‘Fuck you,’ Kuroda wheezed, and kissed his cheek.
Takiko saw the men fighting through the two windows.
‘It’s like having dogs, isn’t it,’ the Countess said, and poured Takiko some more tea. She always took over the tea. Takiko, she said, was shocking at it. ‘I think Kuroda’s a bit in love with him, don’t you?’
‘He’s fine, I’m not worried about Mori’s honour.’
‘So this play,’ the Countess said. She was glittering in the lamplight. It was one of the things that Takiko liked about her, that she insisted on dressing for dinner and after-dinner tea in the evenings, even if nobody was around to see except Takiko and the owls. ‘You’ll start the new run when? Only you know Akiko, whose husband is that irritating education fellow who wants to abolish kanji? She’s just started at The Times.’
‘Isn’t that in English?’
‘One has to start somewhere.’
Takiko snorted and the Countess sparkled.
‘But it would be good to give her an interview, give her a world of help. I thought we could invite her to court.’
‘We? I don’t get invited to court, I’m the scum of the earth,’ Takiko laughed.
The Countess looked worried. ‘No, but I thought you didn’t like to go?’
Takiko had to smile into the tea. The Countess thought she wasn’t a snob, because her father had been a lawyer and she’d married upward, but she was, and she had the upper-class habit of assuming that if you didn’t do things, it was because they hadn’t struck your fancy. ‘I wouldn’t mind if you’d put in a good word for me. Not that I – you know. I don’t want to collapse at your feet and be all, please Lady Kuroda sort out my awkward social career, but …’
‘Oh, obviously,’ said the Countess, who had a brilliant way of puffing up like a cross partridge when she was indignant. Takiko could never work out how she did it, because she was a very slim person. ‘The Empress would be delighted. She’s dull as bloody ditchwater, but she would be delighted.’
‘Is she actually?’
The Countess inclined her head and gave Takiko a wry look. ‘She has written,’ she said, making an elegant, broad gesture with her tea that suggested some kind of art or ballet, ‘a collection of poetry.’
‘Is it good?’
‘No,’ the Countess said. ‘It’s a pile of absolute cack, Pepperharrow, you’ll have to see it to believe it.’ She straightened suddenly and preened. ‘Oh, but we simply must support the young ladies of the court, even though life is simply dreadful for me, and look I wrote a poem, and I might have cut myself with a razor because of the dreadful anxiety of it all, but only a teeny bit because, you know, it would be dreadfully irresponsible, and this poem, well, it’s about life and experience and by heaven if she wouldn’t be improved with a chopstick in the eye. I mean I shouldn’t say that, it’s sad. She’s got everything a person could possibly need, but she’s got nowhere to channel herself, and it’s making her peculiar and stupid. But the point is, don’t turn all shy and working-class. You would be an edifying force in that room.’
Takiko grinned, feeling herself starting to colour. ‘I don’t know if I want to go now, thanks.’
‘Tough it, you’re going, and then I won’t have to,’ the Countess said firmly. ‘I’ve been wanting to get away for a while now. She always has it in the mornings and I’ve been feeling ill in the mornings.’
Takiko edged the plate of little cakes over to her. She didn’t know what to say. All her sisters had had children, but all she’d learned from it was that people with children turned inward. She didn’t see any of them anymore. Congratulations would have been the right thing to say, but she couldn’t bring herself to. She just felt lonely in advance. ‘Oh, right. How are you doing with it?’ she asked at last.
The Countess smiled, full of sympathy. ‘I said I’m feeling ill, not pregnant. I’ve got this absurd hacking cough I never get rid of til midday, it’s absolutely undignified.’
