by Meira Chand
A woman sat in the middle of the room, on the sofa of many draperies. She seemed a natural part of the setting, as if it had been created for her, extending out from where she sat. Her clothes, like the room, were not the sharp decisions most people took, possessive of fashion and approval. Mabel, with one eye on Paris and the other on New York, might have cruel comments. Yet the woman appeared poised and elegant in a fashion of her own. Her face was fine-boned and her hair was swept into a thick blonde knot behind a large tortoiseshell comb. Something bare and thoughtful and certain diffused her. She was gentle and interested without condescension. Her name was Edwina May. She was passing through Japan on her way from China back to England. She was travelling on her own.
‘But I have friends everywhere, which is wonderful. Everybody has been very kind.’ She smiled and turned to Matthew. A look passed between them that excluded Amy and disturbed her. She tried to find things to say, but her comments and questions echoed about her ears, diminishing her to herself. Edwina weighed even trivial matters with well-chosen words.
‘Your dress is so unusual,’ Amy said at last in desperation, hating herself for seeking the safety of such a mundane comment.
‘I’m afraid it’s probably not the fashion you follow in Yokohama, but I’m rather fond of it. I had it made from a Chinese gown that was designed for me especially by Tz’u-Hsi, the old Empress Dowager of China. A wicked old witch,’ Edwina laughed.
‘While in Peking,’ Matthew explained, ‘Edwina was commissioned to paint the Empress’s portrait. And that’s some honour, I can assure you. She was one of few foreigners who have entered the isolated heart of the Forbidden City.’
‘If you’re an artist it’s not so hard,’ Edwina replied. ‘Old Tz’u-Hsi is so vain there is nothing she likes better than having her portrait painted by a “foreign devil”.’
‘Or “she-devil”,’ Matthew chuckled. Edwina smiled and explained to Amy about the imperious old Chinese Empress.
‘How exciting it sounds, and how lucky you are to have the opportunity to live such a life,’ Amy said, acutely aware of the inadequacies of her own life before the glamorous Edwina. She felt suddenly as dowdy as old Mrs Ewart.
Matthew took out his pocket watch, shaking his head. ‘Walter Landor is late as usual.’ He reached for a magazine on a small table and handed it to Amy. ‘Perhaps you’d like to read this.’
The magazine was open at a page of paintings. The pictures were Edwina May’s and the article was a critique of her work by Matthew. It was impossible before them both to digest it as she wished, but the words that surfaced as she read quickly were full of praise. It seemed Edwina May was well established in her world. And linked with Matthew, as she was on the page, by the reflection of his thought and the binding clarity of print, it seemed they were a pair.
She smiled as she handed it back, but something within her closed into silence. Watching them, she felt she had stumbled upon an intimacy she was not expected to see. A sudden nakedness in expression or a spoken familiarity exposed between them something Amy had no wish to define. She wanted to be released, she wished she could go away. Instead, politeness seemed pinned to her face. Once, as she talked with Edwina, she turned her head to find Matthew observing them both, his eyes alert and small, upon one and then the other. She was sure that between him and Edwina there was a relationship from a shared past, still intimate and warm. She tried to push aside the knowledge, to deny it to herself. She felt jealousy and her own extraneousness; something cold and small.
Walter Landor arrived with profuse apologies, when no longer expected. They sat down to a late lunch in a book-lined room that, like the drawing room, opened upon the garden. A cat slept on a battered armchair, the sun refracted on the glass doors of a cabinet and the crystal glasses on the table. It brimmed in the mosaic of a Persian rug until the colours burned. And, caught by the sun, the weathered spines of books bloomed suddenly from austerity into expansiveness, like the atmosphere now about her. Since Walter Landor’s arrival her introspection had been decimated beneath his attention. It was not his first visit to Japan; he had been before, in 1889, when he had stayed with the Frasers in the British Legation. He was a tall, ruddy, untidy man whose voice echoed about the room.
