Death in Midsummer & Other Stories (25 page)

- and was it not exceedingly ill-natured of Mrs Azuma, that, even after all this, she still refused to confess it was she who had eaten the pearl? And if Mrs Azuma's innocence was all pretence, she herself - acting her part so painstakingly - must appear in Mrs Azuma's eyes as the most ridiculous of third-rate comedians.

To return to Mrs Matsumura. That lady, on her way back from obliging Mrs Sasaki to accept the pearl, was feeling now more at ease in her mind and had the notion to make a leisurely reinvestigation, detail by detail, of the events of the recent incident. When going to collect her portion of cake, she had most certainly left her handbag on the chair. Then, while eating the cake, she had made liberal use of the paper napkin - so there could have been no necessity to take a handkerchief from her bag. The more she thought about it the less she could remember having opened her bag until she touched up her face in the taxi on the way home. How was it, then, that a pearl had rolled into a handbag which was always shut?

She realized now how stupid she had been not to have remarked this simple fact before, instead of flying into a panic at the mere sight of the pearl. Having progressed this far, Mrs Matsumura was struck by an amazing thought. Someone must purposely have placed the pearl in her bag in order to incriminate her. And of the four guests at the party the only one who would do such a thing was, without doubt, the detestable Mrs Yamamoto. Her eyes glinting with rage, Mrs Matsumura hurried towards the house of Mrs Yamamoto.

From her first glimpse of Mrs Matsumura standing in the 176

doorway, Mrs Yamamoto knew at once what had brought her.

She had already prepared ho- line of defence.

However, Mrs Matsumura's cross-examination was unexpectedly severe, and from the start it was clear that she would accept no evasions.

'It was you, I know. No one but you could do such a thing,'

began Mrs Matsumura, deductively.

'Why choose me? What proof have you? If you can say a thing like that to my face, I suppose you've come with pretty conclusive proof, have you?' Mrs Yamamoto was at first icily composed.

To this Mrs Matsumura replied that Mrs Azuma, having so nobly taken the blame on herself, clearly stood in an incom-patible relationship with mean and despicable behaviour of this nature; and as for Mrs Kasuga, she was much too weak-kneed for such dangerous work; and that left only one person - yourself. Mrs Yamamoto kept silent, her mouth shut tight like a clam-shell. On the table before her gleamed the pearl which Mrs Matsumura had set there. In the excitement she had not even had time to raise a teaspoon, and the Ceylon tea she had so thoughtfully provided was beginning to get cold.

'I had no idea you hated me so.' As she said this, Mrs Yamamoto dabbed at the corners of her eyes, but it was plain that Mrs Matsumura's resolve not to be deceived by tears was as firm as ever.

'Well, then,' Mrs Yamamoto continued, 'I shall say what I had thought I must never say. I shall mention no names, but one of the guests...'

'By that, I suppose, you can only mean Mrs Azuma or Mrs Kasuga?'

'Please, I beg at least that you allow me to omit the name. As I say, one of the guests had just opened your bag and was dropping something inside when I happened to glance in her direction. You can imagine my amazement! Even if I had felt
able
to warn you, there would have been no chance. My heart just throbbed and throbbed, and on the way back in the taxi -

oh, how awful not to be able to speak even then! If we had been 177

good friends, of course, I could have told you quite frankly, but since I knew of your apparent dislike for me...'

'I see. You have been very considerate, I'm sure. Which means, doesn't it, that you have now cleverly shifted the blame on to Mrs Azuma and Mrs Kasuga?'

'Shifted the blame? Oh, how can I get you to understand my feelings? I only wanted to avoid hurting anyone.'

'Quite. But you didn't mind hurting me, did you? You might at least have mentioned this in the taxi.'

•And if you had been frank with me when you found the pearl in your bag. I would probably have told you, at that moment, everything I had seen - but no, you chose to leave the taxi at once, without saying a word!'

'Well, then. Can I get you to understand? I wanted no one to be hurt.'

Mrs Matsumura was filled with an even more intense rage.

'If you are going to tell a string of lies like that,' she said, 'I must ask you to repeat them, tonight if you wish, in my presence, before Mrs Azuma and Mrs Kasuga.'

