she took her bag and went into her little room to read. Within an hour, the front door opened again and her grandfather’s step resounded in the little stucco house. Coming out to greet him, Vera was stopped by the vision of Keiko on her knees in front of him, pulling off his shoes. ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ she began to mutter, but the old man’s eyes, the one so bright and the other whitened, met hers and she subsided in shame.
And she went back to her room and did her schoolwork, biding her time, biding her time.
2 Ushiro Attacking from behind
Two years passed this way. Vera, James, and Keiko. Now it was 1936.
Vera was thin, pale, and possessed of a ferocious will. Her features had sharpened, and her eye sockets were deeper. Her nose was longer, sharper, and had a bone. It was a patrician nose, her grandfather said, looking at it askance. ‘God knows you didn’t get it from me.’
Keiko tended to both her charges in the morning, seeing Vera off to school and bundling James to the streetcar to his warehouse. Then she washed every item that had been used since the night before; cutlery, dishes, towels, clothing. The fabrics she put out on bushes to dry, running out to collect them when it rained. Once her housework was done she too set out on foot, for the end of the street.
She went in the same direction as James Lowinger, but farther, down to the east end, to the shops in Japantown. Here she would learn the news about her country–never good, because of the war in China–and find the fish, radish, and seaweed she liked. She had a few friends there. One was a dressmaker who made tunics and jackets for Vera. The other was a fishmonger. She would return home before either Vera or James appeared. On the clothesline she pinned the squid to dry; it was transparent, at first, but slowly, as it hung, it turned brown. She cooked eels and little fish on a small charcoal burner on the back step.
She did not seem unhappy; she giggled often and ate heartily, smacking her lips. She smiled directly into the eyes of the neighbour ladies who had yet to think of one single thing to say to her other than, ‘Lovely morning isn’t it?’ They didn’t know what to call her; nobody had told them her name. So that when the first one, the most kindly, called her Mrs Lowinger and Keiko bowed in acknowledgement, that became her name. In this way Keiko was ensconced in the family and on the street. Days and weeks and months went by and Vera continued courting her grandfather and taunting his young wife, his not-wife. The word for Keiko, which Vera was to learn later, was aisho.
Vera was conscientious at school. She too had friends, ordinary girls in tunics and curled hair and rolled stockings; girls who were taking stenography courses and already had boyfriends. But like Keiko she did not like her friends to come to the house or perhaps they did not like to come to the house. Perhaps they had been told not to come. She was never certain. The girls didn’t tease her, just as the neighbours didn’t shun Keiko; that would be too obvious and they were all good Christians. They admired the old man they called Captain James. They were a little afraid of Vera: she was austere and thin. People did whisper that she had changed. It was an irregular situation, as her teachers said, in that house. They praised the girl for her English composition and her skill at volleyball. For being good to her grandfather. They did notice that she grew thinner and whiter (nothing but rice in that house!), and that she lost interest in her friends, and ran off to the warehouse every day when the bell rang. She’d taken it to heart they said, the death of a mother. What could be worse for a girl that age?
But Vera did not think of Belle. She did not, she believed, miss her mother. She could see past her mother now. Where once Belle had loomed, billowy and anxious-eyed, in the doorway between childhood and real life, now there was an absence, an exhilaration. The passageway was visible. Every day after school she parted from her schoolmates at the gate. She ran past the boys for the streetcar along Granville. On the boisterous streets of Gastown, still running, she neatly dodged little gangs of sailors and men with carpets braced over their shoulders and policemen who might ask her why she was at large. It was cold and the rain penetrated her coat; the sleeves were too short because she was growing so fast. The sky was glowering with low clouds; at the edge of the water in the reflected neon lights, red and green, bark and kelp floated on oily smears. She breathed in the air through her nostrils and felt free.
It would be twilight as she climbed the stairs on Homer Street. Through the fogged glass of the window in the upper half of the door she could see the green shade of Miss Hinchcliffe’s desk lamp. She tossed down her bag of books on the chair with the curved wooden arms and bade an offhand hello to Miss Hinchcliffe. Miss Hinchcliffe might have been about to leave for the night, but now that Vera had arrived she’d stay on. And from down the hall came the dry roll of her grandfather’s voice. ‘Is that you, Vera?’
‘It’s me all right!’ She shed the wet coat and hoisted it to the coat tree, and sitting in the captain’s chair, prised off her Oxfords one by one. In her sock feet she slid on the green linoleum to his door and peeked in. Her grandfather’s long narrow jaw seemed to hang a little nearer the blotter, as the curve in his spine deepened.
‘Hello, dear.’ He put his hands on the arms of his chair and pushed himself to his feet. He wavered halfway up, and then, with an extra push, stood.
She kissed his cheek. He smelled sweeter now. Like an old thing. It was death approaching, or maybe all the fish Keiko fed him. He smelled like a grandfather, not a sea captain. Of clean cotton and sweet tobacco and only a hint of the ocean.
‘Just let me deal with Miss Hinchcliffe and I’ll be back,’ Vera said.
Her presence at Lowinger and McBean had changed from being that of a visitor and a child to that of a watcher, and a keeper. Vera had adopted a bustle, as if she actually had jobs to do in the office. She stood in front of Hinchcliffe’s desk. ‘Did the shipment come in? Did he meet the man from Birks?’ She wanted to make sure that these visitors conveyed their needs to him, and not to the secretary.
Miss Hinchcliffe faced Vera with an ironic twist to her mouth. She protected the old man, but he refused to be endangered. Her expression said that Vera was a child and childhood was a phase; it would end, and she would go on to another passion, while she, Hinchcliffe would remain permanently on guard at her desk.
While Vera stood wishing she could get rid of Hinchcliffe. The secretary was like a foreign power. Her grandfather would find this ridiculous, of course. If she complained he would only chuckle; he would never say a word against anyone. He said the office couldn’t be run without her. Hinchcliffe sometimes complained of Vera as well.
‘She doesn’t need to come here day after day,’ the older woman said. ‘She’s taking up a great deal of our time.’
And James chuckled over that, too.
‘Did he have lunch?’ Vera asked.
‘He won’t eat the sandwiches,’ said Miss Hinchcliffe. The sandwiches came around every day from a man with a cart; they’d been coming to everyone in the block for years. ‘That Japanese housekeeper has got him used to noodles. That’s all he wants.’
Vera bridled. Keiko was Vera’s to insult, not Miss Hinchcliffe’s.
‘She is not the housekeeper,’ Vera said.
‘What is she then?’ said Miss Hinchcliffe daringly.
Vera ostentatiously let her jaw drop open. You dare to ask?
‘Does she not cook the meals?’ Implied
