That indicated it was lunch-time. I stretched, luxuriously anticipating twenty-three days of enforced leisure, and—
“You did not hear the bell, miss, I think?”
I jumped, completely unaware of any person so close behind me. I spun around on the cushions and found myself beneath the dark gaze of the small Japanese girl we had seen board.
Her features were, as Holmes had described, more angular than those of the Chinese people I had grown up around in San Francisco. She was wearing ordinary Western clothing, although her frock must have been made for her diminutive frame: put her in a frilly dress and bonnet and she’d pass for a child of ten. Even with her pleated skirt and pearls, she looked no more than fifteen—until she opened her mouth, and the urge to ask if her parents were onboard faded.
I realised that she’d asked me a question, and gave her a smile. “No, I don’t tend to spend much time belowdecks on a ship.”
“Keezy?”
I listened to the word in my memory: queasy.
“Fresh air is better,” I agreed.
“I feel right at home/Lazily drifting asleep/In my house of air.”
I raised my eyebrows politely.
“Bashō,” she told me. “One of my country’s greatest poets.”
I’d heard the name. I reflected on his words: finding comfort in a house made of air. I smiled, then climbed out of the deck-chair and approached her, hand out. “Mary Russell. Headed for Nagasaki.”
Standing, she barely came to my chin. “Haruki Sato,” she said, giving a slight emphasis to the Ha. “I go to Kobe.” Her handshake was practised, although I vaguely recalled that hands were not much shaken in her country.
“Am I right in thinking that in Japan you would be known as Sato Haruki?”
Her face lit up. “That is correct. Easier to turn names around than say to every European that no, I not ‘Miss Haruki.’ ” She had a charming little gap between her front teeth, and she worked hard to push the R sound to the back of her tongue, away from the L. “Correct” came out closer to collect, and “European”—well, perhaps I could provide her with a synonym.
“What about you?” I asked Haruki-san. “Does the sea make you queasy as well?”
“Western food make me kee—queasy,” she said, giving it three syllables in an attempt at the W sound. “If I wait until all are finished, I can go talk the cook into some rice and vegetables.”
“But you sound as if you’d spent time among Westerners.” Beneath the accent, her English was more American than British, and too colloquial for language school. New York, my ear told me.
“Over one year,” she replied. “My father think that Japan’s future lies in its relations with the West.”
“So, he sent you to school?”
“NYU.”
Not school: university. “What did you read?”
Her eyebrows drew together. “Read? I read many—”
“Sorry—I meant, what was your major field of study?”
“Ah, so. Economic.”
Economics. “Does your family run a business? Sorry, that was nosey.”
“Not at all. Economic is useful, yes, but not immediately to my family’s … ‘business.’ ”
I waited, not about to be caught out twice in the intrusive queries endemic to shipboard society. If she wanted to tell me, fine, but I would not enquire further.
To my surprise, she grinned, as if she’d read my thoughts. “I do not think you would ever guess the nature of my family’s emproyment.”
“You’re probably right.” The possibilities were extensive, given what little I knew of Japanese society: rickshaw runners, bamboo farmers, ninja assassins, pearl divers. Octopus fishermen.
She leaned towards me a little. “If I say, will you promise not to tell the others? If it become known, it would be … distracting for me.”
Oh, heavens: she was from a long line of geisha? “Very well.”
“We have been acrobats. For generations, my family performed for the royalty of Japan. Juggling, tight-wire walking, gymnastics. My grandmother was the Emperor Meiji’s favourite contortionist.”
I was delighted: I’d never met a professional acrobat before. “How superb! What is your specialty?”
“Oh, sorry, all that is the past. You see, when I was small, my father fell. From a wire. He was famous jester, you understand? Like—you know Harold Lloyd?” It took me a moment to identify the name with its transposed Rs and Ls, but who didn’t know Harold Lloyd’s character with the round glasses, dangling from extraordinary situations and snatching victory from precarious perches? I nodded. “Father would fool on the high wire and do silly jokes.”
