Butterfly's Shadow (7 page)

Sharpless wondered later whether, had he been at his desk when Pinkerton called, he could have altered the course of events. But what would he – could he – have done? Momentum, once established, has its own imperative; the
situation had moved beyond his power to affect it. There was no runaway horse to be mastered here, no vehicle out of control; just three people moving towards a calamitous impact. Sharpless was a quiet man, not given to emotional extravagance, but he found himself groaning as he contemplated the picture before him.

In the house above the harbour, Pinkerton felt time stretching like elastic, past and present shifting disconcertingly: now, as on that first time, he felt the ridged tatami mat beneath his feet; saw the way light fell on paper walls; inhaled the smell of sweet rice. Across the room, a woman with almond white skin waited.

Seated cross-legged, he engaged his son in a game, a sleight of hand in which an errant thumb mysteriously vanished, then reappeared. The child gurgled with delight as Cho-Cho watched. At one point Pinkerton looked up and caught her eye, but turned back immediately to the game, putting off a conversation that could only be painful. In this situation natural behaviour felt unnatural.

‘Pinker-ton’ – she had never called him Ben – ‘I will prepare some refreshment for you.’ A hint of a reassuring smile. ‘No tea ceremony!’

He was surprised by her grasp of English; she had obviously been studying. And he knew that what her words were really saying was, ‘we must talk’, but she would never say that: it would be too quick, too open, not the Japanese way.

He shook his head. ‘I’m fine.’

When Suzuki hurried back with a small package wrapped in thin purple paper, Pinkerton handed it to the boy with a flourish:

‘Here you go, Joey. Surprise!’

The boy had never before received a present, and he held the rustling paper sphere cupped in his hands, turning it, stroking the dark wrapping. Impatient, Pinkerton tore the flimsy
paper to reveal a wooden spinning top patterned in scarlet and yellow.

‘
Koma!
’ the boy exclaimed, clapping his hands.

‘Thank
ot
-san
for your present.’

‘
Arigatou gozaimasu
,’ he said obediently. ‘Thank you,
ot
-san
.’

Suzuki watched them for a moment. Outwardly they were a family engaged in a family game, but she saw how Cho-Cho’s hands were clenched in her lap; the sheen of sweat that gleamed on Pinkerton’s face although the day was cool. She backed out, bowing, and ran down the hill to the factory.

The woven reed-straw of the tatami mat was proving useless as a spinning surface. Pinkerton reached for the low table and set the top spinning smoothly on the gleaming lacquer. As it spun, the red and yellow painted rings seemed to rise and hover magically in the air above the twirling disc. Again and again the child handed the top back to his father –

‘More!’

Another spin.

‘
Motto!
’

Another chance to snatch in vain at the hovering rings.

Pinkerton ruffled the boy’s fair curls, smiling. Then he got to his feet.

‘I’m due back on the ship.’

There was awkwardness: he knew she was waiting to be drawn into his arms, embraced. Instead, Pinkerton scooped up the child and kissed him heartily on both cheeks, then handed him to his mother, so that the boy was between them, making an embrace impossible. He threw a quick, discomfited glance at Cho-Cho and consulted his watch.

‘I better get back. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ He pinched the boy’s cheek. ‘So long, kid!’ And then, remembering: ‘
Sayonara!
’

Pinkerton struggled to get his shoes on, hands and feet failing to co-ordinate. He left hastily, not looking back, feeling her eyes on him as he strode down the hill. In his white uniform he sweated, moisture crawling down his back, soaking
his armpits. He took off his cap and wiped his brow, his brain a buzzing hive of bees.

From the house she saw him remove the naval cap; saw the way the sun glittered on his hair, the golden hair of her golden husband, who had not touched her since he arrived.

Pinkerton had seen on a market stall a woodcut of a Japanese dragon caught in a trap, its body writhing in panic. He walked through the Nagasaki streets now in a state of agitation no less panic-stricken, his thoughts twisting this way and that.

One: he had a son. Two: the mother was Japanese. Three: he had a career to consider. Four: he had a fiancée. Another man might have put these priorities in a different order. Again and again he ran through the situation, a dragon trapped in a pit, a rat trapped in a maze: a son, a woman he’d almost forgotten, a fiancée . . .

He had found his way without thinking to the consul’s office, perhaps intending to ask his advice, but as he reached the entrance, a woman appeared in the doorway – a vision in yellow, an impossible sight: a girl who should be safely far away in Oregon stood before him as though materialising from his wild thoughts. She laughed delightedly at his astonishment.

‘Surprise!’ she cried, opening her arms wide like a self-presenting conjuror.

He folded her in an extravagant welcoming hug and saw, over her shoulder, Sharpless watching them, bleak faced. Once again Pinkerton felt sweat break out on his body.

And Sharpless, seeing his niece flinging herself into the arms of a man he despised, felt incredulity melt into something like horror. Was Nancy, like Cho-Cho, to become a woman
betrayed? He felt a sinking of the heart, a taste of the pain that lay ahead.

The afternoon aged into the evening and a tray of tea brought in by a servant was removed untouched, to be replaced by another, steaming hot, which cooled untouched in its turn. Nancy, huddled in the consul’s oversized wooden chair, tried to make sense of what she was hearing. Pinkerton had finally run out of words and the silence lengthened. She looked at the two men appraisingly, as though considering their relative merits. Her uncle seemed to have shrunk into himself; he looked old, the long face gaunt and drawn; Pinkerton sat very straight, naval cap tucked under his arm, as though facing an examining board – which in a way he was.

Nancy said slowly, her voice drained of expression, ‘So. You have a child.’

