With My Little Eye (7 page)

The rainy season started. I loved it. Laura hated it.

‘Oh, look! Just look at this.’

Obediently I stooped to peer into the tall, narrow refrigerator.

‘Joy cleaned it only two or three days ago.’ She pointed at the grey-green mould, thick on the egg-rack and rimming the top of the salad tray. ‘What does one do about that?’

‘Get her to wipe it off. Or I’ll wipe it off myself.’

She slammed the door shut. ‘Bloody damp! Bloody rain!’

Later I stood out on the wooden platform of the veranda and, shielded by its sloping roof, stared out at the downpour. There was something calming and assuaging about that gentle, regular, persistent shush-shush-shush sound and the grey-green, tirelessly falling water against the intense green of the grass, the bushes and the trees, all suddenly luxuriant. I crossed to the edge of the veranda and put out a hand. Soon, in a few seconds, it was overflowing with water, cool and silky soft. I raised the hand and splashed my face, letting the water run down my cheeks to my chin and then to my shirt. I wriggled with
pleasure
as I felt it seep through to the flesh beneath.

‘What are you doing?’

Laura was behind me, her voice again sharp.

‘Watching the rain.’

‘Don’t you mean getting drenched in it?’ She stared out morosely. ‘Bloody rain! There’s another leak in Mark’s room, only inches from above his cot. Shall I tell Mrs Kawasaki or would it be better to get someone competent ourselves?’

I shrugged.

‘Would you like to go across to her?’

‘OK.’

I was about to jump down from the terrace into the garden below when she cried out, ‘What are you doing? Are you crazy? You’re in your slippers! Put on some shoes and get an umbrella.’

The old woman who looked after Mrs Kawasaki spoke no English. In the hall she began to say something to me in Japanese, then broke off and shrugged her shoulders, with an apologetic grimace.

‘Kawasaki Okusan,’ I repeated.

Again she shrugged, then shook her head.

A voice called my name from down the passage. ‘Here, here!’ it added. I walked towards it. I had never been so deep into the house. Mrs Kawasaki always entertained us either in her sitting room or out on the veranda.

This was her bedroom, oddly stark in comparison with a sitting room crowded with unnecessary knick-knacks and pieces of furniture. She was lying on a day bed, propped on a number of pillows. On her lap was a copy of an Agatha Christie novel that she had asked me to borrow for her from the British Council library. Most of her reading was of crime novels in English. ‘I’m not an intellectual like my son,’ she once confessed to me. ‘Good books bore me.’

I hesitated just outside the door.

‘Come in! Come in!’

Reluctantly I stepped forward.

‘I’m sorry to receive you here. I – I’m not well. Nothing serious,’ she added quickly, no doubt having seen my look of concern. I had already noticed that the skin of her face was creased and almost orange in shade and that her voice, usually so forceful, had a tremor in it.

‘I’m sorry to trouble you about something. I’ll leave it for another time.’

‘Please!’

‘No, no. It’s not important. It can wait. When you’re better…’

‘No, no. Tell me. But first – sit please.’ The voice had
recovered
its commanding strength. She pointed to the
straight-backed
chair in front of the fireplace. Gingerly I sat down on it.

I all at once noticed that, even on that steaming day, she had a rug over her knees and was wearing a thick winter kimono.

‘Yes?’ she prompted.

Hesitantly I told her my trivial errand.

‘I’m sorry, very sorry.’ She said it as though she were
apologising
for some serious dereliction. ‘We must do something of
course. At once.’ She called out for the maid, who shuffled in. She looked in hardly better shape than her mistress. Her ankles were swollen, as were her fingers, and there was a sty on the upper lid of her left eye.

They talked for a while in Japanese. Then Mrs Kawasaki turned her head up to me. ‘She will call Otani-san. He does many jobs for me. Good. Honest. Please be patient.’

She put her head back on the pillows. She closed her eyes. I realised that I was being dismissed with her usual combination of decisiveness and courtesy.

‘I hope you’ll be better soon.’

She smiled and put a hand to her chest. ‘Old. My heart is old.’ Then a thought came to her. Did I like the Noh theatre? I shook my head. I’d never been to a Noh play, I told her.

‘I think you’ll enjoy it. Most foreigners don’t, but with you I have hopes.’ Again she summoned the maid and rapped out what I guessed to be an order. The maid stumped off,
eventually
to return with a pale-blue envelope with Japanese characters handwritten on it in darker blue. ‘These are some tickets. For you and your wife. I can’t go. I want to go but…’ She rarely made a gesture but now she made one, extending her arms, the sleeves of her kimono falling back from them to reveal how emaciated they were, and at the same time shrugged

‘Tell me what you think of our Noh. Be frank!’

‘So what did she say?’

‘She’s going to get someone to come over.’

‘Soon, I hope. Mark can’t go on sleeping in that room with water dripping on to his head.’

I wanted to say, ‘It’s not dripping on to his head. It’s
dripping
into the bucket that Joy placed on the carpet beside the cot.’ But I decided not to do so. When Laura was in such moods of exasperation and despair I found it better to be silent. Instead I said, ‘She gave me some tickets for the Noh theatre. It’s for the day after tomorrow. You’ll come, won’t you?’

