slapped her across the cheek.
Keiko stood with the red marks of Vera’s fingers spreading sideways over her cheekbone, and a well of deeper crimson, rage perhaps, climbing from her chest to suffuse her face. She said nothing. Vera burst into tears and ran from the room.
* * *
What can happen after a girl has fallen in love with her grandfather and with the storied life of her grandfather and his father too? Only one thing. The grandfather can die.
And that is what he did.
He died.
Not very original of him.
He couldn’t be blamed; he was old. All Vera knew was that here was the same thing all over again. Her mother, her grandfather. Her loved one, the one who took care of her, suddenly gone from his frame, leaving behind the waxy white flesh.
How did he die? She can’t tell you. She forgot about his warnings, his readiness for it. It seemed to her that at one moment he was there, entertaining the regulars in the coffee shop, and the next–when he had tricked her, by asking her to go on without him, leaving him with Keiko–he let go of his life.
It was as if Vera had just come through a sickness herself; she had been asleep and now she was awake.
The neighbours came out of their houses to help. He had to have a Christian burial, they said to each other. There was just Keiko and Vera, and Keiko had no idea what to do. Besides, none of the officials they dealt with would give her any standing, would allow her to be in charge. It had to be Vera. But Vera was fifteen. They spoke of the embalming, the funeral home, the grave site, and the cost of it all. Hinchcliffe took the bills out of Vera’s hands.
Keiko inclined her head at all these conversations, taking note of what was said although no one was sure she understood it. Her young face was unlined and patient and endlessly correct. Vera hated that. She gave herself licence to be awful to the woman, by behaving either with exquisite iciness or appalling rudeness, to keep her guessing.
A crowd of neighbours and Gastown merchants came to the funeral. How sad, they said, and wonderful man, as they came up to shake Vera’s hand. She stood between Miss Hinchcliffe and Keiko at the door to the visiting room in the funeral parlour. She did not like the way Hinchcliffe had taken over, but then who was to do it? Her mind spun with the nursery rhymes her mother had read to her. Parlour, she thought, come into my parlour said the spider to the fly. Hark, hark, the dogs do bark. Wednesday’s child is full of woe. The parlour was all burgundy and varnished wood and there was no air in it. There was no smell of the sea, not even in Grandfather’s clothes, because Keiko had cleaned everything so well.
The minister came; he hugged Vera and said that it was very hard, so soon after her mother’s death. The Captain did not go to the church the way her mother had. But he had lived a good life.
‘A good life?’ protested Vera. What could the insipid word ‘good’ mean in the days of James Lowinger? Did they mean he should have been content to die, as if he’d taken a large helping of life and ought not to be greedy? In fact his life was huge and sometimes horrible, but marvellous, and not to be taken away from her. She had asked for his stories but she could not piece it all together, or make a wholeness out of it.
‘He saw a great deal of the world, I suppose,’ said the minister dubiously.
Keiko knelt beside the coffin. Although they tried, no one could displace her. She sat on her heels and her face was on her hands, which were flat on the floor, folded up like a fan. She raised her body from time to time, and bowed, and then went back down, with no expression on her face. Like the women in the prints, Vera thought.
Vera’s schoolteacher got down on his knees beside her, trying to shake her hand.
‘Miss Tanaka?’ he said. He alone had troubled to discover her name.
When she wouldn’t raise her head he put his down on the floor beside hers and said loudly, as if to wake a sleeper, ‘Thank you so much for taking good care of Vera.’
He was the only one.
But it was because he thought that it was over, Keiko’s taking care of Vera.
‘I suppose her father will come,’ said the neighbours.
No one had thought of Hamilton Drew.
‘And your father? Will he be coming home?’ asked the minister.
Vera looked at Hinchcliffe.
‘We are attempting to locate him,’ the secretary said with a firm smile. ‘I have wired. I have also sent a letter. I am not certain where he is…’
And then they all went home.
And it was silent.
James Lowinger did not wake up and shake the house with his morning sneezes. And there was no bustle to get his morning tea or his shoes and no secret laughter coming from that room and no secret tears either, which was what Vera hoped for. She wanted Keiko to suffer. She wanted Keiko to show on her face the desolation of Vera’s insides. Since she had the temerity to love the old man, she might as well pay the price. What did she expect, taking up with a man so much older? She had to know he would die, didn’t she?
Vera’s pathetic hymns of grief, her English nursery rhymes, swirled in her head. London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down. The North wind doth blow and we shall have snow, what shall we do then? He had died; old men do that, that was what they did. Maybe it was even Keiko’s fault. There were many cruel things she planned to say to Keiko, but when she saw her, head bent over the little iron grill on the back step to cook fish, something moved inside of Vera and she could not.
She went to Lowinger and McBean after school. There was, temporarily, a sense of urgency in the warehouse. The captains came in their blue caps and Hinchcliffe talked to them tersely; they left again. There was no word from Hamilton Drew. Vera was curious, but not heartbroken. She did not remember the man, anyway. The business would have to keep on running, said Hinchcliffe; it could not close because they were always in the middle of a shipment, or an order, and there was no right time to stop. Vera nonetheless hoped that every day would be Miss Hinchcliffe’s last. That she would stand up from her desk and put on her coat and hand over the key to Vera. But no. Hinchcliffe showed no signs of going away.
The flurry of visits soon ended. Vera planned to ransack her grandfather’s office. But Hinchcliffe was there, letting nothing out in the open. She appeared to be very busy with filing and typing letters with two sheets of blue carbon paper behind them. Vera walked slowly across in front of her desk.
Was Miss Hinchcliffe sad?
Hadn’t she too been in love with her grandfather?
Vera used to think that. But now she did not.
She wanted to ask her if she’d seen any signs of the book he was writing, or was going to write, the book that put him in the famous conflict between truth and loyalty, but on entering the door once more after school she thought better of it. She did not want to alert Miss Hinchcliffe. She thought of her grandfather’s impish face, his long chin with the permanent dimple, his finger laid alongside his nose, and she wanted to cry, but she did not.
She wondered if the mythical Mr McBean would appear. She wondered if her father
