With My Little Eye (9 page)

It’s strange. The house seems smaller, darker and damper than before and, when I get into my bed this evening – Laura and I no longer share a bed or even a bedroom because of my
insomnia
– the sheets are clammy. I do not mention this to Laura because I know that my grumbles always upset her. ‘Why don’t you take a more positive attitude to things?’ is a question she often asks.

There is a bottle of champagne on ice to celebrate my
homecoming
before we sit down to an early dinner of smoked
salmon
, filet steak and salad, and the kind of chocolate soufflé that she makes to perfection. As she pours me a second glass of the champagne I don’t remind her that Dr Szymanovski told me that while I was on warfarin I should never drink more than one glass of wine at each meal. He had added, shaking a finger at me, ‘And no binge drinking! No binge drinking!’ I had replied, ‘People of my age don’t go in for binges,’ and he had then forced a laugh.

‘It’s wonderful to have you back.’ She extends a hand across the dining table and places it over mine. ‘So much sooner than I’d expected.’

‘It’s wonderful to be back.’

‘Some tiny good comes out of even the most terrible things.’

‘Should we be drinking champagne when so many people have been killed and mutilated?’

‘If the killing and mutilation of people meant that no one drank champagne, then all the champagne firms would go bankrupt.’

For the next few days she is extraordinarily protective of me.

‘Are you sure you can find your own way up the stairs?’

‘Yes, of course I can!’

Later: ‘Would you like me to cut up that steak for you?’

Later still, when I am peering into my handkerchief drawer: ‘I’d better look one out for you.’

Eventually, I say, ‘Oh, please! I’m not blind, you know. My
sight has just become restricted. It’s inconvenient but not a tragedy.’

‘Sorry. Yes, I looked tunnel vision up on the Internet. In the States someone has invented some sort of lens that can
compensate
for the loss.’

I remain silent. I have already wearied of visitors to my
hospital
bedside telling me of lenses, specialists, or quacks that might be able to ‘help’ or even cure my partial loss of sight. I must, as Dr Szymanovski has more than once told me, merely try to adapt myself to the handicap, as people adapt to the amputation of an arm or a leg.

Lying awake in the grey light of dawn, I think that I can see a darker shape at the bottom of my bed. With a strange mingling of dread and elation, I think:
Smoky
! Then, with a no less strange mingling of relief and loss, I realise that it is only the dressing gown that I dropped there, instead of, as in the past, hanging it up on the hook on the door.

When eventually I drag myself out of bed, I cannot find my glasses. With my tunnel vision the task of hunting for even an object so large often takes an age. I jerk my head from side to side and up and down in growing frustration. The glasses ought to be on my bedside table but they are not. They might be on the dressing table but – no. Then at long last I see that they are resting on the top of my computer. Why on earth should I have placed them there? It is not even as though I had used the computer since my return.

In the same way I find myself hunting for the key to the puzzle of why for so much of the time – putting down a book or a newspaper, switching off the wireless or the CD player, ceasing to listen to what people are saying to me – the
memories
of events in those few months in Japan almost half a
century
ago should now obscure and even crowd out ones that were once so much more vivid. Freakishly the tunnel vision of my mind keeps insisting on focusing on them to the exclusion of everything else.

Laura found the summer even less tolerable than the rainy
season
before it.

Fretfully, almost venomously, she cried out to me from the bed on which she was lying, at midday, in only a flimsy
night-dress
, ‘Oh, do try to get hold of an air conditioning unit for at least this room!’ Air conditioning units, now ubiquitous in Japan, were then a rarity.

‘You mean buy one?’

‘What else could I mean? Steal one?’

‘Well, rent one. That must be possible.’

‘No, buy one, buy one!’

She was still on the antibiotics that Dr Anson had prescribed for the septic mosquito bite, after he had lanced it – a
procedure
that Laura had endured in silence, with the same stoicism with which, having refused an injection at the dentist, she endures the resulting pain. ‘She certainly has guts, your lady,’ he said, as I was seeing him out, Joy hovering – if anyone so large could be said to hover – behind us. She had, unasked, been present at the lancing, soundlessly wincing, as though in pantomime, each time that Laura had done so.

Despite the lancing and despite the antibiotics, it was as though the septic bite had introduced a poison, insidious and potentially deadly, into Laura’s system.

Endlessly and, as I saw it, needlessly she worried about Mark. Obsessively she weighed him, to announce despairingly that he was not putting on the weight that he should. When, many years later, Joe would burp up food or void a foul-smelling diarrhoea into his nappies, it worried her not at all. But when Mark did so, she would become almost hysterical.

‘Oh, that stupid, stupid woman! Why the hell did she have to force that muck on to him?’

‘She never forced it on to him. She offered it to him.’

‘Crazy! It was probably off. I don’t image the hygiene in a restaurant of that kind would be anything to boast about.’

