The Japanese Girl (12 page)

(This is the house my mother was married from, in a white satin dress edged with lace and decorated with pale peach ribbons; she keeps it still, after 21 years, among tissue paper in a box in our attic.)

I knock at the front door. The knocker is of brass, and leaves a smell of metal polish on my fingers. A little movement in the jar tells me that my fish has stood the journey without harm. I wait.

At this stage for the first time I begin to feel afraid.

There is a long wait and then footsteps. The door opens cautiously a few inches and a boy of about fourteen peers out. He is dressed in knickerbockers and a tweed jacket with an Eton cottar and a thin black tie. He is heavily built, rather stout, with fine blue eyes and thick lips. I feel I have seen him before.

‘What is it?'

‘I have come about your advertisement, the one you put in the paper. You know. About the owner of –'

‘Oh … come in.'

‘I go in through a door opened only just wide enough to allow my passage. The hall inside is quite empty; my feet creak on the bare boards. The wallpaper is peeling off the walls. There is a smell of dust and mildew, and also some more unpleasant smell.

‘Come in here,' says the boy. He leads the way into the old drawing-room which I remember from visits as a tiny child. This is empty of ordinary furniture, but the sad daylight falling through the wide bow windows shows a camera, some screens, a couple of fancy chairs and a decorative stage as background. Bending over the camera is Mr Wylde. I remember now he has taken my photograph last year. I wore my new grey suit. But Mr Wylde does not move or look round; he is crouched over his camera like a waxwork, and it is as if we do not exist in the same world.

‘In here,' says the boy, and he leads me through into the conservatory which backs on to the drawing-room.

I see that there have been big changes here. Instead of the little formal garden beyond with the lily pond there is a huge pool, feet deep, constantly swirling as if being stirred from within by great fish. Although it is open to the sky it is an even darker sky than the one I have left in Dickinson Road, and the air is so cold that it strikes to one's bones. There are people sitting round, feet almost to the edge of the pool; but it is too dark to see their faces. I see only their boots: big men's elastic-sided boots, women's button boots, clogs, elegant shoes, jodhpurs, wellingtons, slippers, mules.

I look at the boy beside me. I say: ‘Where have I seen you before?'

He smiled with his teeth. ‘I'm your brother.'

‘Oh no, you're not!' I said. ‘My brother's years older than you.'

‘Not
that
brother,' he says. ‘ I'm the other brother. The one that died in the womb.'

The light is very poor, but I can see that he is still smiling. It is a poor joke, whatever it is meant to be. A nasty joke. I wonder what a womb is and do not like to ask. A man comes up.

‘Is this the boy?'

‘Yes, Great-grandpa. And he's brought the fish. He claims –'

‘Never mind what he claims. Bring him over to the other side.'

I cannot see the man's face. It is as if it is all wrapped up in dark. But he is wearing carpet slippers which scuff as he moves; and he has a gold signet ring on one hand, and carries in the same hand gold pince-nez swinging by a thin cord. There is a smell of snuff as he moves. Sometimes the sense of smell burrows deepest into the unknown, and as I follow him a memory stirs within me, some natal memory, as a beast stirs in a deep sleep.

We follow him to the other side. Here it is different; lighter but with the foggy light of impermanence. I can still see no faces, but only legs and boots. Sometimes one moves as a foot is crossed over. The boots are more bizarre here, of types I have never seen before, some with coloured heels, some laced to the knee. One hears also the faint whisper of voices, like the breeze among palm leaves.

‘Cast in your fish,' says this man.

I look down at the jar I have been carrying all this time, and see that the cover, soaked with water, has broken away and my trout is swimming round and round with great agitation, as if struggling to be free from this confined space.

‘Why?' I say. ‘Why throw it in there? I may never see it again.'

‘You'll never see it again,' whispers the boy at my side, ‘ but you'll have the knowledge. You'll no longer be on an island.'

‘What knowledge?'

‘You'll be one of us,' says this man. ‘Cast in your fish.'

