It is Rose (or perhaps Natasha) who tells Yuji, four days before the term Miss Ogilvy spoke of has expired, about the breaking of Alissa’s waters. It is just after midday. The girl is helping him with his coat, tugging it clumsily off his shoulders in her excitement. ‘Isn’t it blissful?’ she says. ‘We were afraid you’d come too late.’
He waits in the empty billiard room, looking at the painted nymphs and the dimpled, slyly smiling wives of European aristocrats, and wonders about this water they contain that breaks (like porcelain? Like a wave?).
After half an hour the door by the fireplace opens and Dr Saramago comes in. He is wearing a pearl-grey three-piece suit. He is fat and surprisingly young. He has been upstairs with Alissa. ‘Not worrying,’ he says, breezily. ‘Baby later. Time for last sleep.’ He laughs (as if out of a well of cooking oil in his throat), takes a fur coat from the back of a chair, pats Yuji’s shoulder and leaves. A few minutes later Miss Ogilvy appears, crisp white apron, a dress with rolled sleeves, a rolled cigarette in her left hand.
‘There are contractions,’ she says, ‘but true labour has yet to commence. You may go and see her.’
Alissa is in the bed. Her head, her narrow shoulders are raised on a heap of pillows. There is a fire in the grate, and since his visit the previous day a table has appeared at the end of the bed, a card table with towels on it, bundles of white gauze, a tin basin, a large pair of scissors. For two nauseating seconds Yuji remembers Saburo’s story about the doctors in China. Now, then, gentlemen, shall we start with the appendix?
‘Saramago,’ he says, ‘looks like an American gangster.’
She manages a smile. ‘He’s nice,’ she says. ‘He brings us little custard cakes to eat.’
Under the sheet, her body radiates a kind of imminence. The whole room is charged with it, a tension that has reached its perfection.
‘I suppose it will be soon now,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Will you be here?’
‘Here?’
‘At the house?’
‘Yes. If you would like me to.’
‘Yes,’ she says, then shuts her eyes, clutches a corner of the sheet in her fist, moans. It is a sound she made the night they were together in her room in Kanda. She turns to Yuji, no attempt to hide the fear in her face. ‘What if I can’t do it?’ she says. ‘Saramago says he has things to help me. Miss Ogilvy says at my age it will be easy. But what if they’re wrong?’
‘They’re not,’ says Yuji, suddenly appalled at how little there is he can do for her. He steps up to the bed, reaches his fingertips to where the sheet is tented over her belly. ‘Shall I fetch Miss Ogilvy?’
She nods. ‘You don’t need to love me,’ she says as he opens the door. ‘But you must love the child. Will you love the child?’
At three o’clock Dr Saramago returns. He smells of lunch, of China Town. He is upstairs for fifteen minutes, then comes down and leads Yuji to the billiard table. Yuji is good at billiards — he has had more time than most to practise it — but Saramago beats him easily.
‘Next time, shogi,’ says the doctor, grinning and carefully tying a little scarf around his throat. When asked about Alissa, about the baby, he makes an unrolling gesture with his right hand, something that might be readily understood in Porto or Lisbon but which tells Yuji nothing.
At six o’clock the doors are opened and the first of the evening’s visitors arrive, a pair of naval officers, glamorous in caps and long military coats. Yuji is sent to wait in a room on the first floor of the tower. From the window he can see the lights of the neighbouring building. He buttons his jacket. There are radiators in the house, brass concertinas that gurgle and rattle like live things but give off very little useful heat, certainly not enough for the high-ceilinged rooms of the academy. He looks for something to read, finds in the bucket by the empty fireplace a newspaper from May 1938, reads a story about the fall of Swatow, then drops the paper on the boards and begins to pace. Behind a curtain in the far corner of the room is a painted door. He tries the handle. The door is not locked but leads only into a cupboard, its floor piled with women’s shoes, women’s boots. On a shelf at the back is a row of featureless wooden heads each with a coloured wig on it — black, blond, curly red — and from a hook below the shelf hangs a coil of buckled leather he mistakes at first for a horse’s bridle.
In the billiard room, drunken voices sing along to the gramophone. (Is the music louder than usual tonight? Is there something the gentlemen should not be allowed to hear?) When it stops, Yuji dozes in a chair, wakes several times imagining his name has been called, then falls into a deeper sleep from which he is roused by someone standing over him with a lantern — Father, perhaps, come to tell him it’s time for his watch on the platform.
‘The electricity is off,’ says Miss Ogilvy. ‘The child was born by candlelight.’
He follows her, her lantern, up a flight of stairs and along the corridor. Nothing waking could have more perfectly the character of a dream. Not just the uncertain light ahead of him, or the dark figure whose shadow is so weirdly thrown on the corridor walls, but the sense that with each step on the worn carpet his old self, like something useless, something used and finished, is falling away, blowing from him like a dust, like fine ashes.
In the room the candles burn in little clusters. Three on the card table, three on the windowsill, five or six on the mantelpiece. All Miss Ogilvy’s girls are there, one of them sitting on Saramago’s expanse of pearl-grey lap. As Yuji arrives, they twitter with excitement, they rustle, then fall silent and turn adoringly to the propped-up figure of Alissa, the dark bundle lying at the opening of her nightgown.
Out of the hush — a hush that seems entirely theatrical — Alissa says, ‘A little boy.’
‘A little boy,’ repeats Yuji. ‘Yes.’ Then, ‘Thank you.’
Saramago erupts with laughter. Miss Ogilvy shoos the girls from the bed, prods Yuji, quite sharply, in the small of the back. He sits on the bed. The baby is wrapped in a towel, its face pressed against one of Alissa’s breasts. It grunts as it sucks, groans like a dreaming dog. The girls, craning over the bed, sigh with pleasure. To Yuji the desperate sucking seems comical, slightly sinister.
‘Look,’ says Alissa, slipping the towel from the baby’s head to reveal a half-dozen luxuriant wisps of slick black hair. Japanese hair? Western hair? Eurasian? With a finger — and how expert she is already, how much the mother — she draws her swollen nipple from the baby’s mouth. ‘Hold him,’ she says. ‘Take him.’
She shows him how to make a cradle of his arms, then leans forward and gently, very gently, rolls the baby from her arms to his. He feels its heat, the restless stretching of its body. There is something oddly dense about the weight of it, as if its life was rolled up tightly inside it like the sticky wing of an insect. It moves its dark-palmed hands, curls its feet, then rolls its face blindly towards his chest. A tip of tongue pokes out, touches the wool of his shirt. The eyes flutter in startlement. The ignorance of it! The utter helplessness! And this is his son? This scrap? It starts to squall. It becomes rage. Immediately he holds it out to Alissa, feels a moment of awe and resentment at how swiftly her presence soothes it.
Behind him, one of the girls comes in, bottles in her arms, dark green bells of champagne. Saramago opens them. Miss Ogilvy gives Yuji a glass. He turns to Alissa. She taps a fingernail against the rim of his glass. He drinks. Someone opens the window a little. There is the distant droning of an aircraft, of several aircraft. ‘What on earth are they doing flying at this hour?’ asks Miss Ogilvy. After a while the window is shut again.