With My Little Eye (10 page)

‘Cheerio!’

I might not have been there.

Eagerly Laura began to ask the man a whole succession of increasingly intimate questions. He answered with more and more reluctance, taking in a gulp of air each time before he did so and draining his cup of sake as soon as he had finished. Soon, I realised, everyone in the bar was listening to these exchanges, even though I guessed that few of them were capable of following them. I wished that Laura would stop. Her present euphoria was now disturbing me as much as her increasingly frequent periods of depression and lethargy in the past few days had ever done.

Suddenly, in peremptory fashion, she banged on the counter with her cup. ‘More! More, please.’ She held out the cup. The waiter poured, with deliberate slowness. He was staring at her with a gaze that suddenly struck me as disapproving, disgusted, even hostile. ‘
Arigato
!’ It was one of the few Japanese words that she knew. She raised the glass and sipped. ‘To you, old chum!’ Ignoring the toast, he turned away, stooped and fetched a metal tray from under the counter. Banging one hand on it, as though it were a tambourine, he then disappeared into the back of the bar.

‘How about a move?’

‘Oh, no. I told you – I’m having fun.’ She gulped again at the sake. ‘Lots of fun.’

It was at that moment that I realised that the whole
atmosphere
had changed. Our fellow drinkers, their faces all flushed, had ceased to find our intrusion either amusing or interesting. So silent previously, each lost in a private world of dazed
contentment
, they were now suddenly all talking to each other, their voices growing more and more strident. No doubt they were habitués and so, long-time acquaintances. There were
giggles
, then explosions of laughter. The eyes that had once glanced at us only momentarily had become confrontational in the derisive, even aggressive, fixity of their gaze. I slid off my stool and asked for the bill. The waiter, instead of producing
one, merely muttered a sum. I was too confused to grasp what it was and so held out some notes for him to take what was owed. Carefully he selected what he wanted. Then, without a word, he turned away.

‘We don’t want to leave now‚’ Laura protested.

‘Yes, we do. Come on.
Come
!’ I grabbed her arm above the elbow and jerked her off her stool.

‘But why –?’

‘Come!’

Outside she turned on me angrily, ‘What got into you?’

‘They wanted us out.’

‘What are you talking about? They were so friendly.’

‘Not at the end. That’s their world, not ours. They wanted us out.’

‘Rubbish!’

‘I could understand only a little of what they were saying but I can tell you – it wasn’t friendly.’

‘Oh, you imagine these things. You get so paranoid.’

‘
Me
paranoid?’ I put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Shall we take a little walk? It’s pleasantly cool now.’

‘Yes, why not?’ Her mood had again changed with
disconcerting
abruptness. ‘But can you remember where we left the Caddie?’

‘I think so, hope so.’

Miraculously no longer tipsy, she took my arm in hers and rested her head on my shoulder. ‘I’m so glad we left that awful film. That was such an amusing time in that bar. I loved that little man in his business suit. Priceless. Thank you for taking me there.’

As we approached the house down the long lane, we saw that there was an ambulance at its far end.

Laura was horrified. ‘Is that ambulance outside our house?’

‘I don’t think so. Why should it be?’

‘Perhaps something has happened to Mark.’

As we neared, the ambulance took off. We then glimpsed the Shotts standing together on the pavement, not outside our house but outside Mrs Kawasaki’s.

Laura jumped out of the car, leaving the door open. ‘What’s happened? What’s happened?’

Mrs Shott trotted over and put a hand on her arm. ‘Don’t worry, dear. Mark’s all right. It’s Mrs Kawasaki. That maid came over in a terrible state to say she’d had a turn. So we called an ambulance.’

‘A turn? What sort of turn?’ But there was now none of the previous shock and anxiety in Laura’s voice, merely interest.

‘We don’t know,’ Shott took up. ‘It seems she must have passed out.’

‘She was conscious by the time that they carried her out to the ambulance. On a stretcher. She even saw us and recognised us.’

‘She sort of smiled.’

‘The maid’s gone with her.’

