The Painted Cage (28 page)

‘Is it finished, then?' she asked, raising herself upon an elbow.

‘Yes. Soon you shall have it in your hand,' Matthew said.

‘And will we then begin another?'

‘Oh, Amy,' he laughed. ‘Insatiable.' But he gave no answer to her question, instead he related the happenings of his time in the interior.

‘Perhaps,' he chuckled, ‘they know of the Devil in the form of suspicion. You know how bad the epidemics of cholera and smallpox are this year. In the countryside each village proclaims itself spotless and accuses its
neighbours
of harbouring the contagions,' Matthew told her. ‘In one of the villages they would not give us
accommodation,
saying we had brought the demon cholera with us. It was night and raining hard and the next village was miles away. Eventually, begrudgingly, they called forth some Shinto priests. They arrived under umbrellas in black lacquer hats and struck us on the backs with naked swords, to exorcize the demon. After that we were sullenly given some lodgings. So you see,' Matthew concluded, ‘I feel myself purged now absolutely of the Devil and protected against all evil.'

She traced his features with a finger and wondered if sometimes, in his clever way, he did not trick the world and also himself. In his face she saw lines of sadness, dissipation and sometimes despair.

‘You know,' said Mabel primly on the way back in the train, ‘you must endeavour to be more careful. Everyone
is talking. You could at least hide your happiness – that much discretion should not be too hard.' She had been to tea at the Belgian Legation where Baroness d'Anethan had introduced her to Mr Gerald Lowther, the new
bachelor
First Secretary at the British Legation. His sister had come to Japan with him to act as his official hostess. The Baroness had suggested Mabel help her get up some theatricals for the Red Cross.

‘It all sounds utterly boring,' Amy said.

‘That may well be,' replied Mabel. ‘Things do tend to bore in the mundane world. We don't all live up in the clouds, like you.' Amy's face as she stared out at the landscape was mirrored to Mabel in the darkening window. ‘Are you listening to me? I'm not in the habit of wasting my breath talking to a waxwork.' The lights were on in the carriage. Beyond the window trees and fields passed through the reflection of Amy's face, like fantasies through her mind.

‘I heard you,' Amy replied, turning to look at Mabel.

‘And what have you to say?' Mabel asked.

‘I'm as careful as can be,' Amy shrugged, a sense of danger far away, buffered by emotion.

‘You've not a grain of sense nor dignity nor anything else as far as I can see, but the mightiest attack of stupidity,' Mabel snapped. She had recently broken up with Douglas.

‘You're just jealous because of Douglas,' Amy replied.

Mabel looked as if she had been slapped. The wheels of the train vibrated loudly through the carriage over a difficult piece of track. Mabel raised her voice. ‘When I remember how heavenly good Douglas was to me, I'm all contrition. But that's nothing to do with my advice to you.'

Amy turned away uncaring, something leaping in her at the thought again of Matthew, although she had just left him. The wait until they met again sprawled out before her. She closed her eyes and felt his touch upon her body. Mabel looked at her in distress.

‘I really don't know what you see in him. He wouldn't
be my “cup of tea”, as you English say,' Mabel said. Amy laughed softly, Mabel lapsed into silence.

The train gave a sudden jerk and slowed down into a station. Doors banged in the second- and third-class carriages as Japanese shuffled noisily in and out on their clogs, belongings in baskets tied up with blue cloth. It had begun to rain, the platform was crowded with paper umbrellas. The whistle sounded. Nobody had disturbed the peace of the first-class carriage. Amy and Mabel sat on in their corner.

‘You must control yourself,' Mabel continued as the train drew out of the station. ‘You'll come a cropper if you go on in this manner. You've lost your sense of proportion. The whole town is talking.' Amy's expression remained far away. ‘Why can't you use some calculation? It can't go on like this,' Mabel scolded.

Amy was not the same person, the change was all about her, thought Mabel. The pulse that filled her was almost obscene. Discretion to Mabel was imperative to her own involvements. She crafted them like a play, delighting in her control of events. Amy threw herself at circumstance as if she faced a sea. Her survival was a matter of luck, a quality Mabel had learned not to trust.

