But what you will wish to see is the Ho-O-Do Phoenix Hall. Beautiful!’ She broke off there. I had dreaded a long disquisition, of the kind that she often produced on our sightseeing trips together. ‘I have not been to Byodoin for a long time – since I was schoolgirl. And that time I was sick to stomach, so I did not really enjoy.’

‘Why not come with us?’

Her face lightened, then darkened, as she pondered. ‘You are going alone?

‘No, no. My wife particularly wants to see it. Dr Anson’s wife told her about it – a must, she said.’

‘Yes, it is a – a
must
.’ She hesitated over the word, clearly strange to her in that usage.

‘And your company is equally a must. We’d like that.’ In using the plural I was of course lying. Laura would certainly not like it.

She pondered and then shook her head. ‘No.’ Then, more loudly, ‘No. Maybe not. I think that your wife will like to be alone with you. You can take your little baby. He will be happy there. Afterwards maybe you can drive on to Nara.’

‘Oh, we want to spend a whole day at Byodoin. Another time. We have to be careful of cultural indigestion.’

She frowned. ‘Indigestion?’

I couldn’t be bothered to explain. ‘Well, think about it. We’d love you to come.’

She sighed, raising a hand and pressing the back of it to her cheek. She tilted her head to one side, her spectacles flashing briefly in the sunlight slanting across the garden. ‘I think better not.’

Later Laura was to ask me, ‘What on earth do you and Miss Morita find to talk about? I was watching you from the
bedroom
window – the two of you in the garden. Why does
someone
still so young wear those old-fashioned straw hats? Before the war hats like that were worn to vicarage garden parties. Can’t you get her to appear in something more up to date?’

‘I’d not want to change her. I like her’ – I searched for a word – ‘
quaintness
. Somehow it appeals to me.’

‘Oh, you do have the
quaintest
tastes!’

It was odd that Laura, usually so tolerant of my friendships with women in the past, should now so clearly be jealous of someone, well, as
quaint
as Miss Morita. But perhaps, with the clairvoyance that she sometimes so alarmingly displayed, she had already foreseen the years and years of close friendship that lay ahead.

He calls out, ‘Hey! Darlin’, Darlin’! Wait a sec!’

The middle-aged, barrel-shaped nurse hurries past, as though she has not heard him. But of course she has. No one, from one end of the ward to the other, could fail to hear that voice.

‘
Hey!
’ It is almost a bellow of rage. He looks across at me. ‘What a bitch!’

Returning some time later, she is either less busy or is guilty about not having previously answered his summons. She stops by his bed: ‘Everything all right?’

‘Well, I did want something. But now, bugger me, I’ve
forgotten
what it was. You didn’t want even to pass the time of day with me, did you, darlin’?’ His tone has become flirtatious. ‘Just shot past. Perhaps all I wanted to tell you was I like the new hairdo. It
is
new, isn’t it? Yes, those tints are spot on.’ He raises a thumb in approval. ‘Is grub on the way? I’m famished.’

‘Soon. Any moment now.’ He has managed to thaw her out. ‘Sorry I was in such a hurry last time.’

‘No problem.’

When she has gone, he looks around him, clearly at a loss as to what to do next, and his eyes, small and glinting, alight on me. He raises his hand in ironical salute, as though he were other ranks to my august major general, and shouts across, ‘Everything hunky-dory, sir?’

‘As hunky-dory as it can be.’

‘So what are you in here for?’

‘Stroke.’

‘You don’t look too bad to me. For your advanced years.’ He laughs to indicate that this is no more than a pleasantry.

‘Well, I’m glad to hear that. And you?’

‘Me?’

‘What are you in here for?’

He is disconcerted. He hesitates. ‘Well – it’s really one of those women’s things. You know. Something that men don’t usually get.’ He stares down at his linked hands resting on the
tumulus of his stomach. ‘But there it is. Rum thing. Bit embarrassing.’

The Polish sisters have arrived with the trolleys of food. He is relieved of the need to say anything further to me.

‘Hello, hello! Here are those two gorgeous girls back again! Well, darlin’, what have you got for me, eh? How about a kiss for starters? Eh?’

Their faces impassive, the sisters hurry about their tasks. They never respond in any way to him.

‘Stuck-up little bitches!’ he comments to me later.