Far off I heard the pipe, with its three mournful notes, of the late-night noodle man with his stall on wheels. Students,
swotting
into the early hours, were his chief customers.

‘How about some noodles?’ Laura suddenly suggested. ‘I love those noodles of his.’ She turned to the Shotts. ‘You could do with some, couldn’t you?’ She had, it was clear, already
forgotten
Mrs Kawasaki now on her way to the hospital in an ambulance.

‘Well, I don’t know …’ Shott was dubious, ‘It’s getting kinda late.’

‘Just for a short while.’

‘OK. If you insist.’

‘Darling’ – Laura turned to me – ‘get us four bowls. I’ll warm some sake. I’ve drunk a lot already but I could do with some more.’

I still marvel at Laura’s patience and care. This morning she insists on bringing my breakfast to me in bed. Then she runs my bath, supports me on the short walk along the corridor to the bathroom, and insists on helping me in. She picks up my facecloth. ‘Let me soap you.’

I laugh, at once touched and irritated. ‘I’m not an invalid. I can do it for myself. I really can.’

‘That young Scottish doctor told me that you must take things easy.’

‘Taking things easy doesn’t mean not doing anything for myself.’

As I get out of the bath, she watches me, a towel at the ready. Then she envelops me in it and begins to rub me vigorously. Later it is with difficulty that I stop her from kneeling down and pulling on my socks for me.

Dressed, I tell her that I want to walk down to the local library to consult Laurence P. Roberts’s
A
Dictionary
of
Japanese Art
. She at once stops emptying the dishwasher and insists that she will come with me. I protest that that is totally unnecessary but she is already pulling on a coat.

‘No, you don’t have to guide me. Just warn me if I’m about to walk into a lamp post or a dustbin. Or someone else.’ In fact I am feeling nervous and exposed. I should like to clutch on to her but know that I mustn’t. As Dr Szymanovski keeps
impressing
on me, I must learn to adapt.

In the reference section I open the book and turn to the entry that I want. I am seated, she looks over my shoulder. ‘Shall I read it for you? That print is so small.’

Patiently I explain to her, as I have repeatedly explained to her in the past and as I have had to explain to so many other people: ‘There is nothing wrong with my central vision. With my glasses it was always fine for reading, it’s still fine. What I’ve lost is my peripheral vision. That’s nothing to do with my eyes. It’s to do with an area of my brain.’

‘Don’t you want to take the lift?’ At her insistence we took it on the way up to the reference section.

‘No. I must get used to stairs.’

She frowns and then steps away from me. But she is close to me, a protective guardian, as we walk down. ‘Hold on to the rail. Firmly. The last thing you want is a fall.’

I’m tempted to say, ‘The first thing I want is for you to stop fussing over me.’ But with difficulty I restrain myself.

When, out in the street, she takes my arm, I jerk away. ‘No! Let me manage for myself. Please.’

‘Oh, you’re so obstinate!’

Now I am sitting in the conservatory that we added to our little Queen Anne house three years ago. I am in the reclining chair into which, arm around my shoulders, she insisted on helping me. A new biography of Yukio Mishima rests on my knees. When I have finished reading it – if I ever do – I’ll post it to Miss Morita. Since his death, at once so shocking, so preposterous and so futile, she has been weirdly obsessed with him. When she has referred to him in one of her letters, as she frequently does, I make no mention of him in my replies.

I look out into the garden and watch Laura, the summer sun glinting on the thick white hair that she now wears in a straight pageboy bob. She is cutting some roses. The snip-snip-snip of the secateurs sounds as if she were shredding the air.

This morning I have been increasingly exasperated by her solicitude for me, and I have tried less and less to conceal that feeling. But now, seeing her absorbed in her task, I feel
simultaneously
moved, abashed and guilty. When in Kyoto all those years ago she suffered that near-breakdown, I constantly tried to pretend both to her and, worse, to myself that nothing was amiss. If she wanted to lie for hours on end in our air-
conditioned
bedroom, while I visited yet another temple, garden or palace, well, that was her choice. Yet here she is, half a century later, repaying that indifference with so much concern,
kindness
, pity and, yes, love.

