With My Little Eye (5 page)

As I end the reading of a book, I always ask myself, ‘Did you enjoy it?’ Lying awake here, I now put the same question to myself as I edge towards the end of my life. ‘Did you enjoy it?’

How can I say no? Having been born white, to upper
middle
-class parents in a Western democracy and never having been truly hungry and never having endured illness without receiving, as now, efficient treatment for it, have I any reason or right to say no? So, yes, yes, I have enjoyed it. I have known contentment, happiness, and the relief from anxiety, pain and unslaked yearning that is often even more welcome than either of those two. But I wish, oh how often I wish, that I had known more joy.

During those first days in Mrs Kawasaki’s residence I knew it every day, as I had rarely known it before and have even more rarely known it since. It was as though, on waking, I had
swallowed
one of what Laura’s constantly miserable and
discontented
sister calls her ‘happiness pills’. In my pyjamas, even before shaving or having my bath, I’d race up the winding stairs to my attic study, hurry over to the round window and gaze out through it, then another little eye, at Mount Hiei as the sun began to turn its previously grey, humped shape an almost luminous orange. Joy would pulse through me. Yes, yes,
yes
! I wanted to cry it out.

Late one evening Laura drove us out in the Cadillac, over what was then an unmade road but is now a busy thoroughfare, to the river at Arashiyama. Three or four weeks ago, almost fifty years after that first visit, I took a taxi out there, also in the evening, with Miss Morita, the two of us sitting decorously, as always, in our separate corners. With mounting horror I saw the buses parked on what had once been an expanse of vivid grass, moistly yielding to one’s tread, along the bank of the shallow, sinuous river. There were crowds everywhere; booths selling food, souvenirs and even clothes; and noise blaring from the loudspeakers outside garishly illuminated restaurants.

On that far-off evening with Laura it had all been so
different
. We had sat for a long time, saying not a word, on a low wall that mysteriously seemed to separate nothing from nothing and gazed out at the dark coil of water streaked with
luminescence
. At one moment an owl hooted from the trees crowding up and up the jagged mountain on the other side of the gorge. At another moment a geisha, her painted face and the
geta
on which she hobbled along startlingly white against the velvety darkness, and two dumpy, middle-aged men in business suits and ties, no taller than she was, walked past us. She said
something
in a squeakily metallic voice, and one of the men
guffawed
. All three halted, conversed for a moment, and then moved on. Again the owl hooted.

Later we found a boat, its lanterns swaying in the wind, to take us to watch the cormorants fishing. Fifty years later, the river was crowded with such boats and the boats were
uncomfortably
crowded with people. Now our boat was almost alone under the starry sky. One old man rowed, giving a grunt and a deep sigh with each of his strokes. The other beat on the side of the boat with an oar to attract the fish. The three cormorants, still and wary, stood motionless in the prow. They might have been stuffed. One eye of the largest momentarily glittered; then with what sounded like a choked human scream, he dived. Later I had brooded on the possible cruelty of the near-
throttling
cord that prevented these birds from swallowing their prey. I had also found one of those parallels that seem to one now penetrating and now merely fanciful. Like the cormorants, the Japanese were constantly and obsessively diving – in their case not for fish but for ever-new experiences, ideas and ways of doing things. Like the cormorants, they were astonishingly proficient at snapping up their prey. But something, an invisible cord unforgivingly tight round their psyches, prevented them from swallowing and so truly ingesting what they had caught.

On that night, however, I had no such feelings or thoughts. I took Laura’s hand in mine. I put the other round her shoulder and then stroked her cheek with the back of my hand. She turned to me. She was smiling. I smiled back. Joy! But it was a joy totally different from that joy that each morning surged, irresistible as a tsunami, through me as I gazed at Mount Hiei out of the round tower window. This joy was as serene as the
river, as yielding as the grass, and as velvety as the darkness all about us.

Later, after Laura had departed with Mark, leaving me alone, I often used to ask myself with a mixture of bewilderment and desolation, what had happened to that joy. I willed myself to attain it. My spirit stretched out in an impossible craving. Then it slumped back, exhausted and defeated.

