Views of Crystal Water. She ran her fingers over the paper, the way he had the day she and her grandfather had looked at the pictures together. She told herself the story again. A stranger surprised the beautiful diving women taking their ease on the beach. A man and a woman crossed paths under cover of midnight on the arch of a bridge, and a letter changed hands. And then the third, conflagration: the pagoda in flames, the samurai at the gate, the women fleeing.
* * *
One day Keiko came to the warehouse with Vera. She presented herself to Hinchcliffe, bowing. Hinchcliffe barely looked up.
‘Honourable Miss Hinchcliffe,’ Keiko began. She was still bowing.
There was no response. Hinchcliffe’s neck tendons showed more definitely under her chin, that was all.
Keiko looked to Vera for guidance. ‘We come to you,’ she began.
Vera nudged her to stand up straight. Hinchcliffe was gazing intently at a letter she was typing.
‘Hinchcliffe!’ said Vera, like someone prompting a rude child.
Hinchcliffe blushed red.
‘She’s pretending we’re not here,’ said Vera to Keiko by way of explanation. Keiko understood Vera’s English, but then so too did Hinchcliffe. This riled the secretary. She looked up.
‘Yes, Miss Tanaka, what can I do for you?’ she asked.
‘We must talk about what James left for us,’ said Keiko. ‘He told me–’
‘I have my instructions.’ Hinchcliffe’s face was elaborately innocent. Vera examined it closely enough however to be certain that the woman was struggling against tears.
‘Instructions from who?’ said Vera innocently.
‘I really cannot discuss it.’
‘What work are you doing now?’ asked Vera with equal innocence, nodding at the typewriter.
Hinchcliffe whipped her head around. She let her jaw drop in imitation–conscious? Or not?–of the insolent way Vera had previously let her jaw drop in their altercations. The pink of her face powder stood out like crayon on her cheeks, as her complexion took on the chalky pallor of anger.
‘How can you ask that? I have been keeping this business going for years, while the Captain…’ She raised her eyebrows in the general direction of Keiko. ‘Don’t you know it would all be nothing if it weren’t for me?’
Keiko was not giving up. She stood very firmly in front of the desk.
‘We have come to you.’
‘Yes?’
‘We have come.’
Keiko stood smiling, intermittently nodding, pulling Vera into her orbit, willing Vera to copy her. Somehow all three adopted her manner.
‘I see that you have come. But why?’ asked Hinchcliffe. Vera could have sworn she bobbed her head, in an inadvertent bow. She had lost the struggle now, but she did not know it.
‘I have to go shopping,’ Keiko said. ‘But–’ she pulled out the cloth bag she kept tied to a band around her waist. ‘Money is none.’
‘He had it in his desk,’ said Vera. She went into his office and tried to slide open the wide, shallow drawer under her grandfather’s desk, but it was locked.
‘Money is none?’ said Hinchcliffe.
‘He always kept the coffee money there.’
Hinchcliffe reached into her desk and pulled out ten dollars. ‘Coffee money I have. There’s coffee money.’
‘Coffee money is good,’ said Keiko, bowing again graciously. ‘And now we like to have fish money. Rice money. Coal money.’
Hinchcliffe produced several hundred dollars. It was a small fortune. And Keiko rolled it carefully and placed it in her cloth bag. Enough for two more months.
Vera watched carefully where it came from. And she recognised in the quick, practised gesture a habit, and she understood with a cold feeling around her heart, that it was the same gesture with which Hinchcliffe had given money to her grandfather.
‘Of course, I understand,’ said Keiko, bowing.
‘Maybe Mr McBean will come,’ Vera said.
There was something there under all of this but she didn’t understand it, not yet. Someday she would; it was a knot to untangle.
‘McBean?’ said Miss Hinchcliffe. ‘What do you know of McBean? There is no Mr McBean, I have told you many times.’
And Vera thought perhaps this was true. There was no Mr McBean.
Hinchcliffe dusted her hands in a gesture that clearly meant, ‘I am through with you’. Once, twice, three times, the palms together, passing each other, as if she were removing traces of a noxious substance.
Hinchcliffe was the picture of the fierce loyal retainer behind the desk, a figure all too familiar in the lore of Japan. Keiko stood up to her full five feet in height now; the bowing was over. And while Hinchcliffe was still sputtering, now Keiko the humble widow was fully in control of the situation.
‘Understood. Understood. Thank you very much,’ she said. ‘Thank you. We are grateful. Vera and I so grateful.’ She bowed again.
Watching Miss Hinchcliffe dispense with Keiko gave Vera her first inklings of a sorrow that was not entirely selfish. She saw the hands, dusted together; she saw the firm little knot of Hinchcliffe’s lips, that oh so wasp Canadian, ‘Well what did you expect? You had it coming’, and she felt sorry for Keiko. She was her grandfather’s wife, sort of, Vera supposed. Which made her a sort of grandmother. Except that she was younger than her mother had been. Vera hadn’t thought much about Keiko’s age before.
‘How old are you, Keiko?’ she asked.
‘Two times as you,’ said Keiko, smiling shyly.
Thirty.
That night she watched Keiko slowly, carefully cooking the dried fish that she had soaked all day. And she ate it, to please her. Keiko did not smile too broadly. But she looked into Vera’s eyes and nodded, and gave a little bow. Then she got a haughty look on her face and dusted her hands. There was the soft sound of her palms brushing against each other, once, twice, three times. It was her first joke.
Vera burst out laughing. They laughed until tears got the better of them, and put their arms awkwardly over each other’s shoulders and sat, heads down, over the kitchen table. They were stuck with each other.
‘What we will do?’ asked Keiko.
‘I won’t leave you,’ Vera said. Her grandfather would want her to stay with Keiko. ‘All my life,’ he had said. ‘I wanted a deep diver.’ That was a very long time to want.
‘I won’t leave you,’ repeated Keiko.
Vera
