The Painted Cage (11 page)

It seemed, since she had taken up with Mabel Rice, that Mrs Easely had dropped away. This was no loss, thought Amy, remembering Mrs Easely's missionary look. She was quick to discover Yokohama divided into coteries and cliques. The missionaries, the professionals and the Consular Corps kept themselves apart, sailing like superior fish through a pond of murky water. Beyond them only money talked, wheat divided from the chaff down an endless painful scale.

Reggie was delighted. He escaped most of this. He had entry through his position at the club to the best circles. Consuls and wealthy merchants slapped his back,
exchanged
shady jokes or a whisky at the bar. They invited him home. In a town where many had first arrived as drifters, the Foreign Service as pedigree was not called upon in vain. Upon this passport the Redmores trod without difficulty the knotty terrain of Yokohama.

From the beginning Reggie was a success. Apart from running the place he was never without a joke and could soothe a quarrel at the card tables. He held his drink well and the tales he told captured everyone's attention. Nobody disliked him. This was an achievement in the small cosmos of Yokohama. Visitors came and went, return tickets to Paris, London or San Francisco tucked securely in their wallets, but the men of Yokohama might stay thirty years on the balcony of the club, watching the liners come and go. When they turned back into the
high-ceilinged
rooms it was to forestall a vague and nagging
pain. Committees and presidents disagreed, but a manager was indispensable to the welfare of any club.

And Reggie was happy. Drink had never been so
plentiful
or so near at hand. The day passed in an
amber-tinged
haze. He lived permanently amongst friends in impressive, airy, panelled rooms. From the wide balconies the view of the bay with its warships and junks, its yachts and liners, was always with him. And the sound of the midday cannon boomed to accent his happiest hour as the men piled in for tiffin. There broke about him then a great talk of banking and business, of silk and tea, and when this abated a concern about horses and yachts and events at the Negishi Race Club. With each steamer in harbour the club's population swelled and diversified. Sea captains swung into the bar and played at the billiard tables, men on leave from China, Manila and Singapore brought news of fortunes and disaster. And in the hours between tiffin and the evening throng Reggie was happy in the quiet, empty rooms as the breeze blew in and rustled the papers or a ship honked out in the bay. At night there were the endless social events upon which the town fed and thrived – dinners, balls and card parties. To these Amy could not go until after the birth of the baby, upon the advice of Dr Charles. But amongst so many friends Reggie never felt alone. And when these entertainments ended, there were always men to accompany him to Mother Jesus's famous Number Nine, behind the gates of the pleasure quarter. Reggie found no cause for complaint. He was happy in Yokohama.

By contrast, in her first months upon the Bluff Amy saw little of Yokohama's social whirl. Her pregnancy was troublesome, she was confined to bed or to rest upon a velvet chaise by Dr Charles, who attended her. Frequent flare-ups of malaria weakened and depressed her. Mabel, who had never had children, nor, with God's help, intended any for the future, thought the whole procedure repugnant, but found courage enough to visit each day.

Mrs Easely also visited, full of maternal advice and an attitude to childbirth different from Mabel's. Mrs Easely's own two sons were already married and settled in
England. Amy took courage and a comfort from her that Mabel could never supply. She openly voiced to Mrs Easely her fears that she would not survive the ordeal.

‘Nonsense,' Mrs Easely laughed. ‘Dr Charles and Mrs Davis, the midwife, have safely delivered every mother in this Settlement for the last thirty years.'

Amy knitted and sewed for the baby. The growing activity of the child within her and the physical lines of the pile of small garments, waiting for their mysterious occupant, filled her with suppressed excitement and bursts of violent love. It was difficult to imagine the change the child would bring to her life. But until that time the weeks spread out before her, long and dull. Reggie, intent upon establishing himself in the club and Yokohama, rarely tiffined at home, returning late and tired each evening. Amy embroidered and knitted and read the books Mabel brought from the Ladies' Reading Room. At other times she painted the flowers about her as she had in Sungei Ujong. Mabel brought her pots of rare orchids to draw from her own conservatory, or blooms from the nurseries on the Bluff.