Takiko laughed and felt disproportionately relieved. She liked the theatre and the actors in their own tetchy way, liked talking to patrons, liked Mori, but Mori was more of a beautiful creature that lived in the same house than he was a husband. She saw him sometimes, and he still came up for tea in the attic at the Shintomi on Saturdays, but like he’d promised when they were first married, there wasn’t much else to it. He could be sitting just opposite, but he was still as separate as a siren watching from underwater. She had been sad about that for a while, more than she had expected. It meant she never came first for anybody, least of all the people who she would have liked to put first. Until, that was, she got talking properly to the Countess, who had come backstage once and congratulated her and asked if could she possibly have a copy of the play script to read. Ever since, even though Takiko wasn’t half as clever or half as funny, the Countess had shown every sign of putting Takiko first.
For the second time that evening, the Countess glanced down at the floor beside the table. Her accounting ledgers were there.
‘Are you really going to do it?’ Takiko asked. Mori had warned them earlier that the finance people from the Ministry were coming.
‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘I’m tired of living with a drunk.’
‘Well, cheers. To a long, long prison sentence.’
The Countess nodded and smiled, but she didn’t repeat the toast. Later, when she looked back on that moment, Takiko had an unbearable feeling that the Countess had known full well it could never go her way.
The doorbell rang half an hour later. Kuroda’s wife didn’t give Suzuki time to go, and answered it herself; she had a habit of treating any house she was in as her own kingdom. Home Ministry auditors liked their late-night visits. Kuroda was tempted to go out to them and ask if they expected to find a smoking ledger called Naughty Deals about his person, but that would have been dignifying them with the time. His wife simpered at them in the hallway. The auditors kept their answers to yes and no.
‘Just bring them in,’ he snapped towards the corridor.
The auditors were respectful, but not as much as they could have been, emanating clerkly precision and faint distaste to be standing under the sword over the door, the one he had taken as a souvenir for Mori when the Koreans surrendered. They wanted to look at some records. He told them that obviously the records weren’t here. They wanted him to go back to Tokyo. He said no. They wanted to talk. He said in the morning. But his wife hummed and hovered, and said ‘I wonder if …’ a lot, always trailing off into ellipses, and then produced the folders in a bundle and offered earnestly to make the auditors some tea while they read in the side office.
Kuroda wondered why he hadn’t just locked her in the attic instead of letting her set up here.
‘I don’t suppose you charmed them into buggering off, did you?’ he asked when she came out, trying to cover how much he wanted to demand why the hell she would feel the need to hand the ledgers over to Ministry auditors without a warrant.
‘Oh, no,’ she laughed, one hand over her mouth. She always pulled her sleeve well over her knuckles and it made her look like a schoolgirl. He didn’t know why women imagined men found that appealing. He couldn’t think of anything less worthwhile. ‘They seem awfully serious.’
Mori stood up and started to get between them like he always did, lifting his hand to brush her sleeve. But before he could touch it, he stopped and clenched his fist, then sank back against the wall. He looked sick. He must have decided he was going to have to let them have it out at some point, if he didn’t mean to spend the rest of his life shepherding them in opposite directions. The absence of the usual safety net made Kuroda feel odd.
‘So you just gave them everything?’
‘Well, it seemed much better not to try to hide anything.’
It was moronic even for her. ‘Fuck’s sake, girl – do you want to get me arrested?’
Her expression flickered, and then he understood. She did. Of course she did. She would love for him to be in p
rison and not blundering around her nice house, behaving like a commoner and trooping through with all his cheap, common friends.
Of course she didn’t have the guts to tell him to his face to get out of her house. He would have, if she’d done that. It was her house. But instead she’d run here and cowered behind Mori and Mrs Pepperharrow, and now she’d come up with this slimy little slug of a plan to stab him in the back.
She ran like she walked, knees turned inward and pigeon-toed, because the hems of her kimono were all fashionably narrow. Any normal person would have just torn the dress to run properly, especially when he went after her. But she didn’t. She kept on in that way and crumpled when she tripped. He picked her up again and banged her onto her feet and shook her. She wasn’t stupid. She wrote poetry, beautiful poetry. But she always pretended to be brainless, and he hated it, hated it like everyone hated concealed weaponry, and he had never understood why she had to pretend and sneak when there were people like Mrs Pepperharrow who showed you all their guns and gave you decent warning before they blew you out of the water.
