by Meira Chand
Before the hut a long flight of steps had been cut precipitously down the sheer face of the cliff to the Dragon’s Cave. Looking back once Amy saw the old woman, still standing high above them, the awning of her hut flapping against the sky like a bird desperate to be free. Then she bowed and turned away. She probably took them for man and wife, thought Amy.
The foot of the steps shelved suddenly into the sea. From there a few precarious planks formed a rickety gallery, the tide thumped below. Matthew offered his hand and they edged unsteadily round the cliff. The mouth of the cave opened blackly before them, just above the waterline. Waves shattered upon the rocks, sending up drifts of spray to drench them. The gallery turned and ran sharply into the dark, wet orifice of the cave. Inside, the sea still thundered and echoed. Amy’s feet touched the damp, sandy floor. A group of pilgrims waited to leave; they were alone. Near the entrance a small wooden shrine held a few candles and threw out a guttering light. There was an overpowering smell of brine. Other rough shrines with candles left by pilgrims led the twisting way, diminishing into the heart of the island, to blackness and obscurity. Passages branched off, some no more than mildewed cracks within which shelly creatures crawled. At places they had to bend their heads to accommodate the low roof of the cave, closing about them tighter and darker. It was as if they were already swallowed into the hard, thin belly of the dragon, digested slowly, step by step.
Amy gritted her teeth, Matthew carried a candle before them, determined to push ahead to the last and most holy of the shrines. The light illuminated grim gods hewn in the rock whose sudden faces glared at them, disturbed from darkness. Water dripped on her shoulders and her head. Unspeakable things crawled upon the walls, so that she dare not put out a hand to feel the way. Suddenly the tunnel stopped and she found they must stoop and squeeze through the last few yards to enter the final cave.
‘I cannot, I just cannot. I’m sorry,’ she gasped.
Matthew turned. Above the flame his face was cadaverous and strange. ‘If I give you a candle, can you wait here while I go through? I’ll not be long.’ He took a smaller candle from his pocket, lit it and put it in her hand. Then he disappeared.
She listened to the drip of water. Something shelly dropped; her heart was in her throat. Mabel would never have been persuaded to step into the cave. What was she doing here in search of history, in search of love, in search of her mind and soul? What discoveries could she find buried in this fetid grave, surrounded by heathen images from some twilight spirit world? She must be mad. Mad.
Matthew Armitage finally squeezed himself out on all fours from the furthest recess of the Dragon’s Cave. His candle spluttered and was gone, he relit it again from Amy’s. ‘And what did you find?’ she asked him, filled with relief by his reappearance and the sudden flush of light.
‘Nothing,’ said Matthew, ‘absolutely nothing. But how could I say I hadn’t been? The essence of scholarship is in the needless details.’ They retraced their way along the damp passages.
‘Tell me about Edwina,’ Amy said suddenly, brave in the darkness behind him.
‘Edwina?’ Matthew sounded surprised. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Is she married?’ Amy asked, trying to keep the fierceness from her voice.
‘I believe she was, once,’ he replied. ‘Now look at that carving there. Fudosama, I believe.’ He pointed to a grotesque relief, chiselled with others upon the walls.
‘She’s not married any more,’ Matthew offered suddenly. ‘She’s had an eventful but not a happy life.’
‘Oh?’ Amy questioned, unwilling to let him escape.
‘Her father was an English painter and she grew up in Italy where the family settled. She married young. I don’t know much, she doesn’t talk about it. He was also a painter, an Italian. I don’t know what happened to him. He seemed to just disappear, I think. There was also a child, who died. She settled back in England, where she still is and where I met her. She lives with her brother and his wife.’
Was she your mistress? She pushed back the words from her lips. ‘Did you know her very well, then?’ she rephrased the question.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She’s a brilliant woman.’
‘Yes,’ she replied, further words stubbed out in thoughts she did not like. She could not wait now to be out of their tomb. They stepped into the main cave and in the dimness ahead she saw at last, like a rent in the blackness, a fragment of white sky. Matthew turned with a grin.