“Stunts?”
“Stunts, yes. His Majesty the Meiji Emperor laugh very hard at him. Father was so proud.
“And then he fell. He near to died, but His Majesty sent his own doctors and he did not die, and then His Majesty sent his … anma. Massage man?”
“Masseur.”
“Yes, masseur. With them, Father learn to—learned again to walk. But he could not work. And more, it made him look at what he wished for his children. He decided to move us away from the, um, uncertainties of life as an acrobat. He retired to the family ryokan—inn, of the traditional sort, with hot springs. When his uncle died, Father became its owner. Some years ago, he saw that the future of Japan lies in its relations with the West. He think, perhaps English-speaking tourists would be most happy to come to traditional inn, but one where their language is spoken, their food and customs understood. And so five year ago, Father send my cousin to university in London. Next, he send me—sent me—to America for one year. My younger brother will go to New York for school as well.”
I studied her exotic features, a question mark bubbling up on the heels of my initial delight. Shipboard life was conducive to self-invention. In the course of too many sea voyages, I’d met a “professional gambler” who disembarked wearing a priest’s collar; a self-proclaimed dowager countess whom Holmes recognised as a brothel-owner; two remarkably indiscreet “secret agents”; seventeen married couples who weren’t; eight American retired Congressmen, three Senators, and a Vice President, only two of whom appeared in the Congressional Record; and enough superfluous Royals to fill a supplemental volume of Debrett’s. My approach to all was the same I gave Miss Sato now: a face of willing belief.
“Fascinating. So you are on your way home?”
“I am. Although not by a direct route—I decided to see something of the world on my way. But I will be very glad to get back to proper food. And an actual bath.”
“I’ve heard about Japanese baths. They sound … interesting.” They sounded like giant cannibal pots in which the sexes casually simmered shoulder to shoulder, but “interesting” would do to begin with.
She was traditional enough to cover her mouth when she laughed. “Westerners do find them a puzzling side of Japan, it is true.” The word “puzzling” coming from her mouth made me want to pinch her cheeks.
“As the Japanese no doubt find our beef pies and boiled vegetables. Although I agree, one disadvantage in travel is how it makes one crave certain foods.”
“Wrapping her dumplings/in bamboo leaves, the girl’s hand/tidies a stray lock.”
“Bashō again?”
“Bashō spent most of his life wandering; how he must have missed his mother’s cooking!” She glanced down at her wrist-watch. “I shall now go and smile at the cooks. Can I bring you something?”
“No, thanks. They’ll come by with tea in a while.”
She gave a little grimace. “English tea, with milk: another thing I never learn to enjoy.”
She dipped her torso at me and walked away.
I watched her go, with two thoughts in my mind. First, that my chances of getting through the coming days without “intense tutorials” had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. And two, for someone who was not being groomed as a gymnast, the slim figure disappearing down the steps possessed a lot of hard muscl
e.
*1 Arthur Conan Doyle, “His Last Bow.”
*2 Details given in The Game.
Pert gaze, quick sure flight.
What brings this lady sparrow
Onboard a great ship?
A short time later, Holmes found me, to deliver the news that the Darleys were not scheduled to abandon ship in Colombo. To the contrary, they planned to sail all the way to Japan. “Oh, good,” I said gloomily.
“You don’t sound too pleased, Russell.”
“Holmes, I have several printed means of keeping the boredom at bay. I have no wish to hound the footsteps of a man who may or may not have had a criminal past, ten years ago. If you want something to do, why don’t you keep an eye on his son? He looks the sort who cheats at cards.”
Holmes paused in the act of lighting a cigarette. “Cards. Excellent idea, Russell. Thank you.” He strode happily away. I sighed, and went back to my book. I would let the purser know that there was a hefty tip in it for him if he managed to transfer us onto a faster ship to Japan. Perhaps I could convince Holmes that Darley had recognised him?
