Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [7]
‘Tell her I’ll be back with my stuff.’
Pinkerton glanced around the bare room. No closets, no chests that he could see. What did these people do with their belongings? The houses were flimsy affairs made of wood and what looked like paper screens. And as for home comfort, forget it.
Sharpless had told him the word for goodbye:
‘Sayonara.’
He pronounced it awkwardly in his flat American drawl. Then more awkwardness, as he put on his shoes and slid open the flimsy door too forcefully, so that wood banged against wood.
The girl watched him go as he swung off down the hill back to the ship, saw his slouching ease, the way his body moved, the confident stride. In the sunlight he glittered white and gold. He glanced back and sketched a brief, good-humoured salute. She caught his smile: found herself smiling back. He looked younger when he smiled, almost a boy. She folded her hands into her kimono sleeves and squeezed her elbows nervously. Everything was different: what she had undertaken as an unpleasant duty, an obedient acceptance of fate, had changed its aspect. She continued to watch the American as he dwindled into the distance, then out of sight. She recalled his eyes that echoed the sea in the harbour; his hair that blazed like fresh wheat, his strong hands gripping hers, the shock of his lips on her fingertips. The way he towered over Sharpless-san, his head almost touching the ceiling. His smile. She saw that Lieutenant Pinkerton was beautiful.
The transaction was precarious; she was aware that the marriage was not intended to be permanent, but she could try and make it so. She could become useful, valuable, even. She could, perhaps, be taken back to America.
She said, diffidently, ‘Would you say, Sharpless-san, that Lieutenant Pinkerton is a fine-looking man?’
She could not express the opinion herself; that would be noroke, quite inappropriate, but to seek his view was an acceptable way to suggest it.
He frowned. ‘Many Americans have that appearance.’
He kept his voice deliberately neutral. When she had asked about the wedding ceremony, and received Pinkerton’s curt response, Sharpless had observed her small, woebegone face.
What ceremony else? He felt there was indeed something Ophelia-like about Cho-Cho; a commodity to be traded by her family, an object to be desired by a man, and in due time discarded.
When he was promoted from vice-consul he found himself saddled with the only aspect of the job he had found unwelcome – a task he felt was hardly part of the diplomatic process.
The departing consul had shrugged. ‘You can refuse, it’s unofficial of course, and doesn’t come up often – most of them go for the tea-house option. But when the ship’s in port for a while . . . You have to ask yourself; would you want one of our boys to sail home with an unmentionable disease? It’s a convenient system and it works. Everyone wins.’ And so it had seemed, until it came to Pinkerton and Cho-Cho. But the girl wanted him here: he had known her father and she trusted him. He remained uneasy.
He had seen the way she watched Pinkerton. He wanted to say to her: leave now. Run away. Find work in a respectable tea-house, learn to sing and play an instrument; you don’t have to do this. But of course she did have to do this. The marriage broker had made it plain: with both parents dead – worse, a father ruined by debt, disgraced, redeemed only by his honourable suicide – the girl belonged to her uncle, and the uncle had entered into the contract on her behalf. She was a negotiable property.
The consul had listened to the story with dismay. ‘And her own wishes?’
‘She has no wishes,’ the broker shrugged. ‘She has no voice.’
Sharpless’s mournful countenance and long muzzle did not easily crease into laughter, but the habitual grimness deepened as he glanced at Cho-Cho. She was still gazing out of the window, studying the now empty bend in the road as though it held an