‘To warm you up a little,’ says Feneon, handing Yuji a dainty glass in which a mouthful of eau de vie is trembling. He gives a second glass to his daughter, then returns to the drinks table behind the piano for his own glass.
‘And what shall our toast be?’ he asks. ‘Health and happiness?’
‘An end to stupid wars,’ says Alissa.
‘Or at least,’ says Yuji, who here, in a borrowed language, has the dizzying sense he can say those things it would be most unwise to say anywhere else, ‘at least, perhaps, an end to conscription?’
Feneon rests a hand on his shoulder. Yuji hardly dares to breathe. They raise their glasses, sip, swallow. The doorbell rings. Beatrice leaps from the sofa and pursues Hanako into the hall.
‘Things will work out,’ says Feneon. ‘They usually do, somehow.’
‘The Emperor will come to his senses,’ says Alissa. ‘He’ll deal with the warmongers.’
‘The Emperor?’ says Feneon. ‘It seems to me we know very little about him. I’m not sure we should depend on him doing anything decisive.’
‘And in Europe,’ asks Yuji, wishing to remove the name of His Sacred Majesty from the conversation before they are intruded upon, ‘what can people depend on there?’
‘Oh,’ says Feneon, shaking his head, ‘on France making lots of speeches, being brave but at the same time utterly incompetent. On England making treaties, then looking after nothing but her own interests. On the Germans being good at catching trains and reducing everything to rubble. On the Russians . . well, who can tell what our friends the Russians will do?’
‘Arrive in Tokyo,’ says Alissa, ‘if the army keeps provoking them. It’s not 1904 any more. There’s Zhukov’s tanks to deal with this time.’
Taro, Junzo, Shozo and Oki enter the room, laughing together and rubbing their hands. They bow to Feneon then make a half-circle round the stove. At Junzo’s feet the dog dances on her hind legs. Junzo takes a square of chocolate from his pocket, reaches down and lets her, with her soft muzzle, her little tongue, eat from his hand.
‘Junzo’s the kindest of you,’ says Alissa.
‘Because he gives chocolate to an animal?’ asks Oki.
‘Animal!’ says Feneon. ‘Beatrice is a beautiful woman bewitched on the road by a goblin. If one of you would just agree to kiss her, I’m sure she’d change back to her old form. Don’t any of you want to get married?’
The young men, gazing at the dog, colour slightly and say nothing. Feneon, smiling to himself, goes to the table and fills more of the dainty glasses. They drink, give back the glasses, then file past the carved oak door into Feneon’s study. On the desk the projector is raised on a plinth of books (A Cochin Almanac, Warren’s Encyclopaedia of Industry, a volume of Darwin, of Malthus), its brass-bound lens aimed at a linen tablecloth stretched and pegged over the bookshelves. Alissa, with the pug in her lap, sits on the swivel-chair behind the desk, while the others take their places on the rug. Feneon, with the cuff of his smoking jacket, gives the lens a last polish. When he’s satisfied, he nods to Hanako, who pushes up the switch on the wall by the door. There’s a second of utter darkness, then the whirr of the projector’s motor, the ticking of spools, a cone of white light, the pulsing of numbers on the cloth and finally, appearing out of the broken grey like something surfacing at sea, the film’s title: Pay Day.
They’ve seen it before, of course, three or four times, but that’s expected, it doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter that the film is old, because that too is expected: all the films in Feneon’s collection date from before 1929, the year his little unofficial cinema in Saigon (that amusement for the ladies and gentlemen of the Foreign Section) caught fire during the second reel of Fool’s Paradise. What matters is the ritual of being there, the occasion’s innocence, like an echo of those childhoods they have so recently left behind them.
Yuji, his back against the side of the desk, looks between Junzo’s head and Shozo’s, chuckles at the Little Tramp’s antics, then — so familiar is it all, so comfortably familiar — lets his eyes stray from the tablecloth to the gilded spines of Feneon’s library, the silk scrolls on the wall, the Khmer masks, the rack of dragon pipes above the door, the glinting brass lamps from Laos, the Thai Buddha spectral and serene in the weird moonlight of the projector, and plays his usual guessing game as to where amid this clutter, this haul of an adventurer’s life, the letter from Rimbaud is lying, lost or hidden.
Out of the Frenchman’s hearing, the club is divided on the subject. Oki, with a wave of his cigarette, with that old man’s cynicism he affects, says it’s all a tease, a game of the sort foreigners often play, and which only a simple-minded Japanese would take seriously.
Taro asks them to consider the facts. Wasn’t Feneon’s father trading in the Arabian Gulf at the same time as Rimbaud? Doesn’t his family come from Sézanne, no more than a short ride from Rimbaud’s Charleville? And why would he make up such a thing, this man who, to the best of their knowledge, is scrupulous in all his dealings?
Shozo agrees, but argues that the letter never left France, or if it did, has long since vanished, blown away on a breeze or rolled into a taper to light someone’s evening pipe in any of a dozen cities from Pondicherry to Yokohama where Feneon has lived and done business.
As for Junzo, he is predictably stubborn. For him, the letter is somewhere in the house, somewhere near at hand, and for no better reason than because Alissa Feneon has told him so. She even claimed to have read it, though was, apparently, as evasive as her father when it came to speaking of the contents.
And Yuji? He does not know, not any more. Letters are rather fragile objects. By this winter of 1940 it would be more than fifty years old. Shozo, perhaps, is right. The letter is just a family legend now, like Grandfather’s journey to Kyoto. But he cannot, not yet, give up the delightful fantasy of one day catching sight of it, a ragged envelope left as a bookmark in some long ago put-aside novel, or forgotten in a drawer of tradesmen’s receipts or carelessly left among the sun-yellowed piles of Le Figaro under the study window. And inside, in ink paled to ochre — what? Ten lines of a lost poem? Some theory of poetics to set the professors on their heels? Or even something like advice, a hint on how to live, how to write, how to live as a poet, how to be brave enough for that.
When the film is over, they troop back to the salon. On the table between the sofa and the armchairs Hanako has put out plates and glasses and a cake of fresh eggs and French chocolate, baked by Alissa in honour of the year’s inaugural meeting. Only Feneon and Alissa drink wine — it would take too long, says Feneon, to educate the young men’s palates. For them there is beer in bottles that have been plugged for an hour into the snow of the garden.
Holding up his wine to the lamplight, tilting the glass, Feneon smiles lugubriously and says, in a low voice to Yuji at his side, that this time drinking red wine will be his only contribution to the defence of his country, his only patriotic act. Yuji nods, frowns, and thinks of the photograph in the study, the one that shows what Feneon did last time, the picture of the young soldier with his blond beard leaning with one of his comrades against the tracked, man-high wheel of an artillery piece. He longs to ask him how it was, what it was like to be a soldier, whether he was scared, scared all the time, but Junzo is doing his Chaplin walk, Beatrice is leaping at his heels, Alissa is helpless with laughter, and the moment is lost.