by Meira Chand
‘They’re performing Chikamatsu’s Ikutama Shinju down in Isezakicho-dori today. I thought I’d go but the crowds are enormous. Danjūro is appearing.’ As usual he began in the middle of an incomprehensible conversation.
‘You shouldn’t forget how culturally ignorant I am, you know,’ Amy laughed. ‘You’ll have to explain what you’re talking about. I just don’t understand.’
‘Kabuki,’ he announced, helping her from the rikisha. Beside him again, a part of herself – asleep or dispossessed – was immediate again. At Miyanoshita, at the Fujiya Hotel, he had made her feel this way.
‘I hope I shall see you later,’ she said shyly, making her way towards where Mrs Easely waited.
‘Then I shall live impatiently with the same hope,’ Matthew said. Amy looked at him in surprise, but his eyes were as level as usual.
He sat by himself in the dining room. From the angle of their tables she observed him unhampered beneath conversation with Mrs Easely. He took no notice of her, his attention tied to a book. She wished suddenly to be near him with a fierceness she had felt about nothing since returning. She was so agitated she could barely eat her food. There seemed no way, unobtrusively, for things to conspire to this end, but fate surprised her with sudden benevolence. Finishing his lunch, Matthew Armitage approached their table on his way out to be stopped by Mrs Easely, who appeared to know him well. She invited him to join them for coffee and, unaware of their previous acquaintance, introduced him to Amy.
‘Mrs Redmore and I have already met. In fact I once asked her to work with me on a book, illustrating wild flowers,’ Matthew said, sitting down at their table.
‘And didn’t you, Amy?’ Mrs Easely asked, pouring coffee from a jug as Matthew lit his pipe. The smell of his tobacco awoke in Amy feelings she had forgotten. She shook her head.
‘No. It turned out not to be the right time. Tom was born a while after.’
‘During lunch I have been considering if I might again put forward the same suggestion,’ Matthew said.
‘Didn’t you finish that book?’ Amy asked.
‘Oh yes, that was published last year. This is a book on indigenous cults of Shinto and Buddhist worship. It would require sketches of temples and shrines. You did say you might be interested in a future book,’ Matthew puffed on his pipe, looking at her from small, keen eyes. ‘Of course,’ he added, ‘we would once more approach your husband.
‘He wouldn’t object now,’ Amy replied. Nothing seemed real in the dining room of the Club Hotel. The smell of food, tobacco and furniture polish grew intense below the hum of conversation and the clink of china. She did not trust the sudden richness her wishes had invoked.
She spoke to Reggie that night, glad to have something of substance to uphold her part of their pact.
‘Mr Armitage has asked me again to illustrate a book. I met him today by accident with Mrs Easely at the Club Hotel. I’m sure you would have no objections now. Our life has changed so much,’ Amy reminded Reggie. She paced before him in the drawing room, trying to pacify Tom. She had brought him downstairs with her for Rachel, tired from a day spent with a bilious Cathy, seemed unable to control him. He quietened on her shoulder and began to suck his thumb. Reggie looked at her impatiently.
‘Why don’t you employ another amah if Rachel cannot cope? I don’t know any man whose evenings are disturbed in this manner. The nursery’s the place for all this. You’re spoiling the boy.’
‘Poor little mite! He’s just overtired; he didn’t sleep well today.’ Amy turned her head to kiss Tom’s cheek and took no notice of Reggie’s comments. She was glad of the distraction Tom provided at this vital moment. She could see that Reggie, sipping crème de menthe in an armchair after his dinner, was doing his best to show no struggle now that his proposition teetered upon reality. His encouragement did not invade his eyes.
‘It’s splendid about this book, of course.’ Reggie’s voice was full of doubt. Amy stroked Tom’s passive back. Reggie was silent before he spoke again, deep in uncomfortable thought.
‘I can’t stand the man,’ he burst out. ‘I’m surprised at your interest in him; I wouldn’t have thought he was your type. I can’t see what would attract any woman. However, there’s no doubt of his usefulness. He’s in thick with all the right people. I was expecting some dashing young merchant or consul.’ Reggie stopped, then laughed, the crème de menthe slipped dangerously near the rim of his glass as he belched suddenly in surprise. He had measured the competition before him.