‘You’ll want a maid, won’t you?’ Laura and I looked at each other, not sure. ‘The Hansons had one. English. Yes, English! A good woman. Christian. Before them, she worked for the
director
of the French Institute. But, well, for various reasons, she didn’t get on there. Her name is Mrs Fukuda. Mrs Joy Fukuda.’

Mrs Kawasaki went on for some time about a woman whom she clearly regarded as a paragon. Soon after the end of the war, this Joy, so grimly different from the joy that I constantly felt at that time, had arrived in Japan on board a P & O steamer on which she had been working as a stewardess. At Hong Kong a young Japanese, returning from a year of study there, had joined the ship and had fallen in love with her. His family, with a long history of public service, was horrified. She had none of the necessary education and breeding. Worse still, she was a
gaijin
. Despite all this opposition the young couple married and in rapid succession produced two sons. By that time he had wearied of her and had come to the humiliating conclusion that his family had been right about her. A divorce followed, with his gaining custody of the boys. To ensure that she saw them for a stipulated one day each week, she had stayed on in Japan, working first as a receptionist at American Express and then as a housekeeper.

She would, we were assured, arrive early each morning in time to get our breakfast and would, if her other commitments allowed, agree to stay late – for an extra payment, of course – if we wanted her for a dinner party. She was an excellent cook – American style, since she had worked largely for Americans. She was also, Mrs Kawasaki repeated, still a practising Christian. She seemed to think that this was the strongest
recommendation
of all, perhaps because she herself was one.

We were to move into the house from the boarding house the following day. We therefore thought it wise to procure the
services of this marvel before some other foreigners did so. So eager were we that we asked only as an afterthought, as we were about to take our leave, what sort of pay she would expect.

When Mrs Kawasaki named the figure, I gasped, ‘That’s an awful lot of money.’

It was not in fact an awful lot of money by English or American standards; but by then I had got used to everything in Japan being cheap.

Mrs Kawasaki laughed. ‘You always have to pay for the best.’

‘Oh, don’t let’s quibble about the money!’ Laura put in impatiently. That she never did so was something that both impressed me and made me uneasy. If she constantly refused to quibble about money, might she not eventually end up without any?

Joy was formidable in both appearance and manner. After our first meeting with her, we told each other that, after her bitter experiences with her husband and his family, that was only natural. In her early forties according to our guess, she was far taller than Laura and almost as tall as myself, with large hands and feet and a wide, low forehead. Her eyes were heavily lidded, the eyes themselves dull. Her nose was large and flared; her over-white, over-regular teeth in a mouth that turned down at the corners were clearly false. Her clothes looked as if they might be castoffs given to her by Anson’s wife – a cotton dress, held in at the waist by a leather belt with a huge brass
snake-buckle
, a woollen cardigan, thick cotton stockings, flat-heeled brogue shoes. Her accent was curious. Laura said that it
suggested
some inept English actress attempting to play a Yankee. I detected something Irish about it.

We at once realised that this was one of those occasions when the possible employee interviews the possible employer, not vice versa. As, with Mrs Kawasaki in attendance, we
progressed
round the house, Joy had no hesitation in coming out with unfavourable comments on its condition and its contents. That bathroom window, she pointed out, needed fixing, one hinge had come adrift. She had spoken about it to the Ansons but they had taken no action – that was the sort of people they were, never doing today what they could put off to the next. She often wondered how he ever got started on his operations
up at the hospital. Peering down at the dusty sitting-room
carpet
, she announced that she would need a new Hoover. In the hall outside the kitchen, she jerked open a fuse box. We really ought to have some of those modern fuses installed: the old ones had to be constantly changed by hand instead of being reactivated by a switch. And, oh yes, she must tell us about the iron. It was essential that she had one of those new steam irons. It saved so much trouble.

I did not take to Joy. I was never to do so. But Laura was enthusiastic. She had a feeling that she was just the person that we wanted, she told me more than once. She might be difficult from time to time but she would always know exactly what to do and would then do it to perfection.

In the weeks ahead Joy responded appropriately both to Laura’s liking and to my lack of it.

To
know
also
even
as
I
am
known
?

No
!

To
see
also
even
as
I
am
seen
?

Yes, that’s it. If only, if only
!

