by Francis King
I shook my head, ‘It’s all news to us.’
‘Well, she threw over the Australian sugar-daddy for a Jap in the Embassy out there—whom she later followed back to Tokyo. But once the Jap was back home he was too terrified to have anything more to do with her. I don’t think that it was his idea that she should follow him. Besides, without his foreign allowances I don’t think he could have been much use to her.…’
Bill and I looked at each other; we felt that we now knew Thelma far better than we had ever done when she was alive.
‘Anyway, Sasha—who must have been drunk—said something to the effect that she must come and visit us one day. And of course at that she asked for our address. No more encouragement was needed.’ She turned to me with a smile: ‘I suppose that she was really a high-class tart. Wasn’t she?’
I did not answer.
‘You know’—she sipped from the cup—‘she ought to have done better in Japan. I can’t understand it. After all, there are all kinds of rich business men who would be flattered to have a white mistress. Though not old Ishikawa. He’s far too stingy.… Yes, a high-class tart—that’s the best way we can describe her.’
I had already come to accept the fact that Thelma had been ‘a high-class tart’ but to hear it said, in that cool, scornful voice, so soon after her death, filled me with fury. Possibly I should have expressed my fury, if at that moment the maid had not returned to summon Bill to the telephone. It was Neil Waters.
‘I wonder what your Consul wants,’ Bibi Akulov said when Bill had left the room.
I explained that there had been some doubt whether as a Roman Catholic Thelma could be cremated or not.’
‘And they’re against cremation, are they? I suppose I knew that. What does it matter what is done to one’s body after one has finished with it. I’d be quite prepared to be processed into cooking-fat or fertiliser—or presented to the medical department of Kobe University.’
When Bill returned he looked pale and troubled; over-conscientious, responsibility always works in him like a fever. ‘Well, it’s all all right,’ he said, although his expression suggested that things were far from all right. ‘Her father has agreed that she should be cremated. But he wants the ashes sent to England. I said that we would bring them back to Matsue with us. I suppose that he must have got some kind of dispensation.’
‘Isn’t it crazy?’ Bibi Akulov said. ‘All that trouble over the ashes—and they probably won’t be her ashes anyway. And what good does it do to anyone?’
‘Perhaps we ought to be getting back to the police-station,’ Bill said grimly. Picking his shapeless alpaca jacket up off the floor where he had dropped it, he flung it over his shoulders and made for the door. ‘Neil had already talked to Furukawa-san,’ he said. ‘Apparently Furukawa-san still hasn’t grasped that we’re not members of the Consulate staff.’
‘Well, I should let him go on thinking it,’ Bibi said, getting to her feet.
Evidently she planned to accompany us, although at that moment we should both have preferred to be without her.
3
‘Now for this grim business of the identification,’ Bill said, leaning forward in the car and pressing his hands together between his knees.
‘Darling, you don’t have to do it. I’m quite capable of identifying her alone.’
‘Of course I have to do it.’
‘Yes, Furukawa-san will certainly insist,’ Bibi said.
‘He didn’t insist that your brother—’
‘He knew that it would be useless. Sasha can be awfully obstinate. And you can hardly force someone to—’
‘Then why should he think he can force—?’ I began to demand in anger. But the car had drawn up outside the police-station and Bill was jumping out.
Furukawa-san had already explained to us that the postmortem had been completed by a doctor who had come over from Matsue early that morning to certify that death had been due to heart-failure. ‘Then he means that she didn’t drown at all?’ Bill had said to Nishimura. ‘Perhaps.’ But what Furukawa-san had meant, as we slowly established, was that the immediate cause of death had been heart-failure, precipitated by the presence of water in the lungs.
Furukawa-san now got up from his desk, hastily concealing a half-empty bowl of rice and another of pickles under a newspaper, reached for his hat and smilingly suggested that we should go to view the body, rather as if he were about to show us the sights of the town.
