Andrew Miller - One Morning Like a Bird

‘Perhaps it will stay like that.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I suppose it might. The truth is, I mean, between you and me. I worry more about what’s happening on this side of the world.’ She throws a glance to the end of the room where a dozen young officers are drinking together, a party Yuji has already noted, then carefully ignored, not wishing to lock eyes with some drunken lieutenant fresh from Shanghai or the Mongolian border. Other than the waiters the only men in the restaurant not in uniform are at least twenty years older than him.

Alissa orders the wine, the food. She is quite at ease in the Snow Goose, the elaborate etiquette of the place, and when the waiter pours a splash of golden wine into Yuji’s glass she prompts him with her eyes.

‘Oh, yes,’ he says, hurriedly swallowing, ‘it’s quite nice’ though he is perturbed that the wine does not really taste of grapes at all but has, instead, a somewhat surprising flavour of stones.

The waiter fills their glasses, sinks the bottle into an ice bucket, puts the bucket on a tripod next to the table, and with a nod of his blond head, withdraws.

‘What shall we speak now,’ asks Alissa, ‘French, or Japanese?’

‘Why not French for the first half of the bottle, then Japanese for the rest?’

She smiles, agrees, but having chosen a language, they sit in silence, looking at the points of their cutlery.

‘Say something,’ she says at last. ‘Tell me something.’

‘What shall I tell you?’

‘Anything you like. It doesn’t really matter.’

‘Tonight,’ he says, ‘I remembered going on an outing.’

‘Long ago?’

‘I was, perhaps, seven years old. I was with Mother.’

‘A happy memory?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘I don’t even know her name.’

‘Mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘Noriko.’

‘And your father?’

‘Kenji.’ He laughs. Somehow it seems amusing to say Father’s name here. Comically indelicate.

‘Papa’s is Emile.’

He nods.

‘You knew?’

‘It was written inside one of his books.’

‘You’re very fond of him, aren’t you?’

Yuji feels himself reddening. Bien aimer. Bien aimer quelqu’un . ‘He treats me, mm, almost as an equal? He does not assume that what I have to say will be wrong or foolish. He listens to me.’

‘He would have liked to have had a son, I think.’

‘Yes?’

‘He could have shared more with a son.’

‘His business?’

‘That . . and other things, too.’

‘My father,’ says Yuji, ‘is not in the habit of sharing things.’

‘It’s rude of me,’ she says, ‘and please don’t say anything if you’d rather not, but for a long time I’ve wanted to ask you what happened to your father. I know some of it, of course, but it’s all second or third hand, and that’s not much better than gossip. I mean, obviously he’s completely innocent. But I’d like to know what the facts are.’

‘The facts,’ says Yuji, ‘might not be as interesting as the gossip.’ He takes another mouthful of wine, can feel it starting to work in him, to loosen his tongue. He leans towards her a little, his hands folded on the linen. ‘When Father was in his thirties, he published a book, a very long and technical book, on democracy and the constitution. One section, just a few pages, was about the relationship’ — he drops his voice — ‘between the Emperor and the Diet. In Father’s analysis the Emperor is simply another organ of the State. The Diet should take account of his wishes but it is not bound to follow them. Its decisions would be those of a freely elected body. In this way, I think, Father hoped the Emperor could be protected from those elements who might use his authority to justify extreme actions. The book was only read by a few specialists, people like Father. And the atmosphere was quite different then. The criticism didn’t start until after the coup attempt in ’36. They said he was tainted with Anglo-Saxon ideas, that he had failed to recognise the uniqueness of the Japanese situation, that he was a pacifist. I don’t think he took the charges very seriously. He used to tell us they were a symptom of the times and would cease as the times changed. I suppose you could say he misread history, even that he suffered from a certain arrogance.’

‘No,’ she says, ‘I wouldn’t say that. I would say he was principled and courageous.’

‘At the university he became a target for groups like the Black Dragons. His lectures were broken up, his office was ransacked. In the end almost no one would risk speaking up for him. He resigned to protect us, to protect his colleagues. He received no pension, though I suspect he would not have accepted one even if it had been offered.’

‘There was nothing he could do? Nobody he could appeal to?’

‘It’s been worse for others,’ says Yuji. ‘And I, of course, had no position to lose.’

Their food arrives on big white plates, each plate with its piece of breaded meat crowned with a quartered lemon. In the centre of the table the waiter sets a silver dish of fried potatoes, a bowl of steamed rice. ‘ Bon appetit ,’ he says, a quick smile at Alissa.

‘And your father,’ says Yuji, nervous she will want to go on speaking about his own, that he will be tempted, in this public place, into indiscretions, ‘does he often stay in Yokohama?’

She shrugs. ‘Once or twice a month. We lived there, remember, when we first came to Japan. We still have friends there . . Miss Ogilvy, for example.’

‘Miss Ogilvy?’

‘An American. Actually, we knew her in Saigon. She has a house on the Bluff, with lots of cats.’

‘I only know Americans from the films,’ says Yuji.

‘I don’t think she’s a typical American. I don’t think she’s a typical anything.’

‘But your father stays in her house?’

‘Sometimes. He doesn’t always tell me where he’s going and I don’t always ask. We prefer it like that.’

She forks her lemon, twists the juice from it. They start to eat. To Yuji, though he has used Western cutlery before, the knife and fork feel almost unusably heavy, unusably large, more like weaponry than implements for feeding himself, but the food is good and he eats it gratefully.

‘You must,’ says Alissa, pouring wine for them both and taking them into the Japanese half of the bottle, ‘have wondered about my mother.’

‘I have,’ says Yuji, though this is not exactly true. He has simply assumed that Madame Feneon belongs among the distant dead. There are no pictures of her in the parts of the house he has been in, no fond mementos.

‘It’s not a secret,’ says Alissa. ‘At least, there’s no reason for it to be. Certainly there’s nothing I need to be ashamed of.’

He nods vigorously, suddenly convinced she is about to tell him that the mysterious Miss Ogilvy is her mother. Instead, with a studied nonchalance, she says that she has never met her mother.

‘I mean, I must have glimpsed her in the moments after I was born. At least, I suppose I did, though naturally I can’t remember any of that. Does that count as meeting somebody?’

‘It could, I suppose.’

‘She wasn’t married to Papa or anything like that. She was a sort of companion of his, in Saigon. Probably they met at a dance or something, I don’t really know. There were always lots of parties. Anyway, one day she disappeared. No letter, no forwarding address. Just vanished. Seven months later an old woman came to the house carrying a basket with a baby inside. She gave the baby to one of the servants, a girl called Songlian. She said it was Suzette’s — that was my mother’s name — but that Suzette couldn’t look after it. Papa tried everything to find her of course, but he couldn’t even find the old woman. I stayed with Songlian. I slept with her in the servants’ quarters, was fed by her. One night, in the middle of the night, Papa came and sat beside us. He fanned me with his hat, watched me sleeping.’ She smiles. ‘He says he fell in love with me then and decided he would raise me, openly, as his daughter, though it wasn’t quite as easy as that. All sorts of people made their disapproval clear, the club people, the church people, but Saigon isn’t like here. It’s more chaotic, freer. Here, it would probably have been impossible.’