She comes through the door, the roses in one hand. I
suddenly
realise how beautiful she still is. The lined face is perfect in its symmetry, the cheekbones far more pronounced, the
eyebrows
far more strongly chiselled, and the mouth far more firm
than during that long-ago period of excessive heat, turmoil and unhappiness.

I am about to get up from the chair. Swiftly she puts the roses down on a table.

‘Wait! Let me help you. Wait,
wait
!’

Reluctantly, the exasperation surging up in me like a
corrosive
bile, I wait.

Laura had moved the cumbersome air conditioner close to her chair. Or, since it was so heavy, perhaps Joy had moved it for her. Mark was in a crook of her arm, motionless, eyes fixed unwinking on me as I approached. At that moment, with his smooth, shiny porcelain skin and his strangely red lips, he fully deserved Mrs Shott’s repeated reference to him as ‘A doll! A real little doll!’ He really might have been one. The breeze from the whirring machine raised the fine, blonde hairs, little more than fluff, on his scalp.

Laura did not even raise her eyes when I said, ‘Hello, darling. How are you feeling?’

‘Hot.’

‘But it’s really quite cool in here. In my study it’s almost unbearable. That fan does no good at all. I tried to work for a while but I couldn’t.’

‘I keep changing my clothes. I can’t stand the stickiness.’

I suddenly remembered a fellow student at Oxford, with whom briefly I thought myself in love. With the same
obsessiveness
with which Laura would now change her clothes,
sometimes
three or four times a day, this student would constantly scrub her hands, so that they had the raw appearance of having recently been scalded.

‘How is he today?’

‘Well, he hasn’t been sick since the last feed. But his weight isn’t right. Dr Anson said there was nothing to worry about but what does he know? He’s not a paediatrician, he’s primarily a surgeon.’

‘Would you like me to ask Mrs Kawasaki for the name of a paediatrician?’ The old woman had recently returned,
emaciated
, unsteady and shaken with tremors, from the hospital.

‘Oh, God, no! Better a second-rate American surgeon than some Japanese witch doctor.’

I went over and placed my hand gently on Mark’s head. I felt a terrible sorrow. There was something so defenceless and so
pitiable about him, as he looked up at me with his bemused, wondering, pale-blue eyes, edged with almost white lashes. Gently she edged him further up the crook of her arm, as though deliberately to remove him from my touch.

‘I was wondering. Would you like to come to this party with me?’

‘
This
party? What party is that?’

‘I told you. Katinka’s birthday. We don’t have to stay too long. I’ve bought her a box of Marazoff chocolates as a present. Far more expensive than she deserves but there it is.’

Slowly she shook her head, while with a chiming slowness the fingers of her right hand now lifted and now patted Mark’s near-white fuzz of hair. In a considered tone she said, ‘I don’t like that woman. Not at all. Why should I help to celebrate her birthday?’

‘She’s not all that bad. She was kind to us – on balance. When I run into her in the street –’

‘When I run into her in the street I try to make myself scarce before she can see me.’

‘You don’t have to talk to her. We’ll see some of the people we met while we were –’

‘My, what a treat!’

I ignored the venomous interruption. ‘And I gather from the Shotts that there are some interesting new ones.’

‘The Shotts are the sort of people who find the
Japan
Times
so interesting that they spend a whole day reading it. Oh, please!’

I continued to try to persuade her but soon realised that it was hopeless.

‘Well, you won’t mind if I go, will you? For a short time.’

‘Why should I mind?’

‘Remember, it’s Joy’s day off.’

‘I’m not likely to forget. Without her …’

She broke off.

‘Yes? Without her?’ It was ridiculous to feel these sudden jabs of jealousy over someone so ugly, whose only talent was for cooking and cleaning.

‘I don’t know how I’d survive.’

‘Are things really as bad as that?’

She turned her head away. Mark let out a little mew as she shifted in the chair. She said nothing. 