‘We all ate the sushi. Far more than he did. He never had more than a tiny mouthful. He must have sicked up most of that in the car. We’ve had no ill effects.’

But it was useless to reason with her.

Increasingly she would remain in our air-conditioned
bedroom
, drooping on a wicker chaise longue or lying out on the bed, her face often pressed into the pillow. The cot, with Mark in it, would be beside her. Joy would come and go, bringing and fetching trays of food or the iced lemon barley water that Laura had come to prefer to any other drink. She would now often address Laura as dear or even darling. Her usually strident voice would become hushed, as though she were entering a sickroom. Perhaps it was a sickroom, I often thought. Could Laura be having what people called a nervous breakdown? I had never been sure precisely what that term implied.

After Dr Anson, a brisk, cheerful man with a painfully aggressive handshake, had returned to ensure that the infection from the mosquito bite had totally cleared up, I took him down from the bedroom not to the front door but to the sitting room.

‘You know, I’m worried about my wife.’

‘Oh, you’ve no cause for that. Not now. The wound has almost healed.’

‘I don’t mean that. The problem is that she’s always been so full of energy and now, suddenly, she seems to have none at all. She spends most of the time upstairs in that bedroom.’

‘Well, it does have air conditioning.’ At that he pulled out a handkerchief and began to mop his forehead. I had already seen the beads of sweat clustered, like small blisters, on it. There were also dark patches of sweat under the arms of his
generously
cut seersucker jacket. ‘I wish we had a unit in our
bedroom
up at the mission. There’s been talk of installing some units since last summer and now we’re in the middle of this one. I don’t think you have anything to worry about. People not used to this kind of damp heat often react badly to it.’ Again he pulled out the handkerchief and mopped his forehead, so briskly this time that he might have been attempting to scrub off a stain. ‘Well, I must be on my way. Thank goodness we have air conditioning in our operating theatre. I have three
operations scheduled for just this morning and it’s now’ – he glanced at his watch – ‘oh gosh, almost eleven.’

All at once – paradoxically on a day hotter and more humid that any we had so far experienced – Laura took a turn for the better. Having jumped out of our bed a little before six, she hurriedly pulled on some slacks and a blouse, slipped her feet into a pair of rope-soled sandals bought in the local market only a few weeks before, and left me, still half-asleep, to race down the stairs. Before long I heard noises from the garden. I staggered out of bed and crossed to the window. She was
working
out there, vigorously tugging at rampant weeds and then tossing them by the handful into a wheelbarrow. My first
emotion
was one of anger. What was the point of paying the elderly gardener whom Mrs Kawasaki also employed, if Laura took on one of the most onerous of his tasks? But then I was relieved. This was the Laura that I knew – energetic, purposeful,
amazingly
quick and proficient at anything to which she set her hand.

Later I heard Joy’s voice. She must have just arrived on her bicycle, as she always did at this early hour, to prepare our breakfast. We had repeatedly told her that, since what we liked was so simple – coffee, toast, butter, marmalade, a banana or an apple – there was no need for her to get it for us. But she had insisted that she was only too happy to perform this task, and had then added that in any case she could never sleep late. She ended by bringing out her often uttered, ‘No problem, no problem.’

‘Do you think that you should be doing this heavy work, dear?’ she now asked. ‘I was shocked when I saw you.’

Laura’s laugh was clear and untroubled. ‘It makes me feel terrific. You know, back in London I’m the one who looks after our garden. Of course it’s no more than a handkerchief –’

‘A handkerchief?’ The way she said it, I at once thought of Lady Bracknell. It was odd that the use of the word should puzzle her.

‘Very, very small. But gardening is something that has never interested my husband. If I ever go away without him he even forgets to water the pot-plants.’

I let the curtain drop and flung myself back on to the bed.
The icy blast from the air conditioner played full on my body, naked from the waist up.

Later that day Laura said, ‘Why don’t we go to see that Kurosawa film? Everyone’s talking about it – even, believe it or not, the Shotts.’

I was amazed and delighted. For days now I had proposed outings to her – to visit this or that temple, to go to Nara, an expedition still not undertaken, to accept an offer from Dr Anson to show us round the hospital – and each time she had refused. Fretfully she would always give the same reason: it was so hot, hot, hot. It was even too hot, she would insist, either for the game of cribbage with which, in the past, we had so often passed a vacant evening, or for the sex in which we had until only recently taken so much pleasure.

Since, although she knew hardly any Japanese, she had
nonetheless
responded with so much emotion to the Noh play, I thought that she would have no problem with the film. But as soon as we had entered the virtually deserted cinema, she once again became snappish and fidgety. The seats to which we had been shown were far too near the front, she complained, and so we moved farther to the back. But as soon as she had sat down there, she sighed, ‘Oh, this seat is hopelessly uncomfortable. It sags in the middle.’ We moved again. Then, in the middle of the trailer, she started to complain about the quality of the sound – it was just
awful
, couldn’t I hear the crackling? When the film itself had started, things were no better. She sighed deeply, examined her fingernails, turned her head to look all around her, crossed and uncrossed her legs, coughed noisily and at one moment even began to hum under her breath.

