‘I know my mother—’ Sukie continued.
‘There are things called boarding schools,’ Sam said.
‘I could never do that,’ Miranda said. ‘We just couldn’t send Hettie away like that.’
‘Well,’ Sam said, getting up and pouring himself another drink, ‘we could all chip in, I suppose. Want a top-up, Billa?’
That wasn’t what Miranda had meant. ‘Has Michael eaten, or should I take some sandwiches up?’ she said.
‘He has eaten, and some sandwiches will be very welcome all the same, I’m sure. When I was his age—of course, that was when I was drinking, I remember my mother—’ Sukie said.
‘Good, I’ll do that,’ Miranda said. She got up and went into the kitchen, leaving Sukie to tell the story of her juvenile nights with the vodka bottle.
The house had been extended in most directions by the previous owner. Behind the frontage, three rooms had been knocked into one sitting room; a dining room went off to the right of the hallway, not often used. The kitchen at the back was a large addition, steel and glass in a steel-and-glass shell, and lit up like seaside illuminations at night. Miranda, Kenyon and certainly Hettie were not great ones for sitting in gardens, and the loss of half the garden to this marvellous kitchen didn’t seem to concern them. Twice or three times in the summer, Miranda would don a floppy hat kept specifically for the purpose. She would go and sit on one of their four deckchairs with a gin-and-tonic and a copy of a novel by Virginia Woolf. There she would stay until the doorbell rang, and she could be discovered in that position. As far as the outside went, she preferred to walk the streets of Hanmouth and look upon the estuary and its birds. You could not meet up by chance with friends and acquaintances if you sat on your own in your garden. Upstairs there were three bedrooms and a study with a futon; above that, the previous owners had converted the loft into an indeterminate space. If you were any more than Kenyon’s height, you could not stand upright in the converted uppermost room other than along its central spine, under the eaves.
When Miranda had taken the sandwiches and a large bottle of some radioactive fizzy drink upstairs— ‘I know… I’ve just given up trying to give them anything healthier, and they wouldn’t drink squash out of a jug, anyway’ —she refilled the glasses, brought out other oval plates of Marmite pinwheels, bruschetta, vegetables, dips and bought-in miniature fishcakes and Scotch eggs. Reluctantly, they left the topic of Tragic China—they had returned to it, almost without wanting to.
‘Well,’ Billa said. ‘The Makioka Sisters.’
She stressed it in an unusual way, and when Miranda began the discussion, she took care to stress the o.
Half an hour later, Kenyon, washed, brushed and hungry, came downstairs to fetch something for his solitary supper at the kitchen table. He paused at the half-open door, wondering whether to go in, to tell them about the murder he believed he had seen at Paddington station, perhaps even to ask whether he might put the television on to see if there was anything on the news. He heard his wife say, ‘Well, when Kenyon and I were in Japan two years ago…’ She was speaking with confidence. She had got into her stride. He thought of the radio in the kitchen, and the news at nine o’clock.
21.
When Kenyon and Miranda were in Japan, two years ago, they travelled first of all to Kyoto. There were reasons for that. Miranda had proposed that they see the historic parts of Japan before they saw anything more contemporary— ‘To do it in order,’ she said. She had researched not in guidebooks but in historical studies of the period, in works of art history, architectural analysis and garden history, many of which she had lugged home from the university library as soon as the airline tickets had been bought. She also researched online, asking travellers who had been to Kyoto where they recommended staying, what out-of-the-way places they should visit, where they might like to eat, all the time making allowances for the national origins and evident literacy of the recommender. In the end, Miranda set one of her graduate students to compile the information she had gathered in this complicated way into two separate folders, one green for Kenyon, one red for Miranda, and handed Kenyon’s to him in the departure lounge at Heathrow airport, once they had left the car in the long-term car park. Guidebooks were beneath Miranda; if she ever took one, she would be careful to consult it only in her hotel room, and decant any relevant information into the back of a small diary bound in soft leather like a ballerina’s practice shoes. She would be physically incapable of walking the streets of a historic city with a guidebook in her hand.
