The Japanese Girl & Other Stories

  Perhaps if she had been able to visit me it would have been different. But only the wrong woman visited me.

  One day after eighteen months, the accumulated bitterness of everything bubbled over in me and I told Hettie I was not coming back to her when I got out. I told her I was sick of the sight of her anaemic mottled face on the other side of the glass and that I had only stolen the money and gambled with it in the hope of getting away from her. I told her it was her fault all through and I never wanted to see her again and why didn’t she leave me alone and I’d rather be dead than ever live with her again.

  I told her a lot that I wasn’t proud of afterwards, but it did the trick. I had no more visits from her, no more letters. Six months later she began divorce proceedings. I never saw her again.

  It’s a funny thing but a human being can gradually get used to anything. My life before I met Yodi had been all routine: now it was all routine again. Horrible routine, of course, but by the end of the second year just that bit more bearable. The warders you got to know and they got to know you. They were a grim lot and not much intelligence, but you knew which ones to avoid and how to stay out of trouble. The prisoners were nearly all long-term men like me and some were as nasty as they come, but others were friendly enough and generous when it came to the pinch. I came to be known as a quiet one, best left to myself, no trouble to anyone but no use to anyone.

  I read a lot. First it was all travel books, but somehow that began to taste bad and I went on to history and biography. I read and read, everything I could get hold of, and the time passed. I learned to sew mail-bags and did some printing and carpentering. At the end of two and a half years, they moved me down south again – not exactly to an open prison but one where there was more liberty. I was put in the garden. I never knew the first thing about cabbages or how to grow potatoes but I learned now.

  Every three months Sporting Life arrived regularly. But after I’d been moved it kept getting posted up to Leeds and then being forwarded on. There was no way of me letting her know that I’d moved. I just had to hope that some way she’d find out.

  It’s funny too how all the anger and the bitterness dies away with time. Or it doesn’t so much die away as lose its reality. Like Yodi and the plans for travel, like Hettie and her sad thin face, like Annerton’s and the feel of wads of five-pound notes. There’s that song that I first heard about now: ‘ Sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset, quietly flow the years …’ It was sunrise and sunset for me, with just the routine jobs in between, the hours in the garden, the crude meals, the recreation room, the library, the cinema, the shuffling back to the cells.

  It was a monastic sort of life – steady work, plain food, mortification or deprivation of the flesh, time to think. Time to pray. Only no one prayed. And your companions didn’t look like holy fathers.

  I never made any real close friends. I knew all of them, talked sometimes, more often was talked to (usually out of the corners of their mouths). Grey-faced men. Wolf-faced. Weasel-faced. Pig-faced. All with their tales to tell. All longing to get out, but many of them in for their second or third stretch. Many you could see were confirmed outlaws. As soon as their term inside was ended, they’d go out and be against the law straight away, fighting it until they were copped again.

  Not like me – inside paying for my future in the sun.

  The third year went and part of the fourth. I didn’t have any visitors except prison visitors who did their best for me and talked about life outside. There was one cousin who came about every two months. He was the only relative.

  The fourth year went and moved into the fifth. I had my thirty-ninth birthday. Sometimes I felt as if I’d never lived in the outside world at all, as if it was only something I had ever known from hearsay. I’d changed a lot, I thought, when I saw myself in a glass. My hair was going grey at the sides and my cheeks had sunken in. I hadn’t really lost any weight but it was distributed differently. The skin of my body was ash-white like the underside of a stone. I suffered a lot from indigestion and constipation. The colour of my face and hands was not bad because of all the work in the garden, but my nails were broken and darkened with working with the soil. My thumbs had spread and the nails had flattened like little spades. I knew all about market gardening. One of my prison visitors suggested that when I came out I would easily get a job in market gardening. There were good opportunities, he said, and you were paid good money because labour was scarce. I thanked him and thought my own thoughts.

  In the fifth year the only danger was that something might happen and I wouldn’t earn myself full remission. There was a bit of trouble in the prison and I was lucky to be able to steer clear of it.

  Sometimes I tried to picture what Yodi was like, and now and then I tried to remember the itineraries we had planned. But the dead silence of fifty months had sapped it all away. Of course I knew that it would all come back as soon as I was free, but I was anxious lest I should have changed so much that Yodi wouldn’t any longer love me. And would I even recognize her?

  And the fifth year neared its end, and one day, planting out some brussels sprouts, I realized that I would not be there to eat them. I looked round the garden with a new eye and decided that when we finally settled down after all our travels I would always have a garden of my own. Growing things, green things, seemed one of the few jobs in life really worth while.

  And so at last the end. There is an end to everything. And so at last they let me out.

  I came out used to the open air – in a way – but mentally it was as if I’d been five years underground. I blinked like an old dog; I came out into a world where the traffic had doubled and it seemed to me the pace of life had too. And no one cared, no one waited, no one met me. I learned that Hettie hadn’t remarried but was still living with her mother and father. Perhaps that was how she always ought to have been; her one mistake had been ever to leave home.