Increasingly exasperated, I eventually flung myself round to her, ‘You’re not enjoying this.’

‘How right you are! It’s a bloody bore. How can he ever have got his reputation?’

‘Well, it did win the Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival.’

‘That figures. Only something so pretentious could do so.’

I returned to the film, trying to concentrate.

Another sigh. Then a groan. Then, ‘I’m off.’ She got to her feet.

I watched her as she strode towards the exit. Reluctantly and angrily I decided that I had better leave too. Out in the daylight
I hurried to catch her up. I grabbed her arm and pulled her round. ‘Wait a moment!’

‘You didn’t have to follow me. I know that that sort of arty crap always knocks you over.’

I was astonished. She had never herself been a philistine. It was she who had forced me to go twice to
Endgame
, at a time when I used to dismiss Beckett as pretentious, ludicrous and a bore. But I decided not to argue.

Instead I asked, ‘What would you like to do now? The last time I saw her Mrs Kawasaki recommended a restaurant called Inaho. One of the best in Kyoto, she said, and unlike most best restaurants, not all that expensive. It’s ages since we ate out.’

‘Do you think it has air conditioning?’

‘I doubt it. If you want air conditioning we’d better go to the Miyako Hotel.’

‘What I’d really like to do is try one of those sake joints of which one is always reading in Japanese novels.’

‘Do you really want to go to one? Their clientele is usually male – the only females are on the staff.’

‘Well, that’s an added incentive. You know that I always prefer the company of men.’

‘Professor Takahashi’ – this was one of my academic contacts at Kyoto University – ‘took me to one in Gion. I think I can remember where it is. That was the occasion when he got so drunk that he almost toppled into one of the canals as we walked home.’

Suddenly her mood changed, as though a lowering, black cloud had all at once shredded and disintegrated. She linked her arm in mine. ‘This is going to be far more fun than
watching
that dreary
Sanjuro
. It’s so long since we went out together.’

I saw a telephone box. ‘Do you think we’d better give the Shotts a ring to make sure that Mark is all right?’

Those days, when Mark was not with her, Laura would become morbidly anxious. But now, to my surprise, she at once waved aside my suggestion. ‘No, I don’t think so. They’re so good with him. The only trouble of having them is that that pipe of his always makes the whole house stink.’

The bar was wide open to the alley, its sliding doors pushed back. But some short, gaudy curtains, billowing now in and now out as a fan rotated in front of a vast cube of ice set out
on a tin tray, made it virtually impossible to see the customers, perched on their stools, except from their waists down. Most of them were in summer kimono, with wooden
geta
on their feet.

I pushed up a curtain and we entered. All heads turned. The man behind the bar, a cloth tied round his head to look like a makeshift turban, greeted us. I returned the greeting. There was a single stool vacant at either end, but no two stools next to each together. We were about to withdraw, when an elderly man staggered to his feet, gave us a tentative smile and moved along to the stool most distant from us. The waiter pointed to the two stools now empty beside each other: ‘
Dozo, sensei
.’

Laura clambered on to her stool. ‘This is fun – even though I’m the only woman here. Do you think they mind?’

‘They’d probably mind if you were a Japanese woman. But since you’re a
gaijin
… We
gaijin
are a different species. The rules of the Japanese species don’t apply to ours.’ The waiter had set out two sake cups and now waited, flask in hand. ‘Hold out your cup. You must hold it out when he pours out for you.’

She held out the cup. Sitting to the left of her was a
middle-aged
man in a creased blue pinstripe suit and a white shirt open at his scraggy chicken-neck. His scarlet face had a dazed but happy expression. It was clear that he was drunk.

Suddenly he turned his head and, in a blurred voice, announced to Laura, ‘In Japan we have rule. Sake cup must never be full, sake cup must never be empty. You understand? All time he’ – he pointed at the waiter – ‘fill glass. All time you’ – he pointed at her – ‘empty.’ He tittered. ‘So – everyone happy.’

The fleshy young man with tattooed forearms on my right, his bristles of cropped hair glistening with oil, now leaned across me to ask Laura, ‘You English?’

‘No. I’m American. My husband is English.’

‘Good. Very good.’ At that he once more lapsed into a morose silence, resting his chin on a hand and staring into space.

‘I’m really rather enjoying this.’ After two small cups of the sake Laura already seemed to be tipsy. She turned to the man in the shabby suit who had first spoken to her. ‘Do you come here often?’

He drew in his breath, as though the question were a tricky one, and his head rocked from side to side. ‘
Sah
!’ Then he nodded, ‘Yes. Often. After work I come here. Have good time.’ He raised his cup. ‘Cheerio!’