Amy turned her face to the window and smiled at her own reflection. Her eyes stared back at her from the glass, naked in intensity. Men looked at her wherever she went, as if she emitted a mysterious scent. It was, she knew, her own awareness, exuding from her like a light.

Tom coughed with a horrible rasp, the sound tearing through his body. Amy sat him upon her knee and made him inhale eucalyptus oil from the corner of a
handkerchief.
He screamed and squirmed his way off her lap to toddle over to the coal scuttle. He plunged his hands into it before she could stop him and chuckled asthmatically. From her bed Cathy watched him, listless with fever. The crisis was over, according to Dr Charles. He had been that morning and decided that Tom, with some cough linctus, could return to the world. Cathy still needed an assortment of tonics and medicines. The Bluff was
stricken with influenza, the worst epidemic in years. Amy had herself been down with it mildly. She had built up an immunity, said Dr Charles, by nursing the children through their attacks. Reggie had escaped entirely. Dr Charles could not understand it.

Tom rubbed his hands over his face and danced about like a blackamoor. Cathy frowned at Amy. ‘Mama, keep him quiet. I'm going to be sick.'

Amy looked sternly at Rachel who rushed over to Tom. Rachel had been first with influenza; Amy had nursed her too. Tom screamed as Rachel picked him up. He rubbed his black face on her white overall and grinned at her annoyance.

Amy observed her resignedly. As amah Rachel was no longer adequate to the needs of two growing children. She hoped it would not be long before Jessie Flack arrived from England. Mrs Sidley had arranged it as promised. Jessie Flack was happy about the undertaking and the long journey to Japan. She had given in her notice to her employers in Barnstaple, but it might still be months before she reached Japan. It would be a relief, thought Amy, to have a brisk English girl in charge of the children instead of lethargic Rachel. She was impatient for Jessie's arrival.

‘Take Tom downstairs, Rachel, but don't let him out,' Amy instructed. When they had left the room she went to sit with Cathy, wringing out a towel in a bowl of cold water and placing it on the child's hot head.

‘You'll soon be better now, my darling.'

‘It feels nice, Mama.' The child's dark eyes stared up at her, even in suffering self-possessed. Her maturity was different from conquering Tom, strutting about, bellowing his passion for life. Amy saw the depths in Cathy and loved them, fearful for the child. She changed the cold, wet rag on her head until she fell asleep.

She sat back then in the rocking chair and extracted Matthew's letter from her pocket. He too was unwell. ‘A wretched bout of influenza, like yourself,' he wrote. She hoped it was influenza and not the beginning of excuses to dampen their affair. She waited in dread for a time
when he might begin to tire of her and distance her slowly from himself. She had not seen him for a few weeks due to all the illness. Cooped up with the children in their miserable incarceration, she realized with a shock the degree to which she had abandoned them during the months with Matthew. She tended them now with renewed dedication, to assuage her guilt. But looking out of the window at the setting sun over Cathy's sleeping form, she found her thoughts returned too easily to Matthew.

It was the time of maples and chrysanthemums, garden parties and the social season. At last the children were well and Amy able to visit Mabel, who had kept her distance throughout the infections. Amy confided her fears about Matthew's letter.

‘I hope it's not an excuse to stay away from me,' she confessed.

‘I shouldn't think so,' Mabel decided, ‘your emotions are just all battered about, locked up with those children so long. Why should Matthew Armitage be immune to influenza?'

‘I do feel a bit debilitated. My imagination is running away with me,' Amy agreed.

‘Well, then,' laughed Mabel, watering blooms in her conservatory from an elegant china jug, ‘we must do our best to cheer you up.' Her good spirits had returned. She had made it up with Douglas and could show some magnanimity for Amy's state of mind. ‘I have wangled two invitations for the Imperial Chrysanthemum Garden Party. And you know how difficult that is. Only the
diplomatic
corps and government officials are invited. I have arranged it, and now Patrick cannot go. You shall come instead.'

