Three Views of Crystal Water (36 page)

‘And what is it?’

He did not answer. Instead the man continued.

‘We had troubles. We had red tide. All along the beaches shells are pink and oysters are dying. We use the diving girls to move them, even so we only save one fifth of the
crop. The seaweed called
mirumo
will kill them also. We employ women to remove seaweed and kill octopus. But good luck followed: we established pearl banks on the shore of Tatoku Island. Mikimoto settled there with his family. He has water all around on lease to within fifteen miles of the banks.’

James was impressed.

‘You must come to Toba to see,’ said Mikimoto.

That same day James went to church. He rarely went to church. But this day had felt portentous, since morning. Perhaps it was because he had run into Mikimoto: perhaps because he sensed that the event that was going to distinguish his life from other lives, whether – as Mikimoto said – good luck or bad, was coming.

It was an English church – made of wood, painted white, with a steeple, so out of place there. He stopped outside to look at it, and impulse propelled him to enter the building, so English in that alien land. Perhaps inspired by Mikimoto’s ‘godly’ role in making nature do his bidding, he thought he could better his fate. Perhaps he went as penance for
Miyasato.

And there, standing by the apse, was the woman he would have known anywhere.

She was not tall, only seemed tall because of her military posture. Her posture was erect, yet her drooping head said that although she was proud, and used to having her way, today she was beaten. She was tightly bound in around the waist, in the English style, in brown silk. Her hair was piled up on top of her head, exposing the vulnerable nape of her neck. On her cheek, the side of which he could just see, was a tear.

He was breathless. Astonished to find her, but then, not astonished: after all, he found her wherever he went. She was a talisman, and a memory that sent a rush through his nerves. He had dreamt of Kuwait for years.

‘Miss McBean.’

And she turned to look at him with no less astonishment than he felt.

‘It is you?’ she said. ‘Mr Lowinger.’ She extended her hand.
‘Sophia
McBean.’

‘Yes, we meet again.’ Sophia. Pronounced with a Fie! in it. So-fie!-a. So, fie on you.

He repeated his own name, no doubt idiotically, while taking her hand and pressing it to his lips. ‘James Lowinger. How incredible that we should meet once again, in a foreign land.’

But he’d known always, that they would, perhaps even had known it when he woke up this morning. He went where all the pearl merchants went and she did too. His father by this time was dead; he had no idea about hers.

She cast her eyes down. ‘It was Panama, wasn’t it? Mr Lowinger.’

‘It was Kuwait.’

It appeared the memory caused her pain. There were lines down the centre of both cheeks, wet lines, as tears had taken a course over her pale skin. He felt – unkind but true – a small elation at the sight. She had been invulnerable every other time he saw her. Now she was in despair. Perhaps he could help, and win her favour.

‘I hope you will not mind my saying this, but you appear distressed.’

The very word caused her face to lose its shape.

Again he felt a small thrill, of vindication – she had been so composed in childhood, so clearly superior to him in maturity when they had met at twenty; at thirty, she had gained the upper hand; at forty – well he had improved his chances by arriving at a time of crisis for her. But he disguised – he hoped – his smallness with a look of grave concern.

‘Is there anything I can do to help you?’

It was the sort of thing a person of his upbringing did in that circumstance, of course, appear in a moment of diffi
culty to an old family friend, as if by order of the King, as if the English knew the world so well that they could appear at will in any land that caught their interest, and take charge. Oh! Easy! A spot of difficulty in Japan, have we? I’ll just nip down and take care of it …

But he did not know Sophia McBean: he had the illusion of knowing her that comes from having chanced upon a person in foreign climes, not once, not twice, but three times over the years. He was fated. It was written. He felt as if all the previous years since he’d clapped eyes on that pouting girl with her red umbrella had been leading him, inexorably, to this moment. He saw, or thought he saw, which is as good as the same thing, that their lives were destined not just to bounce off each other like lost croquet balls, but to take shape from each other. It was as if he’d found his home again after a long absence.

She burst into a sob then and stepped toward him. He held up his arms. She stepped into them and dropped her head so that her crown pressed lightly on his collar bone.