Tom stirred and raised his head and looked directly at his father. He gave a sudden sob that turned into a howl. Reggie frowned and got out of his chair to pour another drink. ‘I come home for some peace and quiet, not this,’ he said. ‘Take him back to Rachel. Where are you going to find the time for all this silly stuff with that silly fellow?’ Reggie pushed a cork savagely back into a bottle. Amy left the room to take Tom upstairs before Reggie could change his mind.
Nothing would make her use an acquaintance with Matthew Armitage for an ulterior end. Reggie would not understand, so it was pointless to discuss it. She knew why so little in Yokohama appeared fulfilling. She had aspired to change, she realized now, the first time she met Matthew Armitage that day on Isezakicho-dori. He had shown her then, in a few words and a look, the disparity between the person she was and the person she should be.
*
She met him the first time in Motomachi. Her rikisha followed his through the pungent streets of the native town, packed with people, dogs and carts, until they came to a narrow opening between a tumbledown house and a dealer in secondhand clothing. Behind lay a small, dusty temple, drab as the street outside. The paper doors of the temple were drawn back and in the sanctuary, on the altar, stood a statue of a figure wearing a red cotton bib. The place was silent and cool, perfumed lightly with incense. From the courtyard behind came the high note of a bird; a ginger cat appeared suddenly and observed them. She had never been in a temple before, except the one or two the tourists all visited up on the Bluff. They had inspired none of the feelings she felt now beside Matthew.
‘Who is the figure? Is it the Buddha? And why does it wear a red bib?’ she whispered into the silence. Matthew looked at her in surprise.
‘No, not Buddha, but Jizo, a popular bodhisattva of Japanese Buddhism who aids all suffering beings. He is regarded as the guardian deity of children. Bereaved mothers pray to him, sending in the bibs warm clothing for the small lost spirits.’
Amy felt ashamed to remember her own ignorant laughter at the garbed figures. There had been nothing pagan, nothing to laugh at, in the grief of a mother for a dead child. ‘And a bodhisattva? What is that?’ she whispered again.
‘Someone who has attained Buddhahood or enlightenment, but rejects the salvation of Nirvana and release from the wheel of life to return again to human birth to help others towards that end,’ he explained.
She did not like to press him with the questions filling her. From behind the screen a nun appeared in loose robes and with a shaven head. She led them to a bare, mat-covered room before a small garden, like the room Amy remembered at the fortune teller’s. A priest was seated on a cushion, writing at a low table. The afternoon sun streamed about his bent figure illuminating the darns in his worn black robe. He laid aside his brush and looked up, his face wrinkled and kindly. The cat walked in and curled up as they took cushions before the priest, whom Matthew had come to see. The old man’s voice was deep and gentle. He was eighty-four, said Matthew, and writing a religious history of Japan to be completed in three hundred volumes. Two hundred and seventy-five were already finished, stacked in neatly bound manuscripts on a shelf behind him.
The nun returned with green tea and thin biscuits stamped with the Wheel of the Law. The cat rearranged itself and flexed its claws. Amy sipped the tea and listened to what little of the conversation Matthew, from time to time, remembered to translate. The infrequency of his translation left the flow of talk disjointed to her, and yet it wa
s enough. Each phrase Matthew interpreted in sudden, guilty remembrance of her, breaking off from communion with the priest, was so novel in content that it took time for her to digest.
‘He says he wishes to live only long enough to finish his history. His body is helpless and old, he wishes to die to obtain a new one. He is glad to feel he is nearing the Shore of the Sea of Death and Birth,’ Matthew said without emotion. It was odd to hear someone talk so dispassionately of death, as if it was a practicality of no more importance than changing one’s clothes.
‘That which we are is the consequence of that which we have been,’ Matthew interpreted, explaining nothing. ‘In Japan they say the consequences of mangō and ingō, the two classes of actions.’
‘Good and evil?’ Amy queried, trying to find some ground beneath her feet.
‘Greater and Lesser,’ Matthew said. ‘There are no perfect actions. Every act contains merit and demerit. Just as the most beautiful painting has both defects and attributes. When the sum of good exceeds the sum of evil, the result is progress. And by such progress all evil can be eliminated.’
The old man looked benignly at Amy’s anxious face as Matthew spoke. ‘The chain of causes and effects is not easy to explain in a few words. You will learn that the world itself exists only because of acts.’
