She wheels from him, walks out, followed by the prancing cat. For several seconds Yuji is as motionless as the women in the pictures, then he sets his glass balloon on the mantelpiece, limps to the billiard table, and spends the minutes granted him, precious minutes in which he ought to be grappling with the question of his sincerity (though the problem feels impervious to normal thought, almost mystical), rolling a billiard ball against one of the baize side-cushions. He does not hear her return. Her voice startles him.
‘Very well,’ she says. ‘Shall we go up?’
Alissa’s room is on the second floor at the end of the house furthest from the clock tower. It is slightly larger than her room in Kanda, its walls decorated with pink paper that light and time have faded to a blush. Opposite the door is a sash window looking towards the sea, where a pair of fishing boats, black shapes on the glittering swell, are making their patient progress from frame to painted frame.
Miss Ogilvy picks up a towel, a dirty cup. ‘Do not,’ she says to Alissa in briskly enunciated French, ‘tire yourself out with talking.’
When she has gone, when the clip of her footfall has faded along the corridor, Yuji and Alissa are like shy children left by a well-meaning adult to become friends. At last, still stood by the door, Yuji looks up to where she is sitting in the floral armchair beside the window. She is wrapped in a rose-coloured gown, a fringe of flannel nightdress showing below the hem. Her hair, black as his own, is plaited and tied with a ribbon. She looks both exactly as he remembered her and entirely different, a change that is not simply the swollen abdomen on which she rests a small protective hand.
‘Papa called last night,’ she says. ‘I don’t know which of us he is more angry with. He said he hit you.’
‘Not so hard.’
‘It must have been hard if you need a walking stick.’
‘That was something else. A fall.’
‘He had no right to hit you.’
‘Please. It is not important.’
‘He had no right.’
Yuji nods, looks to the window. ‘It’s a nice view,’ he says.
‘Yes.’
‘The sea . .’
‘Yes. It’s restful.’
‘Good.’
‘They’ve been very kind to me,’ she says. ‘All of them. Miss Ogilvy especially.’
‘Miss Ogilvy?’
‘I know she can appear rather fierce at first. It’s only because she has to keep everyone in order.’
‘She told me I should travel.’
‘That sounds like her.’
‘And that I must not encourage her students to drink.’
‘It was one of the girls?’
‘Sandrine?’
‘I expect she was encouraging you, wasn’t she?’
‘It seemed like that.’
From under the edge of the counterpane a seal-grey head appears, a black nose, two eyes sticky with sleep. Seeing Yuji, the animal sneezes and waddles over to him.
‘She has to stay in here because of the cats,’ says Alissa. ‘Dr Saramago doesn’t approve, but Miss Ogilvy says the Portuguese don’t understand dogs. Horses but not dogs. She has opinions on every nationality you can think of. Lots on the Japanese, of course.’ She gives Yuji a quick smile, then seeing how his attention returns again and again to her belly, the evidence of her belly, she says, ‘I can’t get used to it either. Being so . . big.’
‘It hurts you?’
‘A little. At night, mostly. It depends on where the baby is.’
‘Ah . .’ Yuji puts on a most serious face. He has no idea what she means. Where can it be? Sitting on the end of the bed?
‘They move,’ she says. ‘They sleep, wake . .’
‘Is it sleeping now?’
‘No. Awake, I think.’ Then, after a pause, ‘It’s probably listening to us.’
She is teasing him, of course. Surely, she is teasing him, but the thought of a foetal witness to this scene, of a baby, his child, theirs, sitting the other side of her skin listening to everything . . He searches her face for some hint of levity, but she is not smiling now. She is gazing at him intently, nakedly.
‘Papa said Junzo told you.’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘Two nights ago.’
‘Just two nights!’
‘We met . . by chance.’
She shakes her head, and for the first time a note of irritation enters her voice. ‘A pity you couldn’t have met by chance three months ago. There isn’t much time now. Will they send him to China?’
‘Probably.’
‘And you?’
‘I don’t know. One day, I suppose.’
‘This horrible war.’
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t even bear to read a newspaper. I look at these’ — she gestures to the little pile of magazines on the side-table — ‘read about knitting and colic and what husbands like for supper.’
‘I don’t read as much as I used to,’ says Yuji. ‘I have become quite busy.’
‘It’s nice that you’ve come,’ she says. ‘I don’t really know why you’ve come. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.’
He opens his mouth. She silences him with a movement of her hand. ‘Don’t explain,’ she says. ‘I’m not angry with you. I was at first. Then I was sad. Now all I want is for the baby to be safe. You see, it’s really going to happen. It’s not just an idea, something to amuse ourselves talking about. It’s a real baby who’s going to grow up, who’s going to . .’ Her face creases. In Yuji something comes undone, some strapping of the heart. He would like to yell, let out a shout so loud the men on the fishing boats would hear him. He steps towards her, tries to crouch at her feet, but his knee is too sore, too stiff. He stands again, wincing.
She wipes her eyes, grins at him. ‘Look at us,’ she says, ‘with our sticks.’
8
He visits every day, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for a whole morning or afternoon. They meet in her room or in the small dining room at the back of the house, or, on fine days, on the bench between the eucalyptus trees in the little salt-stunted garden. When she is not too tired and her ankles are not swollen, they walk in the winter sunshine, sticks in hand, Beatrice trotting contentedly at their heels. The awkwardness of the first encounter, of the second and the third, the confidences that awkwardness inspired, gives way to a gentle, mutual reticence. They talk together, easily, fluently, but sound, even to themselves, like strangers enjoying an unexpected friendship at a holiday resort. Little is said about the recent past, the three seasons since they knelt side by side in the dark to watch Kasane. Little is said about the life that sits or walks with them in her belly. And when, now and then, a silence between them fills with the weight of unspoken thoughts, there is always something to rescue them, some task, some antic of the dog, some intriguing or comical behaviour from one of Miss Ogilvy’s ‘girls’.
Of these, there are six, all foreigners: Sandrine, Rose, Kitty, Eva, Natasha, Mary. In the beginning, Yuji has difficulty telling them apart. All seem slightly blurred by strong perfume, and all, dressed in fabrics delicate as tissue paper, seem always to have just emerged from bed or bath. They are kind to him, treat him, he thinks, like a pet. He does not, after his second visit, expect to hear one of them play the piano.
That the academy might be an unsuitable place for a woman in Alissa’s condition, a surprising place for Monsieur Feneon to be connected to, an altogether curious institution with a way of doing things that would — or so he guesses — not be much understood in the more traditional parts of the pleasure quarters . . these are questions he turns over, with no great urgency, like loose change in his pocket. After all, there is no one to discuss it with, no one, yet, to be scandalised. And who is he — a person Feneon might have felt entitled to shoot — to raise so much as an eyebrow?