Читать книгу Three Views of Crystal Water - Katherine Govier - Страница 5

Two years passed this way. Vera, James, and Keiko. Now it was 1936.

Vera was thin, pale, and possessed of a ferocious will. Her features had sharpened, and her eye sockets were deeper. Her nose was longer, sharper, and had a bone. It was a patrician nose, her grandfather said, looking at it askance. ‘God knows you didn’t get it from me.’

Keiko tended to both her charges in the morning, seeing Vera off to school and bundling James to the streetcar to his warehouse. Then she washed every item that had been used since the night before; cutlery, dishes, towels, clothing. The fabrics she put out on bushes to dry, running out to collect them when it rained. Once her housework was done she too set out on foot, for the end of the street.

She went in the same direction as James Lowinger, but farther, down to the east end, to the shops in Japantown. Here she would learn the news about her country – never good, because of the war in China – and find the fish, radish, and seaweed she liked. She had a few friends there. One was a dressmaker who made tunics and jackets for Vera. The other was a fishmonger. She would return home before either Vera or James appeared. On the clothesline she pinned the squid to dry; it was transparent, at first, but slowly, as it hung, it turned brown. She cooked eels and little fish on a small charcoal burner on the back step.

She did not seem unhappy; she giggled often and ate heartily, smacking her lips. She smiled directly into the eyes of the neighbour ladies who had yet to think of one single thing to say to her other than, ‘Lovely morning isn’t it?’ They didn’t know what to call her; nobody had told them her name. So that when the first one, the most kindly, called her Mrs Lowinger and Keiko bowed in acknowledgement, that became her name. In this way Keiko was ensconced in the family and on the street. Days and weeks and months went by and Vera continued courting her grandfather and taunting his young wife, his not-wife. The word for Keiko, which Vera was to learn later, was aisho.

Vera was conscientious at school. She too had friends, ordinary girls in tunics and curled hair and rolled stockings; girls who were taking stenography courses and already had boyfriends. But like Keiko she did not like her friends to come to the house or perhaps they did not like to come to the house. Perhaps they had been told not to come. She was never certain. The girls didn’t tease her, just as the neighbours didn’t shun Keiko; that would be too obvious and they were all good Christians. They admired the old man they called Captain James. They were a little afraid of Vera: she was austere and thin. People did whisper that she had changed. It was an irregular situation, as her teachers said, in that house. They praised the girl for her English composition and her skill at volleyball. For being good to her grandfather. They did notice that she grew thinner and whiter (nothing but rice in that house!), and that she lost interest in her friends, and ran off to the warehouse every day when the bell rang. She’d taken it to heart they said, the death of a mother. What could be worse for a girl that age?

But Vera did not think of Belle. She did not, she believed, miss her mother. She could see past her mother now. Where once Belle had loomed, billowy and anxious-eyed, in the doorway between childhood and real life, now there was an absence, an exhilaration. The passageway was visible. Every day after school she parted from her schoolmates at the gate. She ran past the boys for the streetcar along Granville. On the boisterous streets of Gastown, still running, she neatly dodged little gangs of sailors and men with carpets braced over their shoulders and policemen who might ask her why she was at large. It was cold and the rain penetrated her coat; the sleeves were too short because she was growing so fast. The sky was glowering with low clouds; at the edge of the water in the reflected neon lights, red and green, bark and kelp floated on oily smears. She breathed in the air through her nostrils and felt free.

It would be twilight as she climbed the stairs on Homer Street. Through the fogged glass of the window in the upper half of the door she could see the green shade of Miss Hinchcliffe’s desk lamp. She tossed down her bag of books on the chair with the curved wooden arms and bade an offhand hello to Miss Hinchcliffe. Miss Hinchcliffe might have been about to leave for the night, but now that Vera had arrived she’d stay on. And from down the hall came the dry roll of her grandfather’s voice. ‘Is that you, Vera?’

‘It’s me all right!’ She shed the wet coat and hoisted it to the coat tree, and sitting in the captain’s chair, prised off her Oxfords one by one. In her sock feet she slid on the green linoleum to his door and peeked in. Her grandfather’s long narrow jaw seemed to hang a little nearer the blotter, as the curve in his spine deepened.

‘Hello, dear.’ He put his hands on the arms of his chair and pushed himself to his feet. He wavered halfway up, and then, with an extra push, stood.

She kissed his cheek. He smelled sweeter now. Like an old thing. It was death approaching, or maybe all the fish Keiko fed him. He smelled like a grandfather, not a sea captain. Of clean cotton and sweet tobacco and only a hint of the ocean.

‘Just let me deal with Miss Hinchcliffe and I’ll be back,’ Vera said.

Her presence at Lowinger and McBean had changed from being that of a visitor and a child to that of a watcher, and a keeper. Vera had adopted a bustle, as if she actually had jobs to do in the office. She stood in front of Hinchcliffe’s desk. ‘Did the shipment come in? Did he meet the man from Birks?’ She wanted to make sure that these visitors conveyed their needs to him, and not to the secretary.

Miss Hinchcliffe faced Vera with an ironic twist to her mouth. She protected the old man, but he refused to be endangered. Her expression said that Vera was a child and childhood was a phase; it would end, and she would go on to another passion, while she, Hinchcliffe would remain permanently on guard at her desk.

While Vera stood wishing she could get rid of Hinchcliffe. The secretary was like a foreign power. Her grandfather would find this ridiculous, of course. If she complained he would only chuckle; he would never say a word against anyone. He said the office couldn’t be run without her. Hinchcliffe sometimes complained of Vera as well.

‘She doesn’t need to come here day after day,’ the older woman said. ‘She’s taking up a great deal of our time.’

And James chuckled over that, too.

‘Did he have lunch?’ Vera asked.

‘He won’t eat the sandwiches,’ said Miss Hinchcliffe. The sandwiches came around every day from a man with a cart; they’d been coming to everyone in the block for years. ‘That Japanese housekeeper has got him used to noodles. That’s all he wants.’

Vera bridled. Keiko was Vera’s to insult, not Miss Hinchcliffe’s.

‘She is not the housekeeper,’ Vera said.

‘What is she then?’ said Miss Hinchcliffe daringly.

Vera ostentatiously let her jaw drop open. You dare to ask?

‘Does she not cook the meals?’ Implied was, such as they are. A long pointed stare at Vera’s concave midriff.

‘Yes,’ said Vera. ‘She doesn’t actually cook much. Mostly we eat raw fish.’ She said this to annoy.

Miss Hinchcliffe rolled her eyes. ‘It isn’t my place—’ she began, but Vera could see that she did think it was her place.

‘I don’t think that—’ Vera flipped her plank of long, thin, blonde hair.

No one finished what they began to say.

Vera retreated to the table where the woodcut prints were kept. Someone had put out a set of three. She wondered if her grandfather had been looking at them. Or if he had left them there for her to look at.

‘Did you see those?’ he said, appearing at the door of his office, poking his head in, his large sinking head with the handlebar moustaches still hoisted to the horizontal. ‘Quite lovely. You can spend plenty of time lost in there.’ Idly, as if it didn’t really matter, he turned away.

The three prints had been enclosed in a folder, which lay beside them. On the front of the folder was written, in fading blue ink, in a hand that Vera did not recognise, Three Views of Crystal Water.