‘Oh, Dr Szymanovski!’ I call out after him as he moves on from my bed. ‘Sorry. May I ask you something?’

‘Yes.’ It’s almost a grunt.

‘I want to you ask you a question. I want you to be
absolutely
frank. Do you think there’s any chance of an
improvement
in my vision?’

‘Well, if you really want me to be absolutely frank, then my answer has to be – no chance at all. It’s what we call
irreversible
.’ He turns away and then turns back. ‘Short of a miracle.’ He hurries off.

Another source of joy during those weeks in a house far larger than any house or flat in which Laura and I had ever lived together, was our insatiable appetite for sex and the increasing adventurousness with which we satisfied it.

Laura had just come in from taking Mark for an outing in his pram and I was busy in my tower study. She had switched on the wireless to listen to the news on the overseas service. The news from ‘back home’, as she called it, now mysteriously obsessed her. Perhaps it was the premonitory symptom of that morbid sense of isolation in a country in which for most of the time, most of the people did most things differently.

Suddenly, seized by an impulse as uncontrollable as a sneeze, I clattered down the stairs. She was stooping over Mark, who lay out on an antique lacquer table, where Mrs Kawasaki and Joy would certainly not have wanted him, while Laura changed his nappy. From behind I put my arms around her waist,
pressing
against her. My cock stiffened. With a laugh, she jabbed an elbow into me. Then she twisted round and wriggled out of my embrace. In the background I was suddenly aware of the drone of the newsreader’s voice.

‘No.’

‘Oh, come on. You can’t leave me in this state.’

She put a finger to her lips.

‘What’s wrong?’

She whispered, ‘
She’s
still here? She’s baking one of her coffee and walnut cakes.’

‘Well, so what?’

‘She’d only hear us. Or burst in without a warning. If she weren’t so proper and pious, I’d be beginning to suspect her of being a voyeur … We’ll just have to wait.’

‘Oh, hell!’

Now it was she who put her arms around me. ‘Darling, I want it just as much you do. But be patient. Please.
Please
!’

It was at times like these that I not merely disliked Joy but,
unreasonably and unjustly, actually hated her. Her attitude to us was at once protective and disapproving. The protection was exclusively for Laura, the disapproval exclusively for me.

We had never imagined that, when we were eating alone, she would formally serve us, carrying round the dishes of always, I have to confess, enticing food. When Laura remonstrated that she could just put things down on the hideous stained oak
sideboard
, from which we would help ourselves, there was a toss of the head and a look of shocked incredulity. ‘Oh, no, madam. That’s not the way I’ve ever done it. And’ – she gave her odd laugh, as if she were attempting to conquer an incipient attack of hiccups – ‘I’m too old a dog to change my ways.’

‘Too old a bitch‚’ I muttered as she left the room.

Laura put a restraining hand on my arm. ‘
Please
! She’ll hear you.’

‘Well, let her!’

‘We don’t want to lose her.’

‘Don’t we? I certainly do.’

‘We’d never find anyone else so dedicated – and so good a cook.’

It would enrage me to hear the two women chattering
endlessly
in the kitchen or the hall, or on the upstairs landing. I could rarely distinguish much of what they were saying, but one phrase constantly recurred. It was Joy’s ‘Oh, madam!’ The tone in which it was uttered could be one of affectionate reproach, shocked disbelief or uncontrollable merriment. It struck me as disturbing that, whereas Laura was always madam to her, I was never sir. It was as though she knew, without either of us having intimated it to her, that it was Laura who was paying both the rent of the house and her far from
negligible
wages for slaving away to keep it in what she would call ‘apple-pie order’.

On a number of occasions when, over a meal or coffee or tea, Laura and I had a trivial argument about something – the distance of Okayama from Kyoto, the number of the bus from the house to the British Council, the name of Dr Hanson’s young Japanese assistant – Joy, if in earshot, would at once intervene to put us right. Should I emerge victor, it was
something
like: ‘I’m sorry, madam, I can see why you think that. But I’m afraid that he’ – I was usually no more than he – ‘is
right this time.’ If Laura were the victor, it was: ‘You’re right, madam, absolutely right, I can’t think how anyone possibly could think different.’

