The Painted Cage (27 page)

There seemed no strangeness in his body, only comfort and familiarity, as if they had been lovers before. She was unaware of her own needs. Nothing mattered but what she could give. She had forgotten she might also take. So that the sensations that burst suddenly in her took her almost by surprise, and she cried out and knew he was beside her in that moment, his emotion expelled with hers. Afterwards she lay in his arms beneath the quilts, still filled with all there was left to give, unexhausted. Her hands stroked his body, unable to lie still, as if by retracing and retracing the lines of his limbs the moment would never end, and when ended never fade.

‘Perhaps we should dress,' he said at last. ‘Soon they will return.' He drew away from her and sat up, reaching for his kimono.

‘Lie upon me once more,' she pleaded. He turned as she asked and laid the naked weight of himself upon her. She closed her eyes, unwilling to relinquish the moment that for her still brimmed and overflowed.

‘Come now,' he said. ‘It is over, Amy. Over now.' He withdrew his weight and warmth.

She watched him stand up, protected for all his gentle involvement by detachment, by unconcern. And she knew then she must accept the isolation he would insist upon. He was not a man to be possessed, or who would wish to possess in return. The depth and the quality of the experience between them was enough to justify itself.
There would be many things she must accept. Such as the way he had told her softly but firmly, ‘It is over, Amy. Over now.' But she was filled, and knew she would always be filled by the reflection he left within her.

The maid brought their clothes soon, stiff with salt and impregnated with the smell of soot from the fire over which they had dried, hanging from old, blackened rafters. It seemed to Amy as if the smell of salt and soot would linger in her soul forever, immutable as the memory of the House of the Golden Turtle.

She went with him as before, to those places they had decided needed to be sketched. Between them something had solidified and deepened, fallen into place. Her love infused her, she wished to embroider each moment with it. Matthew was close, his manner and voice affectionate. He was close and yet still detached in a way she did not understand, for from the depths of her being she was filled with emotions she could barely hold in place. All equilibrium was gone. Beside him she waited, but he asked of her nothing; he seemed calm and in control. He dispensed affection, but not the passion beneath which she could sense already her own annihilation and was gladly prepared to drown.

‘I am not God, Amy. You must not make me one. I am a man, a man you do not know.' He sounded impatient.

‘But you lift me,' she whispered, ‘to that highest point within myself where I no longer know. Where God and you feel one and the same.'

‘Amy,' he said, and shook his head in amused
exasperation.
‘Do not make it so difficult for yourself. You know, the expectation of happiness is the expectation of sorrow. The line between is negligible and always, somewhere, has to be crossed.'

They sat beneath two stone foxes that guarded an Inari shrine. Amy had brought a picnic, spread out upon a red checked cloth. Matthew took a sandwich. There had been no rain for several weeks, the ground was dry and hard.

‘Do you wish then to meet again?' he asked biting into the bread.

She was surprised that he considered it possible not to meet. She had waited each day for him to suggest it.

‘I don't know any more whether I'm sane or mad,' she said.

He laughed. ‘Maybe you're stark raving sane, or sanely mad. Sometimes it's profitable to walk through a bit of madness. It can bring you out the other end at a place you never expected to find. There's no way, Amy, to grow without pain.'

‘When shall we meet, then?' she inquired, inviting the pain.

‘Whenever you wish. Come again to Tokyo. That, I think, would be best.'

And so it was. She told Reggie she would accompany Mabel to the French Legation. She told Mabel that Matthew wished to introduce her to another artist.

‘I had no idea, darling, there were so many in Tokyo; we must be falling over them without knowing. I'm not sure I believe you,' Mabel said, looking at her hard. ‘Still, it doesn't matter. A friend in need is a friend indeed. We'll meet back at Shimbashi station, as before.'

She was in the house again, filled at every turn by the substance of Matthew. She felt possessive of each detail. The present was like a hand about her; it steered her on and she was limp within it. She placed the portfolio shyly on the table before him, he opened it with a smile. She had finished the sketches of all the temples they had visited, even the Inari shrine.

