The Headman’s daughter gave a small nodding bow in return. She served tea in small bowls and withdrew to the edge of the
tatami.
The Headman’s sons, thickset men with sun-reddened skin, were seated behind their father, away from the hearth. Sitting on the
tatami
mat at the
irori
were two discernible figures, opposite in shape. The visitor had his bowl of tea in his hands and was balanced awkwardly on the side of one hip, with his long legs only half folded against the side of his body, and his opposite arm propping him up. He appeared to have been knocked over, and was straining to get back erect.
The Headman sat solidly on his heels, knees folded like knuckles. He could sit that way for ever. He appeared tall but he was not; like his sons, he was a short strong man, all of his height being above his hips.
Vera could tell by the smile on the visitor’s face that he was
attempting to charm the Headman and believed that he had succeeded. Vera knew better.
Her father was white-skinned with a lantern jaw and gangling stick-legs that normally launched him above the crowd but were in this context useless. He was ill at ease but not as ill at ease as he should have been, because he had not fully appreciated the solidity of the world he had entered. In this same way he underestimated all that he came up against, assuming a world as provisional, as up for grabs, as he was. Vera saw instantly what she would come to call his arrogance, but did not name it. He was unaffected, not bothered. That he could come and reclaim her after years of neglect, as if she were a piece of luggage forgotten on a platform, was stunning, but not to him. It was all in a day’s work: Today I’ll go and find that daughter of mine, tomorrow I’ll open a business. She seemed to know all this as she looked at him before he had even recognised her. And maybe she did. But she would not know she knew it until later, much later.
She knelt in the doorway. He saw her and struggled from his seated position, unfolding his legs eagerly. Too eagerly. She knew that his legs would feel as if they had been broken. Depending on how long he had been sitting there, they might have had the circulation blocked, and be all pins and needles. There were cases when foreigners in Japan fell down when they meant to rise up from
seiza,
and broke a leg. But this did not happen to Hamilton Drew. Standing, he staggered, but caught his balance. He attempted to replace the pain in his face with joy at the vision of his grown-up daughter. No, she is not grown-up. She looks like her mother. She is not grown-up, in his eyes: but she is in her own.
All advantage to Vera, then. He was thunderstruck by her appearance; she barely recognised him. Would not have known him in a crowd. In the months to come she would revise this notion: she did know him instantly; she remembered more than she thought from her childhood; she shared his height, his skin tone. But now, he was simply a strange man who had come to her island claiming her.
His words of endearment, being in English, sounded unfamiliar. He moved toward her. She felt trapped on her knees and jumped up. A voice came out of her. It was the new, hard voice. Her drop-dead ironic ‘frankly I haven’t got the energy’ voice, that would serve her well later, in her siren years. She was nearly eighteen years old. She was not, as she intended, treating him as if he were a stranger.
‘You didn’t answer our letters,’ she said.
He stopped in his tracks as he made for her with open arms. ‘Your letters?’ he cried. ‘I received no letters.’
She was a little shaken by this, but not much. ‘When my mother died,’ she said, suppressing the question mark at the end. ‘And when Grandfather died too. When we were hungry, and when we left for Japan.’
His head sank on the stalk of his neck. ‘Oh, it was terrible,’ he said, making it his loss. ‘That she was so far away and I did not hear …’ his voice faded as he attempted to conceive of how much time he had to account for. ‘Where did you send the letters?’
‘Miss Hinchcliffe sent them, to Kobe.’
‘Ah,’ he said.
There was silence.
‘Who could have believed it,’ he said.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘How much they hated me,’ he said softly. ‘To keep me in the dark for –’
‘For?’ Vera prodded. She saw his repentance but she was not ready to forgive.
‘Such a very long time,’ he finished. He was close enough for the embrace now and his arms were a half-circle, beseeching.
And Vera felt triumphant. She stood at nearly his height, gazing directly into his eyes.
‘You are angry,’ he said.
