With My Little Eye (17 page)

The first thing that I noticed about him was that he was
carrying
a large, battered suitcase, secured with a thick, hairy cord. So far from being an elegant object, it suggested abject penury. But his own person certainly did not suggest that. Despite the heat, admittedly now flagging, he was wearing a shiny grey suit, all three buttons of which were fastened, a white shirt with a wine-red silk tie, and well-polished, extremely narrow black shoes.

‘Good morning, sir. I am Kanaseki. Hiro,’ he added. With a small grimace, he edged away from Bruin, who was jumping up to greet him.

‘Bruin! Stop that! Get down!
Down
!’

Bruin, as always when greeting or confronting a visitor, was slow to obey. I grabbed him and lifted him, wriggling, into my arms.

‘He’s quite harmless. He just gets over-excited.’

‘It is new fashion in Japan to keep dogs in house.’

‘Come in. Put that suitcase down there. Let’s have a little talk.’

I gestured to him to enter the sitting room ahead of me; but, head lowered, he was determined not to do so. He even waited until I was seated before sitting down in the chair opposite to mine. His whole torso was unnaturally erect and he held his head no less unnaturally high. As he clasped his hands, I noticed how beautiful they were, with long fingers and nails buffed to a sheen. I also soon noticed how beautiful he was, despite the dark rings round his eyes, his extremely pale
complexion
and a general air of physical fragility.

I soon felt, as before with Joy, that the interviewee was really interviewing the interviewer. For each tentative question put by myself, there were at least two bold ones put by him. What had brought me to Japan? How long was I planning to stay? Was I living alone in the house? Would my wife be returning? His voice was low and slightly husky. From time to time he would
give a small, nervous cough, a hand raised to his mouth. I noticed the gold band on his wedding finger. He had no
compunction
in enquiring about my private life; but although I was curious to know if the band indicated that he was married, I did not put the question.

Would he like to see the rooms? The house was a large one and there were a number of them, I said. He could choose which suited him best. He appraised each in turn, uttering little. At one point, in a room that had its own washbasin, he went over and tried the taps. At another he merely stood at the window for a while, staring out across the garden as though deep in thought. Eventually, to my astonishment, he opted for what had always seemed to me the most unattractive of all the rooms on offer. Box-like and entered by a door from the
kitchen
, it had a small, high window overlooking the yard. There was little furniture in it and that of poor quality, and one of the soiled pale-green corduroy curtains was sagging from its rail.

‘Are you sure this is the room you like best?’

He nodded. ‘If I come, this room is good for me.’

‘But to get to it you have to go through the kitchen.’

‘No problem.’ He gave a small, elusive, faintly ironic smile, with which I was later to become all too familiar. ‘If I come, I will be often in kitchen.’

After our tour of inspection we returned to the sitting room. As before he waited for me to be seated before sitting down.

‘You wish for reference?’

‘Well, yes. I suppose so. That’s the usual formality, isn’t it?’

‘I have letter from Monsieur Daladier – French consul in Tokyo, now in Africa. If you wish, I can also give telephone of manager of Miyako Hotel. But’ – he made a little grimace – ‘he and I not big friend. Monsieur Daladier very good man,’ he added.

I began to read Daladier’s letter, which was full of praise. I looked up from it. ‘So you really think that you’d like to work for me?’

He considered for a moment and then nodded his head emphatically. ‘Yes, yes!’

‘Monsieur Daladier says you’re a first-rate cook. Coming from a Frenchman, that’s really something.’

‘I like cooking very much. First I learned from Madame Daladier.’

There was no mention of a Madame Daladier in the letter. ‘Well, that sounds excellent. Oh, one thing. Can you drive?’

‘Drive?’ He looked puzzled.

‘I have a car. A very large Cadillac. Very difficult to manage in Kyoto, with so many narrow streets.’

‘Sorry. I never learn.’ His face lit up. ‘But maybe you teach me?’

‘Maybe.’ But I was certainly not going to take on that chore. ‘So when can you start?’

‘Now?’

‘You mean today?’

He nodded and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Why not? I am free. I am ready.’ He laughed. ‘I have luggage. Tonight I cook your dinner.’

‘Well, that’s fine. Terrific.’ But, having felt so enthusiastic, I now experienced a vague unease.

‘We haven’t discussed money yet.’

‘What you wish.’

‘Oh, no, we must fix that. Otherwise – who knows? – I might cheat you.’ I mentioned a sum, generous for Japan at that period.

He nodded. ‘I am happy for what you wish. But you must telephone Miyako Hotel manager to check me.’

‘Yes, I’ll do that.’ In fact I never did. ‘But first we’d better get you settled in.’

