by Francis King
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
Francis King
Dedication
A step out of her reach
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
A package deal
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Francis King
The Waves Behind the Boat
Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph and he reviewed fiction regularly for the Spectator. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for Act of Darkness (1983). His penultimate book, The Nick of Time, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011.
‘One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov.’ Beryl Bainbridge
Dedication
To
John Haylock
A step out of her reach
Part I
Chapter One
I
‘What the hell is Nishimura doing?’
‘Exchanging meaningless politenesses,’ I answered.
A large drop of rain plopped on to the window-pane on my right, to be followed, seconds later, by another. Trickling down, they merged with the dust to leave two parallel streaks as though of dried coffee. Bill grunted: ‘Rain.’
‘I thought that there’d be a storm, it was so sultry this morning.’ But in fact it had been sultry every morning of the summer-school, storm or no storm.
‘Just what we need to make this journey really easy.’ Bill was thinking, I knew, of the next time that he and Nishimura had to change a tyre. ‘Oh, come on, come on.’
‘If he takes much longer I’ll asphyxiate.’
Bill pressed the horn, which was so loud, a double bleat as of a ewe and its lamb, that everyone at the garage and in the street turned round to stare at us. Except for Nishimura; he was used to it. Bill pressed again and yet again.
‘He’s coming,’ I said.
Nishimura was bowing and the garage-man was bowing, as was the boy who helped him. They continued to bow for several seconds whilst the rain, suddenly gathering force, raked down on their heads and open-necked shirts, drenching them in a moment.
‘Come, my boy, come, for God’s sake come!’ Bill shouted into the downpour. Nishimura came.
‘Well, what was all that about?’ Bill asked, as he took the change handed to him by Nishimura.
Nishimura’s usual answer to that question was ‘Nothing’ but on this occasion he surprised us by saying ‘Garage man was telling me about English girl who has died.’
‘Died? What English girl?’
It took us a long time to extract the story, meagre in its details and vague in its locality, and by the time that we had done so we had left the village far behind us: an English girl, holidaying in a remote village around the peninsula, had been drowned while swimming.
‘Do you suppose it can-be either Kay or June?’ I asked.
Only three days before, we had entertained briefly at the summer-school two girls with whom I had once worked at the Embassy before my marriage to Bill. They had arrived together on a motor-bicycle to the astonishment of the Japanese teachers attending the school, and had refused our offer to put them up somehow in the already over-crowded inn, saying that they preferred to sleep in their tent out of doors. After dinner we had walked down to the beach with a party of the students to see how they were getting on, and had found one of them fishing on a ruined jetty in shorts and polo-necked sweater while the other strummed on a guitar. ‘Oh, good! Now we can have a sing-song,’ the older of them said. The Japanese were enthusiastic and later wondered why Bill, who had lectured to them on English music as well as on literature, should at once have slunk away.
‘I’m afraid it may be.’
‘They were going round that way, weren’t they? And Kay was an awfully reckless swimmer.’
‘Didn’t the garage-man tell you the name of the girl?’ Bill turned to Nishimura.
The boy shook his head.
‘Do you mean that he didn’t know the name or that you didn’t ask him?’ I queried.
The boy shook his head again.
‘No alternative questions, Mary,’ Bill said. ‘Let’s ask one first and then the other.’
Eventually we discovered that Nishimura had asked the name of the girl but that the garage-man had not known it.
‘How ghastly! I suppose it must be one of them.’
I had not known the girls well and at the Embassy I had never really liked them; but now, as I remembered that evening on the jetty, June still holding her fishing-rod over the quiet, moonlit water while the Japanese, squatting round in a circle on the sand, sang ‘My Darling Clementine’ with a ludicrously solemn concentration on both the English words and the tune, I felt shocked and sad. It must be Kay. The next morning she had swum out and out, far farther than anyone else of us had ever dared to go, and when she had returned she had told us that she had really planned to cross the bay to the other side but that she had begun to feel too tired and had realised that though she might get there, she would never be able to get back.
There were stops at other villages and small towns: for another puncture; to have one of the windscreen wipers fixed; to adjust the brakes; for yet another puncture; for lunch; to adjust the steering; for a bowl of cold noodles, delicious in that heat, on top of a mountain-pass; to adjust the steering again. Bill took over the driving from Nishimura and at once the boy fell into a deep sleep, his mouth open as he snored.
‘If only I could sleep like that,’ Bill said.
‘I’m jolly glad you can’t. You’d keep me awake all night.’
As we approached Matsue, our destination, all the lights of the ancient Cadillac suddenly failed.
‘Well, it looks as if we shall have to abandon the poor old elephant here!’ ‘ Here’ was in the middle of a small bamboo-forest.
‘And walk home in this rain?’ I demanded.
