The Japanese Girl (6 page)

‘You remember it all.'

‘Yes, I remember it all.'

The afternoon passed. I felt I was visiting. Twice the telephone rang, but each time she answered it only briefly and immediately came back. Of course she was loving and attentive; but there wasn't any reality in it yet. We were still separated from each other, not now by prison bars but by the different lives we had led in the last five years. We were foreigners to each other, with only the shared memory of some months of stolen love and stolen money, which had happened in another age, a long life ago. Before that we had been strangers. Could the memory come alive within us and become a part of our present existence? Patience, there would have to be patience and understanding on both sides. It was early days yet: the very first hours of meeting. I told myself that very soon it would all be different, would be as before.

We were both waiting for the evening. She chain-smoked all the time. She constantly asked me questions about my life, about Hettie, about whether the newspaper had reached me regularly. How shocked she had been at the verdict. How long it had all seemed. When I asked her about her life she several times turned the question into a question about mine. At length, being pressed, she said a little sulkily that she had got through it somehow.

‘How? What have you done? Have you been working?'

‘Oh, yes, most of the time I was working. But three years ago – I have to tell you this, Jack – I had to go to Japan.'

‘
Japan
?' I said.

‘I had to, dar-ling. An uncle died. My brother – it was in his term-time and he couldn't go. I had to go. It was important.'

‘So you have seen it without me.'

‘A little.' She nestled close to me. ‘Only a little. There is much more still to see.'

‘You spent my money to go?'

‘I had to. I thought you would not mind.'

‘Where is your brother now?'

‘At the University. He is teaching. He is very happy in England.'

‘But you are not?'

‘I am happier than I used to be, dearest Jack.'

In the early evening we made love. It was all right, I thought, after all. She was so easy, so sweet, so welcoming. That part was all right. But her bedroom was furnished like a Japanese room, with bright silks and a low bed and paintings of flowers and birds on hanging silk. I was oppressed by the perfume and the luxury. I would have been so much more at home in the bare little room where we had first been together. That would have had some connection with the past. This had not. The past was quite gone. She gave herself to me wantonly; it was beautiful but it was unreal.

In the late evening she got up and made a dish of fried chicken and rice and we had white wine and sat on stools at a low table in the living-room. She pressed the wine on me and I drank a lot, trying to disengage my past and to enter this new world that she now lived in. I was not used to the wine and it went to my head. Afterwards we made love again, and this time I met her wantonness with a sort of savagery of my own. This homecoming contained all the ingredients that I had so often pictured in my lonely cell, only the ingredients had changed their flavour.

Lying there in the dark, I said: ‘How much of my money have you got left?'

‘I haven't counted. For a long time I haven't counted, darling.'

‘When are we going away?'

‘To the South of France, to Italy, to Greece?'

‘Yes.'

‘It's too early yet. It will be cold there. May or June would be best.'

‘When are we going to marry?'

‘It is better to wait. You told me it would be unsafe for a year perhaps.'

‘I think I was too cautious. Nobody will care.'

She lay silent in the darkness.

‘Have you changed, Yodi?' I asked.

‘Yes, in a way I have changed, dear Jack. Your money has changed me.'

‘You don't love me?'

‘It isn't that. Of course I love you. But we have to get used to each other again.'

There was a long silence. ‘Tell me,' I said.

‘I think you are going to be very angry.'

My heart began to thump. ‘Tell me,' I said again.

‘I was faithful to our plan, my darling. I was faithful to it, I swear. I stayed just the same for all of one year, oh, for more than one year. But I asked. They told me it would be at least six years before you got out. I waited but it seemed a lifetime. There was a threat of war. Do you know what that could mean? My father and mother suffered in the last war, were imprisoned, half their lives taken. But if there is another war, this time the world will end. All our chance of ever living, loving, seeing, tasting, enjoying. It will all be done.'

‘What are you trying to tell me?'

‘So I thought, I thought surely he will not
mind
if I see just a tiny few of the things we planned to see together, before it is too late.'

I lay there very quiet in the dark listening to the soft, gentle sweet voice. She was soft and sweet against me.

‘So I went to the South of France in the second summer. I – I stopped there, but it was lovely and I was tempted to go farther. I – I wrestled with this temptation and I lost. So I went on.'

‘Where did you go?'

‘I went to Pisa, to Florence, to Venice. I lost my heart and my mind. I took a boat down the Adriatic to Athens. I went to Istanbul. I swear I did not intend any of this when I left; but the beauty of it, the – the travel went to my head. Your money corrupted me, Jack.'

I still lay very still, but now I was listening to the thump of my heart again. ‘Go on,' I said.

‘It was wonderful, dar-ling. I – I spent money. I bought clothes. Then I came home for the winter here living quietly, thinking of the horrible thing I had done to you.'

The only light in the room was the light coming from outside, through the curtains. It was different from the light in a cell. She wiped her mouth on a handkerchief, and her hand trembled as it moved against mine.

‘It was – a terrible winter,' she said.

‘Yes, it was a bad winter – even where I was.'

‘Don't be angry with me, darling. Please, please. I couldn't bear that. It would make me cry.'

‘What happened that winter?' I asked.

‘In – in the February I could stand the cold no longer. I thought of all the beauty I had seen. I longed for it again. In the February I could stand it no longer. I – went to Japan.'

‘And,' I said, ‘ and to Bangkok and Hong Kong?'

‘Yes … then I came back through India. Bombay, Madras, up to Nepal, then Baghdad, Beirut. And home.'

‘It would cost you a lot,' I said.

‘Yes. It was more expensive than we planned.'

‘But for one only. Or did you take your brother?'

‘No.'

‘Or some other man?'

‘No, it was for one only! I swear to you!'

‘And then?'

