The Painted Cage (8 page)

Soon they were back on the Bund, which took its name from those alien words the British digested in India. All it meant, said Reggie, was something built along the sea, an embankment or a causeway. And a Bluff, he explained – for Amy laughed at the hill above the Settlement – was no more than any headland with a broad, perpendicular face. But no such levity could divest Amy of the feeling that Yokohama was a fantasy, where East and West tripped over each other to fall inextricably and improbably entwined. Driving past the Grand Hotel, she looked up in envy at its verandahs adorned by the fashionable of the world, who revolved through life to a tune she was now already eager to learn.

They continued along the Bund and soon arrived at the Club Hotel, a large, double-fronted house. There were bay windows, a glass porch, iron railings and a hedge. The Yokohama United Club beside it was all new brick and balconies. Reggie descended from his
rikisha
and looked up at the club apprehensively. Its balconies held men in cheery conversation, sunk in basket chairs or leaning on a railing. White-coated waiters hurried about with attentive trays. To Reggie, men and building seemed to merge in an indestructible way. He became subdued, facing at last the reality for which he had come so far. His entry into this impregnable world had appeared, from the distance of Sungei Ujong, only a matter of formality. Now
it seemed uncertain. What would they live on? Where would he begin if he failed to secure the job? He pulled himself up, stuck out his chin and strode into the Club Hotel.

A clock ticked in the entrance hall above dark furniture and polished wood. Through the front door came smells of the sea and oil and fish. Deep in the interior of the hotel cabbage had been cooked. The proprietor appeared, rubbing his hands and smiling wetly beneath a moustache. There was nothing that was not solid and well provided, but it could not compare to the opulent Grand with its elegant guests and orchestra during dinner. As they waited, the ground shook suddenly beneath their feet with the boom of the midday cannon. At this signal the time ball fell from a pylon on the French pier for Yokohama, both at sea and on shore, to check watches, clocks and chronometers. Reggie adjusted his timepiece and replaced it in his pocket with a nod of satisfaction, as if they were now established in the town.

Amy saw little more of Yokohama until Mrs Easely’s visit. She felt unwell and rested in the Club Hotel. But soon a message from Mrs Easely arrived with a servant and a chit book which Amy signed to assure its safe reception. In Sungei Ujong they had had nothing to do with the intricacies of colonial social life. The internal workings of Yokohama seemed infinitely complex and revolved around the constant movement of a great variety of chits. There were chits that were messages, invitations and commands, chits that were letters or threats. There were also chits that were IOUs. The extravagance of life in Yokohama had everyone in debt, incurring expenses out of all proportion to the businesses that supported them. Chits were signed for everything, and the day of reckoning rarely thought of until disaster loomed. Chits could even be dropped into the church collection box, such was the spirit of the place.

Yokohama was also a town of committees, whose work was constantly to sift and reject. Reggie shook with
apprehension
about his application to the club. He had already been tested in numerous ways. Within the all-male
preserve of the club he had been plied with drink to see how he held it, he had been commanded to tell his best jokes. He had been watched to see his effect upon people, his manner of holding a hand of cards, his expertise at billiards. There were certain eyes in certain faces which he knew watched him all the time, waiting for the moment when he might destroy himself. He became nervous and could not eat or sleep. A single blackball from the club would snuff out further thought of a career in Yokohama. Life in the town was like progress up a slippery pole or across a knotty chessboard.

This fact, and the desirability of success, soon became apparent to Amy. Mrs Easely arrived, all plump efficiency and a bustle of small, deft hands.

‘You’ll love the shops here. Did you get a glimpse of Main Street? Everything you would find at home. It doesn’t seem possible, when I think back, how we ever survived here before. Now, my dear, if you need clothes don’t go near the Chinese tailors. They hunt you down and pester. Stick to the imported cutters at Lane
Crawford’s
and Nozawaya’s. And if it’s shoes, insist on imported leather, even at double the price. Local leather is poorly tanned, spongy and lifeless, quite horrid. Although we did make do, for years and years of course.’ Mrs Easely sighed, surprised at all she had survived.

Mrs Easely was proud of Yokohama and anxious to show it off. She suggested they exclude the Native Town, which Amy had already seen. ‘One feels more at home,’ explained Mrs Easely, ‘in those parts of town that are one’s own and under civilized rule.’

They drove towards the green hump of the Bluff and crossed a canal that Mrs Easely said had been dug by the Japanese around the Settlement, to contain and cut off early foreign arrivals. From its beginning, Mrs Easely said, Yokohama had always been two towns: the Foreign
Settlement
and the Native Town.