James disappeared back into his office, telling her they’d go for coffee in a few minutes, and she was left alone with the pictures.

The first view was of a seashore, seen from the top of a dune, as if an observer were crouched there unseen. Near the edge of the water was a circle of women, standing and sitting. They had built a small fire and it was this that drew them together, as if they were warming themselves. They did not huddle and shiver, but stood, tall, and elegant, revelling in their beauty. The women wore only a loose fabric draped over their hips, leaving belly and breasts bare. They were wet, hair dripping down their bare backs. Around their feet were baskets.

It was strange to name this a view of water, because the women were the interesting part, an even dozen of them, with their gently curved arms and their modesty, which she could feel, despite their nakedness. There was a child with them. The child had a small string bag of shells in her hand and a little three-pronged rake. The child’s clothing matched the women’s red underrobes. They had all covered their heads with a white kerchief with blue leaves. They had been in the water and had come out, and these baskets held their catch, perhaps seashells, or fish, although Vera could see no means of catching fish in the picture.

Yet, she realised, as she continued to look, more than half the picture was water. It was flat and turquoise close in, and, where rocks stood up from the surface, transparent: you could see through to the base of the rocks beneath. But out from this shore, the sea reached from one side of the paper to the other and up to a flat horizon. There were waves drawn on it, hard white lines marching relentlessly one after another. The sea was not easy for the small boats that dotted it.

She put the print aside. In the second print the crystal water was black and without waves. The sky was dark, but Vera guessed it was nearly dawn. There were stars, like pricks of white; the artist had copied these stars into asterisks of white in the water as well. Two people, their faces hidden in travelling robes that half covered kimonos of orange and peacock blue, were on a graceful, arched bridge that crossed a stream of water. Drawn together by equal forces from opposite sides to the highest point of the arch, they seemed to tremble there. They were not facing, but back to back: each had walked a few steps past the other, as if they had tried to pass by, but could not. There was danger in the air, and yearning. The woman reached back, a long tapered hand emerging from her robe; she handed the man a letter.

Vera gazed long and hard at this one. It was a very satisfying picture, with the deep black and the royal blue, and the orange patterns of both the kimonos, and the white letter changing hands. Whatever secret was here was successfully passed; she felt relief.

She lifted that print and put it to the side, revealing the last of the three.

In the third view, there had been a catastrophe. It was snowing and the ground was white. But on the horizon, far back in the picture, a pagoda was in flames, turning the sky orange. A road wound through skeletal trees from the gates of that pagoda down to the centre bottom of the picture, and on that road were two hooded women. One was on horseback; the other stood beside her. They wore black and white cloaks with pointed black hoods that draped over the sides of their faces, half concealing them. The mounted woman held a long spear with a curved blade. Vera understood that she would journey through danger, and must protect herself and her younger charge. Behind them, outside the pagoda gate, was a fearsome warrior in laced armour, brandishing his sword. He was their scourge, or their protector. His skirts flew up revealing thick legs in sandals, and the scabbard from his curved sword.

At first Vera didn’t see the crystal water. But there, under the snow-laden branch of a tree was a stream. Unfrozen, the water bubbled over rocks. Aside from the roaring of the flames it would be the only sound. The women would follow its path to safety.

Vera wondered who had named these Three Views of Crystal Water’. The pictures belonged together, and therefore they must tell a story. But it was not clear where the story began.

She stared at the three prints, making up a story that would put them in order. Twelve women went to the seashore to fish and were seen by a stranger. The stranger fell in love with one of the women; but she was promised, or bound. Her trusted servant met him in the dead of night and gave him a letter telling him to go away, that all was lost. However, he would not go away. Instead he set fire to the pagoda and killed everyone in it except the woman and her servant, who escaped, while he watched over the destruction he had wrought.

‘Ready!’ called James.

That day, they made their way down the few steps, next door to the flatiron building where Roberta presided, the Captain stepping gallantly but perhaps a little more slowly than the season before. Vera could see Roberta turn to warn the waiting others. Because by now it was known on Homer Street that the old merchant would come in. And he had an audience. There was the hatter, and a printer with inky hands, and another few traders, in rugs and fabrics. There was Kemp who also traded with Japan, and sometimes his son. There was Malcolm the mailman, if he’d finished his run. Vera and James nodded to the gathered audience, and went to their booth. Roberta’s fierce hand with her damp cloth swept across the table; they watched her midriff at eye level against the tabletop and heard her voice asking what they would have.

‘The usual,’ James said. And then exclaimed ‘Wet!’ with fresh surprise, as if it had never been wet before. ‘Wet today, Roberta.’ He surveyed the other coffee drinkers, now studying their napkins or gazing out of one window or the other to one street or the other. ‘Quite a crowd here today! Afternoon, Kemp.’

‘If it isn’t Lowinger, of Lowinger and McBean,’ said Kemp. ‘Where’s that son-in-law of yours? I heard he was in Madagascar. No, it was Marrakesh.’

They slid into their chairs. Vera was conscious that they made an odd pair, the old man and the girl.

‘I don’t know,’ said her grandfather. ‘He hasn’t been home for some time. Since…’ his voice trailed off. He always stopped talking when Belle or Hamilton Drew came to his mind. Soon after their marriage, they had moved here. Drew had been given the task of keeping the portside office open. The idea was to branch out from pearls. Canadian Pacific had plenty of steamships going to Japan and coming back with imported goods. Smart merchants bought them and divided them up and put them in new packages and sent them on. It was not easy to lose. But Hamilton…

Vera tried to picture her father. Was he part of her distant childhood? It seemed to her there had been a pram, and a sweet tooth for toffee. ‘I turned around and he was absent.’ That’s what her grandfather said about his own father. She remembered her mother crying.

This time James kept talking. ‘The trouble with my son-in-law,’ he said dramatically. He knew he had an audience. ‘The trouble is he was too late.’

‘Too late for what?’

‘Just too late. For everything. He’s an imitator. Never had a thought of his own. Never could go his own way. Like the real people do.’ He sputtered to a stand still. Then he started again. ‘The trouble with your father was he was Scottish.’

Vera laughed at that one. Just one more reason her grandfather gave for not liking him.

He peered at Vera. ‘You’re thin, you’re pale, too, young lady. Are you eating properly? You know Keiko makes very good meals.’

Vera smiled primly.

‘You don’t want to be sickly.’

Unspoken words to follow were ‘like your mother’.

She was branching out too, from white food. She ate the Danish: it had white icing at least. She bit into it.

He laughed his pebbly laugh, the one she had come to love, the one of true mirth – as opposed to the other, hollow draining that was not a laugh but a view of the world.

He sipped his coffee. He had developed a tremor, and it spilled in the saucer. ‘You’re not going to try to get me to talk about pearls today.’

‘Everybody’s here and waiting.’

‘Nonsense. They’re here to have their coffee.’

James Lowinger liked to go out with the pearl divers, to see the stone go overboard and the men stand on it and let it carry them down to the bottom, like the lifts in the flat in London. They swarmed across the sea bed all arms and legs, as if they could stay down for ever. He wished he could do it. The rest of it he hated.

It was six years after his first visit, and the British had again announced that there would be a great harvest. His father got bidding for the rights to the oysters, and up went the price and down went the sun and suddenly it was his. He bought it all. The boats returned with hundreds of thousands of oysters, one in a thousand of which might have a pearl. The overseers slung the bags out of the boats and onto the sand.