I stare up through the hazy light. I can see nothing of their faces, except the boy's, and I am afraid. It is a fear that moves in my backbone like the beginnings of dysentery. But, having come here, the irrevocable step has already been taken. This my soul apprehends without the courage to ask why.

The water is stirring all the time, and every now and then it breaks up as fishes come to the surface; but what is exposed is so smooth and pale that it might be drowned faces surfacing and plunging.

A hand grips my arm. It is the boy who claims to be my brother. But it is not a boy's hand, it is a claw.

‘Cast in. You have always been one of us.'

I pull the last pieces of paper from the top of the jar and then hold the jar over the pool. A silence falls. I had not known before that there was noise, but now I know there is silence. I turn the jar over, the water falls with a great splash, and seconds after, my beautiful fish, as if now struggling to remain with me, slithers out of the jar and falls into the water with a plop.

From everyone, from all the people round me, there comes a great ‘Ah!' Then I look again into the pool, hoping to catch a glimpse of the fish, and a white thing surges to the surface just where the trout has fallen in, and the white thing is my own face.

I sway a little, feeling faint, knowing now that there is a change in me, that in some way now I can never go back. A hand takes my arm again, but it is the old man with the pince-nez. His grasp, unlike the boy's, is friendly, joking. ‘There's a ba-ba. There's a fine boy. There's a lovely fellow.' He might be humouring a tiny baby instead of a boy of nine. I feel him trying to settle the gold pince-nez on my nose.

I neither repulse him nor aid him, feeling just then too sick to care. As he puts the pince-nez on the bridge of my nose, lights, prisms, flash to my brain, colours, reflections, noise, glimpses of scenes, of faces come and go. It is always difficult to put even simple rimmed spectacles on another person's face. At last I put a hand up and steady them.

And then quite suddenly, the darkness and the haze about the pool disappear and I can see every detail of the scene.

I slip back, half faltering, half running, out of the green door, across the pebble-crunching path, out of the paint-peeled wooden gate, across Dickinson Road in the half dark, a tram croaking and screeching towards me. Somewhere I have left the jar too, and run, scarf flapping, thick hair spreading over eyes, cap in pocket, alongside the tall convent wall of Scarsdale Road.

While I have been inside, the frost has come down like thin icing sugar on branch and brick and flag, and the pools in the dented road are glazing over like the eyes of a man dying.

My watch has stopped, and I do not know the time, but from the bustle of people it seems likely that it is nearly five. If so my mother will be up and I shall be questioned about going out when I have been ill. Not that this will be any problem; she believes what I tell her without doubting that I am telling the truth.

I do not know all that I will soon know, but my mind is adult and withdrawn. It is able to look on the thin, pale, tow-headed, breathless, running boy as if it were apart from him and could judge him impersonally. It is able to see the semidetached house with the gas lights twinkling in front room and kitchen as if with new eyes, as if never seen before.

I slip in.

My mother is down and has had tea and is in the drawing-room practising scales on the piano. My father is not yet home. Scales are one of the things my mother plays supremely well. She has put on weight recently and her curly brown hair is losing its colour and turning grey.

‘Why,' she says, stopping playing, ‘wherever have you been?'

I make up a simple but plausible story. I have always had a talent for making up simple plausible stories, and as I have said, she has always accepted these without question. Not that she does not know of the existence of lies, but she has taught me they are wrong and she does not believe me capable of such wrong.

Sometimes I believe she does not think the
world
capable of wrong. She is an innocent, as I shall never be again. They live on an island of innocents, my father and mother, products of our age and a class which has protected itself from the physical world, which knows evil only at second hand and as an abstract concept ever to be defeated by good, which believes in the perfectibility of man, which believes right is greater than might, which knows that God is in his heaven even if by no means everything is right with the world. Theirs is not complacency, for they are too modest for that, it is a gentle, ignorant loving-kindness that I can only envy without participation. At nine years old I am escaped from them and at one with my earlier ancestors and my descendants. This island, their island, will be borne away by their death, perhaps never to recur.

And the third largest trout swims everlastingly out to sea.