‘It is not far, he says,’ Nishimura told us. He and Furukawa-san were walking together while Bibi, Bill and I followed behind them. Nishimura turned again: ‘He says that the lady is in refrigerator. Excuse me.’ He evidently felt that some apology was required for the baldness of this statement. ‘ It is very hot,’ he added. ‘That is why she is placed in refrigerator.’
Furukawa-sah and Nishimura turned into a butcher’s shop, one of several low, wooden buildings on one side of the dusty square along which we were walking. Furukawa-san stood holding the bead curtain aside for us, smiling nervously under his small moustache as he said in Japanese: ‘Please come in. Excuse me. Please. This way please.’ He used the same wheedling tone and approximately the same words that Japanese waiters use to coax one into a restaurant.
‘My God,’ Bill said.
‘You don’t have to go in.’
But Bill pushed in front of me and entered the shop. I followed, brushing away from my face the flies which had already begun to settle there. Bibi stayed outside.
The butcher was a small man in a white coat, blood-stained and reaching almost to his ankles. A strip of towel was knotted around his temples, over which his coarse grey hair stuck out in tufts. He was elaborately polite to us, sucking in his breath repeatedly as he told us how glad he was to see us. how sorry he was about the object of our errand, and how willing he was to do anything in his power to help us. Beneath the formality, always inescapable in Japan, one sensed that, like Furukawa-san, he was genuinely upset and eager to be kind to us. He went to the back of the shop where a woman, wearing kimono, had been lurking, and swung open a door, much taller than himself, behind which I could glimpse half-dismembered carcasses gleaming under the light of a single naked bulb, as they hung downwards from their hooks.
‘You don’t have to go in,’ I repeated to Bill.
Bill shook his head, the freckles on his face all at once growing prominent.
I said to Furukawa-san, who had drawn out a bamboo chair for me: ‘I can identify her better than my husband. I knew her much better. I’ll identify her.’
He peered at me, genuinely puzzled. I was sure that I had said the Japanese sentences correctly; but he still could not believe that either Bill or I knew any Japanese at all. He turned to Nishimura for help.
When Nishimura had translated, Furukawa-san shook his head. He smiled, as though I had made some joke, and patted the chair before me. ‘Please,’ he said, using the English word, not for the first time. Then he said in Japanese to Nishimura: ‘ Of course Warner-san must see the body. As the Consul it is necessary for him to see the body.’
But Bill had already gone through the door.
I walked past Furukawa-san and to his amazement also went through. He raised a hand, he almost caught hold of me—only the breach of etiquette involved in a Japanese man touching a western woman he hardly knew could have prevented him; then he emitted a curious little gasp, as though he were stiffing a hiccough, and crowded in behind me.
As I stepped over the rusty iron ledge, my first sensation, which lasted only a moment, was not one of horror—that was to come later, at its most intense long after we had left the shop, with its smells of sawdust and blood and dust—but of pleasure. To be so cool at last! This was not the atmosphere of the air-conditioned Cadillac, thin and chilly, but the cold one experiences as one steps out of the fug of an over-heated bus on a mountain pass and all at once the raw air hits one like a wave, buffeting one into life again. My pores stopped sweating; my mouth was no longer dry; the s
kin of my arms and neck all at once grew taut.
‘You don’t have to look,’ I said to Bill. ‘Don’t look. It’s only a formality.’
‘Shut up.’
Suddenly I realised that Nishimura was also pushing into the small metal room and the absurd thought came to me—‘This is like one of those awful shipboard parties when there isn’t enough space for all the guests in a crowded cabin.’ ‘Nishimura—why don’t you wait for us outside with Miss Akulov?’
But he shook his head. ‘ It is interesting for me to see.’ He licked his lips, probably from nervousness; but at the time it made him look like some beast of prey, a wolf or a hyena, his large teeth gleaming white under the swinging light above us.
‘Excuse please.’ Furukawa-san eased his way past me, like the over-polite guest who has left his drink on the other side of the milling crowd. ‘Excuse.’ He said something over his shoulder to Nishimura, which I could not catch as the words pattered lightly past me.
‘He says that this is not sight for lady.’
‘Nonsense.’