Hettie had been left behind. In fact, it might be thought that the trip to Japan was a sort of celebration, a kind of honeymoon, to mark the moment that Hettie, at eleven, was able to take her own holidays without her parents. The school had arranged an outward-bound week on Dartmoor. Some kind colleagues of Miranda’s who worked in the library had offered to take Hettie for the second week. They had a daughter the same age, and Mabel was going on the same week on the moor. Hettie did not object any more than she would have to anything else. Kenyon wondered whether they were truly friendly, and previous attempts to bring Hettie and Mabel together had not been much of a success. They had been sent upstairs together, and had come down together, without making any kind of friendship. Still, Kenyon reflected on the failed family holidays from the last ten years, characterized by sulking from one corner or another; Hettie’s refusal, the previous summer, to admit that the Sicilian baroque was as dramatic and entertaining as most authorities believed. Or there was the summer before that, when Miranda had first put a brave face on, then satirically descanted over her agreed fate of spending five days at Disneyland Paris. She’d enjoyed it in the end more than Hettie had. Miranda had managed to keep up the monologue about semiotic and cultural imperialism from one end of Main Street USA to the other. There must have been some pleasure in that. Hettie had only wanted to go because her classmates had gone, and hadn’t really cared for the giant exaggerated animals poking their fat plush fingers in her face. Kenyon thought about these two failed holidays, and it seemed to him that their holidays together had never worked, and that Hettie’s festival independence might be something worth celebrating. He wondered afterwards where it was that he might like to go, though.
(There was one afternoon with the Sicilian baroque. The argument had sent his two women in opposite directions: Hettie back to the hotel and Miranda off with her guide-folder. He was on the steps of some big building, a palace or a cathedral or a museum, or something. Above him, the yellow crumbling cliff of fantasy, curling and uprising and flowering into stone bouquets and flying winged sandstone children; about him, the marble-paved square shining in the afternoon sun as if half an inch of still water covered it. Nobody was about. It was over ninety degrees, perhaps more. Kenyon, in his Englishman’s shorts and his Englishman’s sandals, sat in the sun surrounded by treasures of the Sicilian baroque. He took a long drink of the cold bottle of water he had just bought, and closed his eyes against the heat and the silence. It was some long minutes before thought returned: thoughts of home, and money, and work, and budgets. Those long minutes were probably the place he wanted to go.)
‘I know you didn’t enjoy yesterday all that much,’ Miranda said in Kyoto, after they had left their hotel and its rush-mats and paper sliding walls and endless proffered slippers. They had got through their third morning’s trying breakfast of miso, cold fried mackerel, pickles, rice and a swampy dish of green tofu disintegrating into cold salty water.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ Kenyon said.
‘Well, there’s a few things I want to see, and I can get round them much quicker if we just agree to meet back at the ryokan at four.’
Kenyon did not object to this prepared speech. Something like it was often produced at roughly this point in their holidays. He had enjoyed the previous day, in fact. He had liked the empty yards of gravel with a rock or two in them that passed for a garden in this part of the world. He quite enjoyed looking at a stretch of moss on a
boulder, and he liked the way the floors in the temples creaked, rocking back and forth on one to make it sing. He liked the restful way that the four temples they had visited had been much the same, only varying in their size and in the number of visitors there. It all seemed very nice, and not in need of the explanations that Miranda had been offering him from time to time, about Zen contemplation, representations of the Great Tortoise swimming across the void, or any such thing.
She got into a taxi and, smiling brightly, waved him off. Kenyon rebelliously put his folder of explanations into his shoulder bag, and started walking. Fairly soon, he came across a busy shopping street, of no historical interest, full of department stores and electronics shops. They had driven across it in a series of taxis a dozen or so times by now, and the area had called for no comment. He stopped at a street corner, and waited as if for the light to change. It did change, and Kenyon still stood there, enjoying the foreignness of the beeping and the foreignness of the movement. He liked looking at well-dressed people, and this crowd was uniformly well dressed. They seemed to have put on clothes according to their age and station, and not questioned the basis of their wardrobe any further.