‘Oh, God. Do you really expect me to go? Everyone says what a shattering bore it is. Worse than Kabuki.’ Only a few days before we had gone to the Kabuki theatre. After it, Laura said that, had we not been the Ansons’ guests, she would have walked out.

‘Oh, do come with me! If you don’t like it, you don’t have to stay. It could be interesting.’

‘
Interesting
! Are you crazy? No, no, you go but don’t expect me to go with you.’ She stooped over Mark in his cot, and then turned:

‘How about your Miss Morita? Why not take her?’

‘Because I’d so much rather take you.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘No bloody chance.’

I rang Miss Morita later, when Laura had gone out for a walk with Mark in his pram. It was her mother who answered the phone. Having little English, she kept repeating ‘Go out! Go out!’ in mounting exasperation until I gave up without leaving a message.

I was working up in my tower room when I heard footsteps on the stairs. I knew at once that they were Laura’s, just as Smoky, so many years later, always knew that it was my
footsteps
mounting the front-door steps of the house. I turned, half apprehensive and half pleased.

‘Sorry. Sorry.’ She stood in the doorway, hands clasped before her and head lowered, as though she were a schoolgirl appearing before her headmistress.

‘Sorry for what?’

‘Oh, for being so snappish about the Noh. I’d really like to go with you.’

‘Really?’

‘Really and truly. It might cheer me up.’

‘I doubt it. Kyogen is cheerful – that’s the farce – but the kind of Noh that we’re going to see never is. It’s all death, ghosts, love thwarted, children lost, that kind of thing.’

‘Never mind. I want to go with you.’

The unrelenting rain pattered on our umbrellas as we scrambled out of the Cadillac and made a dash for the theatre. I was
wearing
what I called my outsize French letter, a light-blue plastic mackintosh that Laura hated. Her bare legs were spattered with water; my once light-brown suede shoes were dark with it and squeaked as I walked in them.

The audience was sparse. Between the high stage and the
unraked wooden seats under their canvas canopy, the rain was a shimmering screen through which one peered at the hieratic figures up above one on the stage. The play was Kenzo Motomasa’s
Sumidagawa.
Since this was years before Benjamin Britten’s
Curlew
River
made the story familiar in the West, I was totally ignorant of it. I had brought with me a clumsy English translation, made by an obscure Japanese scholar and locally printed. Miss Morita had lent it to me. The combination of reading the text in the subaqueous light diffused through the falling rain, and at the same watching and listening to the actors was as difficult as nowadays coping with both surtitles and what is transpiring on stage at the opera.

With difficulty I followed the story. A crazed woman travels what is then a vast distance from Kyoto to the banks of the Sumidagawa River near Tokyo, in search of her lost son. The boatman who ferries her across the river gives her the shattering news, vouchsafed to him in a vision, that her son is dead. On the opposite bank a group of Buddhist votaries are chanting a prayer on behalf of the dead child. Mad with anguish, the mother joins them, banging wildly on a drum while she joins in their prayer. Suddenly the ghost of the child appears and then no less suddenly disappears as dawn begins to break.

From time to time I glanced sideways at Laura, fearing that at any moment, exasperated, she would jump to her feet and hurry off. But leaning forward in her seat, she was rapt. On two occasions I attempted to share the text with her, edging it towards her knees, but each time she pushed it aside. When the play ended, I rose to my feet. She remained seated, still staring at the stage. She moved her head a fraction so that a light above us caught her cheekbone. It glistened. Unconscious of my gaze, she raised a hand and with it wiped her cheek. I realised that she had been crying. I was astonished. How had she been able, without even a glance at the English text, to recognise the pathos of a piece of which she had previously known nothing and of which she had been able to understand not a single word?

All she would stay as we stepped out into the teeming rain was, ‘Well, that got to me. It really got to me.’

Had that remote, highly formalised drama prompted in her a prescience of what was so soon to follow?

I have come to hate the bloated, red-faced boor opposite. I have also come to hate myself for hating him. He has a jocular way of baiting an old toff like me but he is never hostile and often, in his crude, clumsy way, he even tries to be friendly. I ought to feel sorry for him, afflicted, to his patent
embarrassment
, with what he mysteriously calls ‘one of those women’s things’. (I shrink from pressing him to tell me what that can be.) Occasionally I do feel sorry for him, but there is always this unyielding substratum of hate, hate, hate. The fact that, as I watch him across the aisle, it is with my little eye as though through a telescope, only gives a sharper focus and intensity to my hate.

As I brood on his awfulness, Laura is suddenly clicking her way towards me. This is her second visit today. The post, always late now, had not arrived when she made her visit this morning and so she decided that she would bring it now. I am moved both by the frequency with which she appears beside my bed – suddenly there since, unless my head is turned, my little eye does not take in her approach – and by her obvious concern for me. This concern drives her to interrogate the nurses and even, on one occasion, Dr Szymanovski’s Scottish assistant, who
happened
to be hurrying past. I suspect that the staff think and even say among themselves, ‘Oh, that woman again!’ They are all, as they often complain, rushed off their feet.