More than once I wanted to shout, ‘Would you mind
keeping
your mouth shut? This is nothing to do with you.’ But I never did. Instead, I complained to Laura. On one occasion when I did so, she retorted, even more defensively than usual, ‘It’s perfectly natural that she wants to put two ignoramuses right when they’re making fools of themselves. Can’t you see that? Think how long she’s been immersed in Japanese life. She’s so well informed. She’s got so much natural intelligence. With the right education she could have been a teacher.’

‘From the way she goes on she must imagine she is one.’

One Saturday, leaving Mark in Joy’s care, Laura and I decided to take the long trudge up Mount Hiei to a temple, concealed in one of its jagged folds, of which Miss Morita had told us.

‘Would you like me to come with you?’ Miss Morita had asked. ‘I can show you the path. A friend is visiting my mother that day.’

Before I could answer, Laura said firmly, ‘It’s sweet of you to offer, Miss Morita. But I know you have an awful lot to do for Mrs Kawasaki. We couldn’t possibly take up so much of your time.’

‘But I’d be happy …’

‘No, no! We wouldn’t dream of it.’ The words had the
finality
of a lid being slammed down on to a box and a key then being briskly turned.

Later I expostulated with Laura: ‘She’d have
liked
to come, poor dear.’

‘No doubt. But I didn’t want to have her trailing around with us. That whiny voice of hers really gets on my nerves.’

It was then that I knew what I had only previously suspected. Laura liked Miss Morita as little as I liked Joy.

In the kitchen Joy prepared a picnic for us. From time to time she would appear in the doorway of the dark, high-
ceilinged
sitting room, overcrowded with elephantine sofas and chairs, in which Laura was yet again listening to the Foreign Service and I was scribbling on some long-overdue postcards. ‘Would madam like some sardine sandwiches in addition to the
ham and the cheese ones?’ ‘I thought you might take some of the pecan pie left over from last night. How would madam feel about that?’ ‘Is it just the Coca-Cola that madam wants or shall I put in some sake as well?’ She never asked about my wants or wishes.

‘Why on earth can’t she get a move on?’

Laura made the now familiar gesture of finger to lips. Then she whispered, ‘You know what a perfectionist she is.’

‘Only too well.’

After twenty minutes or so, I had had enough. I jumped to my feet and strode into the kitchen. ‘How are things going, Joy? Are we anywhere near the end?’

Maddeningly, she went on with her laboriously slow
wrapping
of sandwiches in greaseproof paper. She did not reply. She did not even look up.

‘At this rate we’ll miss the best of the day.’

‘I’m sure madam wants everything just right. We have that in common.’ At that moment Laura appeared behind me. ‘Sorry, madam, for the wait. But as I was saying to him a moment ago, I want everything to be just OK for you.’

‘It always is OK when you do something for us.’

‘Thank you, madam.’

At long last she began to pack the rucksack that I had placed for her on the kitchen table. Pulling open its neck, she sniffed and sniffed again. ‘I hope it’s all right to put food in here.’

‘Why? What’s wrong?’

At my questions she shrugged her shoulders and made a little grimace. ‘Things don’t smell quite as they should.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Have you had clothes in here?’

‘Clothes? No. Well, not for a long time.’

‘That might explain it.’

Eventually she hoisted the rucksack, using both of her hands. ‘Here we go! I’ll help you on with it.’ She hefted it on to my shoulders and then gave it a slap so violent that I nearly
tottered
over. ‘I think everything’s there.’

‘Oh, thank you so much, Joy. What would we do without you to help us?’

‘Well, have a good day, madam. Oh, I’ve put the sun lotion
there with the other things. I don’t want madam to get burned. At this time of year the sun is always stronger than one thinks.’

As we trudged, Laura ahead of me, up the narrow, zigzag path, the greenness of the vegetation, the blueness of the sky glimpsed from time to time through the dense, soaring trees and the deafening screeches of birds for most of the time
invisible
, assuaged my rage at Joy. When the path suddenly
broadened
, Laura halted, hands on hips, and waited for me to catch up. Chagrined, I realised that, despite her limp, she was, unlike me, not in the least out of breath.