The cat regarded her from narrowed, sleepy eyes, as if her ignorance of the truth of things disturbed the peace about them. She was silent, full of questions about the strange path she had stumbled upon. In the face of the old man she saw only virtue and serenity, and yet she had been taught to call him pagan.
Matthew turned to her. ‘Perhaps you should wander about outside,’ he said. ‘Draw what attracts you and represents to you the spirit of the temple. I shall talk on with the priest.’ The nun smiled and led the way.
She drew the altar with the jizo and the cat, who appeared and placed himself with a lethargic jump at the very feet of the statue. The sun, streaming through the open paper doors, gilded his polished ginger fur, as if the gods in benign amusement had deified him too. The thought delighted her, for the sleepy, sanctified cell of the temple was like nowhere she had seen before, no part of the world she existed in. She went out, her face to the afternoon sun in the courtyard. Before the surrounding dilapidated houses on bamboo poles threadbare jackets and kimonos, washed and wet, were crucified with outstretched arms, like souls hung out to dry. She felt at peace in the shabby place, her thoughts meandered without conclusion, there was harmony in herself. Soon Matthew emerged accompanied by the priest. Amy left with regret; the door in the huge gate was closed behind them. She looked back once at the weathered wall shutting away its secret. Above flamed the branches of a ginko tree, as if to remind her of a dream.
Once Matthew stopped their rikishas at the foot of a wooded hill. They set off along a paved avenue, ascending in a stately, gentle way. The sky was a tiny patch far away above the shadows of the intimidating trees. Flight after flight of steps led to empty terrace after empty terrace. The woods enclosed them and the path grew narrower. Eventually, beyond a humble torii they stood before their goal, a small, empty, weathered shrine, no bigger than a large doll’s house. The shock of this nothingness was eerie after the eloquent approach. About them the silence was watchful. Matthew sat down beneath a tree. He patted the place beside him, and when she settled herself produced from his pocket a packet of caramel lozenges.
‘Of what significance is it? she asked staring at the shrine.
‘Of no more than much in life,’ Matthew smiled. ‘We have just climbed one of the multitude of Buddhist and Shinto experiences. The Ways That Go Nowhere and the Steps That Lead to Nothing. In Buddhist terms, the climb symbolizes the pomp and power and beauty that we attach to life and that in the end, in death, leads us all to this ultimate small silence. I find this one of the most beautiful of all the beautiful things in Japan.’ The bowl of his pipe bloomed as he drew upon it.
Amy considered the matter in silence. Matthew leaned back and looked up at the leaves. The scent of pines impregnated with tobacco and the sweet caramel in Amy’s mouth was comforting and seemed to bind them together as strongly as emotion in the strange, high clearing near the sky.
‘My brain aches with all I’m thinking and learning,’ she said in contentment, sucking on the caramel, sticking her feet out before her, legs apart beneath her skirts.
Matthew laughed. ‘You look like a child playing truant. It’s the first time I’ve seen you being quite yourself.’
‘That’s what I feel like with you, as if I’m playing truant.’ Amy agreed.
‘And do you enjoy it?’ Matthew teased.
‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘I never knew Japan had so much to teach me.’
Matthew drew on his pipe. A bird called sharply high above, in a short, repetitive chant. They chewed in unison upon the caramels, large, nubbly things that filled their mouths and demanded concentration. The clearing was silent, sweet with the rot of fallen leaves. Speech seemed for long periods unnecessary with Matthew. Amy felt at peace with him, supported and expanded. Yet at times she was frightened by the strange, esoteric centre of him, like no one she had ever known.
‘Are you a Buddhist?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he laughed. ‘I am nothing. Nothing but myself.’ This reply only deepened the mystery of him. He offered no elaboration and she did not press the matter.
But away from him feelings she tried to press down and deny filled her body, filled her mind. She did not want these emotions to destroy the respect of their partnership, that had not been struck upon the mundane foundations of physical attraction. To expose her feelings to Matthew would, she felt, expose her as no different from other women and diminish her. Without the blatancy of touch she felt their relationship deepened, alert and sensitive to areas of emotion anything more physical would destroy.