‘Now we can come and go from one part to the other, and travel twenty-five miles beyond Yokohama without the need of a passport. We’ve come a long way in thirty years. In the beginning the Japanese hated us and tried
to get rid of us. You couldn’t walk out without fear of vicious samurai. They wanted to pen us in, like they did the Dutch on the island of Deshima in Nagasaki Bay. Penned them in quite literally, my dear, for two hundred years. They built the Settlement for us, you know, when the treaty ports came into being and they saw we had to stay. They dug the canals to cut us off and posted guards at every bridge. They erected a lot of strange houses, neither Western nor Japanese, but an approximation of the two, for they had no idea of our architecture. And there we had to live. That was all down in the Settlement. It wasn’t until ’67 that they opened the Bluff for residence. We all moved there then, leaving the Settlement as a business place. For years we had troops upon the Bluff, British and French, to protect us against hostilities. But the troops have gone, the Japanese accept us as best they can, and from a rough town we’ve established what you see today.’ A breeze blew about them as they rattled along; the straw mushroom hats of the runners bobbed between the shafts.

‘Life was different in the old days,’ Mrs Easely continued, her tone wistful. ‘We were all working hard to establish Yokohama. We were less conscious of class distinctions. Today nothing but money talks. We’re no more than two thousand on the Bluff, but you’ll not find a community more rigid in discrimination. It can be
difficult
for the newcomer. In our affluence we’ve disregarded the moral tone of our town and concentrated on expanding its pleasures. It’s a town now to soften the spirit,’ Mrs Easely said, turning her head, her eyes assessing. Amy took refuge in adjusting her hat. The look she saw in Mrs Easely’s face was the look she saw sometimes in her parents’ eyes or recognized in missionaries.

‘Our great worry has always been our seamen. To give them an alternative to the vile temptations of Yokohama, we formed the Ladies Benevolent Society and established a Temperance Hall and Sailors’ Mission. There we have bagatelle, draughts, dominoes and a reading room. In the
first year two hundred signed our pledge book,’ Mrs Easely informed her.

Amy thought of the difficulty Mrs Easely might have in turning Reggie’s attention from drink to bagatelle. Thank goodness, she thought, concealing her relief, she had arrived thirty years too late to see the founding of
Yokohama.
The runners slowed down, panting hard, pulling the
rikishas
up a sharp incline. Other men joined them and pushed from behind.

‘They call this road the Jizozaka hill. These poor fellows hate the climb, yet they have to haul us all up here so many times a day,’ explained Mrs Easely. The carriages tilted precariously, Amy gripped the side. The road snaked up between houses and shops and foliage. They pushed suddenly round a last dark curve and burst out upon the Bluff.

Amy knew at once she had left Japan; she had entered another world. An invisible door had closed behind her.

She seemed suddenly near the sky. All about her was light and careful, artful greenery. It was Bournemouth, transported and touched by the hand of God. There was a feeling of omnipresence upon the Bluff. They drove along the crest of the hill, along a narrow, twisting road of panoramic views. At each curve the ground seemed to fall steeply away. The sky surrounded them, wide and bare, pressing about them. The sea stretched far below, broken by the sails of junks and fishing boats gliding imperturbably. It was the most breathtaking place Amy had ever seen. She felt she looked down upon the world from here, between mortals and celestials, a mediator between the two. Anyone on the Bluff must be forgiven, thought Amy, in feeling superiority their natural right.

The sea dissolved into nothingness across Mississippi Bay and the Gulf of Yedo. Landwards, purple hills unfolded in mist. They rounded a curve and far away Amy saw unexpectedly Mount Fuji, pale and serene. The shock filled her with unease. While looking down in
arrogance
upon a lowly world, she too, it seemed, was silently observed by something beyond tangibility. Mount Fuji waited, intractable as an oracle – for what, she did not
know. The sea appeared now menacing and the beauty about her turned in upon itself, turned in upon her too. For a moment she was frightened and quickly gave her attention to the stuccoed illusions of the Bluff, whose creators had glibly reconciled all that was irreconcilable.

