The Ginger Tree (30 page)

I wish there was some way I could find out what is going on without seeming nosey. I am certainly not looking forward to that time before the
Empress of Russia
sails.

17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama
September 16th, 1917

Two large whiskies have made me more depressed than I was before them. Probably I should have gone along with Bob to the Grand Hotel to give him support during the ritual of drinking himself unconscious, particularly since I don’t believe, though he is no longer a total abstainer, that he has ever before set out to get drunk. I just couldn’t go with him, even though he asked me to, and I don’t believe he really wanted me there as a witness. Perhaps, with no witness, he won’t do it, but if he does they are trained to deal with these things at the hotel, and will tuck him up in a bed at the end of it. I didn’t suggest that he come back here with me, he would certainly have refused even in his present state of mind. The reformed scarlet woman has had a relapse again and I think he would
have been very unhappy if I had said yes to staying with Emma Lou in Karuizawa. He has always been secretly uneasy about my friendship with Emma Lou.

Poor Bob getting drunk now, and me near to wanting to. I will never forget Emma Lou’s face as she shut that cabin door, having sent Bob away on some ploy, and after herding the children into their four-berth and a sofa cabin across the passage. She stood looking at me for a moment before she said: ‘Well, go on, ask why I am doing it.’ I said I didn’t know what she meant, wasn’t she just going on holiday to the States? ‘No, I am not just going on holiday to the States. I’m going to Pasadena and getting a house there. And the reason I’m doing this is because I don’t want any more children. If I stay in Japan I’ll have them, whether I want to or not. That’s the way things are.’

What I said finally was that if she didn’t want any more children there were surely ways this could be arranged without having to take a house in California and leaving her husband in Tokyo? Her answer was in a louder voice than I think I have ever heard her use, even with the children. ‘There is no other way! Not with Bob!’ After a moment she added: ‘I wanted you to know.’

The thing that makes me feel sick now is that I really had nothing to say to her. We heard Bob’s voice in the side passage to the cabins, the kids shouting at him. Then he opened the door to stand staring at us, hating two women for what he guessed had passed between them.

The
Empress
liners are known for the speed with which they slide away from the dock after that final siren blast, but today everything seemed in slow motion, a deliberate lowering of the gangway, an even slower
cast-off
while passengers shouted messages from the promenade deck and, back in the second class, a schoolteacher returning to the States was being serenaded with a Gospel hymn by a platoon of her girl pupils. Bob and I were side by side, but he was a long way from me, staring up at an Emma Lou surrounded by his children, the youngest being held high so that she could throw a paper ribbon down to her father. Emma Lou must have determinedly bought those ribbons and handed them out, for soon Bob had a cluster of them in his hands and then I had one, too, that voice I
knew so well shouting from above: ‘Catch, Mary!’ So I caught my long green strip and held it until the
Empress of Russia
finally did move and all those ribbons snapped to litter the dock and hang like the debris from yesterday’s party down the steel plates of the ship’s sides. The three-piece war economy orchestra up on the deck started to play, but wasn’t anything like loud enough to drown out the screeching schoolgirls.

Bob was crying. I felt a terrible certainty that Emma Lou, in the distance no longer a recognisable face, was standing there dry-eyed.

17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama
October 7th, 1917

Every morning a ricksha calls for me here at seven forty-five to take me to Sakuragicho Station for my train to Tokyo, always the same puller, a barrel-chested young man wearing his sweat band at a jaunty angle across his forehead who cracks jokes as we travel, quite often suggesting that it is time I got a motorcar. He says that when I do he will give up pretending to be a horse and sit in state behind the steering-wheel. I tell him that if he drove a motorcar with the same abandon he shows in manipulating a ricksha we neither of us would live long. The make he fancies he calls a Rosu Rossi, and it took me some time to translate this to Rolls-Royce.

This morning Komoro and I were held up as we tried to cross the Motomachi, the obstacle being a long column of marching soldiers. Marching isn’t really the word for it, they were doing the Japanese variation of the German goosestep, something that I would imagine is still completely grotesque even when performed by smartly uniformed men, and these men certainly weren’t that, in dress for active service, baggy trousers under ill-fitting tunics, the packs on their backs looking thrown together.