Kenyon watched the crowds crossing the shopping street several times. After ten minutes, he went into a department store, and walked around looking at perfectly ordinary objects: saucepans, plates, clothes hangers. When he came across something he did not think existed in his country—men’s fans, kimonos, displays of sweets made of bean paste, pink jelly and chestnut—he walked on austerely.
Later, he came to a quarter of the town where trees hung over a clear roadside river, and men in tight athletic costumes sat by rickshaws and waited for tourists. Their shoes were rubber socks, cleaving between the big toe and the others, as if that were something they needed to grasp and grip with. He went on, and found himself in a street of wood-fronted houses, two miniature storeys high. This was picturesque, and yet there were no other tourists. They had been everywhere yesterday, snapping at anything.
Soon Kenyon began to feel hungry. He had tried to eat the breakfast but had largely failed. He decided that when it reached twelve o’clock he would go into a restaurant and order lunch. He did not know when lunch was eaten here, but they would surely make allowances for an English tourist, and some English people did eat their lunch at twelve. Twelve came, and he came to a restaurant. Through a bamboo gate, he could see a small garden, twelve feet by four, with a miniature bridge, a pond with carp in it, a bamboo trickling device and some arrangements of moss. There was no priced menu on the front, and suddenly he wondered whether this was a restaurant at all. He had heard fantastic stories about visitors to Hanmouth, after all, opening the gate to a private garden, sitting down at a garden table and ordering tea and scones. He went on.
There was a little run of restaurants further on, and every one had three shelves of plastic models of food in the window. They shone glossily, falsely and inedibly; no one could want to eat anything that looked like that. One of Kenyon’s rules was that restaurants that displayed their food in the window, whether raw, cooked, or artificial, catered for people who could not read. He did not want to eat with people who could not read. He went on. It was only a few minutes later that Kenyon realized that, after all, he could not read here either. The plastic dishes were aimed squarely at him.
As he walked on, one restaurant after another presented itself: a jolly sushi bar full of noisy clients, who all seemed to know each other; a dour American-style fast-food place; an unexplicit simplicity behind a sliding wooden front, surely indicating fifteen courses and twenty thousand yen. Nothing would do; he could not go into any of them on his own. His hunger grew. He imagined Miranda, now, having visited the three temples and two famous gardens she wanted to tick off her list, settling down just at this moment to a good but reasonable meal in a recommended restaurant. He saw the kimonoed waitress handing her a menu and bowing out backwards; he smelt the sour, attractive perfume of the rush matting in the immaculate restaurant where Miranda sat alone, raising a bowl of miso to her mouth with both grateful hands. He sat down at the water’s edge, perspiring, and extracted his green folder. There was nothing in it about restaurants, and Miranda had the guidebook.
‘How was your day?’ Miranda said, when they met again at the hotel.
‘Very nice,’ Kenyon said. In the end he had gone back into a department store and bought a dozen of those chestnut and sweet-potato cakes; he had been so hungry that, not caring what anyone thought in this country of flaunted decorum, he started stuffing down the first of them on the escalator upwards. ‘Really very nice. This is an interesting town, isn’t it? I went where the mood took me, and I went into a temple, but I don’t think I could tell you which one it was. There wasn’t a sign in English, or anything. There was some sort of ceremony going on inside—I think there must have been ceremonial drumming—and I just sat and let myself be swept away.’
This sort of stuff, compiled from similar experiences on previous days, satisfied Miranda. Then she told him what she had been seeing.
‘I thought we might go to the Kabuki theatre tonight,’ she said, in the end. He agreed: he was quite glad to have Miranda with him, on these occasions, to have ideas about what to do and where to go and what to eat. ‘We could have an early dinner.’
He had looked at her sideways: he had wondered if she knew.
22.
Sometimes the discussion flowed easily over the surface of the selected book. Sometimes after a decent interval—ten or fifteen minutes—the conversation turned into the tributary of an ordinary conversation, away from what Sam called the ‘set topic’. After a couple of hours on holidays, the government’s iniquities, an attempt by a supermarket to set up in the Hanmouth meadows, or any other subject of the day, somebody would be bound to observe, ‘And we’ve hardly mentioned the book…’ They were guaranteed to talk.
