Butterfly's Shadow (28 page)

‘I told you I had a date.’

Was her name Lily?
Joey wanted to ask.
Did she – Did you –

He dropped the flower back on the table, picked up his towel and headed for the shower block.

On the next social evening Joey was approached by one of the ‘gaily attired girls’, one with fashionable, unnaturally curly hair. She tapped him playfully on the arm and asked him to dance.

‘My name’s Iris.’

‘Really?’

‘No, not really. It’s really Ayame, but that means iris. Well,
really
it means moonflower, but that’s way too Japanese!’ She laughed, showing her teeth.

As the music died away while Joey’s arms still encircled her, she tilted up her head and allowed her body to sag against his. She smelled of flowers and face powder.

‘Would you like to go on a date?’

‘Yes,’ he said fervently.

‘I have a rubber,’ she whispered. ‘Mail order.’

The presidential cavalcade moved slowly through the streets, Roosevelt waving, smiling his bright, paternal smile, cheered by his loyal subjects. As a morale-boosting exercise, FDR was visiting the shipyards and war industries in Oregon.

Nancy, part of the Democrat support team, moved with the parade, saw the President smile and wave from his open-topped limousine, cloak flung back from his shoulders. The sun glittered on his spectacles, masking his eyes. What was he thinking? He was a world figure now, meeting other world figures at summit conferences. They inhabited an exclusive universe, these people, the air around them filtered, their bodies guarded, protected from the tribulations of unimportant individuals; monarchs in all but name.

‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself !’ he had declared once, giving new hope, a new deal to desperate people, Nancy among them.

Great days. A great man. But times change and men with them, and she was less easily persuaded by politicians today. He had earned their trust, then. Now he smiled and waved but not all of his loyal subjects were sheltered by his paternal wing: some were rounded up and shipped out to bleak corners of the land to languish behind barbed wire.

This grim Oregon neighbourhood was no jewelled route to glory, no road to Samarkand, but a glow of satisfaction came off the President’s countenance that she had observed on other politicians. It came with power, perhaps.

She had thought of FDR in earlier days as the true Democrat, a calm, philosophic prince, a Solomon dispensing wisdom, a good man; but ‘good’ could depend on where you stood, and why.

With the cheers of the crowd in her ears, for a dizzy moment it seemed to Nancy that Roosevelt had metamorphosed into a modern Tamburlaine, riding in triumph through the city.

Around her, arms and flags waved. The President smiled, raised his hand, a patrician salute acknowledging the populace. Nancy’s arms hung rigid by her side.

The names tantalised: Tule Lake, Klamath Falls and Link River . . . In strong winds the flow had been known to blow backwards, north into the lake, leaving the riverbed dry, the clay swirling, following the pattern of the vanished stream. The names tantalised, conjured up moisture, but all around was dust.

Guards checked the perimeter, bored, firearms loosely swinging. With dust coating their uniforms, pink flesh obscured by a sandy veil, they looked like figures of straw and clay, clumsily executed. High above the barbed wire the watchtowers loomed, machine guns turned inwards.

The soldiers disliked this term of duty; they disliked the enemy aliens, pale, fragile women, quiet children, sullen youths and small men whose lowered eyelids concealed their thoughts. The soldiers wished themselves elsewhere – in the real America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. Or on the battlefield, where they could be shooting the bastards instead of checking them in and out for work projects or farm duty; counting numbers for sickbeds. Individually these people were weak as kittens, but among the guards it was a known fact that Japs could operate with the awe-inspiring team spirit of termites destroying a building. In that solidarity lay their strength. They needed watching.

The watchful eyes, the mistrust, fed a determination to simulate ‘real life’ to fight off despair. So there were baseball games,
judo classes, basketball, chess, badminton, music – ‘Don’t miss the symphony concert, Tuesday!’ Joey learned to recognise the traditional festivals – cherry trees improvised from rags and twigs, lanterns from scrap metal, giant chrysanthemums out of wrapping paper. Older internees recited haikus by Basho. The young, defiantly modern, dressed up for Hallowe’en.

Joey continued to slip through the social net: he volunteered for necessary maintenance work, chatted to those who ate at the same table; listened to recitals, dropped in briefly at dances and went on an occasional date; but he was never part of a group.

Was it his imagination or did the conversation flower into vivacity when he left the table? He was not the only product of a mixed marriage – what Ichir
called ‘half-breed kids’. But the others, less physically different, had assimilated painlessly, had been drawn into the community. Was it his fault or theirs? Nurture or the legacy of Pinkerton genes that kept him apart?

He read Nancy’s latest letter with its snippets of anodyne news, mention of a book she had read. His grandparents sent love; Mary increasingly frail but bearing up bravely.

‘
And how goes it, Joey dear?
’

Rain, seeping from the roof trickled down the tin chimney of the wood-stove, hissing into steam. The room felt humid, tropical. His inner South Sea island.

In that faraway country, the outside world, the war went on. Sequestered and alienated, the young ones blotted out the fact of the conflict with music and gossip and sometimes feverish laughter, furtive sex; older internees took it silently, in the spirit of
gaman,
clustering round radios and listening anxiously to the ebb and flow of events from the impossible position of limbo.

Limbo was an undiscovered country that Joe was becoming familiar with: which side should he cheer on? The army defending families in Japan, or the army fighting the enemies of America? Those who had bombed the ships on Honolulu,
or those who were now his jailers? After Pearl Harbor came the battle of Midway – each a disaster or triumph, depending on where you stood.

‘The Japs are finished,’ one guard called to another, pitching his voice louder than necessary. ‘Finished!’

Wrapped in barbed wire, powerless and voiceless, the internees hung in the balance, losers whatever happened.

Shikata ga na.
Nothing to be done about it.

