‘And she was French?’ asks Yuji.
‘Not, perhaps, in quite the way Papa is.’
‘No?’ He waits.
‘I have never,’ she says, ‘seen a photograph of her. I don’t think there is one. Papa tells me she was very pretty, that she was tall, that she was a good dancer. My mirror tells me she was also probably mixed race. Don’t you think so?’
She looks at him, her eyes wide with some mute appeal, some silent defiance, and for several seconds they stare at each other until Yuji drops his gaze to his glass. Is this the answer to the riddle of Alissa Feneon? A mixed-race girl? Cautiously, he raises his eyes again. She has turned a little in her seat, turned away as though to make it easier for him to study her. And suddenly he believes he can see it, as though over the bones of her skull she is wearing a score of faces, tissue-thin, and one of these — not the top or the one below or the one below that — but one of them is a face out of the East, an intrusion.
‘I think I’d prefer it if you didn’t tell the others,’ she says. ‘It’s not as if it’s important or anything.’
‘No,’ says Yuji, manoeuvring the remains of his Wiener schnitzel to the edge of his plate. ‘No.’
At the end of the room, the young officers have started to sing. Just two or three at first, but soon the others join in and all of them beat time with their glasses. A glass shatters. Alissa asks Yuji to call for the bill. When it comes (on a little silver salver) she pays with a note from the purse she keeps inside a fold of her obi.
The waiter brings them their coats, helps Alissa into hers. ‘Vous êtes Française?’ he asks.
‘De Saigon,’ she says. ‘Et vous?’
‘Genève.’ He grins at her, the permitted intimacy of a fellow foreigner, then nods to Yuji, holds back the red plush curtain and they leave the Snow Goose with a chorus of ‘Oh! Our Manchuria!‘ ringing in their ears.
On the pavements of the Ginza, the mild air has brought out an evening crowd of strolling couples, office workers, street hawkers, mobile fortune-tellers. Outside a drinking shop (a place that used to be known as the Lenin), the doorman claps his hands for business, while across the street a gang of students are ragging each other noisily in the neon shadows of the billiard parlour.
Yuji has his usual trouble with the taxis, losing out to people who flagged them more aggressively or who, the moment they saw one approaching, sprinted recklessly into the middle of the road. When, at last, he succeeds in stopping one, he takes his place in the back beside Alissa. She gives the driver the address of the house in Kanda. From there — or so he assumes — he will collect his bicycle, make some remarks about how enjoyable the evening has been, about seeing each other at the next meeting of the club, then wave to her and ride home. But when they step down from the taxi and the taxi leaves, she tells him she has something she would like him to see. Would he mind coming inside for a few minutes?
Hanako, who does not live at the house, has long since left. Alissa uses her own key to open the door. In the salon, Beatrice snorts, shakes with excitement. Alissa put on a side-lamp, drapes her coat over the back of the sofa, excuses herself. Yuji waits by the piano. He lifts the lid and touches, but does not depress, a white key at the bass end of the keyboard, then closing the lid, he walks to the half-open door of Feneon’s study.
Through the unshuttered window, moonlight picks out a pattern in the rug and lacquers the familiar edges of things — the bookshelves, the Buddha, the metal lock of the projector box. He glances over his shoulder, then steps inside, performs a quick circuit of the room, swivels the swivel-chair, and made bold by the dark, sits in the chair, resting his palms presidentially on the desk’s broad surface, the thumb-deep slab of bolted mahogany, and decides that the West’s ascendancy — that dominance the generals and admirals seem so personally humiliated by — comes, in part, from the solidity of the objects they surround themselves with, while the Japanese live among what is fragile and evanescent, in homes any man in a moderate rage could pull apart with his bare hands. Would they really, one day, have to fight these pragmatists who long ago put their faith in iron and steel and high explosives? What is this inevitability everyone seems to have agreed to believe in? This urge to lie down together in the fire?
When he hears Alissa, he moves hurriedly away the desk, from the impertinence of sitting where only Emile Feneon should sit. She pauses in the doorway, and before he can apologise to her, she says, ‘I love the smell in here. Don’t you? I’d like to have it in a little bottle so I could take it with me everywhere I go for the rest of my life.’
‘Go? Where would you go?’
She shrugs. ‘Nowhere unless we have to.’
‘But your father has discussed it with you?’
‘Of course.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘You must have assumed it.’
‘You want to go to France?’
‘It’s far too late for that, don’t you think? Back to Saigon. Perhaps Hong Kong. As I said, we won’t go anywhere unless we have to. Japan is my home.’
‘I’m sure,’ he says, ‘there will be no need for you to leave. I’m sure . .’ He tries to think of some phrase, in Japanese or French, that will reassure her, but she says, ‘Let’s not talk about it any more.’ And then, ‘Were you looking for something in here?’
‘What would I be looking for?’
‘I don’t know. The letter perhaps?’
With the light behind her he cannot see her expression, but he recognises the tone of voice, the streak of silent amusement in it. ‘It would,’ he says stiffly, ‘be unforgivable. It would—’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I didn’t mean . .’
‘No.’
‘Of course not.’
‘But is it here?’
She laughs. ‘Probably. Though it would take us all night to find it. It might even be in the attic. There are boxes and boxes up there.’
‘You’ve really read it?’
‘Years ago.’
‘And you remember nothing about it?’
‘He’s your hero,’ she says, ‘not mine. I prefer Hitomaro.’
‘Hitomaro!’
“‘One morning like a bird she was gone in the white scarves of death. Now when the child whom she left in her memory cries and begs for her, all I can do is lift him and embrace him clumsily.” Isn’t it beautiful? But I was going to show you something,’ she says, ‘unless you’d rather stay here and start looking through the desk drawers?’
He follows her out of the study, then through the salon to the bottom of the stairs. He has never been to the top of the house before, nor, as far as he knows, has any other member of the club. Upstairs was ‘interdit aux élèves’, and though he has been curious about it, has on occasion exercised his imagination on it, he has been content it should remain so, a place apart, a sanctum where the kami sleeps.
Beatrice patters behind them. Alissa sends her back to the salon, then leads Yuji up to the landing, a narrow carpeted corridor where two windows look over the road. On the walls between the windows there are paintings, watery landscapes, a view of a town with tightly winding grey-stone streets.
‘This is Papa’s room,’ she says, opening the door wide enough for Yuji to see the brass bed-end, the big wardrobe, the vitreous gleam of the washstand. ‘And this one,’ she says, passing another door and going ahead to the end of the landing, ‘is mine.’