At this Mrs Yamamoto started to weep.

'And thanks to you,' she sobbed reprovingly, 'all my efforts to avoid hurting anyone will have come to nothing.'

It was a new experience for Mrs Matsumura to see Mrs Yamamoto crying, and, though she kept reminding herself not to be taken in by tears, she could not altogether dismiss the feeling that perhaps somewhere, since nothing in this affair could be proved, there might be a modicum of truth even in the assertions of Mrs Yamamoto.

In the first place - to be a little more objective - if one accepted Mrs Yamamoto's story as true, then her reluctance to disclose the name of the guilty party, whom she had observed in the very act, argued some refinement of character. And just as one could not say for sure that the gentle and seemingly timid Mrs Kasuga would nev^r be moved to an act of malice, so even the undoubtedly bad feeling between Mrs Yamamoto and her*

self could, by one way of looking at things, be taken as actually lessening the likelihood of Mrs Yamamoto's guilt. For if she were to do a thing like this, with their relationship as it was, Mrs Yamamoto would be the first to come under suspicion, 178

•We have differences in our natures,' Mrs Yamamoto continued tearfully, 'and I cannot deny that there are things about yourself which I dislike. But, for all that, it is really too bad that you should suspect me of such a petty trick to get the better of you. ... Still, on thinking it over, to submit quietly to your accusations might well be the course most consistent with what I have felt in this matter all along. In this way I alone shall bear the guilt, and no other will be hurt.'

After this pathetic pronouncement Mrs Yamamoto lowered her face to the table and abandoned herself to uncontrolled weeping.

Watching her, Mrs Matsumura came by degrees to reflect upon the impulsiveness of her own behaviour. Detesting Mrs Yamamoto as she had, there had been times in her castigation of that lady when she had allowed herself to be blinded by emotion.

When Mrs Yamamoto raised her head again after this prolonged bout of weeping, the look of resolution on her face, somehow remote and pure, was apparent even to her visitor.

Mrs Matsumura, a little frightened, drew herself upright in her chair.

'This thing should never have been. When it is gone, everything will be as before.' Speaking in riddles, Mrs Yamamoto pushed back her dishevelled hair and fixed a terrible, yet haunt-ingly beautiful gaze upon the top of the table. In an instant she had snatched up the pearl from before her, and, with a gesture of no ordinary resolve, tossed it into her mouth. Raising her cup by the handle, her little finger elegantly extended, she washed the pearl down her throat with one gulp of cold Ceylon tea.

Mrs Matsumura watched in horrified fascination. The affair was over before she had time to protest. This was the first time in her life she had seen a person swallow a pearl, and there was in Mrs Yamamoto's manner something of that desperate finality one might expect to see in a person who had just drunk poison.

However, heroic though the action was, it was above all a touching incident, and not only did Mrs Matsumura find her anger vanished into thin air, but so impressed was she by Mrs Yamamoto's simplicity and purity that she could only think of 179

that lady as a saint. And now Mrs Matsumura's eyes too began to fill with tears, and she took Mrs Yamamoto by the hand.

'Please forgive me, please forgive me,' she said. 'It was wrong of me.'

For a while they wept together, holding each other's hands and vowing to each other that henceforth they would be the firmest of friends.

When Mrs Sasaki heard rumours that the relationship between Mrs Yamamoto and Mrs Matsumura, which had been so strained, had suddenly improved, and that Mrs Azuma and Mrs Kasuga, who had been such good friends, had suddenly fallen out, she was at a loss to understand the reasons and contented herself with the reflection that nothing was impossible in this world.

However, being a woman of no strong scruples, Mrs Sasaki requested a jeweller to refashion her ring and to produce a design into which two new pearls could be set, one large and one small, and this she wore quite openly, without further mishap.

Soon she had completely forgotten the small commotion on her birthday, and when anyone asked her age she would give the same untruthful answers as ever.

Translated by Geoffrey W. Sargent

He was always busy, Toshiko's husband. Even tonight he had to dash off to an appointment, leaving her to go home alone by taxi. But what else could a woman expect when she married an actor - an attractive one? No doubt she had been foolish to hope that he would spend the evenings with her. And yet he must have known how she dreaded going back to their house, unhomely with its Western-style furniture and with the bloodstains still showing on the floor.

