With My Little Eye (12 page)

Laura is in slippers and dressing gown as she shuffles into the kitchen for breakfast. Usually she gets up before me, slips out of the bedroom to have her bath and then, fully dressed, prepares the breakfast to which she then summons me. Sometimes I am dressed, sometimes still in my pyjamas.

Now she rubs her forehead with the back of a hand and peers around her, as though unsure where she is. Her hair, usually so sleek and tidy, is a mess. There are grey shadows under her eyes.

‘How did you sleep?’

‘Badly. I had these dreams. I always do before today.’ She goes to the toaster and inserts two slices. She looks around. ‘Do you know what day it is?’

‘Of course.’

‘And it means nothing to you?’

‘It means something to me,’ I reply, trying to be gentle. ‘But it doesn’t mean as much to me as it means to you.’

‘Well, no, that’s obvious.’

‘Today brings a memory. It brings a sadness, but so do most other days as well.’ I am exasperated because on so many other anniversaries I’ve said this or something like it to her. ‘I
constantly
think of him, constantly mourn for him. I don’t set aside a single day to do those things. To think of him and to mourn for him is not like giving an Easter egg or filling a Christmas stocking. He’s always here.’ I raise a hand and tap my forehead with my forefinger. ‘He’s also always
here
.’ Now I put my hand over my heart. There is no insincerity in the gestures even if they are so actorly.

The toaster pings as the two slices of bread shoot up. She reaches for the chopsticks beside the toaster and with them extracts, as she does every morning, the slices of toast still too hot to be handled. Slowly she sits down and stares at the slices on the plate before her, as though she had no idea what they were or why they were in front of her.

‘No juice?’ I hold up the carton.

She does not reply. She is staring out of the window. I lean forward, eager and apprehensive. Outside, beyond the smeared pane, I briefly glimpse, out of the corner of my little eye, a grey shadow whisking past. So, after so long, Smoky is back! To Laura she has been invisible, as always.

She turns towards me in a kind of bewildered panic. Then in a sad, soft voice she asks, ‘Will we never get over it?’

‘Too late now. It’s become part of us. We’ve fed on the loss for so long. People become what they eat.’

She begins to cry, the sobs jerking out of her. I jump up, go round the table to her, and fold her in my arms. Her whole body is now shuddering violently, as though in a fit. She is retching on a grief that for all these years, more than half a century of them, her body still refuses to assimilate.

‘He was such a beautiful child,’ she gets out. ‘How could that have happened? Oh, if only–’

She breaks off. I know what will follow.

‘Oh, if only he had never gone to that nightmare country!’

‘He could have picked up amoebic dysentery in all sorts of places.’ I feel a deathly weariness. We have had this
conversation
so often before.

‘Oh, don’t be so idiotic! Not in England. Have you ever heard of a child picking up amoebic dysentery in England? Children may
die
of it here, when they have come from abroad. But they don’t pick it up from being forced to eat stale sushi in a filthy Japanese restaurant.’

I want to argue with her that the sushi wasn’t stale and that the restaurant wasn’t filthy and that he might have as easily picked up the dysentery on the plane home or at one of its exotic stopovers. But I am silent. What would be the good?

I hold her tighter to me. That is all I can do.

All that day Laura seemed, by some miracle, at last to have emerged from the shadows. She was out of bed long before I was. Half asleep, I was aware, with sudden refreshment of the spirit, that she was singing in the bathroom. She has, even now in old age, the voice of a musically gifted schoolgirl – small, accurate, silvery, fresh. She was singing that favourite air of hers,
Sakura
‚ then hugely popular and still hugely popular in Japan. Constantly hearing it in cafes, on the radio and even in the house as Joy crooned it in her deep, vibrant contralto while rocking Mark in her arms, I had begun to hate it for its
sentimental
sickliness. But now the distant sound of Laura’s singing it to herself filled me with relief.

At breakfast she announced, ‘It’s a lovely day. We must get out.’ Even her voice was buoyant.

I had still not completed the article on which I had been working for more than ten days. It bored me even more than ever, but I have a dogged persistence that prevents me from giving up on a task once I have started on it. I hesitated. Then any scruples were swept away by my delight that such a
suggestion
had come from her and not from me. ‘Where would you like to go?’

‘I leave it to you. Choose somewhere beautiful and exciting.’

