The Painted Cage (9 page)

‘She’s an American,’ Mrs Cooper-Hewitt whispered to Amy, a cosmos of ineradicable differences summed up in her distaste.

‘She’s very beautiful,’ said Amy, tired suddenly of the rodent-like eyes of Mrs Cooper-Hewitt.

‘But loud, don’t you think? That might be the kindest word for her and all her countrymen. She has been seen riding a bicycle in pantaloons. They have no heritage, no breeding.’ Mrs Cooper-Hewitt pulled in her chin,
straightening
vowels that might confirm her own pedigree. She looked, thought Amy, like a badger with her small eyes and widow’s peak.

‘Of course,’ continued Mrs Cooper-Hewitt sadly, ‘because of her money she simply cannot be ignored.’

Amy checked a pert reply in defence of Mabel Rice, remembering the importance to Reggie of the
Cooper-Hewitts.

‘Let me introduce you to Mrs Figdor,’ Mrs
Cooper-Hewitt
said.

The woman beside her smiled, her teeth swelled like a wound in her face. ‘We’ve heard about you. I’m sure you’ll be happy in Yokohama. Our husbands have already met. We wish Mr Redmore good luck. Have you met Mrs Ewart?’ She pushed forward a mousy woman who barely reached Amy’s shoulder.

‘What part of England are you from, north or south?’ Mrs Ewart demanded in a defensive Yorkshire accent.

‘And this is Mrs Russell. Her husband is a barrister, the power in our community.’ Mrs Figdor gave a nervous giggle and stepped back to make room for Mrs Russell, a tall woman with a pinched face who did not attempt to smile.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said and relapsed into silence.

Mrs Ewart, Mrs Figdor and Mrs Cooper-Hewitt began to talk amongst themselves. Amy shifted from foot to foot, dry of conversation. She looked up with relief as Mrs Easely appeared and took her off to meet Mabel Rice.

‘You’re about the same age. It will be good for you to know her, although I must warn you she’s rather a character. There’s a bit too much of her for her own good. Don’t let her sweep you off your feet,’ Mrs Easely advised in the voice of a schoolmistress.

Mabel Rice smiled a mechanical smile loaded with
brilliance
and boredom. ‘I’ve heard about you.’

‘News of arrivals spreads quickly here. It’s horribly disconcerting. Everyone knows me and I know no one,’ Amy said as Mrs Easely left.

‘There are few worth knowing, far as I can judge, but that’s for you to discover,’ Mabel replied, her eyes sweeping over Amy.

‘You’re rather severe with them,’ Amy laughed.

‘So’ll you be soon. They may all be God’s own children, but you won’t find a stranger crowd. Likely as not you’ll
be in need of some protection if you try and act partial to them.’

‘Oh,’ Amy was confused, unable to reply.

‘You’ll have to pardon my sharp tongue,’ Mabel said more kindly, her smile now showing quick concern. ‘It’s apt to run away with me. What I mean is that, there appears less wrong with you than anyone else in this room.’ Amy laughed and immediately warmed to her, seeing the awkward offer of friendship from the discerning Mabel Rice.

‘A sharp tongue,’ continued Mabel, ‘is the only thing that keeps me from stagnating in this lazy land. Japan’s a little place. But for my tongue I’d have been eaten alive by all the old cats in the Settlement. Now that’s a secret, so keep it under your hat,’ Mabel ordered.

‘Trust me,’ Amy smiled. ‘I’ve just escaped myself from Mrs Cooper-Hewitt, who anywhere else I’d avoid like the plague.’

‘What, that old Mrs Grundy with the 1860 face, braids of hair still over her temples in the old-fashioned way? If I’d known you ten minutes ago, I’d have come right across without delay to rescue you, poor child,’ Mabel announced and Amy giggled.

‘That woman with the protruding teeth laughs all the time she’s talking,’ Amy remarked.

‘Mrs Figdor is what you English call a “jolly little woman”, but I’ve been unable to find her frankness goes beyond the protruding teeth. I’m convinced she laughs to make her teeth look natural. Her husband is one of the port officers. And that Mrs Ewart doesn’t have the sense of a squeezed orange. But the Lord preserve me most of all from Mrs Russell.’ Mabel rolled her eyes.

‘But I like Mrs Easely,’ Amy said quickly, guilty with disrespect. ‘She has been kind to me.’