The day was fine and warm. The gardens were spread about the Aoyama Palace, manicured impeccably. The Emperor had lived here until recently, when he had moved to a modern Palace. The party was an annual one, held on his birthday. The music of several bands resounded through the gardens. They walked along the
winding paths towards a group of huge marquees draped in imperial black and white stripes and the
chrysanthemum
crest. Either side of the paths the famous flowers were gathered like an army for a regimental viewing, massed in tiers in open-sided shelters. They were
spectacular
in size and uniformity, as if all born in a single instant. An uneven leaf or a rebellious petal were a failure to these flowers. They stood taller than a man, their blooms bigger than a lamp.

But these common troops were nothing to the rare specimens in the marquees. Here the plants stood like lonely ikons, removed by a touch of divinity from the reality of the world. There were chrysanthemum trees with stems as thick and gnarled as trunks, ten feet from the ground, their branches fifteen feet wide. Upon them flowered four hundred blooms. The other marquees held floral tableaux, scenes and figures from history, all worked like a fantastic sculpture in a mass of living flowers. The earthy odour of the plants filled the tents, the air was warm with people. The faint, fetid stench of manure was cut sometimes by a vein of costly perfume flowing from a woman. Japanese men with their wives bloomed for the day artificially like the flowers; forced by court orders into the discomfort of Western attire, they assumed an etiquette the opposite of all they habitually required. Women rarely seen, and referred to in ritual disparity, accompanied husbands thrust traumatically into a culture of ‘ladies first'.

Mabel was excited, she pointed out people to Amy. ‘Those are the Kirkwoods. They're with Baron
Gutschmidt,
the German Minister. I once drove with a party in his phaeton to Okuba to see the azaleas. That's Madame Musin and Count and Countess Oyama. As a child the Countess was sent by the Empress to be educated in America. She took a high degree.' Mabel waved discreetly to Gerald Lowther.

Amy greeted the Frasers and the d'Anethans for the first time since Miyanoshita. Mabel was busy sweeping vivaciously about from group to group, introducing Amy. Soon they were informed the Emperor had arrived and
was making his way towards them. Conversation stilled and a path was cleared between the crowds.

The Emperor was tall for a Japanese, and stout and stern. He walked alone in a general's uniform as if oblivious of the crowds that respectfully lined the paths, Japanese on one side, foreigners on the other. Behind him walked the Empress in crimson brocade with a Paris bonnet to match, followed by ladies in waiting, court officials and ministers of state. The sovereigns bowed slightly to the waiting lines.

‘You know, he has five unofficial wives, all in separate establishments in the Palace grounds. The Empress is his official wife,' Mabel whispered to Amy as they stood amongst the crowd.

‘But that is the custom and always has been, and is not at all shocking to them,' said a voice from behind. Amy turned to see Walter Landor. She was delighted to have someone of her own at last to introduce to Mabel.

‘You must allow me, dear ladies, if you will, to push myself rudely between you. It's important I get a good view. I'm commissioned to paint Their Majesties' portraits. It's an impossible job, for I'm not allowed a single sitting and have to do the thing from photographs,' Walter Landor complained, taking up a position between Mabel and Amy. Mabel threw him a sidelong look.

‘How will you manage to paint them, then?' Amy inquired.

‘Indeed I cannot imagine,' Walter Landor said. ‘I persuaded one of the court officials to allow me to stand behind a curtain at a royal banquet. I had to make a hole in the cloth to glimpse Their Majesties. The plight is a sorry one, I can assure you.' Walter shook his head.

The royal procession passed on to inspect the flowers in the marquees, and their guests were instructed to follow. Mabel walked ahead with Gerald Lowther and his sister. Amy followed with Walter.

‘You know about Matthew, I expect,' he said. She looked at him quickly. From his tone he appeared aware of her relationship with Matthew.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘It's a beastly thing, this influenza.
Everyone's going down. I've had it and so have my children.'

‘Influenza? Oh no, not influenza. Cholera, dear lady. Cholera. Dr Baeltz removed him to the isolation hospital last night. We're all very worried – can't get near him either. I'm sorry you didn't know.' He took her by the elbow and steered her forward, for she had stopped and people manoeuvred about her.

‘Cholera? Why, it cannot be. He wrote to me three days ago that he had influenza.'

‘Three days is a long time in these kind of things. I expect he didn't know then what it was. He called in Dr Baeltz yesterday, I believe, and he whisked him away at once. It's been a bad epidemic this year.'