With My Little Eye (2 page)

I have never been wholly able to recapture the extraordinary exhilaration of those first weeks. I try now to recapture it, as I lie sleepless in the dimly lit ward, hour on hour, in silence broken by only an occasional mutter or moan, the hurried appearance, merely dipping a glance at me as he passes, of a diminutive Filipino night nurse, and a disturbance when the Moroccan opposite to me, a cook in a Soho restaurant I
overheard
him telling another patient, manages to spill his urine bottle and so drench his bed.

The April sun seemed always to shine, the temperature seemed always to be warm, and – rare in Kyoto, I later
discovered
– the air seemed always to be dry and clear. Our baby Mark seldom cried and the skin of his face, later so often red and crumpled by fever and the heat, was then smooth and strangely luminous, as though an invisible lamp were shining down on it with a soft, even light. I used to put out a hand to him and he would clutch one of my fingers with a grip that amazed me with its strength. It seemed to parallel the constant feeling that I had that now, for once, at long last I had myself achieved a firm grip on life.

With my meagre British Council scholarship I had little money. But Laura, then as now, had a lot of it. When I married her, there were friends who clearly thought that I had done so in part – perhaps even in major part – because of all that money flooding in from family trusts and the shrewd
investment
of millions, literally, left to her by her grandmother. But when we had first met, she had been living so simply and
economically
in a one-room flat in an inconveniently remote and dingy mansion at the far end of the Banbury Road, its Edwardian façade all but invisible behind rampant ivy, that I had assumed that, struggling to reconcile a tireless social life with completing a thesis, she must be as hard up as I was. That thesis, on ‘Time and Place in the Novels of Ivy
Compton-Burnett’
, had long since begun to bore her, as it would certainly
have bored her examiners, and she was soon to abandon it. That I did not give up on my certainly no less boring one on Uchida Iwao, Western-style painter and social-realist writer, was what had brought us to Japan.

A friend, a lecturer at SOAS, clearly unaware of how rich Laura was, had recommended to us a
pension
kept by an elderly Russian woman, an aristocratic émigrée known to everyone merely as Katinka, and her Japanese husband. We argued about whether to go to there or, as Laura could well afford, to opt for the Miyako Hotel. Then, on a whim, Laura decided, as she decided most things between us, that it might be ‘fun’ to go to the boarding house rather than to a ‘stuffy five-star palace’.

At least twenty years younger than she was, Katinka’s Japanese husband, a former waiter, shuffled around,
hunchbacked
and silent, in a pair of Western-style carpet slippers trodden down at the heels, as he performed, in what appeared to be slow motion, the few simple tasks that she, always so commanding and energetic, allotted to him. There were seven rooms and a dozen or so guests, the number depending on how many of them shared. People previously strangers to each other would often opt for reasons of economy to be cooped up in the same little wooden box, where they would at once start to get on each other’s nerves. Some of them were students, some youthful transients.

An elderly American couple, the Shotts, had for a
considerable
period occupied what was to all intents and purposes a small flat, part Western and part Japanese in style, at the far end of the building. Ignoring Laura’s attempts to be friendly, they tended merely to nod to us without speaking when we met at the entrance or passed each other in a corridor. Even indoors he always wore a tartan cap pulled down low over his forehead, and carried a heavy stick, as though not so much to support his sturdy frame as to beat off any potential assailant. What she almost invariably wore were ankle socks on her otherwise bare, scaly legs. Under one arm there would usually be a book – borrowed from the nearby British Council library, we eventually learned.

Why and how they had washed up in Kyoto, it took some weeks to learn. Unlike the rest of us, they prepared their own food and so at mealtimes never entered the long, low
communal dining room, with its decommissioned brass
samovar
on a doily-covered table at one end, and its hatch to the kitchen at the other. But as we walked past that room at other hours, we would often glance through its open door to see them sitting on unyielding upright chairs at one of the three large, circular tables, while talking with a feverish animation to Katinka – or Mrs Katinka, as the Japanese usually called her. Their raised voices and uninhibited laughter reverberated down the corridor in pursuit of us. What had they to say to each other? Why, so detached and silent when running into us, were the Americans now so rowdy and jolly?

In that dining room Katinka’s husband would serve us the surprisingly delicious food, much of it of the country of her origin, that she cooked for us in a chaotic kitchen. Even now I remember her wonderfully tender liver in sour cream, her pork chops with beetroot, and above all her Malakoff cake, served in slices so generous that we would often wrap halves of them in our paper napkins to consume later in our room. As her
husband
sidled between the tables, he would continually blink his eyes, turn his head from side to side as though his neck were stiff, and give strange little nods at no one in particular.

We soon decided that we must move. But we put off doing so while I followed up introductions, investigated the libraries and galleries, and wandered the city, still little damaged by speculative greed and the ever-rising flood of tourism, in a tingling daze of happiness and wonder. Sometimes Laura,
leaving
Mark to the care either of Katinka or of some female
student
among our fellow lodgers, would accompany me. But most often I was alone. I preferred it that way. That I should do so puzzled and worried me. In England I often felt bereft even when merely going for a short Sunday afternoon walk in Holland Park or Kensington Gardens without her.