Every style of architecture but Japanese was upon the Bluff. Great red-brick châteaux stood by clapboard frame houses of New England vintage. Porticoed mansions of stone and houses that combined a little of all had
sandwiched
between them bungalows from Raj-ridden India. From the narrow road on the crest of the hill streets fell away at the perpendicular. Long flights of crumbling steps connected lower and upper roads on the side of the hill, roads overhung by semi-tropical flora and great spreading, flowing trees. Houses were arranged in terraces and retaining walls of madrepore held the gardens in place. In their interstices grew flowers and ferns, lining the road beneath privet hedges and azaleas. These charming, lazy, flowery lanes with their precipitous dwellings of fantasy and aspiration were as cosmopolitan as their residents, German, Spanish, French, Scottish, Russian, British, Portuguese, Italian, Swiss,
Scandinavian,
Austrian and American crowded together upon the narrow Bluff. Initial American diplomacy had left its mark upon Yokohama in Mississippi Bay, Perry Island and Cape Saratoga, but the English by their very numbers had long since instructed the movement of the town, laid down the rules of manner. Tea was at four and dinner at eight, and at midday they ate not luncheon but tiffin. Of chits and blackballs Amy already knew. The St George’s Ball outclassed by the sheer amassing of funds any other national event. The LLT & CC, and YCAC, when decoded became the Ladies’ Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club and the Yokohama Cricket and Athletic Club, but kept with their permanent abbreviations a pervasive British flavour.

On the Bluff the grey drabness of the Settlement was far away, but the wish Amy had felt on her arrival, to extract from the scene all Japanese faces, had here been put into practice. There was no mingling with the native
beyond the employing of servants. Homes, churches, theatres, schools, all entirely of foreign architecture, held customs, languages and inflexibilities brought intact across the sea. Those who stayed long enough died and were buried in the Foreign Cemetery, their stones terraced down a windy hill, to gaze homeward in vain forever. Above them the romance of the Bluff revolved on. Few people escaped its fantasy, but like all Edens it catered to a privileged few.

‘The main thing, my dear,’ Mrs Easely advised, ‘is to join the LLT & CC, although it is not easy. Then there’s the Ladies’ Benevolent Society, the Amateur Dramatics, the Literary and Musical Society, the Cinderella Dance Association and many more. Now look, that’s the Negishi racecourse. We’re all very keen on the races here.’ The course was magnificent, nonchalantly sweeping the crest of a hill, commanding more panoramic views.

They walked to the edge of a cliff for a vista of
Mississippi
Bay and its countless sharp green headlands. Then they drove on and Mrs Easely pointed out hospitals,
churches,
schools, the library and reading room, and the famous Gaiety Theatre. In the Bluff Gardens they left the
rikishas
again. The Gardens were situated on the summit of a southerly slope, a swathe of green English turf littered with passive amahs surrounded by golden-haired babies and children in sailor suits bowling hoops about the
bandstand.
Gravel paths and neat hedges traversed orderly plants and trees. They walked to a white criss-cross fence. The hill dropped away steeply in three descending terraces of tennis courts. The neat slap of balls and voices floated pleasantly up to Amy.

‘Oh, Enid,’ shouted a woman whose ankles could be seen below her white skirt. ‘Just look, you’ve done it again.’

‘That is Mabel Rice,’ Mrs Easely said. ‘You will be meeting tomorrow when you come to dinner.’

They returned to Mrs Easely’s home, imposing and comfortable, for refreshments. Mrs Easely advised about houses, explaining their dearth upon the Bluff. Amy’s thoughts were now only of how to move in quickly. The
Bluff, she knew, had already received her; there was a change within herself. Something that had seemed to afflict her for months had suddenly dropped away. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement.

It was through Mabel Rice, met as promised at Mrs Easely’s, that life for Amy began in Yokohama. She saw Mabel first outlined against velvet curtains, as if positioned for a portrait, erect in silk and emeralds, admiring men about her. There was distance in her face, deliberate as a warning. She was put together fastidiously, with money and contempt. Her expression made everyone her audience. Amy was thrust into conversation with Mrs Cooper-Hewitt, whose husband had persuaded Reggie in Singapore to come to Yokohama. Mr
Cooper-Hewitt
had now returned and supported Reggie in the club. As Amy talked to Mrs Cooper-Hewitt her gaze wandered back to Mabel. She exuded the disdain of the
crème
de
la
cr
è
me
on the balconies of the Grand Hotel. In twenty years she would be impossible, frightening many, fooling only herself, but at twenty-six, in Mrs Easely’s drawing room, her confidence was in proportion to her beauty and her wealth. People listened when she spoke; her voice had a broad, nasal twang that allowed British residents like Mrs Cooper-Hewitt to feel immediately superior.