‘Well, how about Daitokuji? That’s said to be both those things. People keep recommending it.’

‘Perfect.’

‘What about Mark?’ I indicated him in his cot under the window. For once he was not screaming in what often seemed to me to be a combination of despair and baffled rage, but lying quietly asleep.

‘Joy could look after him. She loves doing that.’

‘No.’ I nearly added: She spends far too much time with him. ‘Let’s take him with us.’

‘D’you think that’s a good idea – pushing him around in the chair? Unless of course you carry him on your back like a
Japanese mother – or like Brian Anson with that latest of theirs.’

‘Oh, all right. Let’s leave him.’ I realised that all along I had not really wanted to have him with us.

‘And let’s also leave Miss Morita. Don’t ask her to come with us, please,
please
! I don’t want one of her lectures.’ Her tone made me uncomfortable. Yes, she was teasing me; but, as so often with outwardly friendly teasing, there was a rancorous undertow.

I nodded. ‘Agreed. No Miss Morita. Just ourselves. That’s what I want.’

‘That’s what I want too.’

Daitokuji, we discovered, was not so much one temple but a cluster of them. For once it was I who found that my energies were flagging and Laura who insisted that we must press on and on. Soon, as morning veered to noon, the heat became intense. But amazingly, after all her previous complaints, Laura now seemed to be impervious, as she strode out, often ahead of me, Leica at the ready. It was wonderful to see her so totally and, as it seemed to me, miraculously revitalised.

We perched side by side, staring out at Soami’s garden. ‘I don’t know which is the more beautiful, this or the other one.’

‘You mean Enshu’s? This, I think. Yes, I’m sure. This.’

She put her head on my shoulder. ‘It’s terrific to be here with you. Alone. No one else. Have you noticed how cool one feels here? It’s not really cool, not if one looks at a thermometer, but one has this extraordinary illusion; everything cool, cool, cool.’

‘Let’s go and look at a few more of what the guidebook calls “priceless art objects”. And then we’d better think of eating.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘Gosh! It’s almost two.’

A solemn, silent, round-faced novice served us with many small dishes containing food often so difficult to identify that Laura and I would argue at length without ever agreeing
precisely
what it was. I longed for some sake. Instead I kept
gulping
at iced barley tea.

Later, as I put my hands on the steering wheel of the Cadillac, I let out an involuntary ‘Ouch!’ It was as hot to the touch as plates left too long in an oven. The leather of my seat was scorching my bottom through my crumpled cotton trousers.

Laura turned her head to me and smiled. It was a long time since she had smiled at me with so much joy and love.

‘That was wonderful.’

‘Yes, wonderful. There’s so much to take in here. We’ll never be able to see it all.’

‘But we must try.’

The air conditioner, clattering and grinding away, was at last beginning to make a difference to the stifling temperature.

‘Yes, we must come again. There’s so much we haven’t seen. Let’s come again soon.’

I closed my eyes. For the first time for many days I felt totally happy and at peace.

‘How has my little treasure been?’ As Laura leant over the cot, her blonde hair screening her face, I suddenly experienced a violent, literally breath-taking upsurge of love for her. I drew the air deep into my lungs, once, twice. I had to touch her, now, at once, even though Joy was there on the other side of the cot, also looking down at the sleeping baby. I put a hand on her bare shoulder.

‘Oh, he’s been a marvel,’ Joy was saying. ‘Hardly a sound from him all day. He looks so much better, doesn’t he? He’s getting all his colour back. Right as rain.’

She would have gone on talking, but for once Laura cut her short. ‘I’m afraid we’re later than we said. I am so sorry. You’ll want to get home at once.’

‘Well … If that’s all right with you, madam … I’ve left some corned beef hash for your dinner. In the refrigerator. You only have to warm it up. It won’t take you more than a few minutes. And there’s cheese and grapes.’

‘Oh, thank you. That’s fine. You’re an angel.’

‘If that’s all right then … Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to stop over to serve things up?’

‘Oh, no, we can manage perfectly. Thank you so much.’

I felt that, such was her impatience, Laura was restraining herself from pushing Joy’s substantial bulk to the door.

As soon as she had gone, Laura began to race up the stairs. ‘Come! Quick!
Quick
! Not a moment to be lost!’

‘But we have a whole evening of moments ahead us.’

I began to race up the stairs after her.