One morning Laura, having got out of our sagging,
iron-frame
double bed and thrust a foot into a slipper, suddenly stamped out at something. A cockroach was scuttling across the worn linoleum floor. ‘Got it!’ she shouted at a second stamp. The smashed corpse was now oozing what looked like a
yellow-green
pus. Cockroaches were always with us, furtive and
repellent
, as were tiny lizards, seemingly encrusted with emerald dust as they either rested immobile near the top of the rickety
wardrobe or flickered up a wall. She pulled a face: ‘We really must do something about getting out of this dump.’ When we had complained about the cockroaches to the Russian woman, she had tossed her head: ‘You must learn that in Japan
cockroaches
are a way of life.’ By then we knew that she did not care for us or think much of us, however effortfully we tried to charm and please. But she adored Mark, holding him in her arms and crooning to him in Russian, her usually implacable face suddenly irradiated with pleasure and love.

A few days later something happened that disturbed us and puzzled us. As we were returning from the communal
Japanese-style
bath at the back of the house, Laura put a hand into a pocket of her dressing gown. She drew out an object and stared down at it. Then she let out a squeak and let the object drop. A dead cockroach. Had the creature crawled into the pocket and died there? That was the most reasonable explanation. But
neither
of us could then be reasonable. We asked each other: Might the Russian woman have put it there? Might one of the lodgers have done so? All her life Laura has suffered from
sudden
bouts of paranoia, sometimes mild, sometimes acute but mercifully as transient as her migraines. On this occasion the paranoia was acute. ‘Someone is trying to get at us‚’ she said more than once over the next few days. Finally she expressed the fear, at once ridiculous to me and yet vaguely disturbing, that the planting of the dead cockroach might have had
something
do with black magic. ‘Black magic?’ I expostulated. She nodded. ‘Why not? What you’ve still not grasped is that, though this is in some external ways an extremely modern country, it’s also, at its heart – its dark heart – an extremely primitive one.’

As always on such occasions, I did not try to argue with her.

At that period estate agents seemed not to exist in Japan. We therefore decided to ask if someone at the British Council could help us. On our knocking on his door, the plump,
narrow-shouldered
, wide-hipped, middle-aged director, Rex Cauldwell – homosexual, we were later to learn, after he had befriended us – opened it, grinned at us, revealing widely spaced teeth and then, when told of our errand, tilted his round head, with its dandelion clock of hair so blonde as almost to be white, to one
side and said, ‘Alas, alack, you’ve come at a bad time. I’m afraid you’ve caught me while I’m working on my files.’ I could see no files, only an airmail copy of
The
Times
spread out on a desk bare but for a half-full in-tray and an empty out one. ‘Mrs Iwai may be able to help you. In fact I’m sure she can.’

Mrs Iwai, with her pageboy haircut, startling pallor and American accent, was only too willing to do so. It was soon obvious that, with her domineering air and brisk efficiency, it was she who really ran the office. Thinking that, because I was on a scholarship, we must be short of money, she at once came up with a number of totally unsuitable premises that, it soon became clear, belonged to people either related or known to her. Some of these flats gave the impression of having been created for dwarfs. Others were in rickety Japanese houses, all paper and friable wood, which seemed in danger of imminent collapse into the narrow, overcrowded streets on which they were situated. Laura would vigorously shake her head or exclaim, ‘No, no, no!’ even before we had entered such
buildings
, and then as often as not would turn round and retreat up the street, regardless of our appointment with the owners or whoever was acting for them. It was I who would then have to make our peace.

Eventually, returning home even more tired and disheartened than usual, we told Katinka of our problem. After some thought she mentioned three properties, one several miles out of the city on the road to Nara, one with only one Japanese-style
bathroom
to be shared between two flats, and one with no
bathroom
at all, so that it would be necessary to trek out to the public bath – ‘Not more than five minutes away, in Japan the custom of the public bath is usual,’ she added airily. After we had shaken our heads and demurred at each suggestion, she sighed, ‘You are difficult folk.’ She pondered for a while,
frowning
, a hand to the red bandana that she always wore wrapped around her narrow temples. Then in self-reproach she knocked on her forehead with arthritic knuckles. ‘Foolish me! There is Madame Kawasaki. Residence in Kitashirakawa. Beautiful, expensive neighbourhood. Bought for her son, now maybe, yes, in South America. Brazil. But too expensive, I think.’ She sighed. ‘Perfect home.’

‘Might we see it?’ Laura asked eagerly.

‘Sure. But very, very expensive. Not for you, I think.’

‘Never mind. Please, could you put us in touch with this lady?’

Katinka looked down at her scuffed, scarlet bootees with their perilously high heels, shrugged and looked sideways and away from us. Then she stared at Laura for several seconds, eyes almost closed, before saying, ‘Sure. If so you wish.’

That evening Laura, pushing the pram, and I with a Leica that she had recently given me for my birthday dangling from my neck, came face to face with the American couple, as we were going out and they were coming in. For once, to our surprise, we were accorded an unmistakably friendly smile from her and a ‘Hi, there!’ from him. Although ‘Hi’ is not a greeting that I often use, I repeated it in response, adding, ‘It’s such a lovely evening that we decided to give an airing to our little one.’