Later, when, I asked myself why I had not waited outside with Bibi, I came up with the answer that I had wanted to support Bill even if I could not wholly relieve him of the duty, far more terrible to him than to me, of viewing the body and pronouncing it to be Thelma’s. But was there not also some element of morbid curiosity—that curiosity which, as in the case of Nishimura, is directed not merely outwards to the object but also inwards to oneself, as one seeks the answer ‘How much of this can I stand?’
The butcher began to unwind a polythene sheet (Bill’s suits came back from the cleaner in Matsue wrapped in just that same kind of fabric, skin-thin and the colour of skin) off an object lying in the farthest corner on top of a pile of sacks, and Furakawa stooped to help him. The breath of the two men was the only sound superimposed on the rustling of the polythene as the butcher caught it up in sagging folds under his arm. I knew that they were doing something which filled them with revulsion and even horror; but being Japanese they would never admit that even to each other, let alone to strangers like ourselves.
‘Please.’ Furukawa-san turned to Bill. ‘Please.’ Then, all at once, he gave a brief involuntary little giggle. Catching the infection of his hysteria I had to control myself not to burst into laughter.
Under the polythene there was a towel and this he had now drawn down to Thelma’s waist. I forced myself to look, wondering what perverse considerations of decency had led them to replace on her a black lace brassière and who had found it among her things. That, at any rate, was hers—I had seen it that night she had stayed at the hotel and had realised how flat-chested she would be without it—as were the ring on the right hand, the knuckles a greenish purple from their lacerations; the beautiful little mouth which seemed about to make one of her habitual moues of distaste; and the hair in which, I suddenly saw, seaweed and sand had been caked with the salt. The rest was unrecognisable.
Bill gave a kind of groan and stumbled out into the sunlight of the shop. I followed.
It seemed a long time later that Nishimura and the other two Japanese emerged. Bill muttered ‘ How ghastly, how absolutely ghastly.’
‘He wishes to know if it is Miss Lee,’ Nishimura said politely to us. The boy drew a paper-tissue out of his pocket, wiped his lips along it and then returned it to his pocket again.
‘Of course it’s Miss Read,’ said.
‘Yes, I also think so.’
‘I am sorry,’ Furukawa-san said to me in English. He grinned. ‘I am sorry, Mr Warner. Bad, bad.’ He shook his head. Then he and the butcher began to exchange elaborate courtesies, with Nishimura and even myself (such is the force of convention in Japan) joining in.
Bill staggered out into the street; a moment later I could hear the unmistakable sound of repeated retching. The Japanese must also have heard it, but they gave no indication of having done so.
Bibi was beside him, her hand on his shoulder, saying ‘Sit down, sit down for a moment. I’ll get you some water.’ But he pushed her away roughly. ‘I’m all right. I’m all right now. Don’t worry.’ His face was green; his hair stuck to his forehead and his shirt stuck to his shoulders. He, too, might have just been fished out of the sea.
The butcher bowed on the doorstep; I bowed back, at the same time holding Bill’s hand in mine. He was like a child suffering from concussion: squinting into the sunlight, his face expressionless. A Japanese wife would have been ashamed of her husband for having shown such weakness, but at that moment I felt for him nothing but love and pity.
Bill took his hand out of mine and, no doubt intentionally, fell back to join Furukawa and Nishimura, leaving me and Bibi together.
‘It must have been horrible,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t awfully nice—not really,’ I replied, deliberately reproducing her own comment earlier. Suddenly I felt savage with her: for not coming into the shop with us to view the body (but why should I have expected her to do so?); for her chillingly precise appraisal of poor Thelma’s life and death; above all, for the look of contempt which, however wrongly, I had thought I had detected on her face when she had been close to Bill, her hand on his shoulder as he still retched uselessly above the gutter.
‘It upset your husband.’
‘Yes. It’s not his kind of thing.’ Again I used her own remark against her. ‘Nor mine, my kind of thing, for that matter.’
‘You were wonderful.’ She touched my bare arm briefly. ‘Really wonderful. You knew he couldn’t take it, didn’t you? And that’s why you insisted on going in.’
