her own; the ruddy colour drained from his face.
‘She did what?’ He said this in a thin voice of incredulity.
Vera could see that he wasn’t comprehending. He had trouble with the verb, the ‘action word’, they called it at school. It was throwing him off.
‘She died. She’s dead,’ Vera amended.
The hand went to pull his moustache. ‘I see,’ he said.
He saw, but what did he see? Did he see Vera, child of his child, bereft and soaked to the skin and all but transparent with grief?
Or did he visualise, in that instant when he knew she was gone, his beloved daughter Belle? Did Belle’s shortened life from the moment of her birth inscribe itself in his mind? How he held her in his arms, in Yokohama, when his wife handed the baby over without a word? How he tried, but not hard enough, to keep her with him in Japan? Did he think of the first time he lost the girl to his wife? Or the second to marriage? Or the third to Vancouver, Canada, a beautiful city with a view to the Orient?
Or did his mind trip, as his foot tripped–over the grief struck grandchild, and his dead daughter–and stumble on the wife who’d given them to him? Did he think of Sophia, whom he had replaced with this young, Japanese woman?
Vera did not know. James Lowinger recovered his balance and put his foot down on dry land.
He was not at ease there. His life was water. One bit of land or another was much the same; it was not-sea. The news had caught him at the moment of landing, of crossing over from water to earth. All of his life, crossings had marked him–going from island to boat, from boat to mainland. Ramps and bridges were the same. He tripped, he lost his footing. All went into flux, his language, his understanding, his memory.
The Japanese woman caught his arm.
He turned to her. She stood there not getting a word of it. He was unsteady; her arm was holding him up. He hardly knew this little girl, though he recognised her, could not miss her, with that white hair. She was strangely personable, for a child, and too much like his wife for comfort.
‘This is my granddaughter, Vera,’ he said. ‘Vera,’ he said, ‘this is Miss Tanaka. Keiko.’
Miss Tanaka, Keiko, was younger than Belle. Younger than Belle had been, rather, because now it is clear that Belle was never to grow old. Vera was as much a surprise to Keiko as Keiko was to Vera. A surprise and yet not a surprise: James Lowinger was a man who had secrets. He gave nothing away, until he had to. The day before, carelessly, as land came into view, he had told her: ‘Oh Keiko, by the way. A long time ago I was married in Yokohama. My wife was English. She left me and took our child to England. Belle married a bounder; he’s left her I imagine. She has a child, my granddaughter. I wired them, that we were coming.’
But he hadn’t wired we. Only I.
As her grandfather and Keiko stepped off the gangplank, Vera was conscious of herself as a girl needing to be rescued. She had been brave for long enough. She hoped to let down for a bit. When their feet touched terra firma and she had delivered her news she offered up both arms in her grandfather’s general direction, for an embrace. She made the same undiscriminating gesture to the unknown Japanese woman. Then, turning toward home, she worked her hand into her grandfather’s, the one that was not carrying the valise, and allowed a few tears to fall.
They found a taxi that would carry their trunks and she gave the address of the little house on Ivy Street that had been Belle’s, that still was Belle’s. When they arrived, the three of them climbed slowly out of the cab and the driver helped unload the baggage, very little, really; the rest would come later. They made their way up the narrow pavement. And all the while Vera was taking the measure of this man, who was pretty well her only chance for being looked after in the world.
The main event was his moustache, which was waxed and hence pointed at its extreme ends. Or should we say moustaches? A plural will give more a sense of the presence of this accessory. They started under his nose and stood out thickly over his upper lip. When the lip ended (although you couldn’t see the corner of his lips, but you knew there was one) the moustaches swooped down, then up and curled back upon themselves, spiralling into smaller curls. This stiff upcurl happened well beyond his cheeks and reminded Vera of the things on the ends of the curtain rods that her mother called finials.
The finials were not white, not like his beard, and not like his hair, but rather an orangey brown. Moving inward, from the tip, the moustache hairs were a dried auburn and tobacco colour, then a dark brown turning to slate grey, and finally at the root, white. He’d been young when he grew the curls, she supposed. One day, she supposed, his moustache hair turned white. One particularly tempestuous day on the high seas.
The swag of the moustaches also left to the imagination the shape of her grandfather’s upper lip. It might be a villainous thin, hard lip, or it might be, and she suspected it was, a soft, full, sweet-shaped upper lip. Vera would never know. The face was blustery, and had high red cheekbones. His eyes were a beautiful blue, but one of them had a white cast over it. His chin was long and came to a thoughtful point; there was impishness to the lines around his mouth, which showed they’d been made from smiling. He wasn’t as big as Vera had expected: the chest inside his double-breasted navy jacket must have shrunk since the jacket was purchased, and his long sea legs, that Vera imagined would have bestraddled the deck of the bucking frigates the way a cowboy bestrode a horse, did not seem steady. His knuckles stood up, his fingers were as long as a pianist’s, and they waved, sensing things. But his voice, now that he had regained it after the shock of her announcement, was powerful and commanding. Keiko circled in its gusts trying to go respectfully behind him while he tried to herd her in front as if he needed assurance that she was truly there.
Vera produced her key and opened the door, and her grandfather and Keiko were impressed with her competence. They gave each other a look: see how she manages!
And then they entered the door of the house, and disappeared.
And silence descended. For days.
The neighbours who had helped Vera bury her mother poked their heads out of their doors and conferred over the rhododendrons. The trio had been seen. What could it mean? Was the curious little kimono-clad woman a housekeeper? They watched the house. But for some reason, maybe because the Lowinger-Drews kept strange hours, or maybe because each of the three exited singly and deliberately tried to pass unnoticed, the other inhabitants of Ivy Street rarely caught a glimpse of the girl, her grandfather, or the mistress. Because that was what had been determined: the little woman was more than a servant. At night when the lights were on in the house and the curtains unpulled, the pair had been seen, nuzzling. Kissing over the kitchen sink. It was shocking for such an old man. And such a young woman; hardly more than a child herself, much more like a companion for Vera.
‘Well that’s nice isn’t it?’ said a kinder soul. ‘She needs a playmate.’
‘Of course, you can never tell with Orientals, they don’t seem to age.’
They liked Lowinger and they called him Captain. He walked down the street, and his eye was caught by every dog or squirrel that crossed his path. He chuckled and was entirely lost in the creature, until it was out of sight.
‘He’s very charming.’
‘And there is money.’ He was thought to have accumulated a fortune as a pearl merchant, on top of the one he inherited from his father from the same business. But some doubted the veracity of this. Inquisitive housewives smiled on James Lowinger and opened