‘We can probably thumb a lift; You stay where you are, and I’ll get out with Nishimura and see what luck we have.’
Twenty minutes passed. A truck and three cars swished by, throwing up spray on either side of their passage as though they were motor-boats, but none of them stopped. Drenched, the brim of his straw-hat sticking to his forehead, Bill tumbled back into his seat. ‘ The shits,’ he said. Outside Nishimura was still forlornly standing with a tattered Japanese paper umbrella open in one hand.
‘I hate to say it, dear, but I wonder if this car was really a good buy.’
‘What do you expect for a hundred and fifty pounds?’
His tone warned me that it would be unwise to continue. He opened the door and shouted into the darkness: ‘Come, Nishimura, come! Come!’
Obediently the boy churned back th
rough the stream which the centre of the road had become.
‘I’ll drive,’ Bill told him.
‘You mean—we’re going to drive on?’
‘Can’t see what else to do. We’ll go very slowly and carefully. No. I’d better drive; Nishimura. Change places with me.’
Nishimura was a far better driver than Bill, but remembering the importance of face in Japan, I managed not to say so, as we began to chug slowly between the swaying bamboos, the windscreen awash with rain.
Perhaps it was the charm given to me early that morning as a farewell gift by one of the students—‘good for love, business and journey’ he had told me—that brought us safely home. I never expected it.
I
It was as I was preparing a supper of scrambled eggs, bacon and coffee, with a saucepan of glutinous rice and sour-smelling pickles for Nishimura, that the telephone rang.
‘Can you get it?’ I shouted to Bill. But in spite of having been drenched to the skin intermittently throughout the day, he was having a shower.
‘Nishimura! Nishimura!’
The boy did not appear; and I could see through the hatch into the dining-room that he had not laid the table as I had asked him to do.
Eventually I scuttled to the telephone myself with the saucepan of half-coagulated scrambled egg in one hand. I felt sure that it would be a wrong number; it usually was.
Both Bill and I know some Japanese—I call mine kitchen Japanese and he calls his pillow Japanese—but it is one thing to tell the maid what to buy for lunch or to flirt with a bar-girl over a glass of saké and another to understand a male voice speaking a dialect extremely fast into what appears to be a tumbler of water. I soon gave up.
‘Wait a minute!’ Please wait a minute! I must call someone Japanese.’
But the voice went on. As I put down the receiver on the table, I could hear it, at last completely audible, shouting ‘Moshi, moshi! Moshi, moshi!’
I ran up the stairs, calling to Nishimura. The light was on in his room but at first I could not see him through the open door, which concealed most of the bed. Then all at once I glimpsed the arm trailing inertly from the bed to the floor. When he had first come to stay with us, he had slept Japanese-style, on nothing but a futon; but soon he had asked if he could have the rusty, ramshackle bed left for us by our landlady in the storeroom.
‘Nishimura! Nishimura!’
The boy’s room, into which I now ventured, had acted as a strainer for all the things discarded by Bill or myself over the last year: old newspapers and magazines; empty gin and whisky bottles; shoes split at the instep or with holes in the soles; clothes that the moths had devoured; presentation copies in Japanese of works of theology or of studies of Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham and Mark Rutherford, originally prepared as theses.
‘Nishimura!’
It was only in Japan that I fully learned the meaning of the phrase ‘ dead tired’. He might have been dead. Students laughing and joking with each other on a railway platform would, as soon as they had boarded the train, at once ‘die’ in the same way; labourers at their midday break would drop off into unconsciousness, the same wax pallor suddenly descending on their previously mobile features and their bodies so relaxed that they did not feel the hardness of the ground or the often cramped postures in which they sprawled on a bench or under a tree. Bill used to say that it was a matter of vitamins when, after a day by the sea, we would find that all our Japanese guests had at once fallen asleep in the back of the car, their heads lolling on each other’s shoulders as though they were drunk. I always hated to wake Nishimura; it seemed an act of cruelty.
‘Nishimura! Could you please come and answer the telephone? Anyway supper is almost ready. Please!’
Slowly he raised himself on the bed, gasping for breath as though he were a fish that I had just drawn up from the depths of the sea. His face was greenish, the eyes bloodshot and barely open.
By the time I got him to the telephone, whoever had called had already rung off.
‘Sorry. I woke you for nothing. But if you lay the table we can eat.’
Yawning prodigiously, he moved slowly round the table, putting down now a fork and now a knife and intermittently pausing to stare for several seconds on end at his handiwork.
The telephone rang again when we were having our coffee.
‘You’d better go this time, Nishimura,’ I told him.
