Miranda had taken the sandwiches and a large bottle of some radioactive fizzy drink upstairs— ‘I know… I’ve just given up trying to give them anything healthier, and they wouldn’t drink squash out of a jug, anyway’ —she refilled the glasses, brought out other oval plates of Marmite pinwheels, bruschetta, vegetables, dips and bought-in miniature fishcakes and Scotch eggs. Reluctantly, they left the topic of Tragic China—they had returned to it, almost without wanting to.
‘Well,’ Billa said. ‘The Makioka Sisters.’
She stressed it in an unusual way, and when Miranda began the discussion, she took care to stress the o.
Half an hour later, Kenyon, washed, brushed and hungry, came downstairs to fetch something for his solitary supper at the kitchen table. He paused at the half-open door, wondering whether to go in, to tell them about the murder he believed he had seen at Paddington station, perhaps even to ask whether he might put the television on to see if there was anything on the news. He heard his wife say, ‘Well, when Kenyon and I were in Japan two years ago…’ She was speaking with confidence. She had got into her stride. He thought of the radio in the kitchen, and the news at nine o’clock.
When Kenyon and Miranda were in Japan, two years ago, they travelled first of all to Kyoto. There were reasons for that. Miranda had proposed that they see the historic parts of Japan before they saw anything more contemporary— ‘To do it in order,’ she said. She had researched not in guidebooks but in historical studies of the period, in works of art history, architectural analysis and garden history, many of which she had lugged home from the university library as soon as the airline tickets had been bought. She also researched online, asking travellers who had been to Kyoto where they recommended staying, what out-of-the-way places they should visit, where they might like to eat, all the time making allowances for the national origins and evident literacy of the recommender. In the end, Miranda set one of her graduate students to compile the information she had gathered in this complicated way into two separate folders, one green for Kenyon, one red for Miranda, and handed Kenyon’s to him in the departure lounge at Heathrow airport, once they had left the car in the long-term car park. Guidebooks were beneath Miranda; if she ever took one, she would be careful to consult it only in her hotel room, and decant any relevant information into the back of a small diary bound in soft leather like a ballerina’s practice shoes. She would be physically incapable of walking the streets of a historic city with a guidebook in her hand.
Hettie had been left behind. In fact, it might be thought that the trip to Japan was a sort of celebration, a kind of honeymoon, to mark the moment that Hettie, at eleven, was able to take her own holidays without her parents. The school had arranged an outward-bound week on Dartmoor. Some kind colleagues of Miranda’s who worked in the library had offered to take Hettie for the second week. They had a daughter the same age, and Mabel was going on the same week on the moor. Hettie did not object any more than she would have to anything else. Kenyon wondered whether they were truly friendly, and previous attempts to bring Hettie and Mabel together had not been much of a success. They had been sent upstairs together, and had come down together, without making any kind of friendship. Still, Kenyon reflected on the failed family holidays from the last ten years, characterized by sulking from one corner or another; Hettie’s refusal, the previous summer, to admit that the Sicilian baroque was as dramatic and entertaining as most authorities believed. Or there was the summer before that, when Miranda had first put a brave face on, then satirically descanted over her agreed fate of spending five days at Disneyland Paris. She’d enjoyed it in the end more than Hettie had. Miranda had managed to keep up the monologue about semiotic and cultural imperialism from one end of Main Street USA to the other. There must have been some pleasure in that. Hettie had only wanted to go because her classmates had gone, and hadn’t really cared for the giant exaggerated animals poking their fat plush fingers in her face. Kenyon thought about these two failed holidays, and it seemed to him that their holidays together had never worked, and that Hettie’s festival independence might be something worth celebrating. He wondered afterwards where it was that he might like to go, though.
(There was one afternoon with the Sicilian baroque. The argument had sent his two women in opposite directions: Hettie back to the hotel and Miranda off with her guide-folder. He was on the steps of some big building, a palace or a cathedral or a museum, or something. Above him, the yellow crumbling cliff of fantasy, curling and uprising and flowering into stone bouquets and flying winged sandstone children; about him, the marble-paved square shining in the afternoon sun as if half an inch of still water covered it. Nobody was about. It was over ninety degrees, perhaps more. Kenyon, in his Englishman’s shorts and his Englishman’s sandals, sat in the sun surrounded by treasures of the Sicilian baroque. He took a long drink of the cold bottle of water he had just bought, and closed his eyes against the heat and the silence. It was some long minutes before thought returned: thoughts of home, and money, and work, and budgets. Those long minutes were probably the place he wanted to go.)
‘I know you didn’t enjoy yesterday all that much,’ Miranda said in Kyoto, after they had left their hotel and its rush-mats and paper sliding walls and endless proffered slippers. They had got through their third morning’s trying breakfast of miso, cold fried mackerel, pickles, rice and a swampy dish of green tofu disintegrating into cold salty water.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ Kenyon said.
‘Well, there’s a few things I want to see, and I can get round them much quicker if we just agree to meet back at the ryokan at four.’
Kenyon did not object to this prepared speech. Something like it was often produced at roughly this point in their holidays. He had enjoyed the previous day, in fact. He had liked the empty yards of gravel with a rock or two in them that passed for a garden in this part of the world. He quite enjoyed looking at a stretch of moss on a boulder, and he liked the way the floors in the temples creaked, rocking back and forth on one to make it sing. He liked the restful way that the four temples they had visited had been much the same, only varying in their size and in the number of visitors there. It all seemed very nice, and not in need of the explanations that Miranda had been offering him from time to time, about Zen contemplation, representations of the Great Tortoise swimming across the void, or any such thing.
She got into a taxi and, smiling brightly, waved him off. Kenyon rebelliously put his folder of explanations into his shoulder bag, and started walking. Fairly soon, he came across a busy shopping street, of no historical interest, full of department stores and electronics shops. They had driven across it in a series of taxis a dozen or so times by now, and the area had called for no comment. He stopped at a street corner, and waited as if for the light to change. It did change, and Kenyon still stood there, enjoying the foreignness of the beeping and the foreignness of the movement. He liked looking at well-dressed people, and this crowd was uniformly well dressed. They seemed to have put on clothes according to their age and station, and not questioned the basis of their wardrobe any further.
Kenyon watched the crowds crossing the shopping street several times. After ten minutes, he went into a department store, and walked around looking at perfectly ordinary objects: saucepans, plates, clothes hangers. When he came across something he did not think existed in his country—men’s fans, kimonos, displays of sweets made of bean paste, pink jelly and chestnut—he walked on austerely.
Later, he came to a quarter of the town where trees hung over a clear roadside river, and men in tight athletic costumes sat by rickshaws and waited for tourists. Their shoes were rubber socks, cleaving between the big toe and the others, as if that were something they needed to grasp and grip with. He went on, and found himself in a street of wood-fronted houses, two miniature storeys high. This was picturesque, and yet there were no other tourists. They