‘Forgive me, darling Jack,' she said, beginning to cry. ‘Each year it was the same. Every year when I came home I swore it would be the last time. But every year it was the same. I went across America to Honolulu – two years ago, that was – and then to Tahiti. Then there was Mexico and South America. Chile is so beautiful I longed to stay there.'

‘But you came back.'

‘I came back. I'd promised you.'

‘Because of the risk to your brother?'

She looked at me in sudden fear. ‘ Because I had promised
you
! Don't be too angry with me, Jack. I'll – I'll make it up to you. In time it will all be as you planned.'

‘How much of my money have you got left?'

‘I don't know. Really I don't know, darling.'

‘Tell me.'

‘Oh, don't. Don't, Jack.' I had grasped her wrist. ‘I – have other things to tell you yet.'

‘How much did you spend? How much is left?'

‘Your money corrupted me! It made me think differently, act differently! I have never been the same. I should never have promised: I was too young to understand. You put too big a burden –' Her hand twisted in mine, trying to get free. ‘Last year I had £3,000. I thought –'

‘Three thousand pounds! Great God!'

‘Wait! I have more now, darling. I knew then that somehow I must repay you. Somehow I must do something to help. I thought you might be out this year – I wasn't sure. Then something you had said to me once – when I asked you how I should explain having this money if ever I was asked – that came back to me. I had one last holiday. I had always wanted to see Egypt and South Africa … After it I bought this flat, furnished it, set myself up. It was the only way. I have already made money …'

My mind was groping in the dark bog that her words had created. Before I could speak she went on: ‘I can make money again, Jack. This is very profitable. You cannot live here but we can often meet. You can come here as we arrange. And you can travel on
my
money – as I travelled on yours. When I can get away, if I can get away, we can still go together. Please, please try to understand what you did to me leaving me with all this money. I was only a child …'

I released her hand and got up. Doors were opening and shutting in my brain like cell doors clanging in prison. I saw lights where there were no lights, blundered over a chair, began to dress.

She slipped out beside me, put on a kimono, stood near to me, still gently talking, soft labial sounds, distressed, fearful, explaining, excusing, persuading. This must have been a terrible moment for her; yet she had faced it out of fear for her brother. She was very beautiful. I could see what a success she would be in her trade.

I thought of all I had done, of all I had suffered, of all I had planned, of the supreme success of the whole plan – utterly, uterly in vain because of her. I went insane with grief and rage. She had put on the bedside light and saw my face, and then she tried to turn and run.

I caught her at the door. Still pleading, still beautiful, she fought off my hands until they gripped her throat. Then she kicked and scratched while her heart still beat.

After a long while I was lying on the bed alone, and the insanity had passed, and she was on the floor. I got up slowly and went into the bathroom and sluiced my face and hands. Then I went back and looked at her and tried not to retch. My knees were like water, my hands trembling without control. I finished dressing and began to search her flat. The telephone went once but I ignored it. I found two hundred and twenty pounds in a wallet in a drawer. That was all I ever made out of my years in prison.

I put on my coat and went and had a last look at her. It was not until I was about to close the outer door of the flat that I thought of all the fingerprints.

So I went back in and dampened a tea-towel and spent half an hour wiping over all the surfaces I was likely to have touched.

‘I caught a train back to London but missed the last train for Newbury so spent the night in a cheap hotel.

… On the Monday morning I went back to my market gardening. And now I am waiting. There is
no
connection at all between me and the murdered prostitute – no one knows we ever met or knew of each other's existence. The chances are that the police will find a fingerprint somewhere. If they do they'll soon catch on. If not, I am free.

If I stay free I shall stick to market gardening and the soil. Growing green things out of the good earth is one of the few worthwhile jobs left. It is real to me, one of the few things left that are real. And in doing it one does not need to meet people or have dealings with them or to travel far.

If the police do catch up with me, it will mean, perhaps three years in close confinement, and then no doubt I shall be moved to a prison where I can till and hoe the soil again.

I don't want to go back, but perhaps the end in either case is not very different.

These last few days, since that terrible visit to Brighton, some of the tension has been draining out of me. Five years in prison have quite unfitted me for the stress and strain of everyday life, the push and the pressure of people, the business of competing with other men, not merely for a living but for a foot on the pavement, a seat in a train, a place in a queue. Above all it has unfitted me for travel.

It is a relief now to know that all those grandiose schemes we thought up need never be implemented. It's a relief that I shall never have to travel far again.

Bob Loveridge owned this Medici ear-ring. It had been in his family for a long time, and it was one of the things he'd always bring out to show you if you gave him any encouragement. He was proud of it, liked telling the story.

Bob was a friend of mine, though he was 20 years older, and for a few months I'd courted his daughter. Bob was in shipping and lived in Hampstead and drove a Bentley. Lucille, his daughter, had the usual Mini. Bob's marriage had folded up about 12 years ago, and Lucille was now the only woman in his life.

I am an artist. That means I eke out life in patched jeans and a turtle-neck sweater and earn as much in a year, if I'm lucky, as a junior typist. This made the prospect of suggesting marriage to Lucille rather difficult. I had known the family all my life, and I got on well with Bob; and no doubt he had enough for three, but one doesn't
want
to be kept – nor, if painting really means something, does one want to drift into shipping as a means of keeping a family. Because coy little water-colours of a Saturday just won't do.

It was hard, as I say, because she was a pretty girl and we got on well – really well; she had the colouring I like: autumn-tinted hair and short-sighted sleepy eyes with umber depths to them. So when she took up with Peter Stevenson I was half jealous, half relieved. An artist can afford girls, and there are always girls in Chelsea who will share your bed and your gas stove; but marriage … Peter's arrival took temptation out of my way, but made what I was losing all the more delectable.