The baby is restless. Alissa settles him with a touch, then smiles up nervously at Yuji.
‘At the camera, please!’ calls Miss Ogilvy.
They turn to her, compose themselves. She lifts the gun. The light, white and chemical blue, is blinding, and for an instant it prints their shadows thickly on the far wall.
10
New Year is spent with Grandfather. Yuji travels to Setagaya with Miyo. Mr Fujitomi is there. He has brought his wife and sister with him. After eating, they go by taxi to a shrine next to the railway station, a small place compared with the one in Hongo, old, unfashionable. They take Grandfather’s wheelchair. Yuji pushes it. How heavy the old man is, a dead weight, a dragging, dead weight.
Chief Priest Takashita comes out to welcome Grandfather personally. He presents him with a scroll on which a snake is drawn beside certain verses from The Chronicle of Ancient Matters petitioning good health.
They don’t stay for long. Grandfather looks at Sonoko, who looks at Yuji, who turns the chair round. The taxi is waiting for them, the driver flicking through a magazine of fortune-telling.
At the house, the Fujitomis remain for a last flask of sake. Yuji sits with his secrets. Even Mr Fujitomi seems distracted. Has he heard anything from China? How long since the last letter? Grandfather is growling. His lower lip droops, trembles. When Sonoko does not immediately translate for him, he tries to slap her leg.
‘He says,’ she says, ‘Japan is finished.’
The others look politely interested. All day and all night the streets have been full of a fine white mist.
11
As soon as the holidays are over and the academy is open for business again, Alissa moves back to the house in Kanda. It is easier now, much easier for Yuji to visit. He can go for an hour in the morning, then meet Fujitomi in the Low City before returning to the house for another hour in the evening. He is pleased, yet he also understands that the move’s indiscretion, its indifference to local scandal, means the hour of separation is not far away.
On the evening of 15 January, the day families gather to eat New Year gruel, he crosses the garden through a cold west wind to find Alissa and Emile asleep on the sofa in the salon. Feneon is sitting with his back to the stove, the dog on his lap, a newspaper spread across the table in front of him. He greets Yuji with a nod, and after folding away the paper, he fetches his chessboard from the study. In silence they make their opening moves, exchange pawns, clear the lines for more powerful pieces to enter the fray. It’s Feneon’s turn. After studying the board for a minute, he looks up at Yuji and says, ‘I hope I can trust you to be discreet?’
A few months ago and the question would have felt slighting. Yuji would have brooded on it. Now it is merely part of the new honesty between them, the new froideur.
‘I shall be leaving soon for Singapore. The British have a large garrison on the island and there’s an English planter there, a man called Farrell, who I was able to help with some trouble in Saigon. He will, he assures me, now repay the favour. As soon as I have found a suitable house, I will send for Alissa and Emile. It should only be a matter of a few weeks, perhaps a month, but during that time they will be entirely in your care.’
There is no mention, no hint of the possibility of Yuji accompanying them. Is this how Feneon will free his daughter from her unfortunate connection? Or is it simply that Feneon, a practical man, understands as well as Yuji the impossibility of it? How, in better times, in Taisho times, a person like Professor Takano might go abroad, might even live there a season or two while he studied its ways, but now, for any young man — even one with a Class F exemption — to leave these islands without khaki on his back would be tantamount to desertion? He could never come home. He would have no home to come to.
‘I will care for them,’ says Yuji, quietly.
‘Thank you,’ says Feneon, using his bishop to knock over Yuji’s knight. ‘That’s settled, then.’
The luggage — four trunks of battered tin, each with the markings of earlier journeys, the smudged chalk of a cabin number, a pasted-on, half-torn-off address in Bombay, Macau, Cholon — is sent to the Bullseye Academy and then, the day before the sailing, down to the docks to be loaded onto the San Cristobal da Lisboa. The San Cristobal is bound for Shanghai. From there a second ship will take Feneon to Hong Kong, where a steamer of the Peninsular and Oriental Company will complete the journey to Singapore.
Alissa, Emile and Feneon have accompanied the trunks to the academy. Yuji joins them the morning of Feneon’s departure. The weather, turbulent all week, has settled again and a phone call to the agents confirms the ship will sail at the appointed hour of three in the afternoon. They decide on an early lunch, but as soon as they sit down Alissa begins to weep like a child. She tries but cannot stop herself. Feneon takes her outside, returns five minutes later holding her hand. At the table, he tells tales of shipboard encounters, the Irish priest he once shared a cabin with on a crossing of the Arabian Sea, the Romanian countess who travelled with a wolf cub. Miss Ogilvy accuses him of invention, of being little better than a novelist, a romancier, but she has laughed along with the others.
The taxi comes at one.
‘We’ll say our goodbyes here,’ says Feneon. ‘No handkerchiefs waving from the quayside, please.’
The girls form a line. He embraces each in turn, embraces Miss Ogilvy, wipes the small tear from her cheek. He takes the baby in his arms, kisses him until he writhes in protest, then holds his daughter, strokes her hair, gently untangles himself. To Yuji he says, ‘Did I ever apologise for hitting you?’ He reaches into a pocket of his overcoat. ‘This came to light while I was packing. I have no use for it now and perhaps it will make up for any unpleasantness between us.’
He kisses his daughter again, kisses his grandson, picks up Beatrice who, half demented with jealousy of the baby, will travel with him, and goes to the door. Through the window Yuji sees him getting into the car. The driver shuts the door. Feneon looks back at the house, smiles and turns away.
The girls immediately surround Alissa. They seem primed for dramas of this kind, of any kind. They are not reserved, not coolly secretive like the women in the paintings. Whatever they feel is played out on their faces without hesitation. Yuji moves away from them and looks at the envelope in his hand. There is a stamp with a lion on it, and an address written in ink faded to the colour of dried blood: ‘19 rue saint-Maur, Sézanne, France.’ The paper is mottled, stained by time, by the immense journeys it has made. It is beautiful. He smiles at it. He almost prefers not to read it at all but to go on imagining it, the precious content, as if he was one of the old poets picturing the moon from behind drawn blinds. Then the thought seems idiotic, unworthy of such a gift, and he tugs the letter through the ragged lips of the envelope and tilts it towards the afternoon light.
For two minutes the handwriting is completely impenetrable. He begins to panic. To have it in his hands and not be able to read it! Unbearable! He starts again, scans each crabbed line as calmly, as methodically as he can. Single words appear — silence . . newspapers . . money . . dogs . . God . . Then clusters of words — I never find . . half of Europe . . into his fields . . backs of carts . . Then at last, he has it. It speaks.
Harar, 4 February 1890