Garish paper streamers sagged from a ceiling that was still, as I remembered from our brief stay, yellow-grey with grime. On a square lace cloth on a round table in the centre of the room, two vases of towering, ponderously scented lilies flanked a
portrait
of Katinka, clearly taken at least twenty years before, in an elaborate silver frame. At its base was a card bearing the words in ungainly capitals:

A rosebud was drawn inexpertly with pink and green crayons on one corner. Nudging the card out of position, was a
wrapped
present, thin and long – an umbrella? a stick? – and a bulging brown paper bag presumably containing another present. There were also presents behind the card, on either side of it, and on the floor. I added my box of chocolates, in the used gift paper that Joy had found in a drawer before
impatiently
relieving me of the task of clumsily wrapping it up.

I looked around for Katinka. Then she emerged through the door from the kitchen. She was bearing a large oval Pyrex dish, piled high with sausage rolls, in gloved hands. Having set down this load on one of the two long tables, next to a platter
containing
an even higher-piled load of thickly cut sandwiches, she hurried over to me, arms outstretched and calling out my name.

‘Those sausage rolls are a present from your Joy. You tell her of birthday? She is so kind a lady. I invite her but she has other job.’ Strangely, while wrapping my present, Joy had said not a word to me either of her own present or of the invitation. ‘Once she works for me – long time ago.’ She looked around her and then asked, ‘But where is your lady?’

‘Oh, my lady sends her best wishes and apologies. She’s not all that well … This heat is getting her down.’

Katinka rubbed hands twisted with arthritis down her dirndl skirt as though to tame its extravagant, multi-coloured flounces. The nails, many of them chipped, had been varnished bright
red and for the first time I was seeing her lips not pale and chapped, as they usually were even in the summer furnace of that time, but crimson with lipstick, a smear of which had somehow got on to one side of her chin. ‘Oh, I am sorry. Joy told me something.’

Before I could ask what the something was, Katinka’s
husband
, his feet in their usual slippers, shuffled by bearing a tray on which filled glasses rattled, in danger of toppling over. Since he did not stop for me, I reached out and tried to grab one.

‘Not champagne,’ Katinka warned. ‘Too expensive. A cup. A little this, a little that, a little’ – she turned her face up to me with an impish smile – ‘something secret, very secret, known only to Katinka. If you prefer – Coca-Cola, of course.’ She reached out for a half-empty bottle of Coca-Cola from a nearby table, either anticipating my choice or making it for me.

I shook my head, as she held the bottle out to me. Did she expect me to drink from it? I knew that the Coca-Cola would be the highly sweetened version manufactured in Japan. I
hurried
over to Katinka’s husband, now some distance away, and seized a glass of the cup. I sipped. The taste, both bitter and saccharine, was oddly similar to that of marmalade. ‘I’ve left our little present on the table with the others,’ I told Katinka.

‘Oh, you are so kind. Always so kind. You know, this is special occasion, not ordinary, not at all. Today I top seventy. So much happen in my life, revolution, one husband die, then China, then Japan, then war, then children – all everywhere now, not here, some in States, some Australia, one Mexico. And here I am, landlady – with no money! I feel I am a hundred.’

‘You don’t look it,’ I volunteered.

She closed her right hand into a fist and punched me with it on the chest, hard enough to make me gasp. ‘You maybe flatter.’

How right she was!

Rex from the British Council was pushing himself through the crowd, followed by a young Japanese. ‘You must meet my houseboy. I brought him along because he loves this sort of social occasion. Don’t you, Masa?’ The boy grinned. ‘He’s on the Doshisha American football team. Aren’t you, Masa?’ The boy grinned again.

Through the open French doors I could see the Shotts
standing, each the centre of a group, in the narrow backyard. In one corner there were three dustbins, one with its lid lying upwards beside it. In the other corner two bicycles rested, shackled to each other, against a peeling wall. Shott was
smoking
his pipe.

Seeing me, Mrs Shott beckoned frantically and then called out, ‘Come and join us!’

I made my excuses to Rex and walked over to her.

‘I want to ask you – what news of your neighbour?’