Toshiko had been oversensitive since girlhood: that was her nature. As the result of constant worrying she never put on weight, and now, an adult woman, she looked more like a transparent picture than a creature of flesh and blood. Her delicacy of spirit was evident to her most casual acquaintance.

Earlier that evening, when she had joined her husband at a night club, she had been shocked to find him entertaining friends with an account of 'the incident'. Sitting there in his American-style suit, puffing at a cigarette, he had seemed to her almost a stranger.

'It's a fantastic story,' he was saying, gesturing flamboyantly as if in an attempt to outweigh the attractions of the dance band. 'Here this new nurse for our baby arrives from the employment agency, and the very first thing I notice about her is her stomach. It's enormous - as if she had a pillow stuck under her kimono! No wonder, I thought, for I soon saw that she could eat more than the rest of us put together. She polished off the contents of our rice bin like that. ...' He snapped his fingers.' "Gastric dilation" - that's how she explained her girth and her appetite. Well, the day before yesterday we heard groans and moans coming from the nursery. We rushed in and found her squatting on the floor, holding her stomach in her 181

two hands, and moaning like a cow: Next to her our baby lay in his cot, scared out of his wits and crying at the top of his lungs.

A pretty scene, I can tell you!'

'So the cat was out of the bag?' suggested one of their friends, a film actor like Toshiko's husband.

'Indeed it was! And it gave me the shock of my life. You see, I'd completely swallowed that story about "gastric dilation".; Well, I didn't waste any time. I rescued our good rug from the floor and spread a blanket for her to he on. The whole time the girl was yelling like a stuck pig. By the time the doctor from the maternity clinic arrived, the baby had already been born.

But our sitting-room was a pretty shambles!'

'Oh, that I'm sure of!' said another of their friends, and the whole company burst into laughter.

Toshiko was dumbfounded to hear her husband discussing the horrifying happening as though it were no more than an amusing incident which they chanced to have witnessed. She shut her eyes for a moment and all at once she saw the newborn baby lying before her: on the parquet floor the infant lay, and his frail body was wrapped in bloodstained newspapers.

Toshiko was sure that the doctor had done the whole thing out of spite. As if to emphasize his scorn for this mother who had given birth to a bastard under such sordid conditions, he had told his assistant to wrap the baby in some loose newspapers, rather than proper swaddling. This callous treatment of the newborn child had offended Toshiko. Overcoming her disgust at the entire scene, she had fetched a brand-new piece of flannel from her cupboard and, having swaddled the baby in it, had laid him carefully in an armchair.

This all had taken place in the evening after her husband had left the house. Toshiko had told him nothing of it, fearing that he would think her oversoft, oversentimental; yet the scene had engraved itself deeply in her mind. Tonight she sat silently thinking back on it, while the jazz orchestra brayed and her husband chatted cheerfully with his friends. She knew that she would never forget the sight of the baby, wrapped in stained newspapers and lying on the floor - it was a scene fit for a butcher's shop. Toshiko, whose own life had been spent in solid
182

comfort, poignantly felt the wretchedness of the illegitimate baby.

I am the only person to have witnessed its shame, the thought occurred to her. The mother never saw her child lying there in its newspaper wrappings, and the baby itself of course didn't know. I alone shall have to preserve that terrible scene in my memory. When the baby grows up and wants to find out about his birth, there will be no one to tell him, so long as I preserve silence. How strange that I should have this feeling of guilt!

After all, it was I who took him up from the floor, swathed him properly in flannel, and laid him down to sleep in the armchair.

They left the night club and Toshiko stepped into the taxi that her husband had called for her. 'Take this lady to Ushi-gome,' he told the driver and shut the door from the outside.

Toshiko gazed through the window at her husband's smiling face and noticed his strong, white teeth. Then she leaned back in the seat, oppressed by the knowledge that their life together was in some way too easy, too painless. It would have been difficult for her to put her thoughts into words. Through the rear window of the taxi she took a last look at her husband. He was striding along the street towards his Nash car, and soon the back of his rather garish tweed coat had blended with the figures of the passers-by.