On the back of his neck was an awareness that Mori hadn’t run out to stop him. All there had been from Mori’s direction was a thump that sounded like he’d punched the wall.
‘Don’t run away from me, you little coward. Explain why you thought telling them everything would be the clever thing to do,’ he hissed.
‘Oh, but you see, I thought it would be for the best. After all we have nothing to hide—’
‘No you didn’t! Just admit it! Just say it, you bloody worm, tell me to my face!’
‘I’m sure I don’t know what—’
He only meant to give her a bang on the head. When he questioned himself later, again and again, usually in the middle of the night, he was certain that was true. He had not meant for it to happen. He’d meant to hurt her, yes, give her a shock, jolt her into some kind of common sense. But he was drunker than he’d thought, and the base of the tumbler in his hand was heavy. It broke her skull. After she had collapsed onto the floor, he stared. The blow hadn’t knocked her out. She was feeling around for a comb that had fallen from her hair. It was right in front of her, but she couldn’t see it.
He was turning around to go back for Mori when Mori came through quietly of his own accord. If he felt an iota of surprise, he didn’t show it. He knelt down and gave her comb back, setting it into her hand, and then lifted her very gently upright. His knuckles were bleeding. He really had hit the wall, so hard the cuts were pale with plaster dust.
‘We need to hurry to catch the post,’ she said, sounding completely normal, ‘or we shall miss the matinee.’
Kuroda stared at her. He didn’t want to rage anymore. Instead he was seized with the need to get away from her. She wasn’t a person now – she was a thing, a grotesque, wrong thing that was only human-shaped, except for the star-shaped dent in her skull where the likeness failed.
Mori inclined his head at Kuroda and watched him hard, and held her still by her shoulders, and Kuroda realised that this was the punishment. He couldn’t blame it on rage in the moment or tell himself he had been drunk. He was stone sober now. Mori tapped her on the head. It wouldn’t even have hurt her usually; it was the kind of strike you aimed at someone good-naturedly to make him look up and laugh with you. But something terrible must have gone wrong inside her skull already. She folded. Mori caught her.
‘Send for the coroner,’ was all he said.
Kuroda couldn’t move. ‘You let me do that,’ he said, quiet at first, but then the enormity of it pumped a bellows and the anger roared again. ‘You let me, you can’t say you didn’t see – you’re just as guilty as I am, so don’t get on your fucking high horse now and—’
‘I did let you,’ Mori interrupted. He had put a hardness in his voice that Kuroda had never heard before from anyone outside the Admiralty. ‘Now send for the coroner.’ He lifted her onto the couch and arranged her hands into a modest clasp against her belt, around the gold comb.
‘But – what will he find? There’s a – damn it, Keita, there’s the shape of a glass in her—’
‘He’ll find a haemorrhage,’ Mori said. He looked to the side as his steward, Suzuki, arrived with new clothes and a sack. ‘Get changed. Suzuki will get rid of what you’re wearing.’
‘You’re helping me,’ Kuroda said numbly. He heard the strength go out of his own voice.
‘Yes, now go and fetch the coroner. And tell those two in the office that your wife is dead. Say something sensible. Unrelated to brandy tumblers.’
Kuroda took a breath to ask him to just explain what to say, but Mori gave him the look that sergeants give especially slow seamen. ‘Either think properly and get through, or collapse and be executed. You’re no use to anyone if you can’t think. I’m going to sit here.’
