The Japanese Girl (11 page)

But no shadow was there. And none came.

Next day she knew the truth. She had fled back soon after twelve, in humiliation, angry, thankful, sick at heart. She had been sleepwalking and had come awake. It was a hard blow that had roused her, but now she was thankful, hardly able to believe she had gone at all, desperately affronted. By morning she was too ill to get up. Her father was frightened by this odd turn and came to sit by her bed. He'd thought her a bit off colour for some time, he said. Sickening for something for some time. Only last night at supper … Best thing was to send for old Tregarthen. It never did to let these things run on. Women were queer creatures … Oh, by the way, had she heard? That fellow she found on the beach had been arrested in the Tavern last night. A rum-runner, or some such thing; captain of a schooner that had fallen foul of a government cutter and got itself sunk. He'd gone off to Bristol to stand his trial. You thought that sort of thing had died out nowadays. Now in his father's time – your grandfather's, my dear – the game had been worth the candle. Everyone was in the trade then – even the parson.

They gave him nine months, and it was all Miss Cotty could learn. After that the papers said nothing, it being neither news nor policy to report on the health and progress of petty criminals.

In the early spring of the following year she felt it grow in her that one day soon when she went down to the cave he would be there, with the sun shining on his yellow head. For a time then she never went without expectancy and hope, knowing that by now he would be free again, sure he would return to keep the appointment; but always the cave gaped at her and there was nothing but the mutter of the impersonal sea. Before, she had never needed company here; now her loneliness was intense and almost unendurable. All that summer and through the next winter she went daily, blaming herself now for not having got into some sort of communication with him while she could. She never expected him to write or to call at the house; if he came it would be as he'd first come and as she'd always met him.

But she never saw him again.

As time passed the continual ache in her breast grew less unbearable. She carried it about with her like the wound of a soldier, with a certain pride. We are the slaves of our temperaments, and hers, quietly tenacious in all things, grew more constant with the years. She forgot her old judgments and thought only of the fine things in his character. In her mind he grew into a legend. If he had turned up this might have been shattered, but he did not come, and the daily walk became a pilgrimage. She didn't stretch luxuriously in the sun or splash shyly in the water; she came to live over in her memory the hours of that summer.

At home, after the first week, she went on as usual, and no one noticed a lack of interest in the daily round. Susie was soon to marry the baker boy, and Mr Cotty was full of his gout. Little Lavinia, he thought, had tired of her long walks and now took short ones. She'd always been a wilful child, and if sometimes she came back soaked by the soft sou'westers he couldn't do anything to keep her in.

Her need to go down to the cove once every day came to be fanatical. Nothing must stop her. Even when her father died she was only away two days and then went dressed in sombre black to sit staring quietly out to sea with a feeling that her presence had been missed and resented.

After her father had gone the house began to go too. Doors creaked and wouldn't open, slates, rattled in the wind and some blew off and let in the drip of rain. Rooms smelt of mildew and dust, and often enough there were dead leaves lying in the hall. The sand crept round the front garden and slowly covered the soil and the rockery and the flowers.

She grew old, but not quite in the usual way. Her hair turned grey and then white, and her tall figure lost its straightness, but her face never took the lines of age. At fifty she looked young and strange.

They thought of her as queer, living alone in a rickety old house, and they left her alone; but she welcomed that. The important thing in her day was her visit to the shrine by the sea. She had dreamed there and loved there, and now she kept silent watch.

Twenty-three years after that summer she was found one morning by an old tin-streamer lying at the edge of the cliff where the path went down. She had known he was coming and had gone out at dawn but had not quite been able to manage the last few yards.

It's still there, the house, what's left of it, a crumbling ruin half buried in sand, eyeless and roofless and gaunt. And the cove is still there, unchanged as she was unchanged.

One day seventy years after, six people walked into the cove and settled to spend the afternoon in the sun. After bathing they sat in the mouth of the cave for lunch. After lunch they sun-bathed and kicked a ball about and sea-bathed again. After tea the girls began to gather up the things while the three men still lay indolently smoking. It had been a perfect day, and only the salesman was talkative.