Now she lay like an exhausted athlete after a marathon. Eyes closed, hand, palm upward, concealing her face, and her body glistening with sweat, she gasped for breath with an occasional hiccupping sound. When I touched her, she pulled away with a grunt, so that she was on her side, cheek pressed into the pillow. Strands of hair stuck to her forehead. I lay motionless for a while, propped on an elbow, staring at her. I wanted to say to her, ‘That was the best. Ever. The very best.’ But there was something daunting in the distance that she had seemed all at once to have put between us after that period of frenzied closeness.

Eventually I scrambled off the bed and walked round to the table beside it. I pulled open its single drawer and extracted the packet of Camels that I kept there. Camels were her smoke, not mine. I also kept a lighter in the drawer.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Getting a ciggy.’

Always after we had had sex, there was what I called the ‘postplay’ of a cigarette passed back and forth between us.

‘Must you?’

‘No. But I’d like to.’

‘The stink gets into everything. I hate it when I lie down at night and it’s still there on the pillow and sheets.’

‘All right. Never mind.’ I pushed the cigarette back into its packet and dropped both packet and lighter back into the drawer. She and I were the least regular of smokers, lighting up from time to time after a meal or when waiting for someone or something. But I was addicted to that post-coital cigarette and felt exasperated at being cheated of it.

I lay down again on the bed. I stared up at the ceiling. Now, as at Katinka’s, we had our lizards. This was a small one of an exceptionally vivid, luminous green. The sight of it somehow assuaged my disappointment and dismay. I put out a hand and touched her shoulder. I was about to say, ‘Look at that lizard. Have you ever seen anything more perfect?’ But she had already again moved away from me. Then she did a puzzling,
disturbing
thing. With a hand she brushed her shoulder vigorously where I had so briefly just had contact with it. She might have been brushing away a shower of dust or a cobweb.

After a few seconds I again scrambled off the bed. This time I walked down the warm, creaking bare floorboards to the bathroom. In my haste to make love to her I had forgotten to screw back the hexagonal black top of the bottle of Caron. I did so now. My fingers were trembling and I all but dropped it. The shower was gently dripping as it had been doing for days. I turned the cold tap to full and then clambered into the bath and stood under it. The water, always lukewarm from the cold tap during these summer days, hit my head and shoulders with a stunning force.

I was naked under my dressing gown. Laura was formally
elegant
in white silk trousers and a fuchsia silk jacket, both made for her, for an astonishingly small charge, by a dressmaker
recommended
by Mrs Kawasaki. She had also put on a pair of crocodile leather shoes made for her by Lobb’s – the kind of extravagance in which she would so often capriciously indulge in those far-off days. She might have been about to go out to a party, instead of to eat corned beef hash in the kitchen with me.

‘Hungry?’

She shook her head. ‘Not really.’

‘It’s almost nine.’ Like everyone in Japan, we usually ate our dinner far earlier than that.

She sighed and got to her feet. ‘OK.’

From the tall, narrow refrigerator with the orange-yellow stains that Joy had tried in vain to remove with violent
scrubbing
, I took out the Pyrex dish containing the hash. I stared dubiously at it. I had always thought that one ate corned beef hash as soon as one had cooked it.

‘Do you think it’s all right?’

Impatiently she replied, ‘I’m sure it is.’ Then she added, as I carried the dish over to the ancient gas cooker, ‘Oh, don’t fuss so!’

I put the dish down on the kitchen table, preparatory to lighting the oven. But she forestalled me, taking a taper from where Joy kept them in a chipped tumbler and then lighting the taper with a match. She stooped, opened the oven door and turned on the tap.

As the oven ignited with its usual small pop, she let out a
piercing scream and reared away, lighted taper in hand. She went on screaming on the same high, piercing note as I rushed towards her. She pointed.

Later, in telling one of her many stories of the horrors of life in Japan, she would talk of ‘a cascade’ of cockroaches, an ‘army’ of them, and once, to everyone’s amusement, a ‘herd’ of them, a slip for ‘horde’. They plopped out of the oven on to the floor and then scuttled off in all directions.

I put my arms around her, pressing her tightly to me. At once she struggled to free herself. When I still held her, she gave me punch in the side with a fist. Then she yielded to me. Her body became limp. She began to sob. ‘Oh, God, this
country
! This bloody country!’