Now, what to do? Papa Lowinger could hire the natives to open the shells. But then he still needed men to search for pearls. The larger pearls would be hidden in the hinge of the oyster. To remove such a pearl you’ve got to use bare hands and a special prising, cutting tool. So he had to trust some workers. And there were none he trusted. He could chain them and forbid them to chew their blasted betel nut because they would hide any pearls they found in their teeth, and punish them if they did. But he didn’t want the bother, or the brutality of it.

Happily some pearls came loose by themselves and turned up in the silt that built up at the bottom of the tubs. The pearls he found he bottled and sent back to London. But he still had hundreds upon thousands of oysters. He found a place outside Condatchey Bay, where the natives lived. He dumped his oysters in open tubs and they did their part like the docile creatures that they were and began to rot.

There was just one problem. The stench. It grew. In the heat, the dead molluscs smelled absolutely vile. And the smell clung; it did not blow away or dissipate after dark. Day after day, a week, two weeks, there was still the stink of it and more oysters coming in on the boats every day. The village rose up in protest and demanded that the English take the oysters away. But they were poor people and the natives needed the pearling fleets, and the traders persuaded them to let them stay on until they finished.

To keep an eye on the locals, James and his father stayed in a hastily built hut on the beach. James walked on the sand at night, looking at the stars, but it was impossible to escape the smell. He was ashamed. Of the filth. Of the big English brutes with their whips. Of the smell of death. He sometimes wondered if he himself were rotting.

When the rotting was done, and the oysters nearly water, they hired the women and children. They were the poorest of the poor – no one else would do it. Mostly naked they waded in to the mass of decomposing oyster flesh, and felt around on the bottom for pearls. They were up to their armpits in it, and kneeling, gagging at having their faces so close. His father’s men patrolled the edges of the pit with whips. James’s father himself was on a horse. From the height of his seat he saw an old crone slip a pearl into her mouth. He caught her before she swallowed and took her away and bound her to the mast in the hot sun and whipped her until she was nearly crippled.

At nights in their ramshackle house on the beach his papa swore about the greedy government that opened the fishery every year so that the pearls were getting smaller. James went out again to walk on the beach and saw the sun set over India. This is the family business, he thought to himself. This is how Mother got her fine hats and many schoolbooks.

The next day at dawn they woke to find a squad of local officials on the beach.

‘Move on,’ the men were shouting, ‘Go! Away with you!’

They waved their arms. The workers scrambled out of their tents half awake. The officials kicked in their direction, and began to fling sticks at them. The workers began to collect their few small possessions.

Papa came out of the little house to remonstrate. He put on his best manners.

‘Friends! Colleagues! What can I help you with?’

But he was confronted by a short, fat man, who had no small-talk. The Englishman had bought the right to hire the divers and bring up the oysters, he said, but he had not bought the right to let them rot there. He must move on.

‘Impossible,’ said Lowinger. ‘I cannot move this operation, which brings prosperity to you as well as to me. As you see. We are in the midst—’

Ceylon had anticipated his dilemma, said the fat man. In this case the government would help them out by taking two thirds of the oysters as a royalty.

By dark of night they moved on to another village, which had very few people. The oysters continued to appear, every day, on the boats from the pearl banks. James’s papa hoped the government did not notice him this time. He built huts and disguised them with palm branches. They dug trenches and lay the oysters down in them and caused water to run through to clean them. But still they smelled. The police came, but he bribed the police: the oysters were almost decomposed. When the inhabitants began to complain of the stench, he bribed them too.

Dead matter does not give way easily. As the oysters rotted they were infested with larvae and these larvae gave a man strange diseases. While the cleaning went on they had to have a big bonfire burning. It helped with the smell. One man fell into the flames and was burned; he was bitten by flies then and died of oozing infections.

Men’s lungs were damaged. The Chinese coolies seemed to manage the best. The old ladies who waded in the stuff, filtering all that dead flesh through their fingers, seemed indestructible but sometimes one would fall over and nearly drown.

There were flies everywhere. James could not breathe the air; it was oppression, and a plague upon the earth. They tried to clean it up. But more oysters kept coming out of the sea, every day. Lowinger had bought a share of the whole harvest, and the harvest was a good one. He moved from town to town but the locals refused to let him warehouse his putrefying little shellfish, pearls inside or no pearls inside.

At night in their house on the beach – once again, a shack made of boards thrown together, poles and a tin roof – James asked his father to pull up and leave. But no. Oh no, where pearls were concerned, Papa could always come up with a new idea.

When the next batch came ashore Papa produced four huge boxes lined with tin. They were like double-sized coffins. The tin was supposed to keep the smell in, and to stop any leakage when the flesh of the oysters started to go, as inevitably it would go, on the sea voyage to England. He had plans to ship the four large tin-lined boxes to England to be washed on the River Ouse at Buxted where there was running water. He had got a merchant ship to agree to take them. He sent the crates by ox cart to Colombo.

But there was some delay in the shipping. It could have been a storm; perhaps the ship needed repair or took another, better-paying load. The boxes sat sealed in the harbour. The oysters started to decompose and when they decomposed they set off the same disgusting smell, only this time it was enclosed.

James and his father went in to Colombo to pay the boxes a visit. James gave them a wary look. The smell was coming out through the hinges. He stared at the containers and thought he could hear popping sounds inside. There were chemical changes as oyster flesh decomposed, and those changes produced gas. He had an awful premonition.

The two entrepreneurs were not around when it happened. They were back at Condatchey Bay dragging more oysters out of the sea. But they heard about the explosions soon after. The gas blew open the tin-lined cases, and the explosion was heard all over Colombo. The air was fouled and the sky blackened for miles around. The smoke had not cleared when the government authorities were on the trail of the Lowingers, father and son.

They were little wiry men not far removed from the ones Lowinger hired to go down and shorten their lives under water. He scoffed at them all. But these authorities were impervious to insult. They responded by seizing the ruptured cases. They took them away and buried them; no one knew where, but James heard a report they’d gone by in bullock carts toward the jungle.

James’s father sat and fumed in his beach house. He made his son’s life hell, carping on about his schoolwork and having him write out algebraic equations. That made James anxious to go home to England, but his father wouldn’t abandon his oysters.

Then they had a visitor. A man came riding along the beach on his horse, a military man who, like many of the soldiers in Ceylon, had taken an administrative post in the local government. Add to that he gambled a little in the pearl market. His name was Avery McBean.

They’d all met before. He hailed them and then he jumped down off his horse. And who was behind him in the saddle, but that overdressed girl with her pout. Except now she was fifteen and on the cusp of beauty and thought herself even grander than once she had. James hated her on sight. She did not move from the saddle; she was six feet up on the horse and probably couldn’t. The conversation took place like that, with the girl watching from above.

‘We’ve impounded the tin-lined cases,’ said McBean. ‘We had to build new lids, for which incidentally, we’ll charge you. The exciting news is that we found pearls in there just as beautiful and just as big as you’d find elsewhere. However they are the property of the government. And you’re in a deficit situation, Lowinger.’

After the ranting and raving settled down, McBean offered friendly advice. He had figured out the system. You’d not see him buying up lots of unopened oysters. The only smart thing was to buy from the small independent boatmen who will wash a small quantity of the oysters themselves.