‘I bought an ordnance map this morning. It's interesting. The gap we're in is called Cotty's Cove.' He spread the map and pointed with a pencil. ‘You can tell which it is by the way the rock juts out into the sea.'

‘Every rock and every stump round here has a name,' said the young married man, peering. ‘Pass my towel, would you, Dawe?'

The tall fair man roused himself. He'd been almost asleep, on the border-line of dreaming, yet hearing the talk of others.

‘Personally,' he said, ‘I don't care what it's called so long as they don't fence it in and say it belongs to someone called Cotty.' Curious name. ‘The wind's getting up a bit.' Cotty, strange name. Cotty. His pipe was out.

‘And the sea,' said the salesman. ‘We shall have to move soon.'

‘We're safe enough,' said Dawe. There's some sort of a path, I know.'

Silence fell then until one of the sisters came out of the cave.

‘Look what I've found,' she said. ‘I hung my bikini on a ledge and this caught in the strap.' She showed a comb.

It was old, sticky with sand, and the silver of the handle was badly corroded with rust.

‘Looks pretty ancient,' said the salesman. ‘Must have been there a few years.'

‘More than a
few
years,' said the girl. ‘More than a few years, by the shape of it.'

‘Is it worth keeping? Take it back with you as a souvenir.'

‘It's not much good. It might clean up, but …' She stopped and looked across at Robert Dawe, whose eyes were on it. Curious eyes he seemed to have just then, gold-specked on the pupils, and lambent and foreign and old.

‘I should put it back,' he said. ‘ You never know. Someone may come to claim it.'

The sun had gone behind a cloud, and the cove was suddenly chill and colourless. The girl shivered slightly. Dawe's eyes were fixed with a puzzled frown on the horizon where the sea still shimmered. What had he been thinking of when he dozed off? Odd, broken thoughts not quite his own … He felt as if he had just forgotten something and now would never remember. He was sad because something was lost to him for ever.

The girl made a move back towards the cave. ‘All right,' she said. ‘It's no use to me so I think I will.'

No one nowadays believes in ghosts. Like other superstitions, they have been explained away or gone out of fashion. And anyway the rusty comb on the ledge in the cave remains unclaimed.

But on some nights when the moon is up and the sea quiet – all but that thin line of muttering surf; and the sandhills are white and lumpy and the black rock edge alive with a hundred silhouette faces – then maybe something of Miss Cotty; not perhaps her ghost, but some impress of her vigil, some part of her maiden lonely spirit, broods over the cove like an echo of rapture and a memory of pain.

I am nine years old, and I live in the park three miles from the centre of the city. I have lived there all my life. My mother is a delicate woman with catarrh, a weak heart and a resolute will. My father is my mother's husband. He is a merchant, a small tubby vigorous man with a fair moustache, a bald head and keen twinkling eyes. They are both over forty when I am born and they have not much in common with my youth.

They have lived all their lives on an island. Although they are living in a city they are on an island. I too am on this island until I am nine.

We live in a tall semi-detached house with a long narrow garden. On the ground floor there is a drawing-room, a kitchen and a dining-room, connected by a long hall. The dining-room has a big square mahogany table covered between meals by a green velvet cloth with tassels. A white tablecloth is put over this for mid-day dinner, for high tea and for supper. There is a bookcase with Chambers' Encyclopaedia, Darwin's
Descent of Man
and Morley's
Life of Gladstone
. There is a cane-bottomed rocking-chair before the fire and almost always a fire. The walls are hung with a heavy crimson flock paper, and there are big paintings of cattle sitting beside lakes with dark mountains in the background.

The drawing-room is for entertaining and for Sundays. It is a lighter room with moquette velvet arm-chairs, casement curtains drawn in at the waist by a cord, and a 'cello and a piano. My mother and my father play together and they also sing. They sing ‘The Keys of Heaven' and other duets. My mother sings ‘ The Indian Love Lyrics' and ‘ In the Gloaming'. My father sings ‘I Hear You Calling Me' and ‘Absent' and ‘ Sun of My Soul'.