‘Mary Fraser prevailed upon me then to paint the Countess Kuroda. A lovely little woman, exquisite. The sittings were at the Legation. Sir Edwin Arnold was staying there too at the time and came along to the first one. Upset the little Countess terribly by admiring her hands, which were quite extraordinary, tiny as a child’s. “Very dirty,” she said, and tucked them into her kimono sleeves. Now tell me, is it oils you do, portraits like Edwina, landscapes or what?’
‘I’ve done mostly watercolours, mostly flowers. But I’m sketching now for a book of Mr Armitage’s,’ Amy replied.
‘She’s a born illustrator. She shows great promise,’ Matthew said across the table. ‘The miniature is not an easy canvas, but she has a natural ability.’ She felt pleased and yet, in some way she knew they did not intend, patronized by the three of them. Or maybe she decided it was her own anxiety about that promise that Matthew spoke of, as if her future was in doubt.
‘Not good to force roses,’ Walter Landor laughed, ‘and too many, my dear, also die in bud. Take care not to be one of those. Perseverance and dedication are the cornerstones of our craft. Ask Edwina, she can tell you – she’s been through hell for her art.’ It did not appear so to Amy. Across the table Edwina May smiled, serene and beautiful.
Mabel waited at the station, irritable with delay. ‘For goodness sake where were you? I’d a mind to go on without you.’ She hurried ahead to the ticket counter and then on to the waiting train, her skirts dancing ahead of Amy. Throughout the journey she related the details of her day.
‘We were included in Madame Sannomiya’s party to the Shinjiku Gardens. The Longfords, Mr de Bunsen, the d’Anethans and the Kirkwoods were all there. We inspected the Chin dogs Mr de Bunsen has procured through the Sannomiyas for your own Princess of Wales. And we had tea in a darling Japanese house used as a hunting lodge by duck catchers.’ Mabel chatted on. Amy stared from the window at the darkening countryside and nodded when appropriate, full of her own retrospections.
In her mind the afternoon remained like a bright cameo viewed from the threshold of a room she could neither enter nor forget. For the first time she had seen the shape her life should follow. But the development of her intellect was no part of Reggie’s bargain, and the etiolated fruit it might bear was a harvest Reggie would want no part of. She was full of uncomfortable contradictions that excited and depressed. And beneath these thoughts was the knowledge, like a sour seed wedged in a tooth, of all she now knew existed between Matthew and Edwina May. She realized how inadequate were the judgements she had made on Matthew and his life. The only consolation was that Edwina sailed in a few days for England. And the following week it had been agreed that she would go with Matthew to Enoshima, to draw Benten’s sacred temple there.
*
They had met as planned at Zushi, near Kamakura and its great bronze Buddha. She had come to Zushi with Mabel to stay with Enid Desmond, who had a holiday cottage there, on a hill surrounded by pheasants and bamboo. It was not far from Enoshima.
Matthew was pleased with her work. ‘These are just what I wanted. They’ll make all the difference to the book,’ he told her, looking over the sketches as they walked away from the precincts of a shrine. ‘I’m lucky to have found you.’ She glanced at him quickly and he smiled.
They were forced to step suddenly to the side of the road to make way for a procession. Coolies carried tall staves with huge white lanterns followed by rikishas of young girls holding bouquets of flowers. More coolies followed with jars of large tinsel blooms, and behind came priests in white robes with strange mitres on their heads. A small white box, roofed like a temple, swung from poles on the shoulders of two men. More lanterns and tinsel flowers brought up the rear. The procession wound slowly past them.<
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‘What is that?’ Amy asked
‘A funeral,’ Matthew informed her.
‘Where is the coffin?’ Amy inquired in bewilderment. Matthew pointed to the small white box swinging in the middle of the procession.
‘Shinto coffins resemble ours, but this is a Buddhist funeral. The corpse is fitted into a Buddhist coffin in a squatting posture, head between the knees. It could be symbolic of devout meditation or a last earthly representation of the unborn child.’
Amy looked at him respectfully. She had not, as the cortège passed, understood a single symbol of its alien faith. There seemed nothing Matthew did not know. As she watched in new interest, the cortège disappeared around a bend of the lane.