‘No, I am Vera,’ she said. And laughed. That new useful, hard laugh.
He reached farther with his arms. She shrank away.
All this was like theatre to the Headman and his muscular sons and gracious daughter, who had enacted no such dramas, ever, in their small house. They understood no English. But they understood the drama of the prodigal father returning home and felt the tragedy of it. They enjoyed it. They hid, in downturned faces, the rounded eyes of the audience at the opera.
Vera watched as Hamilton’s arms slowly dropped to his sides.
‘All right,’ he said, quietly. ‘You need time. To get used to me, of course. That’s fair.’
Vera questioned herself. Was she angry, as he said? She did not feel angry. She felt powerful. She felt nothing. The two were the same. She was blasé but determined to get away from him, which was perhaps not consistent. This confused her and made her uneasy. She stepped back and looked away, at the Headman.
‘Your father,’ said the Headman, a little late but performing introductions as if he’d been taught. His face lit by a large smile.
‘Vera,’ said Hamilton, trying again, and his face now radiated the joy of a creature that cared for its offspring, reunited with same.
Vera faltered but remained cold. ‘Why did you come now?’
‘Why did I come now? Because I discovered where you were.’
Because you thought there was some advantage in it for you, Vera thought. And was ashamed, and confused that she had thought it. But already tears had weighted her lower lids. She wondered what she really knew about her father. In her growingup years her grandfather had spoken ill of him. ‘Hamilton – he’ll do what’s good for him,’ he’d say. Or, ‘Hamilton wants it all, but he won’t take responsibility.’ When hearing that he was off on another trip, her grandfather would snort. ‘The Crown Prince has more fun than the King,’ James Lowinger would say. ‘Or he’d like to.’ When Vera was very young, her mother defended her husband. But later when he had been gone too long, she stopped. She was sad; there was no joy in her. This man had stolen her spirit. Vera knew Belle had loved him, and missed him, and even died of sadness for him.
‘You discovered just now? How?’ she asked.
‘Hinchcliffe,’ he said. ‘The letters were in her desk.’
Vera repressed a sob of frustration, remembering how that long but short time ago when they buried her grandfather she could not get past the solid body at his secretary’s desk. Tears burned in her throat as a part of her was thinking: but if he did
not
receive the letters, why was he so quick to understand that Miss Hinchcliffe had them?
‘Is Hinchcliffe still there, in the office?’ Vera asked.
‘She was there,’ he said, ‘until I found out how she treated you.’ He paused and then said, as an afterthought, it seemed: ‘And Keiko. It was terrible how she treated you and Keiko.’ He flashed a smile at the Headman. ‘How good Keiko has been to you. I could not be more grateful. I am so eager to see Keiko to thank her.’
This more than anything rattled the foundations of Vera’s hostility. ‘Why did you come here?’
‘I came to bring you home. I am your father. Your only living relative.’
Despite how often she had wanted to go home, now Vera rebelled. Home? She laughed a little bitterly.
‘This is my home now.’
‘My dear, we are on the brink of war. I cannot leave you here.’
War. That word was the only weapon he had. The Headman nodded eagerly.
‘I am not ready,’ said Vera. That was all.
And so the meeting ended. There was no embrace. Vera bowed to the Headman and backed out of the hut.
For several days life continued as if he had never come. Hamilton Drew slept in the house of one of the Headman’s sons, and spent his days watching people work. He watched them paint the banners that would be held up on poles for the festival. He visited the women who inspected the fishing nets. He tried to help the men who were stacking flat rocks on the roofs of the huts, but they were too polite to allow him. His tall thin shape could be
picked out, here and there on the island where nothing rose above six feet but the masts of the little boats.
In the
amagoya,
on their breaks, the
ama
women talked about Hamilton Drew. They remembered when the Englishman came to the summer island, and Keiko went away with him. That was a shocking thing.