‘They're good, very good,' he said, looking each over carefully as he sucked his pipe. Her contentment at his praise filled the morning like the heavy golden light, burning again upon the rugs. He held out his arms to her. He watched her undress, she let down her hair and ran to him naked across the room.

‘You look like a nymph. A nymph,' he laughed and carried her to the bed. And again it began, as it had before – everything she could ask for.

‘I love you,' she said, ‘I love you.'

‘Oh, Amy,' he sighed, but those same words in reply
did not pass his lips. It did not seem to matter. What she felt was enough to provide for them both. She raised herself this time above him, to follow the lines of his body with her lips and hands.

‘God,' he groaned. ‘Are you a woman or a devil?' Again she wished nothing for herself, nothing but what she could give. And this time she was bolder than before, sure of their affinity, sure of her own expertise.

‘I'm anything you want me to be,' she laughed. ‘If you wish to debauch me, I'm infinitely debauchable. If you wish for purity, you can find it with me.' It seemed from that one sphere where their bodies met there was nothing they could not achieve, no emotion they could not find together. And suddenly, she feared all she stood before. If she committed herself to such a relationship her life would be blown to bits. She would gladly face that for Matthew, but he, she knew, was not a man to disrupt his life for her. If she wished for his love she must control her own. She must accept the limitations he imposed.

‘I have decided,' he told her afterwards as she lay quietly against him, ‘that you have more than a little of the devil in you.' And he laughed in satisfaction.

‘I'll never get to heaven, then,' she replied.

‘Dear Amy. To get to heaven you have to go through hell. And having found heaven you have to go back through hell again to pay for having been there. Heaven's a dangerous place and always exacts its price,' Matthew said.

‘I don't care, as long as I'm near you,' she said.

‘I have told you before, I'm not the man you think. I'm not a conventional man,' he answered.

‘I know,' she smiled. ‘Tell me, then, how terrible you are.'

‘You could never be the only one,' he said. ‘It is
possible,
you know, to love more than one woman.'

Her mind was full again of Edwina May. She knew nothing of him beyond what he wished to show her; he did not speak much about himself. She stood outside his life as surely as if she were before a wall. Everything behind was secret.

‘And if I were like other women I would not be here with you,' she reminded him. He laughed and ran a finger down her arm.

‘I long for freedom from hypocrisy, to do what one does without concealment, without shame. One day men and women will live like that,' he said.

‘How will that ever be?' she asked. ‘Men maybe, but I … I can never forget at the back of my mind what I am doing and the price I may pay.'

‘Oh, Amy. The world is changing. Women are not necessarily now the prisoners of modesty and delicacy. There is a New Woman everywhere. Yokohama is so far from the centre of the intellectual world,' Matthew said.

Amy's mind filled again with the image of Edwina. ‘Like Edwina?' she asked.

‘If you want, yes. She is brave and free and lives her own life as she wishes. Many women now live as she does in her kind of circles.'

‘And I suppose you men are only too happy to take advantage of such women,' she said, in sudden
apprehension
of her own situation with him.

‘No, Amy. I do not take advantage of you. You come to me of your own free will. In doing so you acknowledge the truth about yourself. That takes courage, even if
reckless
in your case. And I am aware of the risks you take for me.' He bent and kissed her.

‘How can you know anything?' Amy told him. ‘Love complicates a woman's life much more than any man's.'

‘I know,' he replied.

‘And children,' Amy said, thinking guiltily of Cathy and Tom. ‘Children change a woman as they change no man. Husbands, lovers and children. What chance does any woman have between them? Edwina has no children and no husband. It's easy for her to be free.'

‘It's more than that,' said Matthew. ‘Women are not educated yet for anything but subordination. You have a good brain.' He tapped her head. ‘Learn to use it, Amy. A woman may be different, but she's equal to any man.'

‘I've never been encouraged to believe that. Certainly not by my husband, or my mother.' Mrs Sidley's dark
form stood suddenly beside the bed. Amy turned and shivered.