He nodded.

‘Did you not know this before?’

‘Not exactly . . .’

She frowned in puzzlement. ‘How could you not know
exactly
, Ben? Either you know you have a child or you don’t.’

He had been uncertain, he said. He tried to explain the difficulties: the naval life, moving about from place to place, communication chancy . . . It sounded thin, even to his ears.

Nancy attempted to keep to the facts that could be established. The certainties of this messy affair.

‘So the child’s mother died.’

‘Well, no.’

‘
No
?’

Sharpless saw a steeliness enter his niece’s face, an expression he had seen in his sister. She leaned forward, hands gripping the arms of her chair.

‘You have a
wife
?’

Haltingly, he tried to build a picture for her of how it had been. A man, lonely, far from home. The local custom. A wife
here was not for always. It was . . . what was it? The words filled his mouth like fur balls in a cat’s throat; he coughed, tried to swallow. ‘It was a mistake. But it happened.’

A spasm of disgust. She glanced carefully about the room, as though assessing the framed prints on the walls.

Pinkerton’s ruddy complexion had drained into greyness. He looked and sounded like a sick man as he fumbled his way through a thicket of words: he knew it was impossible for Nancy to condone what had happened. He did not expect her to forgive him; nothing could make up for what he had done. He was the worst of men. All he could attempt now was to do what was right for the child. But he wanted her to know that she mattered more to him than the world—

Nancy stood up briskly.

‘I’m going back to the ship now.’ She addressed Sharpless, her voice as mechanical as a railroad station announcement:

‘Will you get a rickshaw for me, please?’

‘Wait!’ It was almost a shout. Pinkerton added, quietly, ‘Please. Hear me out.’

Sharpless stood up. ‘I’ll leave you—’

But Nancy, in a quiet, dead voice, asked him to stay.

And Pinkerton talked on, sentence after stumbling sentence, his words filling the room like a thickening gas.

He said desperately, ‘It’s not the kid’s fault. He’s my son and I can’t just abandon him. I want to give him a life, I reckon it would be the Christian thing to do. It would be asking too much of you, I know that. But – can we talk?
Please?
’

After a while Sharpless found it hard to breathe. He reached for a fragile cup of cold tea and drained it. He sensed Nancy’s hesitation. Should he speak? She was on a knife-edge and he could tilt her one way or the other. But which way should it be?

He was no Solomon; he wanted no part of a situation that was bound to end in tears. Pinkerton, backed into a corner, was reluctantly seeking what would be the right thing to do.
Cho-Cho, he knew, remained wrapped in a protective garment of hope and illusion that prevented her from seeing the reality before her eyes. One day, she had always maintained, one fine day when the swallows returned, so would her husband. He had returned, but not as her husband, and despite the sunlight the day had taken on the chill of betrayal.

But he was getting ahead of himself: there were three people involved here and the third was being introduced to circumstances bizarre beyond anything she could have imagined.

He expected anything from hysterics to fury, but when, after a long silence, Nancy spoke, she seemed oddly calm, seemed at first to be changing the subject.

‘They told us on the ship that there’s a special church here, an old wooden church.’

‘That would be Oura Cathedral,’ Sharpless said.

‘Is it far?’

‘Not really.’ He felt unreality descending: were they actually having a conversation about a Gothic wooden church? Perhaps his niece was unable to face the truth of what she had heard and was retreating into a sanctuary of ignorance.

Nancy said, ‘I would like to go there. Now. With Ben.’

‘You are aware it is a Catholic cathedral,’ Sharpless said cautiously.

‘I think I can speak to God from a Catholic cathedral as directly as from a Methodist church, Uncle Henry.’

She rose and stood waiting. Sharpless marvelled at her composure, that a girl so young and innocent seemed of the three people in the room to be the one in charge.

He led the way to the street and put them into a rickshaw.

On the journey she remained silent, unreachable beyond an invisible wall, eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance. Pinkerton, clammy in the heat, a babel of unspoken words filling his head, just once attempted to break through.

‘Nance’ he began, ‘if you could just let me try and explain—’

She held up a hand, cutting him off.

At the cathedral she walked ahead of him, went to a pew and knelt, head on folded hands. He seated himself at the back, close to the open door, and prayed, not for forgiveness or a solution, but for a breeze to cool his feverish skin. Time passed. The angle of the sun on the stained-glass windows shifted, throwing moving patches of colour on to the floor. Outside, from nearby trees, the relentless creaking of cicadas filled the air, a sound like rusty scissors, stabbing into his head. Shifting his weight, his uniform trousers damp beneath his buttocks, he waited until at last she rose, gave a brisk nod to the altar, and walked back down the aisle, passing him without a glance.

Nancy no longer looked troubled; indeed she seemed radiant. She had reached a decision, though she did not yet share it with her fiancé; she was human enough to enjoy letting him suffer for a while. She simply asked him to see her back on board the liner. She would talk to him, she said, at noon the next day, in her uncle’s office.

In her cabin, brushing her hair, creaming her face, cleaning her teeth, she sifted through Pinkerton’s words, coming ever closer to the heart of it. She now understood how it had all happened. The way she saw it, a lonely and gullible man, stranded in a foreign port, had been battened on by a clever woman of ill repute who had managed to arouse his pity. From kindness had come something less honourable – Nancy did not flinch from the realities – and an innocent man had been trapped in a dangerous web of deceit. She liked the phrase and repeated it to herself: a dangerous web of deceit. She had heard similar stories from missionaries returning home from abroad. An American husband was the grail sought by women of this type. And what better way to trap a man than by presenting him with a child?