Eventually the three of us were clustered around the telephone while Nishimura translated back and forth. It was about the drowned girl: but it was a long time before we could get any answer to our repeated question ‘What is her name?’ ‘He asks if you are British Council’ Nishimura kept saying and we kept replying ‘Does he mean British Council or British Consul?’ But it was a distinction which Nishimura had never really been able to grasp and which he therefore was incapable of explaining to the police in a remote seaside village. ‘And we’re not even British Council, not really,’ said Bill, introducing, with his scholarly devotion to the exact truth, what seemed to me a totally unnecessary complication. ‘ We’re Council-subsidised lecturers.’
Eventually he was able to tell us ‘Her name is Miss Lee.’
‘Miss Lee. Well, thank God, that’s neither Kay nor June,’ I exclaimed.
‘Never heard of a Miss Lee. Have you?’
I shook my head.
‘Police say that you must come at once to Abekawa.’
‘Certainly not!’ Bill exclaimed.
Nishimura spoke at length into the telephone. ‘Police say that British Council must come at once. This is work of British Council.’
‘Council or Consul?’ Bill demanded. ‘Anyway we’re not British Council. We’re Council-subsidised lecturers.’
The argument continued, until poor Nishimura, turning from the telephone to us and then back to the telephone again, was on the verge of tears from mingled bewilderment, exasperation and fatigue.
‘Give them the telephone number of Neil Waters and tell them to get in touch with him,’ I suggested at last. ‘This is really nothing whatever to do with us. We don’t know the girl, we can’t identify her, and we have no authority to take any kind of action?’
Neil Waters, who had once been my boss in Chancery in Tokyo, was now our nearest Consul.
Bill began to search for his number.
Nishimura shook his head, when the call at last had ended. ‘Police are very angry,’ he said.
‘I hope not with us.’
‘Yes,’ he replied to me. ‘Angry with you.’
‘Well, why the hell?’ Bill demanded.
‘Police says that you English do not wish to look after other English: There are other foreigners at Abekawa but they also say,that this is not their business.’
‘It’s more their business than ours,’ I retorted. ‘Are they—were they friends of this Miss—Miss Lee?’
‘I think so. Maybe she was staying with them.’
‘Well then! Surely they can do whatever the police want them to do until somebody from the Consulate gets there.’
‘Maybe,’ Nishimura answered me.
If he could not with a good conscience say ‘yes’ and felt that it would be impolite to say ‘no’, Nishimura, like many Japanese, took refuge in this ‘maybe’. ‘This temple must be one of the oldest in the district’ one would say to him, for example; and he, knowing (since he was a student of architecture) that in fact it was a modern reconstruction would warily answer ‘ Maybe’, his eyes fixed several inches below one’s gaze. The habit always maddened me.
Bill looked at his watch: it was past midnight. ‘I don’t somehow imagine that Neil will be pleased if they get on to him at this hour, do you?’ Yet it was obvious that he hoped that the police would do just this, since for some reason he has always refused to believe that Neil, a middle-aged married man notorious for his interest in young women, never had an affair with me in the days when we had worked together, and therefore detests him. ‘ Let’s get to bed. God, I feel tired!
’
‘You go on up. I’ll just finish washing up the things.’
‘Oh, leave them until tomorrow. Tanaka-san can do them.’
‘No. I’ll do them,’ I said.
The truth was that, whenever we returned from one of our trips, I loved to wander around the house, examining things, polishing a silver cigarette case or dusting a vase, tidying the refrigerator, playing with the cat, or just lying back on the sofa in the sitting-room and looking around me. We had little of value in the house: a few wedding-presents; some other presents—Japanese dolls, works by well-known modern potters, wood-biock prints—given to us subsequently by our students in return for private tuition, training for oratorical contests or correction of theses; and a few indifferent antiques picked up when we wandered round the back streets of the town or visited Kyoto or Tokyo. I suppose that I am a naturally acquisitive person. Objects which, in the house of a friend or in a shop, gave me no pleasure at all, acquire an aura as soon as I possess them. When Bill and, Nishimura had gone upstairs, I gazed around the kitchen as I dried the few plates and knives and forks which we had used for our meal, with an extraordinary feeling of satisfaction and even, of joy. The American rotary blender which we had bought off a missionary couple the week before we had left for the summer-school, gleaming beside a huge Japanese casserole painted with every variety of sea-food but already cracking at one corner; the linoleum, interlocking blue and black rectangles; the refrigerator, always going wrong but now setting up a grinding whirr, the sign that it was working; the tarnished forks in my hand, with the initials of my grandmother on them; the sheen on the formica top of the round kitchen table.… I had to force myself to get on with my work and not to stand there motionless absorbed in all these separate things. They seemed so beautiful.
The cat, Michiko, suddenly appeared with a bound at the window and let out a curious throaty squawk when she saw me. A moment later she was purring in my arms.