There was nothing we could do but wait at the intersection until what must have been a whole regiment went strutting past, with the people along the street deferential to them, standing in shop doors almost to attention. Komoro, I know, has been quite skilfully avoiding military service and I didn’t think this spectacle would appeal to him much, but I
was wrong. He had managed to light the stub of a cigarette with one hand, the other holding the shaft to keep me on a level keel, and when I asked where he thought the soldiers were going he turned his head to say out of one corner of his mouth: ‘To the station for China. One day we’ll be marching all over the world.’

I missed my train. I didn’t get to the shop until ten.

17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama
June 9th, 1923

Armand has sent me all my letters to Marie, which makes me sad that I have kept none of hers. He has not told me what she died of, but I think I can guess since he says she was ill for more than a year, refusing to leave him alone in Bangkok while she returned to France for treatment. Perhaps she was afraid of surgery. More likely she knew that it would do her no good in the end. Her last letter to me was only four months ago, but there was no mention of illness in it, though perhaps I should have read through the lines of her complaint about Bangkok’s endless, humid heat, and how she longed for that holiday in Japan. She was seven years older than me, which would make her forty-seven.

I used to think of Marie as a woman who had everything, particularly when I heard from her during my first years in Tokyo. Her every word came from another life which seemed to be at the core of what was happening in the world, while all that was happening to me was sore feet. If ever there was someone cut out to be a successful Ambassador’s wife it was Marie, wit, charm, great power over men, and I know well from what she said to me in Peking, and from her letters through the years since, that this was what she wanted above everything. Armand, at fifty now, is not the French Ambassador in Bangkok, and in all their postings Marie must have had to play second fiddle to some woman with probably half her talents. I am sure this has been a great pain to him. He had money, and social position, but lacked the drive which pushes you to the top in the diplomatic service, or anything. The fatal flaw there, if it is a flaw, was that
he wanted a role in life not for his own sake, but for his wife’s. At heart he was a botanist.

What will he do now? He will still be thin, with those sinewy arms in which you could almost see the bones under the tendons stretched over them. For me he had gentle kindness. I’m sure that when I knew them he had never looked at another woman as he looked at his wife, that extraordinary concentration of love down a long dinner table. I can’t believe that there was ever, for him, a Siamese girl in a little house up a side street, but I could be very wrong here. I remember the Swatow Consul’s wife saying that Western widowers in the Far East soon marry again. It will be a curious little shock if I hear of Armand doing that.

When, like Marie, you have no children you pass so quickly into oblivion. I believe that this is the one thing that really terrifies a Japanese, man or woman, the idea that when they die there will be no children to say prayers at the family altar to their departed spirits. That great sceptic, Kentaro’s relative and spy, Assistant Professor Akira Suzuki, believes in nothing that cannot be logically demonstrated, but I am certain would still be horrified at the idea of no ceremonial period of mourning, plus the prescribed prayers, after his body had been cremated. I must say that he has taken out pretty good insurance against this happening, three boys and two girls, all being raised in strict patterns of western philosophical enlightenment, but at the same time undoubtedly being trained to do their traditional duties towards the family dead. This is somehow basic to their national ethos, like cricket to the English, and as totally incomprehensible to anyone not raised within the mystery.

I wonder if Tomo, now almost certainly betrothed, at least, to the daughter of his adoptive parents, would pray for my spirit if he was given the news of my death. He might, I suppose. There is one thing, however, about which I can be quite certain: Jane Collingsworth has been brought up without any instructions to decorate her evening prayers with a request for God to bless Mummy.

17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama
June 11th, 1923

It must have been rereading all those letters I wrote to Marie which has sent me back to my notebooks. I have always been a little superstitious and there is no doubt that her death has made me uneasy, as though it was a reminder, not only of what a long past I now have, but also how easily everything I have worked for could just be written off overnight.