‘We return to life from the Underworld.’ He took a deep breath, stepping out of the cave onto the precarious gallery above the water. He helped Amy up and they made their way back to the steps that led up to the tea hut.
The warmth of the afternoon sun was gone, the air was full of approaching evening. The wind smelled of salt and the end of autumn. Up on the rocks, her sleeves bound back and skirts kilted up, a woman scrubbed away in a shallow pool at a few blue wisps of clothing. She looked up and smiled. As Amy felt her way along the last of the gallery she saw Matthew suddenly reach out, as if about to lose his balance. Beneath her own feet the planks twitched, moving forwards, then backwards. It was as if the sea pushed up in a convulsion, rolling the gallery upon its swell. Under her hand the solid face of the cliff shuddered like a great, slumbering creature stirring suddenly to life.
The gallery heaved again, pitching her forward, creaking and vibrating. She heard the sound of cracking wood mixed with the cry of the washerwoman, herself clinging to the face of the rock that loomed up darkly into the sky. There was nothing to hold onto. The planks parted beneath her, and the sea reached up in a sudden wave, like a hand, to enclose her. It pulled her down, blinding and deafening her.
*
‘Amy!’ Her name seemed called from a distance. ‘It was an earthquake.’ She heard Matthew’s voice again.
‘An earthquake?’ She struggled to sit, coughing, her mouth full of bitterness. An earthquake. She remembered her terror at the mercy of an irritable earth. She shivered and pulled herself up with Matthew’s help. Before her the sea swilled about, slopping over the rocks. The bridge hung in splintered shards, wood floated on the waves.
‘I got you out quickly,’ Matthew informed her, ‘I was thrown in myself by the shock.’ He was as wet as Amy, water dripped from him.
‘I thought I’d never come up at all,’ Amy replied. Her hands were trembling, her clothes were wet and cold. A wind blew and she shivered. The washerwoman dabbed at Amy’s streaming hair and smiled in commiseration. She spoke to Matthew.
‘She says we must hurry to higher ground. She says her aunt has an inn and we must go there. They will dry your clothes. You cannot go back like this without catching a terrible chill. We had better do as she says,’ Matthew said squeezing water from his jacket.
‘It’s already late. They’ll worry about me at Zushi. My clothes will take hours to dry,’ Amy protested.
‘We’ve not much choice in the matter,’ Matthew laughed. ‘We’re wetter than mermaids. And the woman is right, you’ll catch a chill. These autumn evenings are treacherous; there’s already a wind. You can send a message to your friends and explain what has happened. You’ll be back later, that’s the only difference.’
Amy nodded. Before her the sea thrashed. The washerwoman, skirts tucked up about her bare and sturdy legs, climbed the steps before them.
The House of the Golden Turtle was neat and white and open like a shell to the sea, its paper doors removed. They were shown into a room where a lantern was lit and a brazier of hot coals brought in. The washerwoman did not leave but directed a young maid to lay down a set of quilts and close the wooden shutters against the evening, although it was still light. A low table stood on the matted floor, thin silk cushions about it. She turned and beckoned to Amy.
‘She says we must have a hot bath and let her dry our clothes. She’ll give you a cotton kimono, as is the custom in Japanese inns, for you to wear meanwhile. You’ll have to be Japanese tonight and do as they do in Japan,’ Matt
hew smiled. ‘They insist we have a meal while we wait. If you write a message they’ll have a runner take it to your friends.’
‘I’ve told them we will bath separately – that our ways are different,’ Matthew said quietly after she had written the note. ‘Our prudery amuses them; here they bath communally without voyeurism.’ Amy looked at him with relief. Knowing the Japanese way, she had wondered how they would approach the problem of a bath in such a traditional place.