‘You should come some time to Tokyo. There are people I could introduce you to – artists, foreigners like yourself. Tokyo, you know, is different from Yokohama. Money is not our God,’ Matthew suggested.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘so I’ve heard. I’d like to come. I’ll see what I can arrange.’
*
Arrangements were always the problem. There was gossip in Yokohama. She was marked by her own rebelliousness and Mabel’s patronage, but with Matthew Armitage she had the excuse of intellectual pursuit. It was only the fact that many people appeared impressed by her abilities and the project she was working on that kept Reggie belligerently to the bargain struck in Miyanoshita. But he made sure the reflection upon himself furthered his own applause.
‘I told Cooper-Hewitt,’ Reggie said, his eyes full of sly amusement, ‘that the book will be presented to the Empress, just like the one by d’Anethan‘s wife. And that shut him up. Or rather the opposite, left him with his mouth hanging open.’ Reggie laughed hugely. Across the table, laden with dishes of cooled vegetables and a half-carved stump of lamb, Amy controlled her irritation. She told the boy to bring more gravy for Reggie to soak his bread in.
‘Well,’ Reggie said through a full mouth. ‘And how’s our Organ Grinder? Back in the bushes with the birds, or still chasing a clutch of heathen gods? How much more have you got to do for that silly book? You should have a copy bound in velvet or satin or some such thing, and really get it to the Empress through all those bluebloods Mabel knows. Or even your Organ Grinder – he’s in thick with them all. He’d help you do that much, wouldn’t he? That d’Anethan woman had rosebuds embroidered on her cover. The thing is to make it look pretty, that’s what you’ll have to do.’ Reggie piled squares of meat, potato and carrots on his fork until the implement was loaded.
‘We’ll see,’ she said lightly, to keep him quiet.
She was going with Mabel to Tokyo. Mabel went often now on the train to Tokyo to attend the reception days the ladies of the legations each held once a month. Mabel had been clever, insinuating herself with the Baroness d’Anethan since that day on the slopes of Owakidani. Mabel knew,
like inserting a needle into tough cloth, the vermicular art of ingratiation. She did not hold Matthew Armitage in much more respect than did Reggie.
‘Positively ugly, darling. I don’t even think his fingernails are clean. But still, if it’s what you want, you know you can always depend upon me. There’s just no accounting for taste. The old thing, I suppose, of one man’s meat. You’d better come to Tokyo under my umbrella. Once there you can go where you want. Nobody will know.’
Amy took a rikisha by herself from the station to Matthew’s home. She had agreed to meet Mabel back there in the early evening.
Tokyo was different from Yokohama. It was not a European town, although there were buildings of Western style. In spite of crowds, as thick as in Yokohama’s Native Town, Tokyo appeared a leisurely city. Everywhere was green, and everywhere there was Japan, without a reminder of Europe; not a foreign face or a foreign voice or a foreign home in view. Babies in green and orange and purple kimonos played in the streets. Kitchenmaids, red-cheeked and blowsy, haggled for vegetables at street corners. Coolies and workmen and austere old gentlemen in grey kimonos shuffled by on their clogs; pale women of quality passed in rikishas or palanquins. The streets were filled by the colours of flowers, fruit, people and odours that rushed from heady perfumes to the stench of open drains. It was careless and imperious, unconcerned with the pretensions upon which Yokohama thrived. It appeared as Matthew had described it, a flowery, stinking, adorable city. On a raised island of pines, surrounded by reflective moats, was the Emperor’s new Palace, hidden behind trees and huge high walls. Everywhere there was a sense of depth and stability Yokohama did not have.
Matthew lived on the ground floor of an elegant, two-storeyed, Western-style house. Above was a young married couple from the German Legation. They shared the garden with him. The house was spacious and airy and the precious and beautiful things the rooms held, collected carefully by Matthew, had a powerful effect. Everywhere patterns pressed one upon another – the cool blues of flowery china, soft, dark rugs from Persia or Afghanistan, bright weavings and embroidered shawls draped over sofas and chairs. Jars, scrolls, paintings and ivory built up the texture of the room. A huge screen of a tiger and a dragon, in old soft silvers, stood as a backdrop behind a sofa that between its several draperies showed the elderly comfort of some fray. And yet the complexity of the room gave a feeling only of tranquillity. Matthew Armitage’s home reflected him in complement, as unconventional and yet as caring as himself.