I did not tell Holmes about Miss Sato, not then. I wanted to see what she would do next.
Were it not for the muscle, and the sharp intelligence in those black eyes, I would more readily have accepted her as nothing more than a fellow passenger. After all, a sea voyage goes more quickly if one has sympathetic company, and a woman on her own might be expected to seek out another of her kind, even if not of her race.
But there were other possible reasons for a stranger to seek me out. Yes, Sherlock Holmes was currently travelling under the name “Robert Russell,” but neither of us was unknown, and this oh-so-casual meeting could be the preamble to any number of things. So I anticipated a second approach.
It did not come. She did emerge back on the deck after a time, carrying a book of her own, but merely nodded in a friendly fashion before settling into a shaded corner to read. A glance at the cover showed it to be a volume of Shakespeare’s plays, heavy going for someone to whom modern English was a foreign country. From the corner of my eye, I watched her struggles, and waited for her to put forward a question.
She did not. Two hours later, when she closed the book and stood up, I expected her to “notice” me and resume our conversation. Instead, she briefly joined a group of fellow passengers exclaiming at a pod of dolphins riding our bow-wake, then went below without so much as a glance.
When the sun was hovering at the horizon, with the sea reassuringly calm, I went to the cabin to get ready for dinner—for which, it being the first night, formal dress was not required. In any event, I needed to survey the options for table companions. We had followed our standard shipboard survival plan of booking an entire table with the purser, telling him that we would provide the names later. Over the course of the day, I had identified a handful of candidates for the remaining seats: two solitary schoolteachers, a young wife travelling alone (but for a pair of small children and their omnipresent nanny), an elderly woman artist gone contentedly deaf, and a professor of botany from an American agricultural college. During pre-dinner cocktails in the Palm Lounge, each of these proved almost pathetically grateful to be invited to join us, and I was about to take the list of names to the purser (and tell him firmly that we would begin such arrangements tonight) when I spotted Miss Sato in the doorway.
She did not look fifteen years old now. Paint emphasised her mouth and eyes, heels brought her up to a more adult height, and her dress made the most of her boyish figure. Again I waited for an overture. Again, she gave me a friendly dip of the upper torso, then began threading her way through the crowded room towards another young Japanese woman a couple of inches taller than Miss Sato. The two greeted each other with bows rather than embraces, and their expressions seemed to contain the reserve of near-strangers. As I watched their apparently brittle conversation, I reflected that the vocabulary of non-verbal interactions was at times more foreign than a language: I could not tell if these two had recently met, or were long-time friends—or long-lost sisters. The two accepted drinks from the tray of a passing waiter. Within seconds, a pair of young American men came up, drawn like wasps around a picnic, causing shy giggles and knowing glances. Before long, several other Westerners, male and female, had joined them.
I felt almost jilted.
“Whom are you studying so intently, Russell?”
I turned away from the social gathering with a wry smile. “A perfect innocent whom I suspected of hidden plots. Holmes, your misanthropy is contagious.”
“The alert young lady with the muscles of a gymnast?”
“Precisely! What gave her away?”
“Less the build than the balance. A typhoon wouldn’t tip her over.”
“Well, now she juggles books rather than clubs. She lingered on deck earlier, and I feared she might be playing up to me. It would appear that she was merely being friendly.” I glanced at his fingernails, wrapped around a glass. He’d scrubbed away the engine-room grime, leaving the skin a bit raw: I for one had no intention of joining him for lessons from that instructor. “If you’re interested in language tutorials that don’t involve smothering heat and asphyxiating smoke, Miss Sato might be worth asking.”