‘I’m so glad she didn’t come with us.’

‘Who? Joy?’

‘Oh, don’t be silly, darling. I can’t imagine Joy carrying all that weight of hers up a mountainside, tough though she is. No, I meant Miss Morita.’

I said nothing. Then I put out a hand and took one of hers in mine. The skin of her hands, so smooth and soft, always delighted me. I gazed at the sunlight glinting on her thick, yellow hair. It was another of Joy’s accomplishments that she could ‘do’ that hair so well, obviating the expense of the little hairdresser who, toting a scuffed Gladstone bag containing her equipment, visited Mrs Kawasaki every Monday.

‘Oh, God, you look so beautiful.’

She gave a small smile, walked on a few paces and then halted and turned. Suddenly her hand was down at my cock. She raised the other hand, placed it round my shoulders and pulled me towards her. Our mouths met; then my tongue entered her mouth.

After a few seconds, she was pulling away. ‘Perhaps we’d better wait until we’ve had our picnic.’

High up – not far now, we reckoned, to the temple – we decided that we had found the perfect spot. It was a flat, open space, a plateau in miniature, on which two moss-covered rocks stood close together, by themselves, in a sea of grass of such a vivid green that it was almost luminous.

Laura placed herself on one of the rocks, wriggled
uncomfortably
and then said, ‘This one is all sharp edges. And the other looks no better. I think the ground will be more
comfortable
. Did Joy put in that rug, as she said she would?’

I rummaged in the rucksack and then dragged out the tartan
rug. ‘Yes, here it is.’ I spread it on the ground. I bowed and extended a hand in a parody of the sort of Japanese professor that we were by then constantly meeting. ‘
Dozo
!’

‘What about you?’

‘Oh, I’ll just risk a sore bum.’

I now got out the thermos with the warm sake in it and the two cups, each carefully wrapped in a screw of tissue paper.

‘She thinks of everything. I bet the sake is at just the right temperature.’

‘Oh, yes, of course!’

She frowned at my ironic, almost jeering tone and bit into a sausage roll. Joy would often describe her sausage rolls as ‘one of my specialities’, boasting to us on one occasion: ‘Dr Anson was crazy about my sausage rolls. He could never get enough of them. I’d put them out on a plate before one of their parties and he’d gobble half of them before a single guest had arrived.’ Laura chewed, the sun glinting on her hair through the trees as she gazed upwards. ‘Her pastry is just marvellous.’

‘Yes, our Mary Poppins has done us proud.’ Grudgingly I had to admit it.

Though I had not drunk a lot of it, the warm sake under the warm sun eventually made me feel unfocused and sleepy. I too now stared up into the trees.

‘Paradise,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘Paradise.’

Suddenly we heard an incoherent chattering all around us. A herd of grey monkeys had begun to gather, swooping from the trees above us and loping towards us over the grass.

‘Oh, God! Do you think they’re safe?’

I laughed. ‘Oh, I’m sure they are. Miss Morita warned me about them but said they were perfectly harmless. If one has a dog with one, it’s different. Apparently monkeys loathe dogs.’

One monkey, with hanging dugs and a look of patrician
disdain
– the grandmother of the pack, I decided – had edged so near over the grass that I could have put out a hand to pat her, had I had the courage to venture such an intimacy.

‘What do you think monkeys eat? Shall I try a sausage roll?’

‘Why not?’

Laura broke a sausage roll into two and then held one half out to the grandmother monkey. Having stared at it for a while
with cynical, unblinking eyes, she shot out a paw. In alarm Laura dropped the morsel. The monkey picked it up, stared down at it and then raised it to her nostrils and sniffed. Dropping it to the ground, she turned her back to us in disgust and scampered off. Suddenly all the other monkeys, as though at her signal, also scampered off, leaping with astonishing agility from one branch to another of the trees above us. In a minute or two all of them had vanished.

Both of us burst into laughter.

‘So much for Joy’s sausage rolls. An instant monkey
repellent
.’ I shifted my bottom uneasily. ‘You were right about this rock.’ I got up and squatted on the grass beside her. Then I lay full length, my eyes closed and my face once again upturned to the sunlight glittering through the foliage.