Today the conversation about Heidi and the supposed abduction ran its course quickly. They had all said their piece, and with some enjoyment. But when they had reached the end of that, a little silence fell. They were all upsettingly clear that they had shared exactly these views with exactly these people. They had shared them a number of times, and nothing had intervened to refresh the views, to jolly them up a bit, or really to make them worth repeating.
Discussion about The Makioka Sisters had been slow to take off. Both Kitty and Caroline were very clear that they had read it, were rather hot on the point. But the names did slip your mind, and the story, and the events, or so it seemed. ‘I did read it,’ Kitty insisted. Miranda produced her dreaded prop, only brought out in real emergencies: a reading-group sheet of questions and topics for discussion, harvested by Miranda off the Internet and garnished with her own well-nurtured epigrammatic observations. Finally—she’d never known such a dull evening and would happily say so to any of the group in a day or so—she went impatiently into the hall and called Kenyon out of the kitchen. She had resolved not to offer them any more food or drink. Kenyon was getting involved in a cold-beef sandwich and a small bowl of lurid piccalilli.
‘Darling,’ Miranda said. ‘What—I mean what was the name of that temple in Kyoto?’
‘There were rather a lot of temples in Kyoto, Miranda,’ Kenyon said, looking over the top of his glasses.
‘You do know the one I mean,’ Miranda said. ‘It had a sort of squarish gravel garden with fifteen rocks in it, but you could only see fourteen from any given angle. You know the temple I mean.’
‘Yes,’ Kenyon said. ‘I think I remember. I mean I know I do.’
By now, they were all agog. The marital exchanges between Kenyon and Miranda were anticipated and enjoyed all round Hanmouth.
‘What about it?’ Kenyon asked.
‘What was it called?’ Miranda said.
‘Kenzo-ji. No, that can’t be right. Kenzo’s the man who makes the perfume. Senso-ji.’
‘That one’s in Tokyo.’
‘Well, it was something like that.
Why do you want to know?’
‘Kitty thought,’ Billa began, and in five minutes general conversation had broken out. It was striking, the group thought, that though Kenyon was a pretty dull fellow in conversation and Miranda a sparkling one, they didn’t produce dull or sparkling conversation in proportion. Silence tended to hover about Miranda’s most brilliant phrases, like the dull black cloth on which a diamond is laid out. On the other hand, Kenyon, not very enchanting or entertaining in what he said, acted on company like a lump of yeast on dough.
As if to prove it, Kenyon was now telling the gag about Sir Oliver Franks, the Washington Post and the box of crystallized fruit. ‘“Well,” the American said. “That is amusing. I would love to see that issue of the Washington Post. It must have been in Katherine Graham’s time.” ’
The others in the room had nothing to say to this. Billa regretfully turned her glass almost upside down on her nose. A roseate trickle of what had once been Campari and soda headed downwards. Kitty, in harmony, licked her finger and ran it round the fake Palissy snake-and-fruit dish Miranda used for her canapés. She licked it clean of crumbs, ran it around underneath a toad’s ceramic head, licked again. Billa dropped her glass on the carpet with a soft thud. ‘Golly,’ she said. ‘Good job it was empty.’
‘Well, I guess I ought to be going,’ the American said. And, as if on command, there was her blushing son in the doorway, preceded by Miranda and Kenyon’s teenage daughter. Something had happened upstairs: if his eyelashes had grown blacker through some experiment with mascara, Hettie’s glow had nothing artificial about it. She had taken her hair in one hand, and was chewing it, her eyes fixed and her smile enormous, gazing at the American boy. ‘Well, I hope you’ve been having fun,’ the American woman said needlessly, and her son, cued, said, ‘Thank you for having me, Mrs Kenyon.’ Hettie made no comment; she just nodded, unable, it seemed, to detach her gaze. Had she ever been in love before, so instantly? No one could think, and no one wanted to go on observing this passion; they had gone upstairs concrete, grey and lumpen, and come down sheer, shining, polished glass.
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