I told myself that I did not want her admiration, it was the last thing I wanted; and yet it gave me a brief shameful thrill of pleasure. ‘Men are usually more squeamish than women,’ I said.
‘Yes, that’s true. My brother is certainly more squeamish than I am. But still. I couldn’t have stepped out of there as if I had just gone in to buy a pound of stewing-steak.’
‘I once wanted to be a hospital nurse.’
‘You’d have been marvellous at it.’
‘No. I haven’t got the patience. The sick make me impatient.’
Bill joined us. ‘He’s invited us to dinner. At the hotel—he says it’s the only reasonable place to eat. After that, they’ll go ahead with the cremation.’ He now sounded completely his normal self: reserved, competent, matter-of-fact. ‘ He keeps apologising, I wish he’d stop. One would think he’d murdered the poor girl.’
4
Once again Bibi accompanied us although I felt sure, from the way in which Furukawa studiously avoided addressing a single word to her, that the invitation had not been intended to include her as well. When the maid brought in the innumerable small dishes containing the food for each of us, she had to hurry away, at a whisper from Furukawa, to fetch another set Furukawa spoke little during the meal and when he did, it was usually to Nishimura, to whom he seemed to have taken a liking. He and the boy alone of us ate with any gusto. Bibi, I was surprised to see, ate the least, turning over the scraps of fish or vegetables with her chop-sticks and then pushing one bowl aside to take up another. I wondered if the cause of her lack of appetite was fastidiousness about the food—certainly not attractive, since all of it seemed to be impregnated with the same taste, equally compounded of soy and fish—or a greater emotional involvement in the death of Thelma than she had cared to reveal to us.
From time to time she put a question about our lives: what had brought us to Japan; whether we enjoyed living in Matsue; how long we intended to stay. She seemed genuinely interested and after our initial recoil at the apparent heartlessness of her attitude to Thelma’s death, both Bill and I felt the beginnings of a liking for her. She was not really so bad after all, was our grudging feeling; maybe we had misjudged her.
When we got up, both Furukawa and Nishimura were the colour of the strawberries with which we had concluded the meal. As so often before, I was astonished by how little saké it took to make even the hardiest of Japanese t
opers drunk—Furukawa had been bragging about his drinking exploits and had even been persuaded by the waitress, who added her nasal soprano to his equally nasal tenor, to sing us two drinking-songs.
Now, with an effort, he composed his face into an expression of appropriate seriousness. ‘ It is the hour for us to go to the church,’ he said.
Until that moment nothing had been said about the church.
As we drove out of the town Furukawa explained to us that before the war there had been a Finnish mission in Abekawa, which had built a church and a house for a missionary family. The family had left at the outbreak of war and after the war no one from Finland had come to take their place. But the church had survived, with a Japanese pastor and a small congregation of a dozen or so people.
‘Is it a Catholic Church?’ I asked.
‘He says that it is Christian Church,’ Nishimura replied.
‘Yes, I know that. But what kind of Christian?’
‘Sa,’ said Furukawa drawing in his breath sharply.
‘Sa,’ Nishimura echoed, also drawing in his breath, ‘he does not know.’
The church was in fact Lutheran: a shack of corrugated-iron with a tilted wooden steeple attached to one side of it and a trellised porch, a tangle of moraing-glories, in front. Inside, it was hot and steamy. Furukawa introduced us to the priest, whose mouth seemed to be entirely toothless except for a single jagged fang sticking out from under his upper lip, and we all rocked back and forth as we bowed to each other, with the exception of Bibi who wandered off to examine a memorial tablet as though in an effort to dissociate herself from everything that was taking place. Furukawa ushered Bill and me into the front pew and then called ‘Miss Akulov! Miss Akulov!’ Bibi joined us, pulling a face expressing both petulance and resignation. It was growing dark and the pastor climbed up a ladder to adjust the bulb dangling from the ceiling on the end of a length of frayed flex. A hard, yellow light all at once rained down on us.