The coroner, the auditors, and Kuroda had all gone. Everyone had seemed perfectly convinced the Countess had just fallen. Mori had told them so and that had been that. It had all happened before they had even touched the wretched ledgers, which lay unopened on a table still, someone’s teacup still cooling on one. Takiko hadn’t even seen bribes change hands; she didn’t think there had been any. People just believed Mori. Even though Suzuki had gone right past the window with a sack full of Kuroda’s bloody clothes and all the alcohol in the house, heading to the old sulphur well. She’d never thought she was naive, but it shocked her. She would have gone straight to the police station if she’d thought for a second that anyone there would pay her a blind bit of attention instead of just joking about Mori’s mad foreign wife.
Instead, she went to find Mori in his bedroom. On the way, fury and fear roiled together right in the pit of her stomach. God, all that rubbish he’d fed her before they were married, about needing her help: she had been such an idiot that she’d never even considered that help might just mean being murdered at the right moment. The Duke had told her; he’d told her, and she had barely listened for long enough to write him off as a superstitious berk. Half of her wanted to bolt and never come back. It was idiocy to confront a man who had done what she had just watched Mori do. The other half screamed it was better to die fighting than live hiding. Countess Kuroda had lived hiding.
Mori was walking up and down by the verandah door, waiting.
‘I know it was—’
She punched him in the head, a proper right hook. He went down hard on his knees on the floor. Knowing that he’d let her do it only made it worse. She’d never felt anger like it. There was madness in it, a raving howling need to go at him with whatever was to hand until his bones were powder. It was a colossal effort to lock her hands behind her back. She almost choked with it.
‘You let that happen because you thought she was an idiot, didn’t you?’ she said. Her voice came out low and tight. She didn’t sound like herself. ‘You understand that she wasn’t really like that? You know that no one is really like that? She was that way, she pretended to be stupid, because she’s read Sung Tzu. Seem weak where you are strong. She was conducting her marriage like a war.’
‘I know,’ he said softly. He was still on his knees. He sat back on his heels. ‘I know. I’m so sorry.’
‘Why did you let it happen?’ She snatched the back of his hair to force him to look up. ‘What, you thought she wasn’t worthwhile?’
‘Because I need Kuroda as he is now, with this hanging over him.’
‘That’s …’ She had to open her hands, because there were words, but they were bandied around too often to have kept all their power untarnished by idiots and exaggeration. ‘Evil. You’re evil.’
‘Yes.’ He shook his head slightly. She wished he would just be obnoxious, because then it would have been fair to kick him in the face, but he looked haunted, and sad, as though evil was a border he had crossed a long time ago and he was so deep into the country beyond that he could hardly remember anywhere else. He got up gradually. ‘Yes.’
‘What do you need him for? What’s so bloody important?’
He almost looked like he might explain, but then he seemed to put it all to one side. ‘Does it make any difference?’
Without really deciding to, she picked up the sake bottle from the table and fully meant to slam it into his teeth – a savage fury voice right at the front of her mind wanted his teeth in a jar – but before she’d even swung it, he clapped both hands over his mouth and half collapsed. He let himself down the rest of the way to the floor slowly, breathing as though she had already done it, coughing through pain that couldn’t possibly be real but looked entirely genuine all the same. She put the bottle down.
‘What?’ she said, confused.
Mori was shaking his head. He didn’t try to talk.
‘You feel it before it actually … happens.’
He nodded.
Caught between indignation and guilt and deep, nasty satisfaction, she sat down on the floor too. ‘But it wears off quickly?’
He sat back very, very slowly. He had gone white. He looked around without moving his head much, found a piece of paper and wrote, Psychosomatic. Takes a while.
‘You bloody deserved it,’ she said, uncomfortable now. His hand was shaking. She could see he would have liked to touch his own teeth, to prove to himself they were still there, but he couldn’t.
Yes.
She sat in silence for a while, still too full of rage to ask if he was all right.
Mori was silent too. He was sitting back against the wall now, his eyelashes full of pain tears that didn’t fall and his hands clamped together, but he was still shaking. With a little tide of disbelief, she realised he was going into shock.
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow Page 16
