The Phoenix Tree

‘True. But I have seen her, Mrs Cairns – you haven’t. I assure you there is a distinct resemblance between the two of you. She is a very beautiful woman. So are you.’

‘Thank you.’ His intimacy told her how confident he was. But then the kempei were perhaps always confident? ‘No, I need time to think about it.’

‘Of course.’

Yuri brought in the drinks, prompted more by curiosity than a desire to please. She looked at Natasha for some hint of what was going on, but Natasha was too preoccupied with her own thoughts to take any notice of her maid’s curiosity. Yuri shuffled her feet for a moment, gave a loud sniff and went back into the house.

Nagata sipped his saké. ‘It would be better, Mrs Cairns, if you didn’t think about it too long. You could be very useful to me.’

‘How?’

‘If Madame Tolstoy is your mother – and I’m sure she is – if you could be reunited with her, there could be advantages for both of us. In return for any gossip you could pick up in your mother’s circle, I can arrange that you have a pass to go into Tokyo any time you wish. That would help, wouldn’t it? I mean if you want to buy a few things?’

Food had become very scarce in the past few months and the ration available in the village had been barely enough to ease Natasha’s and Yuri’s hunger. There was a general shortage of food throughout the country, but the alien internees had been the worst hit. Without the food they had managed to buy on the black market, Natasha and Yuri would have gone hungry more than half the time.

‘I can’t buy anything if I have no money, major.’ She was stating a fact, not asking him for money.

He misunderstood her; or pretended to. He took a silk handkerchief from his pocket and opened it to show a heavy gold bracelet. Natasha recognized it at once; it had been given to her by a Chinese admirer in Hong Kong. She had sold it three months ago for three hundred yen, less than a third of its value.

‘I’ll continue to hold this as – shall we say, as collateral? I could have you arrested, Mrs Cairns, for dealing on the black market. I know every piece you’ve sold and what you got for it.’

‘Everyone does it. I mean, buys on the black market.’

‘Not everyone, Mrs Cairns, only those with spare cash. A lot of people commit murder, but it’s still a crime. So is dealing on the black market, whether buying or selling. I don’t want to see you in jail – you would be no use to me there. But if you just make yourself useful …’

‘You want me to spy for you?’ She suddenly wanted to laugh at the irony of what she was saying, but managed to restrain herself. All at once she no longer felt in any danger, Major Nagata was no longer threatening her.

‘If you want to be melodramatic – yes.’ He carefully wrapped the gold bracelet back in the handkerchief and put it away in his pocket. ‘I’ll see that you should not go hungry. Food for gossip.’ He chuckled at his play on words and Natasha gave him the smile he expected. ‘We’ll meet once a week and you can tell me what you’ve heard. It should not be hard work for you. It may even be enjoyable, if your mother welcomes you. Life at General Imamaru’s level is very comfortable, I’m told.’

Natasha had begun to feel a certain excitement at the prospect of meeting her mother after all these years; but she could not feel any enjoyment. She hesitated, then took the plunge, into the past as well as into the future: ‘I’ll work for you, Major Nagata. But I’ll need money. I am penniless.’

Nagata smiled at her without smiling, then he took out his wallet and handed her a fifty-yen note. Years of corruption had taught him that his bank account had to have a debit as well as a credit side; he suffered the debit side because less went out than came in. He reached across and dropped the note into Natasha’s lap, a further gesture of intimacy that told her exactly where she stood; or sat. She was his servant.

‘We’ll agree on the terms after your first month’s work, Mrs Cairns. In the meantime that will be enough to be going on with. If your mother welcomes you to her bosom, I’m sure she will also welcome you to her table.’

He stood up, all at once became formal. He bowed, gave her a yellow smile, said goodbye. She escorted him but of the house and he went down the steps, walking with the light step of a man half his weight and one who had got what he had come for.

Yuri came out on the verandah. ‘I was listening. He is a dangerous man. You should not encourage him.’

‘It’s not a question of encouraging him. Did you also hear what he said about my mother?’

‘Yes.’ Yuri was tough-minded, as one should be who wants to be a surrogate aunt. She tightened the sash of her brown work-kimono, making the action look as if she were tightening a noose round someone’s neck. ‘I had better come with you when you go to meet her. You will need my advice.’

