Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [16]
The marriage broker had been biding his time, keeping an eye on the house above the harbour. One morning he came knocking, all smiles, to tell Cho-Cho he had a proposition, a customer. She slid the shoji door closed without a word.
‘Be realistic!’ he called. Pinkerton was gone, swallowed into the ocean as far as they were all concerned.
‘Luckily there are plenty more fish where he came from, you can pick and choose.’
But for Cho-Cho there was only Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton; she already had a husband.
‘Obstinacy is not a virtue in a woman!’ the broker exclaimed, exasperated.
He was heading for the road when the door opened and Cho-Cho called to him. Beaming, he hurried back.
‘I have some good offers for you.’
But it was she who had an offer, for him.
‘Young women in Nagasaki who “marry” gaijin will be more valued if they can speak a few words of English.’
She could give them lessons for a small fee. She could also teach them about American culture, which would please their temporary husbands.
The marriage broker felt he could be frank: vocabulary and culture were not uppermost in the minds of visiting foreign customers. Passing on social skills to other young potential ‘wives’ would not necessarily increase their charms. On the other hand, the charms she had to offer . . .
Cho-Cho closed the door.
Even when he returned a few days later to tell her a respectable elderly gentleman, a local merchant in need of an heir, was prepared to offer her a genuine marriage, a permanent arrangement, Cho-Cho remained unmoved. On his next visit Sharpless gently suggested she might consider this latest offer: the security was surely preferable to a future alone?
She turned to the window and looked out over the harbour. She gazed fiercely at the empty sea, as though through the force of her will she could create a ship, forge metal from water and draw it towards her over the curve of the horizon. And she repeated the familiar words: she knew her husband would return.
‘One day, when the swallows nest again, his ship will be there in the harbour. He said so.’
As an act of faith she had held back one narrow strip of earth in the garden simply for decoration – ‘my American flower bed!’ Surrounded by the closely planted edible greenery the orange and pink blooms sang out, a banner of gaudy vividness.
But as time passed, as humid months gave way to fog and snow, as she warmed her hands at the little charcoal stove under the table; and the dark filigree of the swallows twice more filled the sky without his ship steaming into harbour, she grew thinner, and the flowers, untended, withered. The bright petals shrivelled, dying back into the dark soil.
6
When Pinkerton called at the consulate, Sharpless was not in his office.
Leaving a message to say he would look in again later, Pinkerton set off across town with a junior lieutenant on his first trip away from home, Pinkerton acting as guide and mentor to Jensen, just as Eddie had for him, three years before. Moving speedily through the pungent market district, Pinkerton remarked on signs of modernisation since his first visit:
‘They got themselves a fire-truck! In my day it was a guy with a pole and a red paper lantern running ahead of a hose reel.’
He saw that some of the streets had been paved, some shops enlarged. But the stall where he had bought a bracelet one day as he passed was still as he remembered it. He glanced over silver and enamel jewellery spread out on a white cloth: cloisonné. She had taught him the name for it.
He drew the young officer to a stall selling sweetmeats. ‘Jensen, you should try this: Nagasaki castella, sort of a Portuguese cake.’
Pinkerton was not given to self-searching: in his experience you took what life handed out, knocks included, and moved on. But as they wandered through the turmoil of the little town he felt unsettled; he felt stirrings: he realised with a shock of surprise that he had been happy here.
He wondered, with a twinge of guilt, how things had worked out for Cho-Cho. Not that he had anything to reproach himself with: