Three Views of Crystal Water (45 page)

‘Don’t tell them you were living in Japan. It might cause trouble. Tell them you went over with me.’

‘You tell them,’ said Vera.

‘Where is her passport?’ asked the immigration officer.

‘In her mother’s keeping, I’m sorry to say.’ Hamilton grimaced handsomely.

‘Where is her mother?’

‘Dead, I’m afraid. The girl is now with me. I travel for a living …’

The officer’s heart went out. ‘I have to ask for her passport. I’m sorry.’

‘I have the death certificate, is all.’

‘Not the girl’s birth certificate?’

‘I can send for it. It must be somewhere. I’m sorry, I’ve been a little confused since –’

He pulled out the folded paper and was about to reveal its contents to the officer, but the officer waved them on. ‘She’s obviously yours,’ he said, and smiled.

‘We look alike do we?’

‘Peas in a pod,’ said Hamilton Drew, smiling down at her.

Vera did not know what she looked like. ‘I’m blonde; your hair is red!’

‘Actually yours is greenish blonde from the sea water, and the dry ends taste of salt,’ said Hamilton Drew.

‘And yours is only red because of your pipe tobacco!’

Vera was home, where she had longed to be. Belle’s house on Ivy Street stood just as it had when Vera and Keiko had left nearly four years before. Bounced back in time, she wandered, dazed, the streets of her childhood.

She did not return to her old school: she was too old. She went to the school grounds and watched her friends from vantage points where they couldn’t see her. She stood in the doorways of shops, or behind hedges, as the doors of the school burst open at four o’clock and a gaggle of girls spilled out. They had clinging skirts that flared below their knees and neat blouses that buttoned down the front and pastel sweaters that buttoned over the blouses. They held hands with their boyfriends or walked arm in arm, girls becoming women and finding a lot to laugh about in it. She was alone and on the outside all over again.

She saw her schoolteacher.

‘Vera!’ he greeted her. ‘How wonderful that you got out of Japan. We were so worried. Are you coming back to class?’

‘I’m working now,’ she said.

Sensing her adulthood, her independence, he continued. In the schoolyard there were others who’d taken jobs, who for their own reasons couldn’t be part of the crowd, the teacher told her. She should come back; she would find some others like her.

But it was late autumn now, and she had missed the beginning. The war machine had caught up to her, invading Canada too: troops were piling into train carriages to be shuttled across the great wide plains and then onto ships to Europe. There were boys becoming men and girls alone with the little ones as mothers went to work. There were more current events than you could imagine and she was on the outside, again, and in mourning, again.

Tamio had been amputated from her body. His weight and the comfort of him, and the spice of him and his thrusting; it was all gone. She felt concave and ghostly. She could not eat. There was meatloaf, delivered by neighbouring women: ‘Oh what a miracle you have come home safely! We are all so happy for you and your father!’ they said.

It wasn’t home there, and it wasn’t home here, either.

There were casseroles with ham and scalloped potatoes from the church suppers. ‘You have been delivered from the enemy!’ the minister said, triumphantly.

The hard rounded muscles in her legs softened up and went thin. She was shedding Japan and the summer island. Perhaps she had never gone there. Only when she woke up in the early morning, before the cars began to run their wet tyres on wet streets, could she imagine an island dawn, and remember how she used to rise and go immediately to the well, and sometimes heard the cranes cracking the silence with their raucous cries.

Hamilton didn’t bother about what she did all day. She made her way to Japantown and got herself a wooden
bokkuto.
In the house behind the drawn curtains every day she would practise the cuts. Her body moved stiffly at first,
reluctant to follow the lessons. The ones Ikkanshi-san had taught her, so she would not forget. And she would think of Ikkanshi-san’s words. She practised the duets they had done together. The idea was to take advantage of a mistake made by one partner, and win. She sobbed as she practised. He had betrayed her. Never mind. If he was the enemy, so much the better; she could do the
kata
and really mean it.

When she felt braver, she went down to the beach in the early morning and practised there beside the Pacific Ocean. The other side of the same ocean, she thought. The same water. She knew this water.