  They found me a job at a petrol station, but I moved soon from that and started work with a firm of garden contractors near Newbury. It was up my street, the sort of thing I’d grown used to now, and to like. The men were better, that was the chief difference. After a month I sent a copy of Sporting Life to an address in Brighton. On the back page I wrote my new address. Two weeks later a copy of Sporting Life came back to me. It didn’t have any address on it or any message. It didn’t have to. Not even a date. The date we’d arranged was to be two weeks after the date of the newspaper.

  I began to be dead scared. Even just living in the world outside the prison, ordinary life, was bad enough: it rushed about me like a whirlwind; people were mad. But now I was approaching the climax of my whole scheme. I was scared that I should look so old, that I wouldn’t recognize her, that we wouldn’t like each other any more, that she or I would have forgotten the arrangements for meeting, that something had gone wrong outside I would know nothing about. Perhaps she was dead. Perhaps the police would be waiting for me.

  I tried to freshen up, to make my hands look better, to get the ingrained dirt out of the nails; I put dye on my hair and then thought it looked worse than ever and tried to wash it out. I bought a fresh suit, a coloured shirt, a gay tie: they all looked wrong on me, as if you were dressing up a corpse.

  It was to be a Saturday again.

  Always, it seemed, everything happened on a Saturday. I left Newbury early, changed from Paddington to Victoria, took a fast train for Brighton. I didn’t like crossing London, I was really scared of people, so many people. Even the train seemed fuller than usual for midday. People looked smarter, younger, took no notice of me. No girl sat opposite me in the train reading a book up and down and from back to front.

  It was windy at Brighton as usual. My legs felt like jelly as I went down the hill. Maybe, I thought, even the café where we’d arranged to meet would have closed down, be an amusement arcade or a supermarket.

  But no, it looked just the same, didn’t look as if it had even had a coat of paint all these years. It was near the end of
lunch time but the place was still crowded. I blinked on the threshold, afraid to plunge in. Then in a corner I saw a smartly dressed Japanese girl.

  I almost didn’t recognize her, she was so smart; and she looked much older, more sophisticated, her glinting hair quite short: she looked more Japanese; there was no mistaking her now. Somehow in five years she had grown up and her race you couldn’t mistake.

  She wasn’t looking up – she was eating soup and had a copy of Sporting Life propped up against a sauce bottle. This was exactly as arranged. There was one empty four-table and an isolated seat here and there, but I went slowly across, shakily, could hardly stand.

  ‘D’you mind,’ I said, and cleared my throat, ‘ d’you mind if I share your table, miss?’

  She glanced up briefly, eyes trying to be casual but strangely scared. ‘Not at all.’ She looked down again at her newspaper.

  Nothing more was said. I sat down, the waitress came, and I ordered. This was as far as our arrangement had gone. We’d agreed that from here on we should go on with our playacting, pretending, in case anyone had followed me, that this was our first meeting, that we just casually got acquainted, liked each other, and arranged to meet again sometime.

  But the separation had been too long; too much emotion, too much tension built up in half a meal. In any case I knew I had been too cautious in my planning here. Nobody followed me. Nobody ever would. Nobody cared twopence what happened to me or what I did from now on. I’d committed a crime and had paid for it, and that was it so far as the police were concerned. I was free.

  Free but damaged. I was still locked, chained within an experience, could not shake off the fetters. I was not the same man. And I was scared. I was scared of not being satisfactory to her. At first when you are imprisoned sex is a big problem; but the months and the years simply sap away your vitality and your desires …

  Over the coffee we began to talk. Words came aridly, guardedly, bridging great gaps of time, turning back to try to fill in the gaps. Often it was like reaching for stepping-stones that were not there.

  After coffee we got up, went to her place. She had long since left the little room we had had, lived now in a smart flat just off Bedford Square. It was an old-fashioned sort of house but the flat was very smart. On my money, I presumed. Did it matter? It was our money, jointly owned, to be jointly spent.

  Sitting in this flat smoking and drinking another coffee I felt ill-at-ease, uncouth, a stranger. She too was ill-at-ease, restless, kept getting up and rearranging things, stubbing out one cigarette and lighting another. She had changed for the better – at least in looks – as much as I had changed for the worse. She wasn’t any longer the lonely, meek, submissive, casual little girl whose parcel I’d picked up. She was so well tamed out, her nails painted, a rich perfume about her. I kept eyeing her. Her skirts were absurdly short, she was like a warm well-bred beautiful cat. The difference in our ages when we first met had hardly seemed to matter. Now it was a gulf.

  She said: ‘Dar-ling, do you remember those plans we made? To travel. To travel here and there.’

  ‘Yes … they kept me going – for the first year or so they kept me going.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘Oh, I remembered them all through.’

  ‘I’m glad. So have I.’

  ‘Well, it was our aim, wasn’t it. One of our aims.’

  ‘The first one was to go to Paris, wasn’t it?’

  ‘No, the South of France.’

  ‘That’s it. And then to Italy and Venice.’

  ‘Then down the Adriatic by steamer.’