‘She can be a sourpuss when she wants,’ said Mabel, and Amy suspected that beneath her manner Mabel was not immune to disapproval. ‘She’s one of those women who make the truth sound so sarcastic it does more damage than a lie. Let me introduce you to my husband, Patrick.’ Mabel turned to an elderly man who had
appeared at her side. He was tall and well-dressed with a grey vandyke beard. Although he was middle-aged his skin was unlined, smooth as his manner.

‘I did happen to note you talking to Mabel and I thought, there’s as lovely a woman as we shall ever reckon to see in the Settlement,’ he said in easy familiarity.

‘Don’t talk like that, Patrick, she’ll think you’re flirting and not stay my friend,’ Mabel scolded.

‘In America folks wouldn’t call that flirting, only paying a compliment where it’s due,’ Patrick apologized.

‘Then I shall take it as such, with thanks,’ Amy laughed, delighted at such casualness in relations. He soon left them, but Amy was pleased to find one more thing in common with Mabel – a difference in age with their husbands.

Throughout the evening they contrived to sit together. Amy wished Mabel would talk in a quieter way, for her voice echoed arrestingly through a silence; people turned their heads. Amy caught again that missionary look in Mrs Easely’s eyes, and saw the tall and dour Mrs Russell exchange a glance with Mrs Ewart.

‘Monotony is death, I think,’ said Mabel, playing outrageously for attention. ‘It is important to know how to live, really live. Let us be reckless, I said to Patrick, and die if we must. I would rather die of recklessness than boredom in Cincinnati,’ Mabel said, explaining how they came to Japan. It appeared that Patrick Rice was immensely rich and had recently ventured into a business in tea. Mabel herself was an heiress. This fact went before her in whispers to those who did not know, and in
exasperation
to those who deplored her. She was quick to enlighten Amy about herself, devoid of modesty.

‘Papa made a fortune in kitchen ranges, I’m not ashamed to say. But we’re now in the nineties, the Age of Progress. Everything’s changing, and Papa’s not one to be left behind. He’s now into mail order catalogues, a new thing in America. He’s going to end the age of rural isolation and take high fashion to the hinterlands.’ She had a way of talking that sliced off chunks of unwieldy
life and pinched it into shape. Such power was deserving of respect.

‘Your dress is so perfect,’ sighed Amy. ‘I’ve no idea where to start upon things here.’

‘The little cutter at Nozawaya’s is a gem, but you have to be firm with her,’ Mabel explained.

‘I’ve really almost nothing to wear,’ Amy was forced to confess. ‘Mould and white ants finished everything off in Sungei Ujong. Singapore lives in eternal summer. They had neither the styles or cloth for winter there. And now I’m in this dreadful condition.’ Amy looked down at the ripeness of her pregnant form.

‘Yes, I noticed,’ said Mabel. Amy was unsure if the remark dismissed her condition or her clothes.

‘I could take you along to Nozawaya’s,’ Mabel
condescended.
Amy grasped assistance eagerly, excited at the prospect of friendship with Mabel Rice.

‘I’ll collect you tomorrow after tiffin,’ Mabel decided as they waited with their husbands in the Easely’s porch before a queue of
rikishas.
Patrick Rice had a carriage of his own imported from Shanghai, and this arrived with a flourish amongst the spindly
rikishas
with their bony runners.

‘Let us give you a lift.’ Patrick Rice offered. Reggie accepted with alacrity, no less pleased than Amy with their new acquaintance.

‘Certainly won’t do no harm to know
them,’
Reggie chuckled afterwards. ‘That fellow Rice is where I aim to get soon in Yokohama.’

The following day Mabel Rice arrived at the Club Hotel and tactfully refrained from comparisons with the Grand. As they rolled along in their
rikishas
Mabel talked
whenever
the carriages came together. She explained they had been on their way to live in Shanghai when waylaid by Yokohama.

‘Money actually, to be precise. There’s a deal more here than in Shanghai. In the hand quicker too, or so Patrick tells me,’ Mabel shouted across their bouncing
rikishas.
‘But of course in Shanghai we wouldn’t ride in these
absurd perambulators. Everyone has a carriage.’ In Mrs Easely’s drawing room Mabel Rice, Amy recollected, for all her conspicuousness had not talked in this terse and unrefined way. She took the familiarity as a compliment.