‘Again in hospital.’

‘
Again
? That looks bad.’

‘There’s talk of her son coming back from Brazil.’

‘I don’t like the sound of that. He’s a medic, isn’t he?’

‘A famous one, I gather.’

‘Well, perhaps he can do something. Though I have a feeling – things having gone so far – and considering her age …’

At that moment Shott shouted to me, ‘Stop flirting with my wife and come over here for a sec! I want you to meet a young lady, just arrived, from your country. She’s a painter, believe it or not. But not in the line that interests you. She wants to work with some folk called the’ – he turned to the girl standing in front of him, her back to me – ‘what are they called, dear?’

‘The Gutai group.’

‘Have you heard of them?’ he asked me.

‘I’m afraid not.’

In a deep, husky voice with a trace of West Country accent, the girl said, ‘No reason why you should. But they’re going to be famous.’

‘And you’re going to become famous along with them.’ Shott put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Now, Betty – that is your name isn’t it? – I know you’ll get on fine with this fine English gentleman. He knows a lot about painting – Japanese painting.’ The hand went from her shoulder to mine, as he propelled the fine English gentleman closer to her.

There were freckles across the bridge of her nose and on the chest exposed in a vee where her blouse had two of its pearl buttons undone. Her eyes were green, with sandy lashes, and her forehead was low under a widow’s peak of thick, auburn hair. She was not a beauty, far from it. But immediately I felt as though a spark had ignited the dead wood of the days of
boredom, unease and sexual frustration caused by Laura’s
seemingly
unstoppable drift into indifference and despair.

As so often in such situations, I spoke too fast, while at the same time fumbling for words. She appeared to be interested in me, but perhaps that was just a social adroitness. She could not have been more than in her early twenties but she had about her an impressive air of competence and composure.

‘I’d like to see your pictures.’

‘Would you really? I doubt it.’ She laughed with what I can only describe as spontaneous delight not merely in our
conversation
but also in her new life in this odd boarding house in this even odder country. ‘So far I’ve only painted one since I arrived here. I’ve been so busy settling in and adjusting myself. All my other pictures are back in England.’

‘Are you liking it here?’

‘Oh, yes, of course, yes, yes.’

‘And the heat? That doesn’t bother you?’

‘Oh, no, I love it! I don’t want to sleep. Every night I go out for a walk along the canal. It’s so calm, so beautiful.’ She broke off. Her face had suddenly lit up as, now on tiptoe, she peered over my shoulder. ‘Oh, there’s my new friend! We met two days ago. He’s teaching at a university called Ritsumeikan.’ She waved an arm frantically. Then without a word, she left us and rushed back into the dining room.

‘Well, that’s a sweet kid,’ Shott said. ‘Now I must propose madam’s health. Excuse me.’

I did not wait for this. As all the other people in the yard began to crowd into the dining room, I looked for an
immediate
exit and found it from the yard into a narrow passage, crammed with litter and dead leaves, and so out into the road.

The fire that the girl had ignited in me still crackled away, at once disturbing and exhilarating. After we had been for so long so sexually active, Laura’s and my relationship had deteriorated into no more than a friendship, sometimes affectionate but for the most part scratchy and querulous. During the past days the heat that had made Laura so apathetic had made me
increasingly
horny. I had begun to masturbate – something that I had rarely done since my schooldays – two or three times each day. But the satisfaction was similar to that which I had experienced for a brief period during which, as an undergraduate, I had
been a chain smoker. For a few minutes the hunger was appeased; then it reiterated its demand even more urgently than before.

On my journey to the party, I had not brought the car but instead had walked up from the lane and along a narrow
pathway
that provided a short cut, through a wasteland in which people exercised dogs that they always kept on leads, up to the boarding house. Now I took the longer route along the canal. That was the route that she – that girl, that Betty – had told me she took for her evening walks, alone in the past but perhaps soon with the man with the shoulder-length hair and the face so oddly wizened for someone of his age, to whom she had waved so excitedly and who had eventually waved back with what appeared to be no more than amused condescension.