Nancy celebrated her birthday by packing bandages. At forty-one she felt too old for a party. And who would she invite? From office desk to Red Cross station to volunteer counter at the military coffee shop, she was running as hard as she could, getting nowhere, but there was nowhere she wanted to be. She felt useful. She was exhausted, but that had its advantages: a tired mind in a tired body; a way to keep thought at bay.

War brought gloom and fear. Uncertainty. She became adept at deciphering the news. From what the government allowed its people to hear she could infer considerably more; it was not always encouraging.

Closer to home, reading between the lines in his letters, she feared for Joey: withdrawing from all he had considered himself a part of, he seemed at the same time to be rejecting a past that was not his, but might have been. Had she been wrong to bring him up the American way? Maybe she should have shown him more of that other world, introduced him to what was, after all, a part of his past, a culture that had survived a sea-crossing and flourished here in its own quiet way. But she had been afraid. Ah, there it was again, lurking; that weasel word. Fear.

Increasingly, she felt an unfocused sense of dissatisfaction. She could recall how, long ago, she had looked forward to being ‘grown up’, mature; to resembling the older women with their style and confidence. Now she was an older woman and
it was the young who called the tune. Surely there should have been a point when she was grown up and confident, before the downward spiral, the sense of defeat? She must have been too busy to notice.

Filling the hours seemed the easiest way to fill the days, the weeks, months. Life became a jigsaw, one piece of her schedule slotting into the next, leaving her no time for anxiety, and not much time to dwell on thoughts of other possibilities. Had Ben lived . . . Had the Japanese not bombed Pearl Harbor . . . Had she met and married someone else, would she once more be alone, the imagined man whose body had warmed hers now swept into the conflict?

She was busy stacking dishes in the coffee shop when a man on the other side of the counter said ruefully, ‘You don’t recognise me.’

She glanced at him: tall, thin, a touch of grey in the dark hair, face an anonymous oval, like a cartoon character with sketched-in features – two dots for eyes, a vertical stroke, a horizontal dash.

‘Should I?’

‘Well. We had a rather jolly conversation last week while you made me a cup of something you described as tea.’

‘Oh, right. The Englishman.’

‘Defined by my accent. Rather depressing, that.’

‘Not your accent. Your perfect manners,’ Nancy said, stating a fact, unflirtatious.

‘Ah!’

She glanced at the sky as a grumble of thunder came and went. A sudden sweep of rain hit the windows.

‘You’ve brought us English weather; I’m sure our climate used to be better behaved.’

‘You could be right. But I’m not sure the meteorology of nostalgia can be trusted: those endless golden summers, snowball fights at Christmas – was it really like that?’

For a moment she was disconcerted: surely her memories
of lost innocence must be true? Sun on the seashore, beach parties with toasted marshmallows, a swimmer waving from beyond the surf . . .

Charles considered the woman at the coffee dispenser. Dark blonde hair, cut unflatteringly short. Dress a practical brown, its shape unbecoming. Make-up confined to a dash of lipstick. This was a woman who gave no thought to her appearance.

He noted the downward droop of her mouth, the shadowed eyes. The wedding ring. Charles was not given to small talk, but this woman with her abstracted air, her neglected hands, her stillness, drew him. To hold her attention he asked her, conversationally, if her husband was with the American forces in Europe.

She stared at him, shocked by the unexpectedness of the question.

‘My husband has been dead for ten years.’

He groaned. ‘Oh God. I’m sorry.’

‘Why? How were you to know?’

About to move off, back to clearing cups and plates, she gave him a quick, forgiving smile. For a moment her drooping mouth curved upwards, other muscles lifted; her nose wrinkled sweetly. Fleetingly, her face was transformed.

Charles had the strongest sensation that if she took even one step away from him he would lose her for ever, and he could not allow that to happen. He must keep her talking, however creakily he engineered it.

‘Look. My name is Charles. Charles Bowman, I’m over here working with your people for a while.’

‘Uh-huh. Is that Bowman as in bows and arrows? Were your ancestors archers, fighting for Henry the Fifth at the battle of Agincourt?’

‘Actually,’ Charles said, ‘they were in the wool trade. In a particularly flat bit of south-east England.’

He saw her pause, watched the muscles in her face relax;
she was almost smiling. He considered his options and dived. ‘The name was given to the man who untangled the wool. He used a bow – seriously, he did. It was the Italians who thought up the process but then we pinched the idea.’

‘When did all this go on?’

‘Oh, quite late . . . thirteenth century?’

And at that she laughed out loud. ‘Right. Really late.’

He added, encouragingly, ‘I could tell you all sorts of exciting stuff, about my good old ancestors vibrating the string of the bow in a pile of tangled wool to separate the fibres –’

‘You’re putting me on.’

‘I’m deadly serious. It got us the finest, softest thread you can imagine.’

She was stacking plates again; he was losing her. He began to gabble.

‘The old methods produced yarn that was so resilient it could be bent thirty thousand times without breaking or fraying.’ Desperation dried his mouth. Words, words, words; he was on a slippery slope to oblivion – what woman would want to talk to a one-track wool-twit? He felt like an old buffer addressing a Women’s Institute knitting circle.

‘We exported the stuff. Look what wool did for Florence, the most beautiful city in the world, the art, the treasures, but then the Black Death . . .’

He took a deep breath and risked a change of tack: on his last visit he had noticed her, off duty, absorbed in an old, fragile book. ‘Dante said a few things about the city.’ She glanced up. ‘Would you like to know more?’ he asked. ‘Over dinner?’ he added. ‘I promise not to say another word about wool.’ Cautiously, ‘How do you feel about poetry?’

When Nancy next wrote to Joey she mentioned she had met an Englishman, doing some kind of liaison work in the US.