‘We must really think of a title for the book,’ Matthew said as they started forward again. ‘Have you any ideas? I’m not good at titles.’
‘Well, I’m sure you’ll be better than I,’ Amy laughed. Secretly she felt sick with shame at her ignorance of all he spoke about. Sick too with the knowledge of her participation, until so recently, in a life which condoned that ignorance. It seemed that with Matthew some part of herself she had never known had unexpectedly been born. The worth she sensed in this new part of herself seemed to outweigh any other. What she might intellectually and artistically achieve if her circumstances were different was something that now gnawed away at her, leaving an empty, hopeless hole. It inspired as it depressed, until she wished Matthew Armitage had never discovered her, never dislodged her from a setting that had then seemed adequate. Now everything in her life was disturbed, like a shaken-up kaleidoscope whose bits and pieces flew about and sought another pattern.
*
She could taste the salt on her lips, and the wind blew in her ears. Enoshima waited before them.
‘Sometimes,’ said Matthew Armitage, ‘I think the sea is the only god.’ He looked away towards the horizon. Amy did not disagree, filled by an awesome sense of spirit she had never felt before.
‘Long ago,’ continued Matthew, ‘they say there was no island here, just a bad-hearted dragon who ate the children of the village of Koshigoe. One night there was an earthquake and a terrible storm. In the morning, in the sea before Koshigoe stood Enoshima, newly risen from the water. On its highest point sat the goddess, Benten, enthroned on a rainbow cloud, and seeing her there the dragon hastily departed. Enoshima is known as Benten’s sacred island, although at one point an effort was made to exchange the cult for that of three Shinto goddesses, to whom several temples were rededicated.’ They stood in the middle of a fragile bridge; strong morning light consumed the sea. Upon it swam the island, so full of strange gods and presences, so enveloped in legend and mystery, that Amy half expected it to float away and melt on the horizon.
They had come to Enoshima early that morning, crossing from the mainland on the long, narrow bridge, inches above the high tide. They appeared in continuous danger of being washed adrift, waves spilt over their feet through the wooden slats of the bridge. At low tide a strip of sand connected the island to the mainland and could be walked across. From the shore the island had the quality of magic about it, the bridge undulating away like an umbilical cord attached precariously to the world. Even the light, Amy decided, appeared different on Enoshima, filled by a strange iridescent quality, like the pearl lining of a shell. Or perhaps it was just the heightening of her own emotions that imbued the place, making it extra, making it more. But she preferred to think it was Benten’s magic and nothing to do with either herself or Matthew Armitage.
He appeared, as ever, preoccupied with thought and metaphysics. He wore plus-fours and had brought his alpenstock along. He looked out across the sea and not at where he put his feet on the rotting bridge. Amy felt with each step she left her world behind and entered at last the Real Japan. Although Japan was about her everyday to absorb, on the Bluff it seemed to be removed from her by an impenetrable wall. Curiosity was discouraged and derided upon the Bluff as a dangerous chink in the armour of survival, a disease to decimate them all. It was different with Matthew Armitage; he had changed her perspective of Japan.
The village of Enoshima climbed the steep cliff by a single road of mossy steps cut in the rock. It was narrow and perpendicular, with wooden houses either side, tumbledown balconies overhung the street. Enoshima was famous for its shells; shops lined the lane, their treasure overflowing every door. Nautilus and conch shells, massive clams and mother-of-pearl, twisted towers like pagodas, spilling from boxes and baskets. There were colourful corals and the beautiful glass ropes of the Hyalonema sponges found beneath Benten’s cave. Huge tortoise shells hung before shops, but these were nothing compared to the mythical tortoise who lived somewhere in the Enoshima caves, twenty-three feet across his primordial back.