‘They’ll do you every time,’ said McBean, infuriatingly calm with his Scottish burr. ‘They see that the English are greedy and their greed makes them desperate and a desperate man has little success outwitting molluscs or little wiry brown men.’ The English, he said, as if he were somehow in a different category.

‘Thank you very much,’ said the senior Lowinger, ‘but you are wrong.’

‘Aye, if you say so,’ said McBean easily. ‘You’ll find out the wisdom of my words, sooner or later.’

And the girl sat like a princess on her steed. She smirked down on James. Neither child nor woman, she was something alarmingly in between. He squirmed. He went pale under his hot red face. She parted her perfect lips and stuck out her tongue at him. Then she giggled and rolled her eyes at her father. James smiled, uncertainly.

McBean got on his horse and whirled around.

She looked back over her shoulder and blew James a kiss.

He would never be free of her.

Vera hated to see her grandfather in his bed. For years she had heard people reassuring Belle that since the old man had been all over the world, he’d come home safe and sound and end his days with her. It was what you were supposed to do when you led a life of great danger. ‘He’ll likely die in his bed.’

Therefore, Vera thought bed was the most dangerous place for him to be. She tried to drag him out of it, in the morning. Some days he would shake his head, and go limp, as if all the energy had drained away under the sheets. She would jump on top and rumple up the sheets, prodding him, until he roared for her to go away. He would not come out of his room before she left for school, and those days were not good days for algebra and geography. Vera would worry about him and race to the streetcar for Homer Street as soon as the bell rang for the end of classes. When she burst in the door, her eyes would go first to Hinchcliffe’s face for any clue of mishap, and then to her grandfather’s office door. He’d be in there, a little pale, perhaps, and sinking into his chin. On the way to coffee she would hold his arm at every step he took.

But on other mornings he gamely shook her off with the lion’s roar she wanted, and said he’d be up just as soon as she left him alone. He would wash, and put on his white shirt for the office. Vera would pay a little better attention in school but still make haste for Homer Street immediately after.

On Sundays – most Sundays, if it wasn’t raining – they walked. This particular Sunday the sun was shining. They started at English Bay. James wore a wide straw hat, and Keiko wore a headscarf, blue with white figures on it. People glanced at them, as they passed, no doubt thinking they were an odd group. But Keiko never seemed to notice. She loved the bleached, lost logs that rolled in on the tide and was forever marvelling.

‘So big, so big,’ she said. ‘Where from are they?’

‘They’ve been logged somewhere up north I suppose,’ said James. ‘And sent down in a log boom, and got loose from it.’

‘Oh, oh,’ said Keiko.

Vera liked the kelp with its beads of bright green, which she could squeeze between her fingers and pop. She wandered down to the water to pull up some kelp and back to her grandfather to walk beside him, and away again to walk along a log and hop over another tangle of them, teetering on a rock. No one told her not to now. Her mother had loved to walk on the beach too, and they would pick up shells, and sometimes sit in the lee of the sea wall, looking at what they’d found. But her mother had been nervous of the sea and especially of Vera on the beach, afraid she’d be swept away or fall off a log. They talked about her mother a little then. How she had gone to boarding school in England. How he had been out of touch for so long, until she came to Paris. ‘We all lived together then,’ said James Lowinger reflectively. ‘Until she found Hamilton Drew. Or he found her.’

They reached the path through Stanley Park.

Keiko was different here from the woman she was at home.

She seemed to have known the water for a long time. She cast an expert eye on the rivulets and the bubbles in the sand and knew exactly what rock to pick up to find the crabs. She walked beside James, head inclined toward him, attentive to his words and to his step, if it faltered. But she was also listening to the wind on the water, and smelling the salt. Sometimes she stood and scanned the horizon.

‘Weather changing,’ she would say, or, ‘tide changing.’

‘Keiko knows all about the sea,’ James would say, squeezing her elbow. ‘All my life I have wanted a girl just like her. A deep diver,’ he would say. Then he would laugh, that dry chuckle that wasn’t really aimed at anyone. ‘Has all my life come to this?’ he said. ‘Do I talk about it as if it was over? I suppose it will be, soon. I suppose I could begin to sum it up.’

They went as far as the benches at First Beach before he sat. Keiko had tea in a thermos. She poured some into the tiny china cup that she brought for him. And when he spoke his eyes looked far out to the east as if there might appear, on the horizon, one of the great sailing ships he’d been on as a boy.

‘At weddings, the Indians used to bring up a pearl from the bottom of the sea and bore it through with a hole to symbolize the taking of a maidenhead. You wouldn’t understand—’

‘Of course I would. Do you think I’m an infant?’

‘We did it when your mother married that man, my son-in-law.’

‘You hate my father,’ said Vera sadly.

‘We saw through him, that’s all. It wasn’t difficult. We saw him for what he was. An opportunist. I saw that in him maybe even before he saw it. But your mother was determined. You couldn’t stop her. Even her mother couldn’t stop her. She said she’d give her a wedding and give her a pearl and give her away and that would be the end of it. Never speak to her again. And she never did.’

He shook his head and laughed again without humour, out of amazement, perhaps. ‘Far as I knew. Of course she wasn’t speaking to me either. When she stepped up to the priest Belle wore one rosee pearl in each ear, a perfect match they were. Your grandmother got them in Kuwait and had kept them all that time.’ He looked very thoughtful then. ‘She sold everything she could make a gain on. They were freshwater pearls from the bottom of the sea. It’s a magical thing, that. We also took our pension pearls and made a necklace so close to the earrings you’d have sworn they came out of sister shells. They got married and that was that. Hamilton Drew took it all. He took my daughter. He took the pearls. He took—’

He stopped.

‘What did he take?’

The old man thought about it for a while.

‘He took my name, that’s what he took. He took my good name and used it for his own ends.’ He brooded and when he spoke again he was back on the Romans.

‘You know Seneca had to chastise Roman women for wearing so many pearls. You can read about it, go look it up. Emperor Caligula’s widow wore pearls in rows and lines all around her head, her bodice, her sleeves and her hem. She wore them hanging from her ears, around her neck, on her wrists, and on her fingers. When she went out into the streets people had to look away so as not to be blinded. And it became the fashion. Ladies began to wear them on their feet, on their shoe buckles, in the thongs between their toes and between their legs too, no doubt.

‘Do you know why Rome invaded Britain? Your teachers probably told you something about Gauls and Caesar. But that’s all hooey. The real reason was the Romans wanted British pearls. They were freshwater pearls, found in lakes and streams, small and of poor colour, some said. But the Romans were desperate. The rage for pearls consumed them. Finally they had to pass laws, prohibiting persons of lower rank and unmarried women from wearing them. This greatly increased the number of marriages, as you can imagine.

‘But you see – and here’s the rub, my dears – pearls have always been connected with wars and theft and ugliness. It’s just the opposite of all that purity. Conquered people had to pay a tribute in pearls, just as they did in women, and in slaves. There was once a battle lost by an emperor called Pezores. I don’t remember what country was his. But he wore an unrivalled pearl in his right ear. Just as he was about to be killed by his enemies, Pezores tore this pearl from his ear and threw it ahead of him into the pit. Emperor Anastasius, the victor, was furious. He promised five hundred gold pieces to anyone who would comb the pit, full of dead men and dead horses. And hundreds did, pawing through that gore. But no one found the pearl. It was lost for ever, with the dead.’