Her hair smelled like butterscotch. That copious, golden brown hair that he had seen before, gleaming in sunlight and moonlight, let down in long tresses when she was a child, and coiled in bright knobs when she was a young lady: now it was lifted and wrapped in knots and pushed forward over her crown. It made her look like a missionary. She felt chaste in his arms.

‘We came here,’ she said, brokenly, stepping back and wiping her tears, ‘for the pearls.’

‘Of course.’

‘Father and Mother and I, and some of my brothers.’

‘Yes,’ he said. Other English merchants had done the same.

‘We were living in Kobe.’

Where the pearls were sold.

‘Our shop was burgled. Robbers came and – they stabbed my father. His arm. It’s quite useless.’

‘When did this happen?’ he asked.

‘Some months ago,’ she said.

It crossed his mind to wonder why she was crying on that particular day, but it would have been callous to ask.

‘They have left to go back to England. He cannot manage. I am to stay here and run the business.’

‘Alone?’

She flashed him an unbudging look and he bit his tongue.

‘It is tragic.’

He took her for a walk along the Bund. He took her to the teashop. They went to the gem dealers and he watched the way she placed a pearl in the very centre of her palm, cupped there, and looked at it quizzically as if expecting it to speak. The way she lifted it between thumb and forefinger, and rolled it just lightly with the tips of her finger and thumb. She placed it on a flat surface, not the velvet pad the jeweller presented her, but the wooden table or stone stool, even if she had to sit on the floor as the Japanese did. She put the pearl down and nudged it gently, then nudged it again, to see the roll. She might do this for five full minutes, pushing it this way and that to see the freedom of its movement. Then she would pick it up again and hold it in the light, the half light and the darkness, to see what happened to it then. And then she would say,

‘One hundred fifty yen.’

Or perhaps, ‘One thousand yen.’

Or more likely, ‘Fifteen yen.’

Or even, with a small flick of her nail, send it back to the shopkeeper. ‘Cuckoo pearls in the mix,’ she’d say. ‘They all promise that the manufactured ones are kept out but they are not always.’

He was entranced by her manner, which was arrogant, coquettish, and deadly serious. He was a little afraid of her too. But she had only to laugh a little, over her shoulder, and raise an eyebrow at him, and he would dissolve. He was carried away. It was the beginning of an adventure, the
end of the old him, and the start of a new James Lowinger. He was suddenly the sum total of his resumé – an aficionado, a world traveller, a lover, a trader – when throughout his stumblings from port to port he had never actually felt he added up to much at all.

Her mouth was the colour of cinnamon. She tasted of some fruit that was unfamiliar and perhaps still green, its fragrance held in but about to be released. Her lips were hard but would soften, under repeated kisses. He asked her to marry him in three days’ time, and to his astonishment, she said yes.

They went to Toba for their honeymoon.

In the narrow streets, the fishermen and their wives went by face down, not wanting to meet their eyes. One who knew a little English made a giggling face and circles around his right ear. Mikimoto-san? He is crazy; he is
kichigai.
They sent them to the noodle shop. There the people said Mikimoto spent all day at the waterfront.

‘What does he do there?’

‘He plays with baby oysters. Mikimoto is mad for oysters. He prays to them and not to Buddha.’

They went to the seafront.

And there was Mikimoto. No bowler hat this time. Barefoot, standing in the water. A fleet of little boats was coming in. It was like something out of myth. A scene from Paradise. Standing in the boats laughing, smiling, nearly naked, were women. Their bodies were perfect, gilded and strong. Without fear, they moved like young animals with joy in their limbs.

It was how women ought to be; why had he not known? Unencumbered by heavy skirts and binding clothes, loose, breasts free, narrow midriffs and waists each one different, but each the same – the curve to wider hips, the apple shape of their cheeks with the black strap that held their modesty in place.

And James was blinded. Like Odysseus with those sirens. And amazed. These were the divers who went down to lift the oysters when they were threatened by the red tide? The ones Mikimoto hired to dive in March, when the water was so cold, to move the oysters near warmer currents? These beauties were the nursemaids to his mollusc children. These little goddesses were Mikimoto’s secret weapon.