I am not going up to Tokyo today. Emburi San can look after things perfectly well, as she told me quite emphatically over the telephone. Sometimes I think she could run the business better than I do, and in a number of ways is far more contemporary. I find the postwar fashions hideous, one of the worst periods for sheer ugliness in women’s dress in history, these up and down lines, too short skirts, and the waist hung on the hips. Now as never before clothes are designed by men who hate women. Emburi San tries hard, but I find it almost impossible to dress Japanese even in careful adaptations of these fashions. For one thing, women here were never meant to show those legs sat upon from an early age, for another they almost all have long backs, which puts the new waists on them not much above where the knees would be on a tallish Western woman. If things go on like this I’ll be back to dressing court ladies in floor-sweeping gowns and cartwheel hats decorated with ostrich feathers.

Having a day off in the middle of the week when I am not ill is a strange feeling, I don’t quite know what to do with my morning. I thought about telling Komoro to get out the Dodge and drive me down over that rutted track to Kamakura, but I don’t really want to sit alone on a beach in this heat eating sandwiches or to lunch with the foreign sahibs in the hotel. If he hadn’t been in Shanghai Peter would have come with me, delighted at this sign that I am beginning to take things more easily. I wonder if I am, or is this only a brief departure from norm?

I am just in from a garden that has only one thing wrong with it, a backing of
kiri
trees as a windbreak which makes it too hot in weather like this. Otherwise it gives me more pleasure than the house. It is exactly
eight years today since I first saw the place and knew at once that this was where I was going to live. Peter says I won’t marry him because I couldn’t bear to have him in here messing it up, and it is certainly quite true that I would never contemplate moving into the thing he allowed a
half-American
, half-Russian architect to erect as a monument to the Nasson money. There is also the fact that I really have quite enough of Peter as it is, with him as the man next door.

This garden really isn’t mine at all, restored by my money, yes, but it is still six-eighths the possession of a good many generations of my predecessors who, being Japanese, still haunt the place for two weeks every year at the Festival of the Obon, led by poor Mrs Misune who slit her wrists. Another eighth goes to Sato the gardener, leaving the last eighth to me, my portion shared with Saburo the cat without a tail I got to deal with the rats and who has stayed to deal with me. I am a forty-
year-old
spinster with her cat, if someone with my past and present can hope to be so classified. The British Embassy certainly hasn’t got around to awarding me that status and now, on account of Peter, won’t ever do it, leaving me barred from those receptions which are quite celebrated in Tokyo, all of them watched over by a portrait of King George the Fifth, and attended only by those who cannot find a decent excuse to stay away.

Before the World War Peter used to go to Embassy ceremonial occasions, like Empire Day, but now he has even less chance of getting through those portals than I do, forever to be unforgiven for what he did in 1912. About then, sensing what was coming in Europe, he renounced his British citizenship along with his father’s name of Williams, taking his mother’s name of Nasson and her Swiss nationality. There was logic as well as an instinct for self-preservation behind this move, for Peter’s father was half British, half Japanese, whereas his mother was all Swiss, which made him just a quarter of a Briton with a good solid claim on neutrality through the years 1914–18. As he puts it, no invitation to the British Embassy for the rest of his life is a small price to pay for never having seen the mud of Flanders. A divorce from his wife, who now lives in Deauville, was part of his loss at this time, too, the lady English and a patriot who only lives in France because the climate is so much better.
Somehow I can’t see Peter as a married man and I tell him that he only suggests marrying me because he likes to have his brand stamp on everything within his orbit.

I have never before put down on paper what I feel about Peter, and I find myself staring at the words, suspicious of them. Twenty years ago the idea of having as a lover someone who could calmly admit to being a physical coward would have appalled me. The Samurai warrior was a big part of Kentaro’s attraction, the mystery of a man who could sit facing the rising sun offering prayers for his dead soldiers. I never got in behind the mystery. The curtain at times seemed to be rising but before anything was revealed it dropped again. Peter is not mysterious. He mocks me by our similarity. With him I have nothing to defend, it would be a waste of time. Married, we would quarrel too much. This way, we each have our houses to withdraw to, the separate identities they offer by a physical
environment
, the studied perfection of the more than slightly bogus Japanese for me, a concrete horror glittering with the evidence of Nasson money for him. From either of our bedrooms on a fine morning we can see Mount Fuji, the peerless one.