Here James Lowinger shook his head. Vera knew they were talking about her mother again. And Keiko screwed the lid of the thermos back on, and put the tiny china cup back in the cloth bag that she hung around her waist, and they stood up and turned back along the beach.

It was as if he had run into a wall.

What was the wall? Vera wondered. It was the wall of death, perhaps. Belle had gone into it. Her grandmother, the Captain’s wife, must have gone into it, and now he himself was looking at it.

On Sundays when it rained, Keiko kept James at home. He coughed now, and when he coughed his whole body was wracked. Vera went out alone. She walked in the grey drizzle and thought about pearls, and slaves, and women. A fresh pearl white and perfect was beautiful. It had a value beyond price. But a marred pearl was worthless. A woman about to be married was ‘bored’ by a man; an eel could prise open the oyster shell and feed on the animal inside, swallowing the pearl as well.

James Lowinger could talk about pearls in literature, he could talk about pearls in history, pearls of the conquered and the conquerors. But any story hung subject to cancellation, as he rambled. Her grandfather said he did not want to tell. But he did want to tell. It was as if he had come home to tell her something. But the story began long ago; he could not tell it all at once.

‘You know I don’t want my stories falling on the wrong ears,’ he said, teasing.

‘Who do you mean?’

He put his finger alongside his nose. ‘You know who I mean.’

‘You don’t mean Keiko?’

Of course he didn’t. He held out his hand to her; his face was lit with the pleasure he felt in her nearness.

‘You mean Miss Hinchcliffe?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Vera. She is no more than a functionary.’

‘You mean my father then.’

‘Oh, interesting suggestion. My son-in law,’ he said. ‘My erst-while son-in-law.’ James Lowinger took full responsibility for the error in judgement that had put Hamilton into the family: this weak link was his, not his beloved Belle’s and certainly not Vera’s. ‘What an unnatural cruelty! Do I still have a son-in-law when I have no daughter?’

Some days he mentioned the book again. Some days he said he had already got it half written. But he certainly would not finish. The problem was, he said–

‘I know, Grandfather. It puts you into an impossible struggle between truth and loyalty. You told me.’

‘Good girl, you remember.’

When James was ill Keiko nursed him and Vera went to school in a rage and fought with her friends and went after school to Homer Street, even though he was not there, to stare at the ukiyo-e. A silent Miss Hinchcliffe sat over her typewriter.

‘Where is Mr McBean?’ Vera asked her.

‘There is no Mr McBean.’

Vera did not believe this.

‘But his name is on the door,’ she said stubbornly. ‘See? Lowinger and McBean.’

Miss Hinchcliffe smiled in a pinched way. ‘I know it seems that way.’

‘Is he in the Far East, the way my father is?’

‘I told you there is no one called Mr McBean.’

‘Wherever he is, it is time for him to come back,’ said Vera.

‘Aren’t you going to go for coffee?’ Hinchcliffe would say.

‘Not by myself,’

One day when James was ill in bed, Kemp came down from the office above and took Vera to the coffee shop with him. When they burst in through the door shaking rain from their umbrellas, Roberta looked up with hope that the Captain would be with them. Malcolm the mailman was there, at the end of his rounds. The hatter was telling stories about the sailors and how one would come ashore and buy a smart hat, a Borsalino, say. Then he’d go on a big tear and lose it. The hatter could go around the bars and pick up lost hats in the morning if he felt like it. And the next day, before his leave was up, the sailor would come back and buy the same one again.

They murmured appreciatively at this homely story and then it was silent in the triangular café with its three booths.

Roberta said, ‘How is he?’

And Vera burst into tears.

The men sat embarrassed while Roberta took Vera in her arms and patted her on the back.

‘What are we going to do with her?’ she said to the others.

James Lowinger lay in his bed. His veins stood out under the skin on his head. Vera had not imagined that a head could get thinner, but his had. His flesh was clinging to his skull. He lay with his eyes shut but his voice did not change and he could still laugh so that it sounded even more as if his voice were gurgling down a drain. Day by day he grew lighter, his face more luminous. It was as if he were getting younger, on a cosmic timescale that had nothing to do with the days and the months and the years they were living through.

He spoke to Vera in a valedictory way.

‘A longing, almost like lust, to tell the tale as we have lived it, grows stronger the older we are. God knows that man’s lust is a subject of which I have some experience. I mean only the lust for objects. I say “only”, as if this were more manageable, more civilised than sexual lust: it is not, only an expression that has a more public acceptance.

‘I have no greed for gems or gold, which may strike you as odd. Indifference is rare in my trade and the one aspect of my personality to which my survival can be attributed. My lust inclines to the private and the physical, far healthier if you ask me. And for much of my life I was unsatisfied. It made me a good observer of others mind you. That is the story – how their lust entwined with mine.’

There were good days and bad days. Keiko heard news in Japantown that made her cry, and she wrote letters home, letters to which she got no replies. She found one man in Japantown who was from Kobe, and every few days she went to hear his news. But the letters he received were vague, and in contradiction to the news she heard in Vancouver. In Japan the people said the war in China was going well. Papers came to call up men and boys, and this was an honour, to serve the Emperor. Here, the papers said the Japanese were going to lose the war in China, and that the soldiers themselves were poor and hungry, and the people in Japan were even hungrier.

One day, while visiting her friend in the tailor’s shop, Keiko heard about the drowning of a fisherman. Although he was no one Keiko knew, and from a village many miles from her own, she was struck with dire premonitions and went home silent. While she was washing the dishes after dinner she told Vera about the sea near her home.

‘It can be dangerous if you don’t know. Every child is made to swim. The father throws—’ here she demonstrated with her hands cupped at the level of her knees, as if she were pushing a large bag of laundry over a wall ‘—throws the child over the boat into the sea. And watches. The child will go down and breathe in the water. The child will nearly drown—’ she mimed choking, dying, ‘then the father will dive in and bring the child back. But as soon as the child has’—she acted out spitting out the water ‘—the father again—’ she made the scooping motion with her arms ‘—into the sea. Second time, the child knows how to swim. Anyone who learn to swim that way – while going down to drown – is safe for ever.’

She did not bother James with her worries. He was very busy in his half-conscious world. At times he needed her care, calling out weakly, but good-naturedly, for tea. Sometimes he was sick on himself, and she came with a basin and towels to clean him. But he was often asleep. In his sleep he expended a great deal of energy. He thrashed and sometimes spoke, and even laughed, or scoffed, at imaginary companions in his dreams.

‘He simply must eat more,’ said the doctor.

‘He eat what he want,’ said Keiko.

But to Vera she explained. ‘He is fighting demons. Meeting old friends. It is very much work. That’s why he is so thin. He dreams away his food.’ She backed away from the bedside when the doctor came to look at James but she did not take her eyes off him.

The doctor did not push further. ‘He is old,’ he said. ‘He has come home to die, like an animal does.’

Keiko bowed and did not contradict the doctor. But when she and Vera were alone she spoke. ‘An animal does not come home to die,’ said Keiko. ‘An animal crawls away by himself. He come home for other thing.’