During those hours the world dissolved for Amy. She was lost in a solitary place filled with silences that seemed to reach down deep into her body. She emerged from these journeys of colour and wash to find the world still waited for her. Mabel raised an eyebrow but cultivated patience and even accepted a sketch. There was
something
arresting about Amy's flowers, but they lacked for Mabel the delicate charm she expected in
accomplishment.
There was, she thought disapprovingly, a lack of restraint in Amy's enthusiasms. She was devoid of the calculation Mabel found important in life. There was a hint of wildness behind the petals of Amy's orchids. There was an excessiveness which Mabel found disquieting.

For Amy, in her dark, narrow house upon the Bluff, shut up except for a brief walk, Mabel's visits brought vigour to her day. She waited for the dramas Mabel ably related. The doings of wicked Yokohama, its pleasures, pains and clandestine excitements passed third-hand to Amy through the sharp mirror of Mabel Rice. The Yokohama
she came to know was not the town the tourist saw or the one righteous residents knew. It was another place, flowing like a secret river at the base of the solid Bluff. In time it was impossible for Amy to believe she had not seen all that Mabel had, was not witness to the same events or the same sensations. Her view of Yokohama was like the reflection of a window in a tiny mirror. And to such a captive audience Mabel grew reckless, spinning with growing wit and malice the panorama of Yokohama; a panorama as brilliant, unknown and sensuous as had been the jungle for Amy in Sungei Ujong. That too had been a world Amy observed only from a distance, living within it in imagination from the safety of her home. So now, through Mabel Rice, Amy lived her first months in Yokohama, within it yet apart.

They watched the snow blow that winter in flurries upon the Bluff and the windows of Amy's house, filling the dark rooms with reflective, white light. Sometimes Amy ventured, swathed in rugs in a
rikisha,
to Mabel's house. In the pink satin of Mabel's boudoir or the warm, sun-filled conservatory, pressed close by exotic plants and by endless refilled teacups, Mabel continued to fashion the wickedness of Yokohama upon the innocence of Amy Redmore. There was nothing she did not know and nothing Amy did not absorb like rain upon dry earth.

‘They're all past sinning or have never had the
opportunity,
that's their trouble,' Mabel said of Yokohama's virtuous wives. ‘You should have heard them this morning in the Ladies' Reading Room. Tittle-tattle,
tittle-tattle
, they're all drier than a bowl of prunes. They talked of nothing but Tilly Manley.'

Amy fingered the petal of an orchid in Mabel's conservatory and settled more comfortably into her chair, waiting to hear of Tilly Manley, the wife of an officer of the American Mail route, whose flighty progress she followed through Mabel.

‘She refuses to live any longer at the Club Hotel and has removed herself to the Grand. It seemed the American Mail docked a day ahead of time. On arriving at the Grand Hotel George Manley was told his wife was out. He went
up to her room to find her there in the arms of who else but Jack Austin. My amah has it all on the assurance of Tilly's own amah.'

‘What will happen?' Amy asked.

‘Oh, innocent! Surely by now you know Tilly. She will persuade George yet again that she is persecuted by unwanted attentions because he leaves her so much alone. Poor George will feel it all his fault.' Mabel yawned. ‘Tomorrow Douglas is taking me skating. Enid and Lettice and Dicky Huckle have promised to join us there. I have sent a note to Guy le Ferrier; they say he skates
marvellously
.' Each winter, on a frozen paddy near the beach of Honmoku, the fashionable skated in fur hoods and muffs to the amazement of the locals, who squatted in thin peasant clothes to watch from nearby fields. Amy had heard about Douglas Roseberry and had recovered from her shock. It was one thing to listen to the wickedness of others, another to discover Mabel did the same. It had been on a seat in the Bluff Gardens on a fine morning a few weeks before that Mabel had imparted this confidence to Amy. Until then Amy had not realized Mabel had a lover.

‘And Patrick knows?' she asked.

‘But of course Patrick knows.' Mabel was amused. ‘The arrangement is of mutual consent. I'm always discreet. Patrick has a little establishment of his own, out at
Nogeyama.
Not many people know about
that.
And if I'm to put up with it gracefully, you can be sure I need
something
in return.' Mabel's expression was suddenly hard in a way Amy had not seen. ‘I assure you,' she laughed, ‘Patrick is a remarkable man. He's marvellous about Douglas; they are the best of friends. Douglas even rides for Patrick's stable.' Amy looked at her, amazed.

