Andrew Miller - One Morning Like a Bird

‘I won’t have them drinking in the morning,’ says the woman. ‘I would be grateful if you did not encourage it. They do not need much encouragement.’

Yuji apologises. It is, in the circumstances, easier to apologise.

‘Can you speak English?’ she asks.

He tells her he cannot.

‘French, presumably?’

‘Yes. Some.’

‘I am Miss Ogilvy,’ she says. ‘I speak six languages, including, self-evidently, your own. By birth I am a citizen of the United States of America. Battle Creek in Michigan. It is a place you will not have heard of.’

‘I would like to visit America,’ says Yuji.

‘Have you travelled at all? Have you ever been outside Japan?’

‘Unfortunately,’ says Yuji, picturing to himself the map in Horikawa’s office, the black lines sealing the coasts, ‘that has not been possible.’

‘Yet I am informed you have pretensions to being a writer. A writer, even a Japanese one, must surely travel, if only for the stimulus of disappointment.’ She scoops up a silent grey cat from the rug between her feet, strokes it with her wrist. She is taller than Yuji, thin, very upright. Her hair is of a kind that does not exist in Japan, fine and finely crinkled, brown, auburn, dyed. She is certainly old enough to be Sandrine’s mother.

‘Very well,’ she says. ‘Let us talk of the matter in hand. You are here to see Alissa.’

‘Yes.’

‘You are her friend.’

‘Yes.’

‘You are the one responsible for her condition.’

‘I . . Yes.’

‘The baby, in Dr Saramago’s estimate, will be born two weeks from today. On this occasion I happen to agree with him, though babies are not trains. They do not arrive according to a timetable.’ She watches him with her small, brazen eyes. ‘What do you know about babies, Mr Takano?’

‘Know?’

‘Do you, for example, like them?’

‘Hmm. It’s quite difficult to say.’

‘I don’t see it’s difficult at all.’

‘It’s only . . I have not met many.’

‘Babies are everywhere. You do not need to be specifically introduced to one. I wonder,’ she says, ‘if you have the stomach for this. Being afraid, of course, is not itself a disgrace. Your life is about to be altered in a manner you apparently did not expect it to be. You will be a father, and whatever arrangement you come to with Alissa, that will remain inescapably the case. The question, then, is this: are you sincere?

‘Sincere?’

‘In your wish to be here. In your intention to behave with rather more practical decency than you seem to have felt necessary in the past. Nothing more, given the circumstances, can reasonably be expected of you. But neither can anything less.’ She sets down the cat. Immediately it starts to wind itself round her narrow, stockinged ankles. ‘I will give you a quarter of an hour to reflect. It is quite enough time to finish your refreshment and leave the house, if that is what you choose. If, however, you are still here when I return, then I will assume you wish me to understand you are indeed sincere. That we are to trust you.’

She wheels from him, walks out, followed by the prancing cat. For several seconds Yuji is as motionless as the women in the pictures, then he sets his glass balloon on the mantelpiece, limps to the billiard table, and spends the minutes granted him, precious minutes in which he ought to be grappling with the question of his sincerity (though the problem feels impervious to normal thought, almost mystical), rolling a billiard ball against one of the baize side-cushions. He does not hear her return. Her voice startles him.

‘Very well,’ she says. ‘Shall we go up?’

Alissa’s room is on the second floor at the end of the house furthest from the clock tower. It is slightly larger than her room in Kanda, its walls decorated with pink paper that light and time have faded to a blush. Opposite the door is a sash window looking towards the sea, where a pair of fishing boats, black shapes on the glittering swell, are making their patient progress from frame to painted frame.

Miss Ogilvy picks up a towel, a dirty cup. ‘Do not,’ she says to Alissa in briskly enunciated French, ‘tire yourself out with talking.’

When she has gone, when the clip of her footfall has faded along the corridor, Yuji and Alissa are like shy children left by a well-meaning adult to become friends. At last, still stood by the door, Yuji looks up to where she is sitting in the floral armchair beside the window. She is wrapped in a rose-coloured gown, a fringe of flannel nightdress showing below the hem. Her hair, black as his own, is plaited and tied with a ribbon. She looks both exactly as he remembered her and entirely different, a change that is not simply the swollen abdomen on which she rests a small protective hand.

‘Papa called last night,’ she says. ‘I don’t know which of us he is more angry with. He said he hit you.’

‘Not so hard.’

‘It must have been hard if you need a walking stick.’

‘That was something else. A fall.’

‘He had no right to hit you.’

‘Please. It is not important.’

‘He had no right.’

Yuji nods, looks to the window. ‘It’s a nice view,’ he says.

‘Yes.’

‘The sea . .’

‘Yes. It’s restful.’

‘Good.’

‘They’ve been very kind to me,’ she says. ‘All of them. Miss Ogilvy especially.’

‘Miss Ogilvy?’

‘I know she can appear rather fierce at first. It’s only because she has to keep everyone in order.’

‘She told me I should travel.’

‘That sounds like her.’

‘And that I must not encourage her students to drink.’

‘It was one of the girls?’

‘Sandrine?’

‘I expect she was encouraging you, wasn’t she?’

‘It seemed like that.’

From under the edge of the counterpane a seal-grey head appears, a black nose, two eyes sticky with sleep. Seeing Yuji, the animal sneezes and waddles over to him.

‘She has to stay in here because of the cats,’ says Alissa. ‘Dr Saramago doesn’t approve, but Miss Ogilvy says the Portuguese don’t understand dogs. Horses but not dogs. She has opinions on every nationality you can think of. Lots on the Japanese, of course.’ She gives Yuji a quick smile, then seeing how his attention returns again and again to her belly, the evidence of her belly, she says, ‘I can’t get used to it either. Being so . . big.’

‘It hurts you?’

‘A little. At night, mostly. It depends on where the baby is.’

‘Ah . .’ Yuji puts on a most serious face. He has no idea what she means. Where can it be? Sitting on the end of the bed?

‘They move,’ she says. ‘They sleep, wake . .’

‘Is it sleeping now?’

‘No. Awake, I think.’ Then, after a pause, ‘It’s probably listening to us.’

She is teasing him, of course. Surely, she is teasing him, but the thought of a foetal witness to this scene, of a baby, his child, theirs , sitting the other side of her skin listening to everything . . He searches her face for some hint of levity, but she is not smiling now. She is gazing at him intently, nakedly.

‘Papa said Junzo told you.’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Two nights ago.’

‘Just two nights!’

‘We met . . by chance.’

She shakes her head, and for the first time a note of irritation enters her voice. ‘A pity you couldn’t have met by chance three months ago. There isn’t much time now. Will they send him to China?’

‘Probably.’

‘And you?’

‘I don’t know. One day, I suppose.’

‘This horrible war.’

‘Yes.’

‘I can’t even bear to read a newspaper. I look at these’ — she gestures to the little pile of magazines on the side-table — ‘read about knitting and colic and what husbands like for supper.’