‘What other thing?’ Vera hung by her grandfather’s bedside and when he spoke she listened. Open, his eyes burned red at the rims and bright blue in the centre; his collarbones under the pyjama top stood up higher. Often she watched him sleep. Even then his eyes were busy under the lids.

‘Are you going to the office today?’ Vera asked, tearful, at the bedroom door.

‘I don’t think so, my dear. You’ll have to go for me.’

She went, crying.

As James Lowinger lay dying, he knew he’d been wrong about what was important. He’d been wrong about pearls, and even wrong about the stories. They were in the past. Soon he too would be in the past, and join his stories there. They were on record and official; in them he was clearly in command. They were of the mind and, in the life of his body, they were utterly worthless.

He sank into his body.

He sang, he wrestled, he suckled, he grappled and he danced with the love of his life in those last few hours. He lived to the full reach of his senses without fear or guilt, because what was to be regretted, now? He knew that Keiko came and went from the room with her basin and her cool cloth; he knew that she knelt beside him. He supposed, even, that she understood he had descended into a realm of pure delight, or rather that the world had risen away from him. He no longer felt the pain of Belle’s death, a pain he had tried hard to hide. He was loosed to his own flesh and every bliss it had to offer. That day, he lived one night, over and over. When it finally eased away he was ready, this time, to let go.

When Vera came home he was gone.

Keiko was quietly washing his body.

‘He works so hard,’ she said, ‘to die. He—’ and she acted out the thrashings and groans that had mysteriously accompanied his last hours. ‘And he—’ she closed her eyes and allowed a wide smile to cover her face.

Vera slapped her across the cheek.

Keiko stood with the red marks of Vera’s fingers spreading sideways over her cheekbone, and a well of deeper crimson, rage perhaps, climbing from her chest to suffuse her face. She said nothing. Vera burst into tears and ran from the room.

* * *

What can happen after a girl has fallen in love with her grandfather and with the storied life of her grandfather and his father too? Only one thing. The grandfather can die.

And that is what he did.

He died.

Not very original of him.

He couldn’t be blamed; he was old. All Vera knew was that here was the same thing all over again. Her mother, her grandfather. Her loved one, the one who took care of her, suddenly gone from his frame, leaving behind the waxy white flesh.

How did he die? She can’t tell you. She forgot about his warnings, his readiness for it. It seemed to her that at one moment he was there, entertaining the regulars in the coffee shop, and the next – when he had tricked her, by asking her to go on without him, leaving him with Keiko – he let go of his life.

It was as if Vera had just come through a sickness herself; she had been asleep and now she was awake.

The neighbours came out of their houses to help. He had to have a Christian burial, they said to each other. There was just Keiko and Vera, and Keiko had no idea what to do. Besides, none of the officials they dealt with would give her any standing, would allow her to be in charge. It had to be Vera. But Vera was fifteen. They spoke of the embalming, the funeral home, the grave site, and the cost of it all. Hinchcliffe took the bills out of Vera’s hands.

Keiko inclined her head at all these conversations, taking note of what was said although no one was sure she understood it. Her young face was unlined and patient and endlessly correct. Vera hated that. She gave herself licence to be awful to the woman, by behaving either with exquisite iciness or appalling rudeness, to keep her guessing.

A crowd of neighbours and Gastown merchants came to the funeral. How sad, they said, and wonderful man, as they came up to shake Vera’s hand. She stood between Miss Hinchcliffe and Keiko at the door to the visiting room in the funeral parlour. She did not like the way Hinchcliffe had taken over, but then who was to do it? Her mind spun with the nursery rhymes her mother had read to her. Parlour, she thought, come into my parlour said the spider to the fly. Hark, hark, the dogs do bark. Wednesday’s child is full of woe. The parlour was all burgundy and varnished wood and there was no air in it. There was no smell of the sea, not even in Grandfather’s clothes, because Keiko had cleaned everything so well.

The minister came; he hugged Vera and said that it was very hard, so soon after her mother’s death. The Captain did not go to the church the way her mother had. But he had lived a good life.

‘A good life?’ protested Vera. What could the insipid word ‘good’ mean in the days of James Lowinger? Did they mean he should have been content to die, as if he’d taken a large helping of life and ought not to be greedy? In fact his life was huge and sometimes horrible, but marvellous, and not to be taken away from her. She had asked for his stories but she could not piece it all together, or make a wholeness out of it.

‘He saw a great deal of the world, I suppose,’ said the minister dubiously.

Keiko knelt beside the coffin. Although they tried, no one could displace her. She sat on her heels and her face was on her hands, which were flat on the floor, folded up like a fan. She raised her body from time to time, and bowed, and then went back down, with no expression on her face. Like the women in the prints, Vera thought.

Vera’s schoolteacher got down on his knees beside her, trying to shake her hand.

‘Miss Tanaka?’ he said. He alone had troubled to discover her name.

When she wouldn’t raise her head he put his down on the floor beside hers and said loudly, as if to wake a sleeper, ‘Thank you so much for taking good care of Vera.’

He was the only one.

But it was because he thought that it was over, Keiko’s taking care of Vera.

‘I suppose her father will come,’ said the neighbours.

No one had thought of Hamilton Drew.

‘And your father? Will he be coming home?’ asked the minister.

Vera looked at Hinchcliffe.

‘We are attempting to locate him,’ the secretary said with a firm smile. ‘I have wired. I have also sent a letter. I am not certain where he is…’

And then they all went home.

And it was silent.

James Lowinger did not wake up and shake the house with his morning sneezes. And there was no bustle to get his morning tea or his shoes and no secret laughter coming from that room and no secret tears either, which was what Vera hoped for. She wanted Keiko to suffer. She wanted Keiko to show on her face the desolation of Vera’s insides. Since she had the temerity to love the old man, she might as well pay the price. What did she expect, taking up with a man so much older? She had to know he would die, didn’t she?

Vera’s pathetic hymns of grief, her English nursery rhymes, swirled in her head. London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down. The North wind doth blow and we shall have snow, what shall we do then? He had died; old men do that, that was what they did. Maybe it was even Keiko’s fault. There were many cruel things she planned to say to Keiko, but when she saw her, head bent over the little iron grill on the back step to cook fish, something moved inside of Vera and she could not.

She went to Lowinger and McBean after school. There was, temporarily, a sense of urgency in the warehouse. The captains came in their blue caps and Hinchcliffe talked to them tersely; they left again. There was no word from Hamilton Drew. Vera was curious, but not heartbroken. She did not remember the man, anyway. The business would have to keep on running, said Hinchcliffe; it could not close because they were always in the middle of a shipment, or an order, and there was no right time to stop. Vera nonetheless hoped that every day would be Miss Hinchcliffe’s last. That she would stand up from her desk and put on her coat and hand over the key to Vera. But no. Hinchcliffe showed no signs of going away.

The flurry of visits soon ended. Vera planned to ransack her grandfather’s office. But Hinchcliffe was there, letting nothing out in the open. She appeared to be very busy with filing and typing letters with two sheets of blue carbon paper behind them. Vera walked slowly across in front of her desk.

Was Miss Hinchcliffe sad?

Hadn’t she too been in love with her grandfather?

Vera used to think that. But now she did not.

She wanted to ask her if she’d seen any signs of the book he was writing, or was going to write, the book that put him in the famous conflict between truth and loyalty, but on entering the door once more after school she thought better of it. She did not want to alert Miss Hinchcliffe. She thought of her grandfather’s impish face, his long chin with the permanent dimple, his finger laid alongside his nose, and she wanted to cry, but she did not.

