Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [65]
Kneeling nearby, Suzuki listened as the other two talked on in their mingled stream of English and Japanese. Never beautiful, with the years Suzuki had acquired a maternal serenity, her face unlined, her small eyes bright. She could understand most of what was said, and she enjoyed the verbal fencing from the sidelines. She provided Henry with the traditional marriage they were both comfortable with: her voice was not often heard, at least when others were present. She smiled indulgently now as her husband accused Cho-Cho of becoming increasingly westernised:
‘You’ll be cutting your hair next.’
‘You men are so unobservant: I cut it months ago – discreetly!’
‘And you spend too much time with Americans—’
‘I spend time with customers who come to my restaurant.’
‘To eat pot-roast and apple pie!’ He shook his head. ‘They should be trying eel and vinegar rice. You’re betraying your culture.’
‘Poor lonely gaijin, missing their home town; the last thing they need is peculiar foreign food!’ She mocked him: ‘You’re so naïve, oniichan! My restaurant is successful because I don’t serve eel and rice. They regard me as a mixture of an American momma and a geisha too mature to be dangerous. I provide them with stories to take home; I am exotic but safe!’
‘But how can you pass your time with these limited people?’
‘Because they amuse me. I don’t need your seriousness all the time. With you it’s all wabi-sabi, beauty in the sadness of things, the imperfect . . .’ She shifted into English for the wordplay she had learned from him, and he had learned from the Japanese: ‘I like to find the fun in profundity.’
She relapsed into Japanese: ‘It was once traditional for women to wear leather socks in bed – though I can’t remember why, perhaps it was to rub their feet smooth. Or perhaps to punish their husbands. Would you like Suzuki to be traditional with her nocturnal footwear?’
Henry said mildly, ‘What you’re really doing is proving the truth of the old Japanese view of male and female, that a man is a child in a suit of armour, a woman is a velvet glove over a hand of steel. The gods protect me from steely women!’
Cho-Cho exclaimed in mock-despair, ‘Suzuki, how do you put up with him?’
‘Because he is the perfect husband.’ Suzuki, too, could engage in straight-faced response. ‘The Samurai believed a woman should look upon her husband as if he were heaven itself. Who could find fault with heaven?’
She rose to her feet. ‘Now, we will eat.’
Cho-Cho shook her head. ‘I must go in two minutes: I have a new man in the kitchen – he might poison the customers.’
Suzuki left the room, her plump body lent grace by her dark kimono, appropriate clothing for a married woman.
Henry had abandoned the Western uniform of suit and tie: no longer an American official, he had taken to wearing a Japanese robe. He displayed, as Cho-Cho teasingly put it, a chameleon quality. In the street he blended with the locals: a husband, a father.
‘Just another Nagasaki resident. What would your sister say!’
She glanced round the room but decided not to provoke Henry today by mockingly noting how traditional it was. This was where he spent quiet hours writing articles to explain the country he loved to the outside world; explanations that became increasingly difficult when the long, draining war with China flared into what the Japanese called incidents and the West condemned as massacres, war crimes, inhuman brutality. That, too, was part of tradition; the iron grip that held them prisoner.
He saw her to the door now and together they looked out at the view. The Sharpless residence was tucked into the hill-side not far from the Glover House, visible over treetops.
‘Remember, so long ago, when you brought me up here to show me the Glover estate? How silly I was . . .’
‘Why silly?’
‘For wanting an American garden, for one thing.’ She looked out at the green landscape Henry and Suzuki had created; the rocks and moss. ‘This is perfect. Youthful wishes can be silly; part of being young, I suppose.’
Unspoken: she