Thus, from being a suspicious character, Miss Sato became a resource. We were too late to claim her for our table, but she dutifully introduced us to her friend, Fumiko Katagawa, and once I had reciprocated with my husband, “Mr Russell,” the names began to run past us. The Americans were Clifford Adair from New York, dressed in a blinding white linen suit; Edward Blankenship from Iowa, whose evening wear looked borrowed from an elder brother; and Virginia and Harold Wilton, a shy brother and sister from Utah. There were two Australians, nearly identical brothers named John and James Arthur in rumpled tropical suits, who laughed loud and often and who both answered to the nickname of “Jack.”
Then came the five English travellers in my fellow group of under-thirties. Two of them knew no one onboard: an ebony-haired woman in her late twenties with a knowing look and the unlikely name of Lady Lucy Awlwright, and Harold Mitchell, a very young man headed for a job at an uncle’s business in Hong Kong, whose pronounced Northern accent, spotty face, and off-the-rack suit suggested he would find friendship here an ill fit. Two of the others were travelling together, an extended version of the Grand Tour that signalled their families’ enthusiasm to have them safely out from underfoot for a long time: Reginald Townsman and the Honourable Percy Perdue (“I’m Reggie” “Call me Percy”), both of whom were Eton and King’s College. They were acquainted with the other man, Thomas, Viscount Darley, the fair-haired snob who had so absurdly set my hackles on edge the moment he stepped down from the carriage in Bombay. I resolved to be friendly to him, to make up for the slight.
On a simple Atlantic crossing, the numbers of young and unattached passengers would have been much higher, but this was the end of the world when it came to wealthy Westerners, thus the population of the Thomas Carlyle was more heavily weighted to married couples in Colonial service, retired Europeans and Americans, and Asians from Sub-continental to Chinese.
No doubt there were more Westerners onboard, attached or otherwise, but on this first night out of Bombay, nine young men and two women drew together like nervous cattle, pulling into their sphere a pair of Japanese women, a delicate lad from Singapore, a stunning Parsee girl whose husband was abed with a sore tooth—and one Mary Russell.
With a murmur in my ear—“You ‘young things’ are better without me”—Holmes faded away. And it was true: once he had left, the younger men relaxed, their voices growing louder as they began to crow before the women and jostle for superiority.
In no time at all, aided by the emptying of glasses, the competition had sorted itself out on national lines, with the Australian brothers on one side, the four British men on the other, and the Americans undecided between them.
Talk veered, perhaps inevitably, into sport: specifically, the kind of football—
or as the Americans called it, soccer—they had witnessed in India. At that point, Thomas Darley lifted his glass and said, “To the Colonies, long may they take our cast-offs.”
American and Australian eyes met, and a common loyalty was declared.
His indiscreet words, added to the slow and deliberate blink of his eyes, pointed to his being well on the way to drunkenness—which surprised me, as he did not seem to be drinking very rapidly. I kept an eye on him as I listened to the conversation, nodding at random points, and saw the deft way in which he stepped aside to take a drink from a passing tray, then re-inserted himself into the circle next to Miss Sato. He sipped from his glass and made a remark that brought a gust of laughter. A few minutes later, he raised his hand to make another comment. When he lowered it again, somehow it ended up across Miss Sato’s shoulder.
She gave Miss Katagawa an uncomfortable little smile and tittered into her hand, but the arm remained heavily in place. After a while, he lowered his head to say something into her ear. She replied, he said something else—but at her next response, his grin locked. He drew back slightly. A few moments later, his possessive hand dropped from her shoulder and slid with feigned nonchalance into his pocket.
What had she said? He was charming (that sinister word again) and educated and clearly had money at his command: if he hadn’t emerged as the leader of the ship’s rich, bored, and unattached populace by midday tomorrow, I would eat my cloche. He looked about my age—twenty-four—which meant that either he had not seen active service during the War, or if he had, it was limited to the final months. He also looked to be exaggerating his drunkenness as an excuse for misbehaviour.
A few minutes later, he repeated the ritual of freshening his glass, using it to end up beside the Awlwright girl. No: perhaps I would not reconsider my initial impression of young Darley. But as his absence created a space beside Miss Sato, I moved into it.