She wondered if the mythical Mr McBean would appear. She wondered if her father would come. Miss Hinchcliffe divulged nothing. Vera sped past her and disappeared into the back. The pictures lay where she’d left them.

Three Views of Crystal Water. She ran her fingers over the paper, the way he had the day she and her grandfather had looked at the pictures together. She told herself the story again. A stranger surprised the beautiful diving women taking their ease on the beach. A man and a woman crossed paths under cover of midnight on the arch of a bridge, and a letter changed hands. And then the third, conflagration: the pagoda in flames, the samurai at the gate, the women fleeing.

* * *

One day Keiko came to the warehouse with Vera. She presented herself to Hinchcliffe, bowing. Hinchcliffe barely looked up.

‘Honourable Miss Hinchcliffe,’ Keiko began. She was still bowing.

There was no response. Hinchcliffe’s neck tendons showed more definitely under her chin, that was all.

Keiko looked to Vera for guidance. ‘We come to you,’ she began.

Vera nudged her to stand up straight. Hinchcliffe was gazing intently at a letter she was typing.

‘Hinchcliffe!’ said Vera, like someone prompting a rude child.

Hinchcliffe blushed red.

‘She’s pretending we’re not here,’ said Vera to Keiko by way of explanation. Keiko understood Vera’s English, but then so too did Hinchcliffe. This riled the secretary. She looked up.

‘Yes, Miss Tanaka, what can I do for you?’ she asked.

‘We must talk about what James left for us,’ said Keiko. ‘He told me—’

‘I have my instructions.’ Hinchcliffe’s face was elaborately innocent. Vera examined it closely enough however to be certain that the woman was struggling against tears.

‘Instructions from who?’ said Vera innocently.

‘I really cannot discuss it.’

‘What work are you doing now?’ asked Vera with equal innocence, nodding at the typewriter.

Hinchcliffe whipped her head around. She let her jaw drop in imitation – conscious? Or not? – of the insolent way Vera had previously let her jaw drop in their altercations. The pink of her face powder stood out like crayon on her cheeks, as her complexion took on the chalky pallor of anger.

‘How can you ask that? I have been keeping this business going for years, while the Captain…’ She raised her eyebrows in the general direction of Keiko. ‘Don’t you know it would all be nothing if it weren’t for me?’

Keiko was not giving up. She stood very firmly in front of the desk.

‘We have come to you.’

‘Yes?’

‘We have come.’

Keiko stood smiling, intermittently nodding, pulling Vera into her orbit, willing Vera to copy her. Somehow all three adopted her manner.

‘I see that you have come. But why?’ asked Hinchcliffe. Vera could have sworn she bobbed her head, in an inadvertent bow. She had lost the struggle now, but she did not know it.

‘I have to go shopping,’ Keiko said. ‘But—’ she pulled out the cloth bag she kept tied to a band around her waist. ‘Money is none.’

‘He had it in his desk,’ said Vera. She went into his office and tried to slide open the wide, shallow drawer under her grandfather’s desk, but it was locked.

‘Money is none?’ said Hinchcliffe.

‘He always kept the coffee money there.’

Hinchcliffe reached into her desk and pulled out ten dollars. ‘Coffee money I have. There’s coffee money.’

‘Coffee money is good,’ said Keiko, bowing again graciously. ‘And now we like to have fish money. Rice money. Coal money.’

Hinchcliffe produced several hundred dollars. It was a small fortune. And Keiko rolled it carefully and placed it in her cloth bag. Enough for two more months.

Vera watched carefully where it came from. And she recognised in the quick, practised gesture a habit, and she understood with a cold feeling around her heart, that it was the same gesture with which Hinchcliffe had given money to her grandfather.

‘Of course, I understand,’ said Keiko, bowing.

‘Maybe Mr McBean will come,’ Vera said.

There was something there under all of this but she didn’t understand it, not yet. Someday she would; it was a knot to untangle.

‘McBean?’ said Miss Hinchcliffe. ‘What do you know of McBean? There is no Mr McBean, I have told you many times.’

And Vera thought perhaps this was true. There was no Mr McBean.

Hinchcliffe dusted her hands in a gesture that clearly meant, ‘I am through with you’. Once, twice, three times, the palms together, passing each other, as if she were removing traces of a noxious substance.

Hinchcliffe was the picture of the fierce loyal retainer behind the desk, a figure all too familiar in the lore of Japan. Keiko stood up to her full five feet in height now; the bowing was over. And while Hinchcliffe was still sputtering, now Keiko the humble widow was fully in control of the situation.

‘Understood. Understood. Thank you very much,’ she said. ‘Thank you. We are grateful. Vera and I so grateful.’ She bowed again.

Watching Miss Hinchcliffe dispense with Keiko gave Vera her first inklings of a sorrow that was not entirely selfish. She saw the hands, dusted together; she saw the firm little knot of Hinchcliffe’s lips, that oh so wasp Canadian, ‘Well what did you expect? You had it coming’, and she felt sorry for Keiko. She was her grandfather’s wife, sort of, Vera supposed. Which made her a sort of grandmother. Except that she was younger than her mother had been. Vera hadn’t thought much about Keiko’s age before.

‘How old are you, Keiko?’ she asked.

‘Two times as you,’ said Keiko, smiling shyly.

Thirty.

That night she watched Keiko slowly, carefully cooking the dried fish that she had soaked all day. And she ate it, to please her. Keiko did not smile too broadly. But she looked into Vera’s eyes and nodded, and gave a little bow. Then she got a haughty look on her face and dusted her hands. There was the soft sound of her palms brushing against each other, once, twice, three times. It was her first joke.

Vera burst out laughing. They laughed until tears got the better of them, and put their arms awkwardly over each other’s shoulders and sat, heads down, over the kitchen table. They were stuck with each other.

‘What we will do?’ asked Keiko.

‘I won’t leave you,’ Vera said. Her grandfather would want her to stay with Keiko. ‘All my life,’ he had said. ‘I wanted a deep diver.’ That was a very long time to want.

‘I won’t leave you,’ repeated Keiko.

Vera knew it was true.

The days crawled by, the weeks crawled by; she watched the size of Keiko’s cloth bag shrink. She returned by herself to Hinchcliffe.

‘We need to buy food. And pay for the bills,’ Vera said. ‘Where is the money for that?’

Hinchcliffe had not recovered from the fact that Keiko had got the better of her. ‘She is not his wife.’

Aisho.

‘He must have left money for her. And for me,’ said Vera.

‘It is better to wait until your father comes back,’ said Hinchcliffe.

‘And what if he doesn’t?’ asked Vera.

Miss Hinchcliffe said that since she first wrote about Captain Lowinger’s death, her father had not answered the telegrams.

In retrospect, it seems preposterous that they did not press her more. That they did not ask for a will. That no adult other than Keiko inquired about provisions. That no one questioned the ownership of the company. That the unknown person who had given Miss Hinchcliffe instructions did not appear, or at least give more instructions. That Hamilton Drew did not answer the telegrams.

But many things were mysteries and they were not to be solved because James Lowinger had died. And no matter what the neighbours called her, Keiko was not Mrs Lowinger. She did not speak good English and she was Japanese.