After he had followed me out into the hall and picked up his suitcase, there was a ring at the bell. I was about to go to the door but he forestalled me. He opened it to reveal an extremely tall, muscular middle-aged man in a beautifully cut, beige
raw-silk
suit and a wide-brimmed panama hat, with what looked more like a red-and-blue sash than a ribbon around it.

For three or four seconds the two Japanese stared at each other, the younger transfixed by the older. Then Hiro said, ‘Excuse me. I go to my room.’ Having hefted the giant suitcase, he left us.

The visitor smiled at me. ‘You do not know me,’ he said in a near-perfect American accent. ‘I am Dr Kawasaki. My mother is your landlady.’

‘Oh, yes! Do come in. I heard from Mrs Katinka – you know, of the boarding house – that you would shortly arrive. And now here you are! Please.’ I indicated the sitting room.

He smiled, revealing regular, white teeth of a kind that, unless false, were then rare in Japan. ‘Not now. Later I hope. I just wanted to introduce myself. I hope we’ll see more of each other later. At present I’m jet-lagged. As you’ll know, my
mother
is gravely – probably terminally – ill. So I felt that I must be here with her.’

‘I wish I could do something for her.’

‘Thank you. But now there’s little to be done. We thought her indestructible. She was never ill. Until now, she had never been in a hospital except to visit me at my work. But sadly …’

‘Is your family with you?’

‘It was difficult to bring them.’ Without elaborating, he put out a hand. ‘I’m happy to have met you.’ I took the hand. Its grip was professionally emphatic. ‘We must soon meet again – either here or over at my place.’

After he had gone, I went into the kitchen and called through the door into the bedroom beyond it, ‘Are you all right in there?’

‘Yes, thank you.’ Hiro appeared in the doorway, a coat
hanger
in a hand. ‘Who is that gentleman?’

‘Dr Kawasaki. He’s the son of my landlady. He’s just arrived from South America to be with her. She’s very ill – maybe dying.’

He turned away. I hesitated, moved off and then halted. Over my shoulder I glanced into the room through the half-open door. Totally absorbed in the task, he had already begun to tweak at a jacket before slipping it over the coat hanger that he had first put down on the bed.

At breakfast Laura has an infuriating way of spreading out the
Daily
Telegraph
on the kitchen table, so that I have no space for my own
Independent
and little space for my plate or cup.

‘Oh, I see that Rex Cauldwell has died! He was ninety-seven.’

She also has an infuriating way of reading out titbits of news that are of absolutely no interest whatever to me. But this one is.

‘You remember him, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do. I’ve not yet succumbed to Alzheimer’s. Or if I have, I’ve forgotten that I’ve done so.’

‘One couldn’t help liking him. Did you know that he was a CBE?’

‘No. That figures. He progressed from one major post to another and ended up in Paris, the plum of them all. When I think back, the tolerance of the British Council in those far-off days astonishes me. Nowadays we keep hearing of this
pink-ceiling
thing in organisations like the BBC and the Foreign Office, but there was a time when practically every British Council representative was queer.’

‘I never thought he’d get so far. Not I mean because of being queer. But he was always so
lazy
.’

‘Yes, but clever with it. People were always saying admiringly that he could delegate – which merely meant that he had the gift of getting subordinates to do the things that he himself could not be bothered to do.’

‘I wish we hadn’t lost touch with him.’

I sighed. ‘I wish that of a lot of people. Why did we let our lives become so narrow?’

‘Because lives, like arteries, tend to narrow in old age. That’s the way it is.’

I was taking Bruin for a walk. That was the one thing that Hiro was always reluctant to do for me. Before going out for the day, I would say to him on leaving, ‘You will give Bruin his usual walks, won’t you?’ He would rarely make any reply, merely nodding. When I returned, often exhausted from grubbing in libraries or attempting to communicate with some authority (almost always male in those far-off days) on Japanese art in my rudimentary Japanese and his equally rudimentary English, I’d go out into the garden to find dog ‘poo’ (as Joy would always call it) either littering the lawn or else, a favourite
repository
, piled in a small, malodorous mound under the
persimmon
tree.

Now, as always, Bruin was straining at his leash, panting and gagging, while I tugged to restrain him. For a creature so small he was amazingly strong.

Suddenly a male voice called out from behind me, ‘Hi, there!’ I at once recognised it as belonging to Erwin Shott. Eager to return to my work, I had no wish for the kind of lengthy, rambling conversation to which, after their initial
taciturnity
to us at Katinka’s, he and his even more garrulous wife were now addicted whenever we met.

I turned. ‘Hi!’ I tried to look pleased.

‘So that’s the little fellow! We heard you’d got him. Hello, boy!’ Shott stooped and held out a hand, the forefinger and middle finger orange with nicotine. Bruin responded by baring his needle-sharp teeth and yapping. Swiftly I jerked him away.