The garden is now very hot. Up here with the
shoji
pushed back for the sea breeze that hasn’t yet arrived I can feel heat radiating past me skywards. The geriatric pine, under careful nursing and winter wraps, has recovered its needles and these days its gnarled limbs are crutched by wooden props. I am pretty certain Sato says prayers to that tree when working around it, and there are times when the idea of a venerable vegetable growth having a soul doesn’t seem too weird to me, at least not when I am out as a guest in my garden. There is another tree which Sato dislikes almost to the point of bitterness, this probably in the main because he can’t identify it. He comes from Kyushu where a sub-tropic climate, or near it, rears many exotics but he has never seen a tree like this one. With positive hatred in his voice he calls it a foreign thing. Actually, it is totally inoffensive, doesn’t grow very fast, and has quite pretty pointed leaves which take on a reddish tinge in autumn. When you crush one of these between your fingers it gives off a faintly gingerish smell, and though a bushy habit makes it a little out of place in a formal Japanese
garden, especially where it grows up near the focal point of a stone lantern on a miniature hill, I am still not letting Sato touch it. I have warned him that if I come home one day and find that tree gone he will go, too. Its odd-plant-out look somehow accents, for me at any rate, the carefully maintained perfection of everything else around it. Sometimes I see Sato straightening his back and pausing to curse my tree, but it survives.

17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama
June 17th, 1923

Peter, back from Shanghai, insisted that I go up with him to a
performance
of the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, saying that the programme, being totally sentimental, ought to appeal to me. We went in his Morris Cowley, which is what the British call a ‘saloon’, windowed in like a hearse, and stuffy with engine smells. I much prefer my open Dodge touring car and my ex-ricksha coolie chauffeur.

The concert included the ‘Fingal’s Cave’ overture which ought to have brought tears to my Scottish eyes, but didn’t, Liszt, and finally Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. Programme notes in Japanese and near-English told us to look out for the love theme in the work, stating: ‘ … at first quite loud sadness becoming more softly and not often, then only to arrive at last like small echo in booming death cave’. Peter said that after this information we should be ready for anything, including a big laugh, but I found myself waiting for the little theme, moved by it, wanting it to be much stronger at the end than the pathetic little suffocated whisper it became.

I was conscious of Peter watching me and in the car driving home he was suddenly quite vicious, saying that I was like a world traveller trying to move around with a heavy trunk stuffed with my own past, and it was about time I learned that all any of us need is a very light suitcase. When I didn’t say anything to that he came in to the attack again. According to him, I have a large personal area for a misty dream, this dedicated to the sacred figure of my warrior, now a general. Couldn’t I see that I had got a
big damn nothing out of the dream? I said I had a son from it. He said: ‘Where?’

I could have cried out then. I
had
been back in the dream, listening to that music, seeing Kentaro again in the Tsukiji garden looking down at his son for the first time, then, later, squatting on the matting making a little procession of origami toys. Peter was trying to make me cry, but I didn’t do it.

He says that I should go through that big trunk to throw away everything that won’t fit into the light suitcase. He may be right. Actually, quite a lot has been got rid of already. When Richard was killed in France in early 1918 I didn’t beat myself with shame at what I had done to him; all I really felt was relief that I was free of a man who had refused to divorce me, this from what I could only see as a kind of malice, though it may have been principle. Jane, now nineteen, I remember on her birthday. Tomo, soon to be eighteen, comes through a door into a shadowed room much more often, but I can never manage to see his face, and always his father seems to be with him, as though to keep me from doing this.

I might rent a house in Karuizawa for August and take that psychic trunk with me to sort out the contents once and for all, as Peter suggests. I wonder if he suspects I have hung on to this box with my journals? He can’t have seen it, it has always been hidden and locked.

Noki Besso, Karuizawa
August 18th, 1923

I was down this morning at the tennis courts watching the men’s singles semi-finals for the Karuizawa Cup. It was a hard battle between an American called Wendels and a Japanese youth, Kenichi Massami, who lost in the last set. It was only when they were coming off court that I saw how young the Japanese player was, no match physically or in years for the American. Then, as he straightened from picking up a towel, the Japanese boy looked at me. He was angry at losing. His look could have come straight from Kentaro.