The woman led them across the courtyard to the bath-house, its privacy safeguarded by no more than paper doors. Matthew sat down on a bench outside to wait while Amy went in. Steam thickened the room and made it difficult to see. The woman indicated to Amy to take off her clothes, and laid out a blue and white cotton kimono in a small ante-room. It was too hot to stay long, but while Amy scrubbed and rinsed and then soaked in the scalding water, the thought of Matthew outside the door, so close to her nakedness, filled her as powerfully as the heat of the tub. Once she was dry she wrapped the kimono about herself and the woman reappeared to pull it tighter and secure the sash. She led Amy back up to the room.
Dressed in so little, naked and glowing, she was aware of her body in a new way. Released from cruel constrictions, Amy’s flesh seemed to flow with a life of its own. Her blood still throbbed from the scorching bath. Soon Matthew returned, dressed as casually as herself, the lines of his limbs clear beneath the thin kimono, his flesh fevered. She sat across the table from him on a cushion and knew she should feel ashamed, whatever the emergency, to appear before him like this. And yet, in spite of chastising herself, no sense of shame appeared. She looked at him once and lowered her eyes, unsure of her feelings.
‘It’s the custom to relax like this, while we are here,’ Matthew assured her. ‘They’re bringing us a hot nabe dinner. Have you eaten mizutake before? And sake? It is good and will warm you as well as brandy.’ He picked up one of two small bottles the maid had placed on the table and poured some into a tiny cup for her. It was hot and delicious and buzzed like electricity in her head. Her face and her skin beneath the kimono, were red as a lobster from the bath. She laughed, looking at her colour and Matthew’s matching flush.
‘Marvellous thing, the Japanese bath. It’s more than a bath, it’s a sensual experience. And healthy too. It boosts the circulation to such a point that they can walk home half-naked in the snow from the bath-house and feel no cold nor catch one.’
The sake filled her head and veins, dissolving the strangeness. Matthew lit his pipe, and the room was filled soon with the familiar odour of tobacco. The meal, a broth of chicken and vegetables, was cooked on the table over an earthenware bowl of coals. A maid served them kneeling at the table, and giggled at Amy’s awkwardness with chopsticks. Amy looked at Matthew, somehow the sudden intimacy they were thrown into changed the balance between them. And the extra she felt she knew about him since she had met Edwina May made her wish to know all he held in reserve from her.
The maid cleared away and wiped the table. ‘She says your clothes will soon be dry and you can rest there if you wish,’ Matthew said, pointing to the quilts.
‘I’m all right here,’ Amy replied, sitting primly on her cushion. ‘I don’t expect they will be long.’
‘Probably not.’ Matthew drew on his pipe. She felt the tension mounting between them like a wire pulled too tight. She did not know what to say. She wished to be to him as she knew now Edwina May had been. And suddenly she felt she was not wrong in knowing he wished it too. This new knowledge, passed silently across the table, filled the room. Matthew knocked his pipe on the box of coals. The maid lowered the light and closed the door.
‘Would you like me to go away? And come back later, so you can rest? Would that not be best?’ Matthew said.
‘No.’ Her voice was barely audible, her eyes upon her hands.
‘Then,’ he said, ‘what do you want me to do, Amy?’ The question, she knew, had no relevance to the moment. She was sure he spoke in that language found in the silences between their words and conveyed upon mundane inquiries like a rare seed upon the wind. She raised her eyes and saw he waited for an answer. She looked down at her hands again.
‘Take me,’ she whispered, ‘as we both wish.’
‘Look at me, Amy,’ he said, and she raised her eyes. ‘There is no need, you know. We are friends. It can remain like that. There is no need for anything more.’
‘There need not be but, there could be,’ she said, awkward once again.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked.
‘Don’t you want me?’ She still kept her eyes upon her hands.
‘When you are attracted to a woman you always want to be naked with her. That is not a question to ask,’ he said.
The words seemed as erotic in themselves as any touch could be, as if the exchange was like a first caress. They sat again in silence, the table large and bare between them. He stood up and moved around to sit beside her, drawing her back to the edge of the quilts. Everything within her stilled. The flame of the oil lamp flickered in shapes about the walls. She was glad of the dimness, unsure, unwilling to break the delicacy of the moment and expand it into flesh. He stroked her neck and then her fingers as if in taking her hand they must cross a road they faced together. He drew her to him then.