And Vera was no longer a child, but not quite an adult.

‘How will you live? Who will you live with?’ her teacher asked her. ‘Did Captain Lowinger provide for your schooling?’

‘I will get a job,’ said Vera.

The teacher mentioned the Depression. Men out of work everywhere.

‘I do know it’s a depression,’ said Vera. I’m not an idiot.’

You couldn’t tell her anything, the teacher remarked to his colleagues.

The doors of the neighbouring houses remained closed and few people expressed curiosity about how they were managing.

By mutual agreement, Vera and Keiko had arrived at the conclusion that it was beneath their dignity to go in front of Hindicliffe again.

‘I will find a job,’ said Keiko. Her eyes were round and bright. Vera read the newspapers to see what was available. But there were no jobs. And men came to the door almost every day asking for work, asking for food.

Keiko went to the dry cleaners and offered her services: they were Chinese. No no no, they said. Chinese workers were dying of starvation. And China was the enemy of Japan.

In Japantown her friends told her to go to the fishing boats. So Vera and Keiko took a long bus ride to Horseshoe Bay. They stood on the docks there and sniffed the air. It smelled of gasoline and kelp. But it also smelled of ocean and timber and wilder places farther north and they were excited. Keiko waited for the boats to arrive and spoke to the men in Japanese. She said she could dive. She said she could clean fish, scrub boats, anything. She said she was ama. But the men who ran the ships laughed. If they had jobs they had to give them to a man, with a family.

By then even the kindliest neighbours said, ‘But surely the girl’s father will come?’

But Hamilton Drew did not come.

Vera went again to the warehouse, which now was like a tomb; entering the door there was like entering a place of pain. ‘Where is my father?’ she asked.

This time Miss Hinchcliffe said she had heard from him. The letter was postmarked in Kobe, Japan, she said, emphasising the capitals. He wished to return and settle matters. But he was unable to do so at this time. She had confidence that he would. In the meantime he had asked her to carry on.

‘You are lying,’ said Vera. She was certain of it; she could tell by the spots of red on the secretary’s cheeks. She backed away from the desk. ‘I will write to him myself.’ Then she ran out of the door into the evening gloom, so that the secretary could not see her crying.

‘What did she do before, in Japan?’ the kindliest neighbour asked Vera, about Keiko, encountering the two on the street.

‘I am a diver,’ Keiko said, understanding.

‘Oh,’ said the neighbour, her eyes jumping from Vera to Keiko. A furrow developed in her brow. Perhaps she thought that Keiko was a performing diver, like in a circus. ‘I don’t suppose there is much call for a diver here.’

Vera’s teacher advised Keiko to go to the aquarium; maybe Keiko could find a job cleaning tanks. This was a good idea, and they both went, but once again Keiko was refused. Men did that job.

They returned to Horseshoe Bay. ‘I am a good diver,’ said Keiko. ‘What I love to do. Go to shore I do it. Pick up shellfish under the water,’ she said.

They tried a strip of beach on Bowen Island. But even Keiko could not work underwater, not in Canada. It was too cold. One man told her to go to Australia, but she did not know how to get there. There was only one place she could dive. Japan.

And suddenly, more than anything, that was what Vera wanted. To go with Keiko to Japan. She was angry at Hamilton Drew. She did write to him, but all she could put for an address was Kobe, Japan. If her father came, if he at long last materialised, she wanted to be gone. To have disappeared somewhere, so that he would look for her, and mourn. Even better to have disappeared in the Far East, where he had disappeared himself.

She felt that she was a failure, a useless, unlovable girl. She had been insufficient to keep her mother alive, and no better at keeping her grandfather alive. Whatever it was they were fighting her father about, whatever it was the men were looking for, it was more important than she was: that was the message. She might as well go off to Japan, wherever that was: she was no good for anything else.

It happened quickly, after that.

Keiko’s fishmonger in Japantown would let her work to earn the money to get home to Japan. Only for three months, he said, she could clean fish. But you cannot take that girl with you, he said. She is white, and she will not be safe.

‘He must be crazy,’ said Keiko to Vera. ‘It is not so.’

‘Japan will have war with all the white people of the world,’ said the fishmonger. ‘It is you who are crazy.’

Because they knew it would be for the last time, they returned to Homer Street. Hinchcliffe was positively rigid, Keiko strangely poised.

‘Honourable Miss Hinchcliffe,’ she said, bowing deeply. Hinchcliffe could not see the little smile around her mouth because Keiko’s face was directed toward the green linoleum floor. ‘We have much use of money you before given. And now we come to say that we like to go shopping more.’

‘It is for me,’ said Vera. ‘Grandfather would not have wanted me to be hungry.’

‘No,’ said Miss Hinchcliffe. ‘He would not. Whatever he left, it is for you. But he left nothing. I have looked.’

Vera felt as if she had lost him all over again.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she whispered.

Perhaps that was why Hinchcliffe opened the desk drawer and pulled out another two hundred dollars.

Keiko and Vera were ecstatic. It would go toward their tickets.

Anger was not all that drove Vera to go to a strange country. There was something more grand and admirable, under the rage of an abandoned child. Japan was a palace of marvels. She wanted to go there to find beauty and tranquillity and mystery. She had seen this in the pictures. This was the Japan of her grandfather’s travels, of his life. She did not understand, or remember, that the pictures were ancient, that the world they described was one hundred and more years old. What difference did it make? The pictures spoke the language of dreams. She went to find the land where it was spoken.

But the language of dreams is loss. The love of beauty is elegy. Made of flesh, we see with the eyes of the past, over the shoulders of the living. The older Vera will tell this to her collectors, the ones who love the ukiyo-e but do not understand why. The ‘here and now’ that the ukiyo-e artists carved and coloured was already dying, even in its own time. It is useless to mourn or to fight it. We might as well celebrate. It is a kind of ecstasy.

But so dangerous, in the West. To give in is to give up ambitions. She will see this, in the prints she had examined so minutely, in her grandfather’s elderly wisdom. To adopt an inspired idleness, an absorbing ritual. It was so foreign and alluring in the land of her upbringing, her Canadian, Protestant upbringing. Though sad, Belle was never idle, but earnestly found digging up the flower beds or mowing the grass, rattling the dishes in the drying rack or sighing over the wringer washer. Never so beautifully turned out as the Japanese in their riotously painted kimonos behind a screen with chopsticks in their hair, busy in occupations of the moment, blissfully turned away from, but patiently awaiting, eternity. Vera would not get it right herself, not for many years.

Now she had an ambition.

She would go to the place where he had been, this grandfather of hers.

She would go into the pictures.

Maybe that is what happens to people who have been abandoned.

They go to the place where their abandoners have gone.

She went to where her grandfather had been.

But her mother had also left her.

She could not go to where Belle had gone. She would not go.

Later, when life was very dark and when she was nearly the age Belle had been when she died, Vera did think of going where her mother had gone. Of taking the bus, paying the exact fare, making her way along between the rows of seats, as that young mother with the faraway husband had done, lurching because her balance had never been good and it was worse with the medicine. And then ringing the bell for a stop. The handbag carefully left by the side of the bank.

She did not go that way.

‘For that you may be proud of yourself,’ said the sword polisher.

‘Do you think so? Some days I wonder.’

He offers neither condemnation nor praise.

‘You had another path to find.’