She was a proprietary servant. She would have made a good trade union official. She went back into the house, leaving Natasha to contemplate the darkening day and, possibly, an even more darkening future. The chrysanthemum bushes were like twisted balls of faggots. The maple tree beside the house was a many-armed crucifix. Out on the bay, on the leaden sea under the leaden sky, the fishing-boats, sails furled, looked like floating scarecrows in fields that no longer had crops. She felt utterly depressed, though not afraid.

She had never felt afraid of the future; living the life she had led, she had accepted there was only tomorrow to worry about. To think further, to next year, or the next ten, would have spoiled the present; even Keith’s unexpected death had brought no fear of what might lie ahead. She could be afraid, terribly so, but the cause and its effect had to be immediate. She wore dreams like armour.

‘Ah well,’ she sighed, and folded the fifty-yen note Nagata had given her and put it in her pocket. At least she would be well fed if and when she went to meet her mother. She practised the word, but could hardly get her tongue round it: ‘Mother … ?’

That night she made her monthly report to the US Signal Corps station in the Aleutians. She said she had nothing to report, but the station had a message for her. A man would soon be on his way to Japan and would contact her on arrival. His code name was Joshua. She took down the message, decoded it and sat wondering at how, on this otherwise ordinary day, the world was suddenly contracting.

2

‘One should never waste one’s time trying to impress those lower than oneself,’ said Professor Kambe. ‘One should only try to impress one’s peers or above. That, as the commercial men say, is where the dividends are.’

Natasha had heard this sort of mock heresy at parties at the university, but she had not expected to hear it in a house as grand as General Imamaru’s. The small group of men round the professor, however, raised their whisky glasses and laughed at his wisdom. One or two of them glanced at her to see how she had responded, but she kept her face blank and moved away to a safer distance; from the moment she had entered the general’s mansion she had felt she was under intense scrutiny. Her beauty, her different beauty, was a handicap, like an ugly birthmark; she was an outsider, the one foreigner in the room. Except for Madame Tolstoy, who had greeted her politely and without surprise.

‘We are pleased that Professor Kambe has brought you, Mrs Cairns. My friend, General Imamaru, is a great admirer of what your late husband did for Japanese art history. When Professor Kambe asked if he might bring you, the general was delighted.’

Natasha had been in a dilemma for several days before hitting on the idea of asking Professor Kambe if he would take her to a reception where she might meet Madame Tolstoy. She had shied away from the idea of going direct to Madame Tolstoy and introducing herself; the woman might just have refused to see her. Alternatively, if Madame Tolstoy had agreed to see her, there would have been no prior opportunity to study her and decide if she was a mother worth claiming. In the present circumstances there was as much decision in accepting a mother as deciding to be one, a sort of reverse pregnancy.

‘Why do you want to meet her?’ Professor Kambe was a widower, in his sixties and susceptible to pretty women. He had studied at Oxford and Heidelberg and had some Western attitudes; but he came of an aristocratic family and if anyone thought critically of him, they did not voice those thoughts. It was he who had brought Keith Cairns to Tokyo University and he had maintained an avuncular interest in Natasha since Keith’s death. ‘She is just another one of General Imamaru’s fancy women.’

‘I understand she is the one.’

‘Well yes, I suppose so. She has lasted longer than most. But you still haven’t told me why you want to meet her?’ He looked at her reproachfully. Though he knew nothing of Natasha’s background, he guessed that, since Keith Cairns had never mentioned it, it was not impeccable. ‘I hope you are not looking for a model.’

Natasha tried to blush, but she had had difficulty doing that even as a child. ‘Of course not, Kambe-san. It’s just curiosity, that’s all. I have heard so much gossip about her …’ Though she had never been disrespectful towards Kambe, she had never been able to practise the ‘respect language’: it always lay on her tongue like a mockery. So she spoke to him as she had always spoken to men, on their level but with just a hint of flattery when it was necessary. Though she knew that a woman’s flattery always put her above the man. ‘And she is like me, an outsider.’