How can you know water? It is never the same, said Ikkanshisan. It may be in the same place, but it is not the water that was there yesterday. If you say you know the water what you are saying is that you know one minute of the water. The container is what you know. You don’t know water at all.

I do know water, said Vera. I have learned water. I have brought back what I learned. It is the one thing I brought back. Nothing else. Water is everywhere. I can look at the surface and what is underneath becomes apparent to me. I could map the underwater sea bed; I could find anything that falls into it.

Tell me again: what do you know about water, Ikkanshi-san repeated.

She told him: I know the colour of it in every wind. I know the shorelines and the depth of it. Where the rocks are hidden under the surface and how close to the surface. If the wind blows from the west, that the top of the rock will cause a dimple, that is all, no hint of the rest, but if the wind blows from the east an ugly crag breaks the surface – in one place – I know that three feet farther there is more rock down in the darkness.

How do you know the darkness? he asked, quietly.

They were sitting, now, in his new, perfect, empty room. It was, temporarily, her sleeping room, and her sword practice room. This would be one of the last times. He paid her the compliment of letting her lead. She was to do the exercise first, and he would show her if she made mistakes.

I see myself in it.

That is good. You are learning, he said. When I see an opponent threatening to strike, Ikkanshi said, I try to transform myself into him. I then know every move he will make. If I stop even for a hair’s breadth between his action and my own, between my own and the next, I am dead.

Hamilton went off each day to the offices of Lowinger and McBean on Homer Street. He never invited her, but one day she went after him. And there it was, the frosted glass, the half door, the gold classical printed letters on the door: Lowinger and McBean. Here she thought the whole world was lost, but it was going on much as before. Well not entirely: Miss Hinchcliffe was absent as promised, her desk a mess of papers and full ashtrays, with Hamilton Drew’s feet up right in the middle of it. He sat jawing on the telephone, and did not look pleased when Vera came in. It was nothing to how displeased Miss Hinchcliffe would have been, Vera thought. In her grandfather’s office the Beauties still stood around the walls like a picket fence, but Hamilton had stuck pins in them, right through to the old, softening plaster walls, pins to hold up notepapers on which were scribbled numbers and addresses.

The café regulars met still and talked about the war: Kemp, and Roberta the waitress, the postman on his rounds. But now there were working women who dropped in looking important on their way to jobs making uniforms for the soldiers. And if she went to join them, she found herself sitting in the same booth where she had sat before she left, with her grandfather. And hearing the same stories but told differently, by Hamilton Drew.

In Hamilton’s stories she was poor Vera, the tall girl, so pale, who’d been spirited off to Japan when poor Belle died. The girl who’d been cold and hungry and diving half naked for shellfish with the natives until her father rescued her.

‘But Dad!’ Vera protested. He made himself the hero. She
excused him; supposed they would all do the same given a chance.

Her father charmed her, the way he told it. How gallant he was! How gentle, as he lightly touched her back. How sensitive, as tears came to his eyes when he thought of the hut he had found her living in, on the summer island.

‘Sucking on fish skeletons, wasn’t she?’ He patted her shoulder. She did not like to be touched, not now

‘With algae growing in her hair.’

‘Dad!’ (Yes, it had gone green; that happens to blondes who spent all day in the sea. But he didn’t say that.)

‘And the native boys eyeing her.’

More than eyeing me, if you only knew Dad, she thought. She smiled modestly down into her teacup.

‘Best of all, she’d taken up the sword to defend herself hadn’t you? Imagine my astonishment! Taking lessons from a samurai who’d fetched up there, on the lam from the Imperial Army, wasn’t he?’

‘Not a samurai, Dad, a sword polisher.’

‘She’s got guts; you can say that for her. Not like her mother –’

Mr Kemp winked at her. ‘You never know, you never know,’ he said. He travelled to Japan every year to buy and sell fabrics. His warehouse was the floor above Lowinger and McBean. He was a kindly man, who ended every utterance with a chuckle of embarrassment. He was distracted by little dogs and cats, any animal that went by. Women he did not notice much, though he flirted with Vera, in a chivalrous way, winking when he came in the door, chuckling again when Vera’s father went on talking about the Lowingers.