A spare and salty wind cut up the street, stirring the gaudy banners draped above each shop. Old women and round-faced peasant girls, their faces weathered, called from every door, voices rippling along the road to the accompanying clatter of clogs. Amy did not want to turn away from this picturesque cliff and its fragile delights. It seemed that the essence of Benten’s under-sea world had already half-claimed her own. The impoverished village, clinging like a limpet to the cliff, as calloused and eroded by wind and sea as any shell upon the rocks, appeared the most beautiful place she had seen yet in Japan. There was something here she recognized from that small, bare garden of the fortune teller. In its frugality and humility was a richness of spirit nothing could demean.
Matthew enjoyed her pleasure and puffed at his pipe, satisfied. Unspoken between them, it seemed understood that he was the teacher and she the pupil, although of what ethics or subject was never discussed. She constantly puzzled at their relationship, but, untangling little, gave up and let herself flow with it. He bought her now three long hairpins cut from mother-of-pearl. He turned her about and stuck them in her hair, wound tightly and simply in a single knot, low on her neck. She dressed herself differently for Matthew, suppressing the artifice that Yokohama demanded everywhere she could. It was already as if she led two lives, the one with Matthew and the one she lived in Yokohama as the wife of Reggie Redmore. She smiled at Matthew in delight, touching the pins with her hand, patting her hair in place about them.
They continued past the shops and climbed through a knot of wind-beaten pines. Between their twisted branches were sudden glimpses of the ocean far below. They passed some pilgrims, in white leggings and straw sandals and hats, on their way to the sacred caves below. There were three temples, the highest standing where Benten first appeared on her island. It crowned the ridge in desolate dignity, empty to the wind blowing through it. Buddhist in architecture and now Shinto in faith, enclosing with its bamboo fence only the salty air, whistling between wooden pillars. The sour and iconoclastic rage that had emptied the temple of its Buddhist faith had failed in its scorn to demolish the presence of the goddess, which still hung like incense, indestructible upon the breeze.
Within the shrine the Shinto mirror of polished silver was dusty, the straw ropes and the white paper gohei weathered and bedraggled. In the mirror, tilted from a beam before the inner shrine, Amy glimpsed for a moment her own pale face, a reflection of that self it was said must be lost before eternity could be entered. That was what Matthew had told her, as he had told her so much else. So much that her head now burst with the deeper meanings of symbols and signs, the confused gelling of Buddhism and Shintoism in the life of each Japanese, the iconography of statues and paintings, screens and scrolls whose bare brushstrokes effortlessly created a universe as real as her own. Everything about Japan that before she had disdained, everything dismissable as exotic oddity or the quaint workings of a childlike world, now bore down upon her as the sophisticated, disciplined functioning of a civilization as sensitive and astute as her own. The giggles of Mabel and her friends now seemed shameful, and something Amy wanted no part of again. And yet that night she must return to them and hear out their flippant inquiries about that over-rated little
island without even a decent inn. She took out her sketchbook and began to draw.
Skirting the side of the island, they came to a point high above the caves from which a steep flight of rough steps descended. Several tea huts were gathered together, no more than platforms covered with an awning or a bit of thatch. They rested here and an old woman, as weathered as a twig, brought straw-coloured tea. The withered old crone in her coarse blue garments, salt-washed and faded by the sea, hurried up with a box of live coals for Matthew to light his pipe. He smiled and spoke to her, conversing in an easy, fluent way as if he had known her for years.
The woman bowed and grinned with pleasure. Amy smiled in return, wishing she herself could speak to the woman, ask questions about her simple life which seemed suddenly richer than her own, ordered as it was by the harsh and magnificent pulse of the sea. She sensed a wisdom honed from obediences she could never know. The old woman’s existence was as frugal as the wind whistling through Benten’s temple, a life of survival, devoid of artifice, stripped and bleached as the contours of a weathered bit of bone. Perched high up on the sunny rock as if in some breezy, sun-dried nest, the sea far below, the wind in her ears, Amy was touched by feelings never known before. She wished she could sit like this forever; she wished they need never leave. But Matthew had already knocked his pipe on the box of coals and now stood up to continue their journey. The old woman bowed and smiled as they left.