He had smiled understandingly: like a true aristocrat he knew that most of the world was made up of outsiders. ‘Tomorrow night then. General Imamaru is having a reception for a fellow general who has just come back from a glorious retreat somewhere in the Pacific’

She was never sure whether to smile or not at Kambe’s sardonic comments on the military; he came of a family that had supplied generals to the army for several centuries, but he seemed to have an academic’s contempt of them; perhaps that was why he and Keith had always got on so well together. But she was not prepared to take the risk of sharing the joke.

Now, at the reception, she moved round the room towards where Madame Tolstoy was seated with two of the generals’ wives. This was Natasha’s first venture into Tokyo’s high society and she was surprised at the lack of respect for the Palace’s austerity policy. There was none of the depressingly drab dress one saw everywhere else; Professor Kambe had warned her that she did not need to look as if she were on her way to work in a coffin factory. Most of the women wore kimonos, but several of them, the younger ones, were in Western dress. Natasha had been careful about what she wore, choosing one of her more discreet dresses, a peach-coloured silk that threw colour up into her cheeks. She had come in by train from Nayora in the standard dress of baggy trousers and quilted jacket. She had brought the silk gown and her fur coat with her in a large cloth bag and changed at Professor Kambe’s house.

Madame Tolstoy had also been discreet, though she had not been prepared to take discretion too far for fear of being disbelieved: she wore what could only be described as a missionary version of a cheong-sam. It was not too tight, the slit in the leg was not too high: even a priest would only have been aroused to venial sin.

Madame Tolstoy introduced her to the two women, one of whom was the wife of the general who had beaten a glorious retreat in the Pacific. She had the look of a woman who knew what a retreat, glorious or otherwise, was. The other woman, plump and pale as a thick rice ball in her kimono, was the wife of yet another general. Natasha felt like a novice camp follower.

‘Mrs Cairns lives out at Nayora,’ said Madame Tolstoy. ‘She is so fortunate to be away from Tokyo. She is interned there.’

‘How nice,’ said the first general’s wife and looked as if she wished she might beat a retreat to Nayora.

‘I’d be just as happy here,’ said the plump wife and looked around the large room where they sat. General Imamaru’s mansion had been built for the general’s father by a Japanese apostle of Frank Lloyd Wright’s who had lost his nerve. Cohesiveness seemed to dribble away in corners; solidity and fragility confronted each other like figures in a Hall of Crazy Mirrors. The general had not improved the interior by furnishing it with what appeared to be a furniture album of his travels; some day it might be preserved as a museum of bad taste. The plump wife loved it. ‘I don’t know why you don’t move in here, Madame Tolstoy.’

‘One has to be discreet,’ said Madame Tolstoy, and looked as coy as only a madame could. ‘General Imamaru prefers me to live in the house across the garden.’

‘Did you furnish the other house yourself?’ said Natasha. ‘I have heard you have beautiful taste.’

‘People are so complimentary,’ said Madame Tolstoy, and looked at her with benign suspicion.

‘I should love to see it.’ Natasha saw the other two women look at her with sudden cool disapproval. She knew she was being forward and disrespectful, but she was speaking to another outsider, not to them. Still, she backtracked, if only for Madame Tolstoy’s sake: ‘That is, if I should not be rudely intruding.’

She had spent the last half hour studying her alleged mother and had decided that she had to know more about her, even at the risk of – what? She had not even begun to contemplate her future with a newly-found mother. But she sensed now that Madame Tolstoy was puzzled and intrigued by her. Could it be that the mother in her had already recognized the daughter?

‘Come to my house later,’ said Madame Tolstoy. ‘General Imamaru wants the ladies to retire early. He and the other gentlemen have matters to discuss.’

Natasha smiled her thanks, bowed to the three older women, though not as low as their position deserved, and moved away. She had never been able to bring herself to descend through the various bows of respect; a slight inclination of the head, more European than Oriental, was as far as she ever went. Though, if ever she met the Emperor, which was as unlikely as meeting God, she knew she would go right to the ground, even if only to save her neck. Having turned her back on the God the nuns had given her, she was still amazed at the reverence the Japanese gave to the Emperor.