‘I suppose it skips a generation. The grandmother was a terror. Forbade her daughter to marry me.’

‘I’d say she showed some good sense there, Drew.’

There were hearty laughs all around the table.

‘Old Captain Lowinger himself didn’t like me either –’

‘You never know,’ concluded Mr Kemp, putting his palm flat on the table and pushing himself to his feet.

Vera’s grandfather used to say that pearl-bearing oysters once lived near shore, comfortably, in warm shallow water. But oysters retreated to deeper, more secretive places because ancient people hunted them.

He made her laugh, describing a huddled tribe of refugee molluscs migrating down the sloping ocean floor, in their slow, inch by inch way; drifting on tides, tipping down inclines, shooting themselves forward on a jet of expelled air when they flexed their one and only muscle to snap the shell shut. She liked the thought of this undersea migration, silent hooded throngs of knobby, scaled, parasite-coated creatures moving, followed by those that fed on them, the starfish and the octopus and the eels. It was a slow migration, a few inches in each generation, a foot in twenty-five years. In summer, the oysters would spawn and the surface of the sea would bubble with foamy eggs. The eggs would float into contact with sperm and be fertilised. By autumn the egg would be swollen to the size of a thumbnail; over winter it would become a spat.

The spat were the clever ones in the new generation, who shrank from the shadows of boats floating over them, and dived under the sand as spears and dredges came down on them. They would tumble, shoot, drift farther down, away from the light and the glittering surface, until they came to a new shelf. Immigrants, the baby oysters would attach themselves to this shelf. After two years they would have a shell, at four years be ready to produce a pearl, at eight years they were dead. The last spawn would have moved again, set up home in some new safe haven, under an overhanging bank, where the waters were temperate, where the tides were not too violent and the storms couldn’t reach.

‘The shining of a fine pearl,’ James Lowinger once said, ‘is a half uncanny thing.’ As lustrous, as eerie, as suffused with
moonlight or yellow flame as a pearl might appear in his palm, he would sigh and say, ‘Imagine how it must have shone when it was hidden in the dark cold bottom of the sea!’

‘But why would it shine brighter there, Grandfather?’ Vera would ask. It wasn’t logical.

‘I just fancy they were brighter down there, that’s all. Where they come from, where they’re at home and not afraid. They can be alone and be true to themselves. There’s many an unknown in the study of pearls and in the world in general, and many an answer that isn’t logical, my girl,’ he would say. ‘They shine best for themselves alone.’

Wherever he was in his travels, all through his life after his marriage, and becoming a father, James practised a kind of tithing. When he had a cache of pearls to send to traders in Europe or New York, he would take out one, and put it away. It was his pension, his tax to himself. He didn’t notice the cut from his gains, because he didn’t know what the gain would be. He never took the best pearl – he was too greedy for that – but it was always far from the poorest too.

The trick was where to keep it. He had no associates. He was sleeping in grass huts and Chinese bunkhouses and over the bar at port-side hotels; sometimes he had a little house, but he was never there long enough to establish a safety deposit. He got a habit of sending the pension pearl ‘home’ to Sophia for safekeeping.

This was never easy: there were taxes to avoid, and thieves in Her Majesty’s Post Office. He invented a scheme of burying the pearl in a present for Belle, a kewpie doll or a pincushion or a set of fake pearl cufflinks. Miss McBean (who despite being his
wife had never in spirit surrendered her maidenhead) for all her many faults was not an avaricious person, and after a few years she lost interest. It was Belle who unwrapped each pair of Chinese slippers or packet of Indian silk and knew there’d be a pearl somewhere.

That was their game and he kept up his tithing, and forgot the stash: there was always some new gem to be bought for a song and sold for an opera. Times were good. In 1912 there was a dip when the Balkan war scared the Americans and Europeans out of buying. But before the year was out, there were fresh millionaires everywhere and every one of them wanted to buy a famous pearl, to be not only rich, but elegantly, tastefully, so. Traders in Paris were cabling abroad demanding magnificent specimens for the possessor of some newly-minted fortune.