They had to wait for the fitter when they reached
Nozawaya’s.
Amongst bales of silk and velvet Mabel accounted for her interest in Amy. ‘You know, don’t you, there are not many people like us in Yokohama. I’m not counting the diplomatic corps of course, or people like the Easelys. But it is a fact that the best people live in Tokyo. They’re all little people here, come to make their fortunes. Those Ewarts, for example, or the Cooper-Hewitts. Or that man Figdor and his wife. Unbearable. And
all
of them
British.
I’d no idea until I arrived here of the idiosyncrasies of your race. Oh, and the missionaries!’ Mabel rolled her eyes to heaven. ‘None of them of course, you realize, will be able to block you in the LLT & CC if your husband gets that place in the club.’ Mabel turned to finger a bale of silk. She pulled it loose before a mirror, then let it tumble to the floor before turning her attention once again to the problem of Amy’s clothes.

It had not been possible in the tropical backwater of Sungei Ujong for Amy to ascertain that every garment she had been married with was now obsolete. It was impossible to explain the inevitability of decline in Sungei Ujong to Mabel Rice. It could never happen to Mabel. Amy looked down at herself in despair.

‘You’re no shape at all, quite apart from your present condition. There is a different kind of corset now. And a suit. Have you never had a suit? They’re all the rage,’ said Mabel critically, pacing the floor, her own hourglass figure an engineered art, unimpeachable in a turquoise outfit with exaggerated sleeves. It was elegant and severe, very Mabel Rice and American. Her blonde hair was perfectly coiled under a hat of feathers, tilted at an angle.

‘We’ll have to wait for the corset now,’ said Mabel with a twitch of eyebrow. ‘And as for the clothes, perhaps we should alter your others. Later you can throw them away. That would see through these tiresome months and get
rid of the horrid things too.’ They looked in frustration at Amy’s thickening form.

‘We’d better concentrate on hats and shoes.’ Mabel sounded rather bored.

Looking Amy up and down Mabel Rice, against her better judgement, produced some warmth of feeling and wondered why she felt responsible. There appeared in Amy something in need of excavation and she could never resist the power of reshaping the nondescript. The interior of a house or room, the design of a dress, a friend, each became her own creation, each changed and grew at her instruction like a painting or a sculpture. In different circumstances, Mabel dreamed, she could be a great hostess, a patron of artists and writers, their source of inspiration, critic of their work. She possessed the insight and the arrogance to wrest order from creation. But fate had not placed her with the cream of the world; she must make do with Amy Redmore.

It did not matter to Amy that not many people liked Mabel Rice. The fear she inspired in lesser women seemed to Amy and to Mabel justifiable and comic. At the end of the afternoon, within twenty-four hours of meeting, they could already exchange a private smile at the loud-voiced hysteria in Nozawaya’s of a raw-boned matron in an apricot dress whose father, whispered Mabel, was a butcher in Edinburgh or Carlisle.

Amy had just returned to the hotel room when Reggie burst in and picking her up swung her about, laughing loudly.

‘We’ve done it,’ he shouted. ‘We’re part of Yokohama.’ At the club he had been unanimously accepted. His eyes flashed, reflecting happiness. He smelled of drink, the anxiety of the afternoon and the gratuitousness of success. He pulled her to him, his mouth wet, words and
excitement
bubbling from him. He poured a brandy and made her toast their new life in Yokohama.

‘It was right to come. Don’t you feel so, Amy? You’ve seen the Bluff, you’ve seen the life. It’s splendid, we could not have chosen better.’ His cheeks and neck were
flushed. ‘It’s a good post at the club, a job of prestige, a way of knowing those who count. This is not an easy town. People quickly shut you out.’ He rubbed his hands about his glass. ‘I mean to make my way here, Kitten. One day, I’ll go into silk or tea. It’s a great place,
Yokohama
.’ She was glad to see him released, like her, from the imprisonment of isolation, anxiety and depression. She told him of the afternoon with Mabel Rice, the flattery of her interest.

‘I’m not surprised,’ Reggie replied. ‘She’s just the type to recognize a bit of class. She’s from new money, as it sounds. You’ll do us both proud in Yokohama.’ He turned away to pace the room in exuberance and tell her about the election. His tone grew loud and boisterous and he swung his arms about.

‘Ssh. People will hear you,’ she implored with sudden irritation. In the middle of her happiness Reggie’s excited words illuminated their life in a way she had not foreseen.

In the isolation of Sungei Ujong, remote from people and conventions, they had been reduced to no more than themselves, a balance of strengths and traits. There had been no need to view themselves beyond that insular functioning. But suddenly now, for the first time, she heard him speak with vulgarity.
A
bit
of
class.
How she hated to hear him talk like that. The use of those words in reference to her, and the manner in which Reggie phrased them, made her feel exploited, made him in some way diminished. She bit her lip, filled with discomfiting emotions.