He helped her slip the kimono from her shoulders and ran his hands about her breasts, then bent to them. He laid her back upon the quilts and undid the sash of her kimono so that it parted and she lay naked before him at last.
There seemed no strangeness in his body, only comfort and familiarity, as if they had been lovers before. She was unaware of her own needs. Nothing mattered but what she could give. She had forgotten she might also take. So that the sensations that burst suddenly in her took her almost by surprise, and she cried out and knew he was beside her in that moment, his emotion expelled with hers. Afterwards she lay in his arms beneath the quilts, still filled with all there was left to give, unexhausted. Her hands stroked his body, unable to lie still, as if by retracing and retracing the lines of his limbs the moment would never end, and when ended never fade.
‘Perhaps we should dress,’ he said at last. ‘Soon they will return.’ He drew away from her and sat up, reaching for his kimono.
‘Lie upon me once more,’ she pleaded. He turned as she asked and laid the naked weight of himself upon her. She closed her eyes, unwilling to relinquish the moment that for her still brimmed and overflowed.
‘Come now,’ he said. ‘It is over, Amy. Over now.’ He withdrew his weight and warmth.
She watched him stand up, protected for all his gentle involvement by detachment, by unconcern. And she knew then she must accept the isolation he would insist upon. He was not a man to be possessed, or who would wish to possess in return. The depth and the quality of the experience between them was enough to justify itself. There would be many things she must accept. Such as the way he had told her softly but firmly, ‘It is over, Amy. Over now.’ But she was filled, and knew she would always be filled by the reflection he left within her.
The maid brought their clothes soon, stiff with salt and impregnated with the smell of soot from the fire over which they had dried, hanging from old, blackened rafters. It seemed to Amy as if the smell of salt and soot would linger in her soul forever, immutable as the memory of the House of the Golden Turtle.
She went with him as before, to those places they had decided needed to be sketched. Between them something had solidified and deepened, fallen into place. Her love infused her, she wished to embroider each moment with it. Matthew was close, his manner and voice affectionate. He was close and yet still detached in a way she did not understand, for from the depths of her being she was filled with emotions she could barely hold in place. All equilibrium was gone. Beside him she waited, but he asked of her nothing; he seemed calm and in control. He dispensed affection, but not the passion beneath which she could sense already her own annihilation and was gladly prepared to drown.
‘I am not
God, Amy. You must not make me one. I am a man, a man you do not know.’ He sounded impatient.
‘But you lift me,’ she whispered, ‘to that highest point within myself where I no longer know. Where God and you feel one and the same.’
‘Amy,’ he said, and shook his head in amused exasperation. ‘Do not make it so difficult for yourself. You know, the expectation of happiness is the expectation of sorrow. The line between is negligible and always, somewhere, has to be crossed.’
They sat beneath two stone foxes that guarded an Inari shrine. Amy had brought a picnic, spread out upon a red checked cloth. Matthew took a sandwich. There had been no rain for several weeks, the ground was dry and hard.
‘Do you wish then to meet again?’ he asked biting into the bread.
She was surprised that he considered it possible not to meet. She had waited each day for him to suggest it.
‘I don’t know any more whether I’m sane or mad,’ she said.
He laughed. ‘Maybe you’re stark raving sane, or sanely mad. Sometimes it’s profitable to walk through a bit of madness. It can bring you out the other end at a place you never expected to find. There’s no way, Amy, to grow without pain.’
‘When shall we meet, then?’ she inquired, inviting the pain.
‘Whenever you wish. Come again to Tokyo. That, I think, would be best.’
*
And so it was. She told Reggie she would accompany Mabel to the French Legation. She told Mabel that Matthew wished to introduce her to another artist.
‘I had no idea, darling, there were so many in Tokyo; we must be falling over them without knowing. I’m not sure I believe you,’ Mabel said, looking at her hard. ‘Still, it doesn’t matter. A friend in need is a friend indeed. We’ll meet back at Shimbashi station, as before.’
