Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [50]
Nancy cast about for a reply – The woman on the floor; the frightened child –
Mary reached for the letter and read it aloud: it brought the news that her brother had died. A peaceful death surrounded by his wife and children—
‘Wife!’ Louis exclaimed. ‘Children?’
‘Henry had a Buddhist funeral, traditional Japanese, as he had requested, carried out with full ceremony,’ Mary read on. ‘Crying is felt to be appropriate at our funerals and sometimes people are hired as professional criers. This was not necessary on this occasion as everyone loved Henry and wept because they missed him. In this part of Japan, in Kyushu there is a custom of placing a stone called a pillow-stone on the fresh earth covering the coffin. I placed a stone on your behalf, his surviving sister.’
There was more: an affectionate description of Henry’s life as a successful journalist writing about the land he had adopted as his own. His sister, the letter continued, would of course be aware of how much he had done to try to increase understanding between his two countries at a difficult time. She was enclosing a snapshot—
‘What snapshot?’ Mary exclaimed. ‘There’s no snapshot.’
‘Look in the envelope,’ Louis suggested.
Inside the envelope was a small photograph, a family group: Henry Sharpless, his wife and three small, perfect girls.
‘The wife’s Japanese,’ Mary whispered into the room.
‘Henry’s wearing Japanese clothes!’ Louis said. ‘If you ask me, he looks Japanese.’
‘He looks happy,’ Nancy said.
Mary studied the square red seal, the signature. ‘Cho-Cho.’
She added, ‘Joey must be told.’
Must he? Must he really? Nancy imagined an alternative: she would simply tear up the letter, put it in the incinerator. No further action needed. Joey would continue his life, an American boy in America, happy. There were the nightmares; she was aware of the nightmares when he woke screaming, stammering jumbled words. But they were infrequent now, and she soon soothed him back to sleep, stroking the fair curls that reminded her of Ben.
She too had her nightmares, but hers involved water and mud and drowning; and she would wake gasping for breath.
‘Who will tell him?’ Mary asked.
From the hall, Joey’s voice: ‘It’s okay. I heard it already.’
Nancy spun round.
He stood in the doorway, holding his schoolbooks, nodding slowly, as though listening to unspoken words, his face expressionless. Then he turned away and went up the stairs.
‘The house is too small!’ Louis groaned. ‘No privacy!’
And Mary said, distractedly, ‘Oh, that’s too bad, the boy should not have heard it unprepared.’
Nancy was already halfway up the stairs. The house was, indeed, too small for three adults and a growing boy, but what alternative did they have, with her at work all day, and Joey to be cared for after school by Mary and Louis? Her own space was as cramped as a closet, but it was somewhere to gather herself together away from the sandwich-like pressures of her parents and her child. And at least here Joey had a room with a real door, not a curtain.
She knocked and waited. After a few moments she knocked again on the attic door.
‘Joey?’
The door opened and he stood, holding on to the handle, a questioning expression on his face, as though answering a call from a visiting tradesman. It had not occurred to her, till now, how much he had grown: at fourteen he was as tall as she was. Waiting, he looked her straight in the eyes.
‘Can I come in?
‘Why? To tell me more lies?’
He released the handle and stepped back with sullen courtesy to allow her to enter. She went in regularly to clean the room and tidy his things, but now she looked at it differently, with the eyes of a stranger. The storage boxes had been moved into the cellar, and Louis had put up bookshelves, and built a makeshift closet on one wall, between the sloping ceiling and the floor.
Beside the dormer window was an old armchair; in the centre of the room, where Joey could stand upright, a small desk and a chair with curved, slatted back. A shag rug. The floors in the house with the electric