‘You should get him a choke lead,’ Mrs Shott volunteered.

‘I don’t want to run the risk of choking him to death.’

‘That’s the only way he’ll learn,’ Shott said firmly. ‘With animals you must always make it clear who’s the master.’

‘That’s something I’ve never been good at.’

‘How’s the new houseboy working out?’ Mrs Shott asked.

I was surprised. I had not seen them since Hiro’s arrival. Then I reminded myself that in that then tiny expatriate
community everyone knew everything about everyone – even if, as was often the case, the parties had never met each other.

‘Oh, he’s terrific.’

‘As good as Joy? It’d be hard to find anyone as good as Joy.’

‘Oh, yes. Even better.’

‘You must be kidding,’ Shott said.

‘No. He’s like a robot programmed to anticipate all my needs and to do everything I want.’

‘Sounds kind of creepy,’ Mrs Shott exclaimed with a laugh.

‘Oh, no, not at all.’

Later, going over the conversation in my mind, I thought of that word ‘creepy’. Was he creepy? Well, perhaps yes, in as far as there is something creepy about perfection. As I turned my key in the door, he was somehow always present to take my briefcase and, if it was raining, also my umbrella, to watch me squat and take off my shoes, and then to select from a neatly ordered row the slippers that he had decided were mine and so never offered to anyone else. At exactly seven he would bring the usual bowl of ice into the sitting room and insist on
pouring
out for me the first of my many gins and tonics. He would then twitch a curtain straight or neatly fold a newspaper before giving his abrupt little bow, hands to knees, and leaving the room. He rarely spoke except to greet me or in answer to an enquiry of mine. From the start, he always addressed me as ‘master’ (in English). I remonstrated – better if he called me sensei, as so many Japanese did even though I was not a
professor
, or by my surname, or even by my Christian name. But he never complied, and eventually I gave up.

For all the hours that I might need him he rarely left the house, unless on a brief shopping expedition. He conducted what private life he had late in the evening, after I had gone up to bed. As I mounted the stairs, he would hurry out from his room through the kitchen and call up, ‘Good night, master! Sleep well!’ One of his long, delicate, perfectly manicured hands would be resting on the downstairs banister, one of mine on the banister high above him. He would peer up and I would peer down. Then I’d say, ‘And you sleep well, too.’ Later, with my then abnormally acute hearing, I’d catch the sound of the front door opening and shutting and the creaking of the gate into the street. Eventually I began actually to listen for them.
These nocturnal escapes from the life of solitary service that he had imposed on himself had begun to fascinate me.

His cooking was far superior to Joy’s or even Laura’s. With infinite care, even when I was eating alone, he would, like Joy before him, carry in the dishes and stoop for me to serve myself. ‘Oh, just put them down,’ I’d say, as Laura and I used to say to Joy; but he ignored my instruction. During the day he wore a summer kimono but for the evening he would put on either the shiny grey suit (I was never sure whether the material was silk or terylene) or a pair of dark-blue, immaculately ironed cotton trousers and a white cotton jacket. Often when I went to his room to ask him about something or for something, I would find him not there but in the intervening kitchen at the ironing board. In her haste to be done, Joy’s ironing had been slapdash, so that on one occasion, when we were going to a party at the British Consulate in Kobe, Laura had insisted that she must re-iron the shirt that she had selected for me and so had made us late. Hiro’s ironing was perfect.

When, one exceptionally stuffy evening, I entered the kitchen to ask for more ice, I was surprised to discover him at the
ironing
board not in his usual kimono but in only a jock strap. He showed no embarrassment, laying down the iron and then prompting me, ‘Yes, master? You want something?’

‘Oh, just some ice. I can get it.’ With a mixture of curiosity and a surge of excitement, as though two leads had been applied to my heart to give it a series of increasingly violent shocks, I was taking in every detail of a body that I had never seen virtually naked before. The pale, narrow torso, totally
hairless
and the skin even smoother than Laura’s, fascinated me.

‘I will bring.’ He turned to go to the refrigerator. It was then that I saw the shiny, diagonal bruise, like an oil slick, stretching from the top of his right shoulder almost down to his left hip. I was so shocked that I cried out, ‘What on earth have you done to yourself?’

He turned, ice tray in hand. ‘Sorry?’

‘Your back!’

‘Oh, I have fall. I get off streetcar and I slip. No problem.’

‘But why didn’t you tell me?’

He shook his head and gave me that small, elusive, faintly
ironic smile with which I had now become so familiar. ‘It is not important. Now I will get lemon. Please. I come soon.’

Having set down the oval tray with the ice bucket and saucer of lemon slices, he said, ‘Gin and tonic, master?’

‘Yes, please.’ As he raised the Gordon’s bottle, I added, ‘But be a little more generous this time.’