They rowed their little boats standing, one girl at the tiller, twisting it, gracefully. It was a dance, an enticement, but she did not intend it to be. As they beached their craft, they jumped over the sides and their feet scuffed the unfurling foaming waves. They took the ropes and pulled their boats up the sand, the muscles of their thighs and waists straining, their faces full of exuberance – not like other women of Japan or even women of England. Never in the world had he seen anything like the
ama
divers.

Slaves in the Red Sea, manacled; young boys, flogged when they rose to the surface without an oyster until their blood ran red, and then pushed back over the side of the dhows so that the salt got in their wounds. Grey corpses of divers who got caught underneath brought back to port in Broome. Malays with distended lungs and concave trunks; furtive alcoholic Mexicans with their knives. All of them were gone. The only couriers for pearls should be the
ama
girls.

‘Good day, Mikimoto,’ he said. ‘You are the luckiest man in the world.’

He smiled. ‘And they are loyal, too,’ he said.

Sophia McBean stood by him, wedded wife in her English mourning, or that was what it looked like – the long skirt getting salt and sand in it. Poor woman, what did her many accomplishments matter then? She was eclipsed by the girls’ beauty, and speechless for the second time that day. The first had been earlier that morning when the fact of marriage and the job required of her was impressed upon her. Missionary position indeed!

Mikimoto showed James his pearl banks. He showed him how the oysters spawned, creating a scum of bubbles on the surface in the sheltered coves, how the fisherman collected the spat in cones and let them grow, how many years it took. But the secret of how he coaxed those oysters to grow pearls, Mikimoto did not quite tell.

Vera sat in the entrance hall of the Pearl Museum. From here she could see the women inside working with bent heads and tweezers, moving perfect white balls across bands of black velvet. Many times she heard the guide explain how Mikimoto had developed the cultured pearl. Her job was to speak English to the English visitors, but there were no English visitors. There was the war.

Very occasionally foreigners came from Tokyo. Once a man in a fedora and overcoat appeared on the ramp leading up to the museum. He was big and wore glasses, and he looked like an American. When Vera saw his silhouette, she wondered for a fraction of a second if he were her father. But no, she did not expect Hamilton Drew. The man asked for a tour in English. But he was not truly listening as she made her explanation of how the nucleus was inserted into the gonad.

‘What brought you here?’ this man said. He said it quietly, in a different voice to the voice he’d used to ask her other questions. It was as if he thought she might be a prisoner.

‘I brought myself,’ said Vera.

‘But you are only – what – sixteen?’

She was older but she said nothing. It was beneath her dignity to be asked her age.

‘Where were you born?’ he asked.

‘Vancouver, Canada.’

She wished she hadn’t answered. She wondered if this were a trick, if she should have papers that said she could live here.

‘My grandfather was a pearl merchant,’ she said. ‘My mother was born here.’

He blew out his breath in a whistle.

‘I don’t think it’s safe for you here. Go home to Canada while you can,’ he said. ‘There is a war –’

‘I know there is a war,’ she said. ‘It is in China, and it is going very well.’

‘Not that war,’ he said. ‘There is going to be a war in Europe and perhaps around the whole world.’

He gave her his card. She kept it at her desk. It said: Horace Calder,
Chicago Sun.

The snow began to sag and dimple and melt from the stones. It ran away down the slopes of the mountains, and white mounds were isolated in shady places where they softened in the day, and turned crisp overnight. At last it was
risshun,
and time to leave, and once more the boats set sail for the summer island. Vera stood looking straight ahead over the water until she saw the flat low top of the island just distinguishing itself from the waves. She put her fists over her head and cheered.

‘Were you afraid it was lost, that it would not be there this year?’ Keiko asked.

The day the sails appeared on the horizon on that fourth
risshun,
he was surprised that he could feel such anticipation.

Keiko signalled her happiness to see him. But Vera did not look his way. She was even taller now and streaks of a soft brown had infiltrated her white-grass hair, as if with the coming adulthood she would be obliged to dim her light. She was no longer like a strip of cloth or a board. She had become wide in certain places and narrow in others. Her shoulders were broad and she had long arms and legs. She tripped walking up the beach. She and her friend leaned their sharp, thin
shoulders together and giggled. She was clumsy, he saw; there was too much length in her bones for her thin muscles to manage. Probably, like the rest of them, she had not had enough to eat.