  ‘Calling at Dubrovnik before going to Greece and Turkey.’

  ‘You remember it all.’

  ‘Yes, I remember it all.’

  The afternoon passed. I felt I was visiting. Twice the telephone rang, but each time she answered it only briefly and immediately came back. Of course she was loving and attentive; but there wasn’t any reality in it yet. We were still separated from each other, not now by prison bars but by the different lives we had led in the last five years. We were foreigners to each other, with only the shared memory of some months of stolen love and stolen money, which had happened in another age, a long life ago. Before that we had been strangers. Could the memory come alive within us and become a part of our present existence? Patience, there would have to be patience and understanding on both sides. It was early days yet: the very first hours of meeting. I told myself that very soon it would all be different, would be as before.

  We were both waiting for the evening. She chain-smoked all the time. She constantly asked me questions about my life, about Hettie, about whether the newspaper had reached me regularly. How shocked she had been at the verdict. How long it had all seemed. When I asked her about her life she several times turned the question into a question about mine. At length, being pressed, she said a little sulkily that she had got through it somehow.

  ‘How? What have you done? Have you been working?’

  ‘Oh, yes, most of the time I was working. But three years ago – I have to tell you this, Jack – I had to go to Japan.’

  ‘Japan?’ I said.

  ‘I had to, dar-ling. An uncle died. My brother – it was in his term-time and he couldn’t go. I had to go. It was important.’

  ‘So you have seen it without me.’

  ‘A little.’ She nestled close to me. ‘Only a little. There is much more still to see.’

  ‘You spent my money to go?’

  ‘I had to. I thought you would not mind.’

  ‘Where is your brother now?’

  ‘At the University. He is teaching. He is very happy in England.’

  ‘But you are not?’

  ‘I am happier than I used to be, dearest Jack.’

  In the early evening we made love. It was all right, I thought, after all. She was so easy, so sweet, so welcoming. That part was all right. But her bedroom was furnished like a Japanese room, with bright silks and a low bed and paintings of flowers and birds on hanging silk. I was oppressed by the perfume and the luxury. I would have been so much more at home in the bare little room where we had first been together. That would have had some connection with the past. This had not. The past was quite gone. She gave herself to me wantonly; it was beautiful but it was unreal.

  In the late evening she got up and made a dish of fried chicken and rice and we had white wine and sat on stools at a low table in the living-room. She pressed the wine on me and I drank a lot, trying to disengage my past and to enter this new world that she now lived in. I was not used to the wine and it went to my head. Afterwards we made love again, and this time I met her wantonness with a sort of savagery of my own. This homecoming contained all the ingredients that I had so often pictured in my lonely cell, only the ingredients had changed their flavour.

  Lying there in the dark, I said: ‘How much of my money have you got left?’

  ‘I haven’t counted. For a long time I haven’t counted, darling.’

  ‘When are we going away?’

  ‘To the South of France, to Italy, to Greece?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s too early yet. It will be cold there. May or June would be best.’

  ‘When are we going to marry?’

  ‘It is better to wait. You told me it would be unsafe for a year perhaps.’

  ‘I think I was too cautious. Nobody will care.’

  She lay silent in the darkness.

  ‘Have you changed, Yodi?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, in a way I have changed, dear Jack. Your money has changed me.’

  ‘You don’t love me?’

  ‘It isn’t that. Of course I love you. But we have to get used to each other again.’

  There was a long silence. ‘Tell me,’ I said.

  ‘I think you are going to be very angry.’

  My heart began to thump. ‘Tell me,’ I said again.

  ‘I was faithful to our plan, my darling. I was faithful to it, I swear. I stayed just
the same for all of one year, oh, for more than one year. But I asked. They told me it would be at least six years before you got out. I waited but it seemed a lifetime. There was a threat of war. Do you know what that could mean? My father and mother suffered in the last war, were imprisoned, half their lives taken. But if there is another war, this time the world will end. All our chance of ever living, loving, seeing, tasting, enjoying. It will all be done.’

  ‘What are you trying to tell me?’

  ‘So I thought, I thought surely he will not mind if I see just a tiny few of the things we planned to see together, before it is too late.’

  I lay there very quiet in the dark listening to the soft, gentle sweet voice. She was soft and sweet against me.

  ‘So I went to the South of France in the second summer. I – I stopped there, but it was lovely and I was tempted to go farther. I – I wrestled with this temptation and I lost. So I went on.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘I went to Pisa, to Florence, to Venice. I lost my heart and my mind. I took a boat down the Adriatic to Athens. I went to Istanbul. I swear I did not intend any of this when I left; but the beauty of it, the – the travel went to my head. Your money corrupted me, Jack.’

  I still lay very still, but now I was listening to the thump of my heart again. ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘It was wonderful, dar-ling. I – I spent money. I bought clothes. Then I came home for the winter here living quietly, thinking of the horrible thing I had done to you.’

  The only light in the room was the light coming from outside, through the curtains. It was different from the light in a cell. She wiped her mouth on a handkerchief, and her hand trembled as it moved against mine.