‘Please?’

‘Make it a big, big one. I mean more gin, not more tonic.’

Up to that moment he had never initiated a conversation with me. But now, as he handed me the glass, he looked at me for a moment with eyes pitch-black and oddly yearning and then said in a voice so quiet that I could barely catch it, ‘Master, you drink too much. Always, drink, drink, drink. Not good.’

‘No, not good. You’re right.’ I shrugged. ‘But there it is.’

He was still staring at me. ‘Why you drink so much? Why?’

Strangely, I did not tell him to mind his own business, but replied wearily, ‘Because I’m unhappy.’

‘Unhappy? Why unhappy?’

‘Because I miss my beautiful wife and beautiful baby.’

‘They do not come back?’

‘I don’t know.’

He tilted his head to one side and sighed. His curiosity seemed to have been satisfied.

‘Call me if you want something, master.’ He turned back at the door. ‘Usually master has drink at seven. Now’ – he looked at the Longines watch on a narrow gold bracelet on his wrist (how odd, I had thought when first seeing it, that he should have a watch so expensive) – ‘it is not yet six.’

‘Drink makes the time pass quicker.’

‘You want time to pass quick?’

‘Yes. The quicker the better.’

That was the first real conversation that we had ever had. In my loneliness and despair I now craved for others with him. When I initiated one, he would stand stiffly, listening but saying little. When I ventured to put a question about his own life, he would answer briefly and reluctantly. Sometimes he would merely dismiss the question – ‘Not interesting’ or ‘I bore you.’

Dr Kawasaki was rarely at home. Early in the morning he
would set off in the large, modern Mercedes that he was either renting or had bought and would usually return at eight or nine. I assumed that he spent the whole day at the hospital with his mother. On the rare occasions when we ran into each other, he would say yet again that he hoped soon to ask me over. At last he did so, having first enquired if I played chess. In those days, having represented my Oxford college, I was proud of my skill. But he soon demonstrated, in humiliating fashion, that he was by far my superior. Our game over, he led me out into the garden, where we sat by a fountain, overgrown with weeds but still spouting, and drank white wine – an unusual drink at a period when it was whisky that was usually favoured by the Japanese well-to-do. So alert during our game, he now was clearly tired. He spoke of his wife and three children and then added that I’d be able to understand how he felt without them, since I too was now alone. At one point he asked what I had been doing during the war. I was a conscientious objector, I told him, working on a remote farm in Shropshire. He frowned at that and shook his head. Then he laughed, ‘In this country they’d have shot you, not sent you to milk cows.’

‘And you?’

‘As a doctor I was doing a doctor’s work.’ Whatever that doctor’s work was, he clearly did not wish to talk about it.

A few days after my visit, I was sitting in my tower study. Miss Morita had just left, bearing away a number of things that she would be typing for me. Feeling unaccountably restless and
dissatisfied
, I lowered my book and went to the window. I could now hear two voices in conversation in Japanese below me. Dr Kawasaki and Hiro, the latter holding a trowel, were talking over the low wall between the two houses. Dr Kawasaki said something and Hiro then laughed loudly, throwing back his head, in a way that he had never laughed in my presence. They went on talking eagerly.

Two evenings later, a short time after midnight, Bruin started to scratch at the door and whimper – a sure sign to me that he wished to be taken out. I stumbled out of bed, pulled on my dressing gown, pushed my feet into my slippers and hurried downstairs. Arms akimbo, I stood motionless in the long, totally deserted lane and watched him go from tree to tree,
cocking a leg. Finally he squatted by one and, a rapt expression on his face, began to strain and eventually defecated. Gladdened by this feat, he scampered off.

In the distance I heard a car approaching. It was a large black Mercedes. It stopped outside the Kawasaki house and two men got out. One was Dr Kawasaki and the other, to my
amazement
, Hiro. They talked for a little while in low voices and then separated. Dr Kawasaki walked deliberately, head bowed, to the one house. Hiro hurried to the other and skipped up the steps. Clearly neither of them had seen me.

I surprised myself by feeling not merely amazed and
mystified
but also jealous – or was it possessive? I lay on my back, sleepless, trying to work it out. A number of scenarios, each less plausible than the one that had preceded it, processed through my mind.

Then at last I fell asleep.

At breakfast the next morning, Hiro’s air of chronic ill-health seemed to have intensified. The rings round his eyes were even darker, the greenish-white sheen of that miraculously smooth skin even more marked. As he set down the coffeepot, his
nostrils
dilated as he stifled one yawn and then another.

‘I didn’t know you knew Dr Kawasaki.’

Frozen, he stared at me with wide-open eyes. ‘I meet him in Miyako bar before he go to South America. He is customer. In Japan barman must talk to customer. That is the way.’