She remembered Patrick Rice's amiable,
uncommunicative
face, his smooth grey hair and knowing eyes, and wondered if she had made a mistake. She was not sure she knew what Mabel meant by ‘an establishment'. She felt suddenly far more out of her depth than ever in Sungei Ujong. There had been only the jungle to
comprehend
there, its dangers untraversable. Here, it appeared,
beyond dinner tables, bridge parties and legation balls lay an enclosed and fetid terrain. It lay beneath the surface of things, contagious as disease. Mabel studied Amy's shock and moved nearer the seat.

‘All we women of spirit, my innocent, have our
ami
particulier,'
whispered Mabel, her eyes narrow and amused.

‘But Mrs Easely….'

‘Mrs Easely?' Mabel laughed in disbelief. ‘I said any woman of spirit. Don't you know in Tokyo how the foreign community gossip and deride us? They're tied to such conventions there; they can never enjoy themselves as we do in Yokohama.' In the breeze Mabel adjusted her hat and smiled at a group of small children trailed by amahs and perambulators.

‘You see that little one with the red curls? That's Alice Crossly's youngest. Don't you think he's the image of Arthur Carlyle, who danced such attendance on her all last year? Just look at that red hair. There's nothing of Robert Crossly there. They say poor Alice is working out a tardy redemption on the hospital committees.' Mabel laughed until Amy joined in, and the dreadfulness of it all seemed suddenly to vanish. The Yokohama Mabel knew was smooth as a reflective surface, its navigation no more than the practised manoeuvres of the skaters at Honmoku. There appeared no way to learn but to draw breath and push off from all upright surroundings.

Sometimes Amy reviled herself for not rejecting Mabel. She felt contaminated by a life she was innocent of, but these feelings passed before the necessity of Mabel's patronage. The day was dull without her elegant, dissolute intrigues. She thought of the time when she too would sample Yokohama, close to Mabel's side, and was filled by excitement. It was as if some strange, dark force gathered about her, waiting.

Eventually, on a windy night at the end of February, Cathy Redmore made a safe appearance. Dr Charles placed the swaddled bundle in Amy's arms and she looked at the child in wonder. Amazement, terror and
the exhaustion of pain seemed no less an experience for the baby. Her lips quivered pathetically in her small crimson face. It was clear at once that Cathy Redmore was a personage in her own right and not the indivisible flesh and blood Amy had passively harboured. She held the child close, aware suddenly of its vulnerability before a cruel world. Love made her strong in a new way.

Apart from some croup and occasional colic, Cathy grew robust and knowing. However late Reggie returned from the club, unless too inebriated he insisted on seeing the baby. ‘She recognizes me,' said Reggie proudly one day in the nursery. ‘She has smiled at me twice, I swear.' He doted on his daughter, although he had hoped for a son.

‘It's only wind,' Amy told him. ‘It's too early yet for smiles.' But when later Cathy greeted her in the same manner she hugged the child in excitement. She had kept Cathy close since birth, reluctant to relinquish her to the young amah, Rachel, sent on the recommendation of Mrs Easely to take charge of the baby.

‘Preserve me from motherhood,' said Mabel when she visited. ‘Why don't you get a wet nurse? It's time you returned to the world. Of course, she's very sweet and I'm happy to be godmother, but there's a limit people should go to in the business of maternal sacrifice.' Mabel stroked the baby's cheek but did not pick her up. ‘Life is waiting for you in Yokohama.'

‘All in good time,' laughed Amy, rocking Cathy contentedly.

In her preoccupation with the baby Amy hardly noticed Reggie's comings and goings. The presence of the child excluded the need in her life for anybody else. Reggie hovered upon the periphery of her days. She remembered him happily when he was there and forgot him as happily when he was not. Cathy involved her totally; she could ignore the sinuous strategy of an adult world, full with her own perfection.

‘Seems to me I'd be a peculiar friend if I didn't draw your attention to a few things, though likely as not you won't heed them,' Mabel said at last in exasperation.