Katherine Govier - Three Views of Crystal Water

They found a taxi that would carry their trunks and she gave the address of the little house on Ivy Street that had been Belle’s, that still was Belle’s. When they arrived, the three of them climbed slowly out of the cab and the driver helped unload the baggage, very little, really; the rest would come later. They made their way up the narrow pavement. And all the while Vera was taking the measure of this man, who was pretty well her only chance for being looked after in the world.

The main event was his moustache, which was waxed and hence pointed at its extreme ends. Or should we say moustaches? A plural will give more a sense of the presence of this accessory. They started under his nose and stood out thickly over his upper lip. When the lip ended (although you couldn’t see the corner of his lips, but you knew there was one) the moustaches swooped down, then up and curled back upon themselves, spiralling into smaller curls. This stiff upcurl happened well beyond his cheeks and reminded Vera of the things on the ends of the curtain rods that her mother called finials.

The finials were not white, not like his beard, and not like his hair, but rather an orangey brown. Moving inward, from the tip, the moustache hairs were a dried auburn and tobacco colour, then a dark brown turning to slate grey, and finally at the root, white. He’d been young when he grew the curls, she supposed. One day, she supposed, his moustache hair turned white. One particularly tempestuous day on the high seas.

The swag of the moustaches also left to the imagination the shape of her grandfather’s upper lip. It might be a villainous thin, hard lip, or it might be, and she suspected it was, a soft, full, sweet-shaped upper lip. Vera would never know. The face was blustery, and had high red cheekbones. His eyes were a beautiful blue, but one of them had a white cast over it. His chin was long and came to a thoughtful point; there was impishness to the lines around his mouth, which showed they’d been made from smiling. He wasn’t as big as Vera had expected: the chest inside his double-breasted navy jacket must have shrunk since the jacket was purchased, and his long sea legs, that Vera imagined would have bestraddled the deck of the bucking frigates the way a cowboy bestrode a horse, did not seem steady. His knuckles stood up, his fingers were as long as a pianist’s, and they waved, sensing things. But his voice, now that he had regained it after the shock of her announcement, was powerful and commanding. Keiko circled in its gusts trying to go respectfully behind him while he tried to herd her in front as if he needed assurance that she was truly there.

Vera produced her key and opened the door, and her grandfather and Keiko were impressed with her competence. They gave each other a look: see how she manages!

And then they entered the door of the house, and disappeared.

And silence descended. For days.

The neighbours who had helped Vera bury her mother poked their heads out of their doors and conferred over the rhododendrons. The trio had been seen. What could it mean? Was the curious little kimono-clad woman a housekeeper? They watched the house. But for some reason, maybe because the Lowinger-Drews kept strange hours, or maybe because each of the three exited singly and deliberately tried to pass unnoticed, the other inhabitants of Ivy Street rarely caught a glimpse of the girl, her grandfather, or the mistress. Because that was what had been determined: the little woman was more than a servant. At night when the lights were on in the house and the curtains unpulled, the pair had been seen, nuzzling. Kissing over the kitchen sink. It was shocking for such an old man. And such a young woman; hardly more than a child herself, much more like a companion for Vera.

‘Well that’s nice isn’t it?’ said a kinder soul. ‘She needs a playmate.’

‘Of course, you can never tell with Orientals, they don’t seem to age.’

They liked Lowinger and they called him Captain. He walked down the street, and his eye was caught by every dog or squirrel that crossed his path. He chuckled and was entirely lost in the creature, until it was out of sight.

‘He’s very charming.’

‘And there is money.’ He was thought to have accumulated a fortune as a pearl merchant, on top of the one he inherited from his father from the same business. But some doubted the veracity of this. Inquisitive housewives smiled on James Lowinger and opened their mouths to speak, but words failed and they faded behind their front doors. Were they scandalised by this Japanese woman in her kimonos? Or just shy, as shy as Keiko herself? There was little censure spoken in the corner grocery store; James Lowinger excited no real disapproval for his flagrantly irregular life. Perhaps a little envy, was all. If he hadn’t come home with an oriental woman, who took tiny steps because the folds of her kimono draw together at the knee, they’d have been disappointed.

What they didn’t know was that Keiko, despite her demure and inarticulate manner, her lowered eyes, was no timid Japanese mistress. She was an ama , a diving woman.

For a while life changed little on Ivy Street. Vera still walked to school in the mornings, but the housewives did not call out to her, or if they did it was with a kind of pity. It was not only Keiko who was strange but she, Vera, who became strange by her association with the Japanese woman. And the bravery she affected when her mother died stuck to her. She wanted to lay it down but she could not. She still had her friends in the schoolyard. Sometimes after school they all went to buy a soda pop. She was held in a certain awe because of the tragedy of her mother’s death, and its odd denouement. She didn’t talk about it, but one day the minister stepped out of the manse and said: ‘Is Captain Lowinger in town then for a few months? Will he be stopping here, with you?’

Vera said she didn’t know.

In front of her grandfather’s mistress, Vera was polite and excessively well behaved. This nuance was lost on Keiko, as Japanese children are usually well behaved, but Vera meant it as a hostile gesture. It was to show Keiko that she was a guest and not part of their household at all.

There was another change: instead of going home after school, Vera went to her grandfather’s place of business. It was on Homer Street, down by the water. She took the streetcar to Granville, and over the bridge to the Gastown, on the waterfront. Gastown was the oldest part of town, the port, where the old light standards had once been gas lamps. The lights were left on all day, but they were far apart, and small; often the fog and rain made the street very dark. You could smell the kelp and the oil that mingled at the dirty edge of the water.

That November Vera walked through late afternoon gloom in delight. When her mother was alive she was never allowed to come down here alone. There were fish and chip shops and bars. And there were sailors from all over the world, in their white clothes, sometimes their blue clothes, with weathered faces and strange tongues. At any time of day they might spill noisily through the doors of a bar; they might be asleep standing up at a bus stop. They lived on another timetable, they’d crossed the date line, the equator, the Tropics. They’d be looking for sex, her mother had told her. Vera knew not to catch their eyes, never to look at them directly. As she walked quickly down the street they might look at her, but she was too young and too thin to be of interest.

Out of range of roving sailors, Vera slowed to look into the dark entrances of hotels. The sexy women limping in high heels, were in there often. Farther along the street were women who looked tired, handing out tracts about God and Jesus Christ. There were shops selling seashells, plastic flowers and postcards of the Lion’s Gate bridge. There was a hat shop that belonged to her grandfather’s friend. A furrier with buffalo coats, a hardware shop, a shop selling steel-toed work boots and checked shirts. There were jewellers, traders, importers, exporters. And then there was Lowinger and McBean.