He'd been lucky, right from the start, you had to admit that. No convenient fog, which everybody said was the only chance; not even darkness; he'd just slipped away from the working party in full daylight and made off unnoticed for the trees on the other side of the valley. Then there'd been the lucky bicycle; he'd gone down that rough track like a lunatic, pedalling for dear life and hoping he wouldn't strike a stone. Before the warders had blown he was out on the main road and cycling briskly along, and you might have thought he was a curate out sick visiting if it hadn't been for the awkward question of clothes.

Two motorists had stared at him coming the other way, and he'd jumped off the bicycle at the foot of the long hill and run beside the river until he came to the house. There again it was touch and go, but he went up to a side window and broke it and climbed in. In the third bedroom he found a suit and a cap. He grabbed them and was out again before anyone saw him. He spent the rest of the daylight in the wood on the slope of the other hill. Lying there, there was plenty of time to take in the smells of damp earth and young leaves and lichen and the roots of trees; they were a real tonic after two years inside; but they didn't feed him. When darkness came it was a long and hungry tramp, making so far as he could south-east by the stars. He struck the hilly and deserted road through Holne Chase and walked for a while with the River Dart bubbling alongside. He slid through Ashburton when the first dyes of dawn were blueing the east. As he went by a blackbird piped a noisy alarm – not at him but at a tabby cat weaving in and out of the fading shadows on the other side of the road.

After that it was bird song all the way. A city man, Leslie Gibb hadn't realized before what a row they all made, and he innocently supposed that this went on the year round and was not limited to a month or so. By now hunger gripped like the beginning of cramp, but he would make no move to steal food. The last the police would have heard of him was a broken window and a stolen suit near Dartmeet. If he stole food he would be drawing an arrow on a map.

Full dawn saw him through Bicklington. He thumbed at one or two truck drivers but none of them stopped. There was sure to be a road check, and he kept a look-out at each village. He wished his suit fitted better: he was strung uncomfortably high.

There was the fussy, waspish sound of a motor behind him, and he raised his hand hopefully as he turned. It was a private car and to his surprise it stopped. Driver and car were antiques, the driver sixty-five or more, in a bowler hat and a worn blue suit, with a wing collar made for a bigger man.

‘Want a lift for a few miles? I'm only going as far as Sidmouth.'

‘Thanks. Thanks very much.'

Gibb ran round the car and got in. It palpitated breathlessly for a few seconds, then the old man shoved in the gear with a sound like a small boy rattling an iron stick over railings. They jerked into motion.

‘Lovely morning, isn't it! Lovely morning,' said the old man. ‘Makes you feel good to be out and about!'

‘You're dead right, it does,' said Gibb, relaxing on the lumpy seat with relief. Oh, to get off his feet!

‘Going far?'

‘Well, yes … London, sort of.'

‘Well, well, very enterprising to be off so early. I personally like to be up early, y'know. Always have done, ever since I was a lad.'

‘Yes,' Gibb agreed. ‘I like to get up early too.'

The old man crashed the gears at the foot of a hill, and they ground up it at a fast walking pace. The engine roared and quivered madly as if it was going to take off and leave them behind. A bright, red-faced perky old man with sharp features, and a way of thrusting his thin neck out like a bird. Like an elderly Rhode Island Red, just about ready for the cooking pot.

‘I'm going to see my sister at Sidmouth!' shouted the old man. ‘Always go every month! You a Londoner?'

‘Yes.' They got to the top of the hill and rattled down the other side. Gibb glanced at his driver. One of the inquisitive type.

‘Been working down here?'

‘Yes,' Gibb said swiftly, sidelong. ‘Been on a dock job at Plymouth, I have, see, but yesterday I hear my little girl's been knocked down! Car come on the pavement behind her. Just coming home from school, she was, poor kid. Pushed her into a lamp-post. Broke two ribs, they say. Couldn't sleep when I heard. Terrible, isn't it?'

‘Terrible,' said the old man, clucking his tongue. ‘ I'm
very
sorry for you. Very sorry indeed. Have you heard how she is?'