Today it is a large packet of letters that she removes from her bag. She looks unusually pale and, as she takes a step towards me, holding it out, her limp is so pronounced that I think for a panicky moment that she is going to fall. ‘I’ve removed what seems to be junk. Lots of bills. I’ve dealt with those. I thought you’d want to see the letter from Joe.’ Instead of handing it to me, she now begins to shuffle the pack as she looks for the airmail envelope that bears Joe’s meticulous, minute writing of our address.

‘Read it now if you like.’

‘Later.’

In saying that, I have disappointed her. There has never been any urgency in my interest in Joe, any more than there has been any in his interest in me. From the beginning I tried to love him with the protective ferocity with which I loved Mark. But I could never achieve that.

‘He’s always so busy.’

She is making excuses for him. Since my stroke, he has
telephoned
once to ask how I am, and there has been a get-well card signed by him, his wife and one of their three daughters, the youngest, still living with them in Auckland. I met that daughter first as a child, when they brought her with them on a holiday visit to England, and then again as an awkward,
enthusiastic
teenager, when Laura had persuaded me that we must travel on to New Zealand after she had accompanied me to Australia on a lecture tour.

‘Yes. It’s extraordinary that someone should devote so much of his time to linguistics, of all things.’

‘Is that any more extraordinary than devoting so much of one’s time to Japanese art?’ For all our years together, more than half a century now, her constant complaint has been that she ‘just can’t
get
’ Japanese art. Once she even remarked of it, ‘You always say that it’s a miracle of less meaning more. But as far as I’m concerned it’s a catastrophe of less meaning even less.’

I take her hand, in one of those sudden surges of love, a wave that sweeps in and then withdraws, leaving a cavernous darkness, that has, so puzzlingly to me and no doubt also to her, always characterised our relationship. ‘I can see you’ve been doing too much again. You look tired.’

‘Oh, it’s that bloody boiler. So many telephone calls, so many excuses. I wish we’d never taken out that contract. It’s almost three weeks since the whole problem started.’

It is she who has always dealt with the practicalities of our life together.

Abruptly I break out, ‘I do wish that this bloody trouble with my sight would clear!’

‘It won’t. You know it won’t. They’ve told you it won’t. It’s tough, but there it is. You’ll just have to adapt yourself.’

It’s tough
. You’re tough, I think. But I admire her for her
refusal ever to embrace an illusion or to encourage others to do so. Far more than most people, she will begin a sentence with ‘We’ve just got to face it.’ Now I just have to face it.

When she says goodbye, leaning over to kiss me on one cheek and then the other, I put out my hands and pull her towards me. She all but topples over on top of me. ‘Oh, I do wish I were out of here. With you. Back home.’

‘It won’t be long. Be patient.’ She runs fingers through my sparse, grey hair. ‘I’ll come by tomorrow morning. But a little later than usual. That bloody plumber is coming at ten.
If
he comes.’ She moves off, raising a hand in farewell. Then she turns. ‘What about Smoky?’

‘Smoky?’

‘The ghost of Smoky. Is she still visiting?’

‘From time to time. Not as faithfully as you do.’

As I speak, summoned as though by our talk of her, a grey shadow scuttles soundlessly across the ward and vanishes. I stare after it but say nothing.

I pick up Joe’s letter and slit open the envelope with a knife forgotten by one of the two Polish sisters when she took away my tray.

The letter begins ‘My Dear Dad.’ I hate that ‘Dad’. It used to be ‘Daddy’ and I hated that too. They have all, he writes, been so shocked and anxious since hearing the news of my stroke. It must be ghastly for me, with that restriction of vision, but it’s good news that I can write and read with no difficulty and can even watch television. He had so much wanted to fly over at once to be with me but unfortunately, with the examination season upon them, that was out of the question. Rosie would have come, in fact had almost done so, but in the end she had so much wanted to see her boyfriend row in his eight at the annual college regatta that, reluctantly and guiltily, she had given up on the idea. Erwin took his rowing so seriously and so she too had to take it seriously…

Like all my letters to him, all his letters to me attempt to convey an abundance of love and concern when really there is little of either of those things. From the beginning, we
mysteriously
never really bonded, just as he and Laura never really bonded. Once, when I was reprimanding him, then only eight years old, for some trivial lapse in table manners, he had wailed,
with an extraordinary passion, almost in tears, ‘You want me to be Mark. But I’m not Mark. I can’t be Mark. I don’t want to be Mark.’

Stricken, Laura jumped up from the table and rushed round to put her arms about him. He shrank, as though she were about to slap him. ‘We don’t want you to be Mark, darling. We want you to be yourself. We love you as yourself.’

But she was lying. And the recalcitrant, despairing,
unattractive
boy knew that she was lying, as I did.

I cannot go on reading his letter, just as years ago I could not go on listening to him holding forth in wearisome periphrases and labyrinthine sentences each time that he returned home from Oxford for the vacation. I push it into the drawer of my bedside table. Tomorrow morning I’ll read it, I tell myself. I might even try to answer between the tests scheduled for me.

Now, I want a snooze.