‘Be true to yourself,' said Matthew.

‘Can't you see I'm doing my best to make a start?' Amy answered.

Matthew laughed. ‘The gifts of the flesh and the senses, forbidden though they are, remain a key that if never turned corrodes and then despairs. Look at all the sour old women of Yokohama, fleshy with gossip and
frustration.'
He took her again in his arms. ‘Yes, you've made a start.'

There was nothing now in her life but the waiting for Matthew and the moments to be had with him. That secret life was reality, and the reality of every day the fantasy of life. The faces of her children came and went before her, brought forward by Rachel to be kissed, scrubbed and shiny from their baths, milky-mouthed and boisterous. She laughed and bent to them, enfolding them in her arms, and knew the love she gave to them was the love that came from Matthew. He left nothing within her untouched. And at moments now she was obsessed by the wish for a child from him, a reckless, terrible wish. With its thought she no longer cared if, in the eyes and the bones of this child, Yokohama would discern it had no Redmore blood. It would be of Matthew and herself. She could think no further. The world had fallen away; she lived each moment on a pinhead of time, emotion and fantasy. She would have met him every day in Tokyo, in Yokohama, in daylight, in front of people, uncaring. Unaware of anything but him.
Him.
But he would not have it.

‘It is not necessary, Amy,' he told her. They sat naked together on the side of the bed. She said nothing; she could see it was not what he wanted. She was always aware, within her own turmoil of feelings, of that isolation he insisted upon, and by which he controlled their relationship. If she did not obey he would turn kindly but firmly away. He spaced their meetings agonizingly, but from one to the next she was prepared to wait.

‘Enough, Amy, is as good as a feast.' His hands slowly followed the contours of her limbs that she would have given in one meeting, again and again. Had he wished it. She saw now that, as much as he wanted to control the madness that consumed her so that it did not drown them both, for him the infrequency of their meetings really was enough. He was a sensuous, not a sexual man. Beside him Reggie was a bull, all bristles, flesh and
sexuality,
no hues beneath the primal. At the thought of Reggie she felt repulsed and turned again to Matthew, to the simplicity of their nakedness.

She loved the journey to Tokyo. Rich, soft hills of bamboo filled the windows of the train. The land, worked and crammed into tiny valleys was seductive in intensity. The light melted over it, luminous as the feelings within herself. The fields gave way to a litter of rickety wooden houses growing into the town and the great terminus of Shimbashi. This acceleration of urban density, instead of seeming ugly, appeared only to match and keep pace with the heightening of her own emotions. Until, at the pivot of it all, she rushed out of the station to the waiting
rikishas
with barely breath to bid Mabel goodbye.

He had been away in the interior, she had not seen him for two weeks. It seemed she too had been absent. Only in his presence could she come to life again. She stretched out like a cat to be stroked, yielding, opening, spreading. And afterwards it was as if she was drunk, unconscious and replete. As if she were cleansed and emptied from the deepest recess of herself. She lived for nothing but to be filled by him, until there was no place within her that he did not possess. She wished his contours could be burned upon her flesh, so that the welding of a few moments would last upon her forever.

She sensed his apprehension at this violence he ignited, an abandonment she was helpless to control. He feared it would destroy the careful architecture of his life. And yet she knew he waited for all that her own excesses could awaken in him, as if she had consumed him.

Once, within the glass face of a clock, she saw their bodies reflected upon the bed, tangled and moving,
absorbed in each other, and knew with a shock what he had already seen, that her own sensuality would destroy them. She wondered then how long he would allow it.

‘This cannot be sin, for I'm happy,' she whispered. Her own fullness burst in her. She turned and lay on her back, staring at the ceiling.

Matthew smiled. ‘Maybe that's the difference here. They've never heard of our horny old Devil. They have no sense of sin, or evil as we perceive it. Perhaps the naturalness of their lives places them nearer God. Maybe in the preface of the book I should touch upon the matter.'