It was another man, though, Alfred Highman, who sang ‘Sun of My Soul' at their wedding breakfast. His was a light tenor, and his voice echoed through the house as my mother changed out of her wedding dress and got ready to leave. On the train, as it was pulling out of Exchange Station, my father sat on his silk hat. They went to Llandudno and made gentle love together on the warm September nights.

I have one brother but he went to the war, and another brother, but he died. I am a child of their middle age. I do not belong on their island.

We have one maid, Patty, a Northumbrian girl, who worries my mother because she will not always wear a cap; and sometimes there are rumours that she meets men on her afternoons off. Patty is quite a problem, for she is pretty and knows it. Indeed I have sometimes stolen into her bedroom and found her standing in front of the mirror saying: ‘Aren't I beautiful! Aren't I beautiful!' Once, too, I walked into the bathroom when the tumblers of the key had not turned and found her naked to the waist standing with arms raised holding up her hair and with plump high breasts like pale, pale oranges waiting to be plucked.

I am often ill and sit alone in the dark dining-room reading, and one day I pick up the paper and see this advertisement. ‘ Will the owner of the third largest trout please communicate with Wylde, 60 Dickinson Road, when he will hear something to his advantage.'

Now I know that I own the third largest trout. It swims round and round in the big glass bowl on the pedestal in front of the dining-room window. His scales glisten gold and silver in the evening gaslight and in the morning sun. There are two other fish with him, but he is the biggest I have, and the third biggest in all the world.

How can I take him? He is mine, but my mother would not let me go. She would say it was dangerous crossing the busy streets, though in fact Dickinson Road is the only busy one, with single-deck electric tram cars skidding rapidly over the sets. The Park, where we live, is a private enclave within the city, privately kept up, with soft bumpy roads and lodges at each entrance, and wooden bars like frontier posts to keep out unwanted traffic.

How can I go? But Wednesday is Patty's afternoon off, and my mother rests each day from two until four. I will have a sick headache and be unable to go to school. I do this, and the dark October day connives at secrecy.

I know exactly where 60 Dickinson Road is, for this is my grandfather's house. Or it was my grandfather's house until he died. Then we were going to move there ourselves, and had the bedrooms repapered, mine with bluebirds flying over silver trees; but at the last moment there was some dispute with an uncle and the house was publicly sold. I do not know who owns it now, but I feel I shall be recognized.

I cannot take the whole bowl for it is too heavy to carry, but there is a two-pound stone jamjar and this with water in it can just contain my fish. Once it has plopped in, slippery and a little greasy in my fingers, it moves round almost snout to tail. Such a lovely fish with under-hung bottom jaw and slow palpitating gills and eyes like the blind man down the road. Secret, silent friend, he knows me, he knows
his
friend, and shows it with little twitches of his fins and tails. I put a thin sheet of wrapping paper over the top and tie it with fine string the way I have seen my mother do with home-made marmalade.

School cap and a scarf, tuck the thick fair hair out of my eyes; jar under arm. The only risk is meeting rough lads who might play some trick. But mostly they will be at school, where I should be.

I slip down Scarsdale Road to the end of the Park, water flipping under my arm and darkening the paper cap. Across the rough ground opposite the Park and on to Dickinson Road. It is half a mile then.

The day has lowered, and there is a hint of frost. All sounds are clearer, more distinct, as if heard in an extra dimension. A dog's bark, the cry of a child, the hollow-tooth clop of horses' hooves, a city hooter, the bristling whisper of a broom among leaves, the noisy clanging bell of a distant tram.

No. 60. It looks different. There is a notice outside. Wylde's Photographers. It was Wylde's who advertised. This is a bigger, squarer house than ours; it is more middle-aged, more substantial. The bay windows spread wide like an alderman's waistcoat. A crabbed oak tree, some thirty feet high and very powerful, stands in the front garden, its branches stretching towards the windows, which are just out of reach. The gate is big and wooden, not iron, the path loose-pebbled, and walking on it makes a noise like chewing nuts. The front door is green. There are no curtains at the front room windows, which I am not tall enough to see into.