Ama
marry their own kind. Still,
ama
women are strong and know their own minds. Keiko chose and they did not question her, unlike some others in the village. Hamilton Drew had been here then and looked the whole place over with his trader’s eye and did not see anything of value, and so he had left. Now he had come back and wanted Vera.
True, he was Vera’s father. But Vera did not know him any more. Vera was now part of the summer island, part of the
ama
village. Keiko had adopted her and come home bringing her, and now the
ama
had adopted her. They had taught Vera and she dived with them.
It was a dilemma.
Their conclusion was that Hamilton Drew should stay on the summer island for a time, until Vera knew him better.
Keiko cleared her face of all expression and hid her eyes. She brought up the matter of war. Perhaps because of the war, Vera should go.
Setsu believed that Vera was safer here with them if this war was also coming to her land, to Canada, so far away.
And Maiko said, ‘We are losing our young ones.’
‘Why has he come?’ Vera cried. ‘What does he want?’
‘I believe that he has come for you.’ Ikkanshi sat with her in his new room, which had become hers.
‘But why should he come for me? He never came for me before.’
‘Perhaps,’ the sword polisher said, ‘there has been a current event.’ They used to joke about this term but she did not laugh today. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘the war will come closer to our island.’ And he told her a little of what he knew. Britain and her allies had declared war on Germany. Japan would have greater enemies
now, and might not be as close to victory as the people believed. Perhaps Vera’s father felt a responsibility to take her away from this danger, and this deprivation. He did not know exactly if this were true. He tried to be fair.
In a few minutes Keiko joined them. They all sat together like parents and child. It was as if there had been another death. ‘When you dive,’ said Keiko, ‘you overcome your fear and you enter a new world. When you rise again you wish to bring something of it back with you. That is the most difficult task. Even when you succeed, you can be changed. Sometimes you cannot return to what you left. You are different, or the place is different.’
Ikkanshi reached out and put his hand on Keiko’s thigh. It was the first time they had touched in front of Vera.
‘He is your father,’ she said. ‘That is one reason. We are in danger, that is another. Canada is your country. The bones of your mother are there. That is the final reason.’
Vera could go back to her world; that was most important. Who she went with mattered less.
‘Vera must go away,’ Keiko said. ‘I am the one who brought her here and I am the one to say she must go.’ Now the decision was made.
They knelt, there in the empty room, as if before the inevitable.
Vera did not cry. She was pale, very pale, and quiet and hard. She wondered if Keiko loved her. A part of her had wanted to go home, since Hana drowned. They used that word; she used it herself, although Vera did not know the meaning of home, now. She held in her mind the possibility of another life she might have led, might still lead. Her father had appeared in answer to her dreaming and her begging, and now he was here.
But also she did not want to go. Hamilton was new to her. She had no love for her father, instilled from childhood, stored in her as a programmatic thing. These pieties, these traditions were not a part of her and had never been. It was what made the sword polisher and Keiko love her and fear her too. She had
become part of life on the island. And there was Tamio. She would have to leave Tamio.
But in the end she agreed that she should go. Keiko was the one to speak. She was right: she had brought Vera here and when Keiko said so, Vera would leave.
They talked about the sea. About the tide and its rhythms. How people were born on one tide and die on another. How even if she went to the other side of the Pacific Ocean, she would still be on the sea.
Vera said only one thing: she wanted to dive again, before she went to Hamilton Drew. Keiko walked away then, in the moon glow and darkness, away from the houses and the preparations for
O-Bon
that had begun in the temple. Perhaps she cried, but Vera did not see it.
Teru walked alone along the water in the dark. From time to time a man or boy approached to speak to him, but he shook his head and plodded on.
Alone too, Tamio worked on his boat, where he had waited for Vera after dinner each night, as before. But she did not come. He cleaned the boat and folded the sail; he rubbed oil into the wood of the rudder, as she walked unseen by him to the far, higher end of the path. For several nights it was like this: Vera went alone to the High Place and looked out to sea. Tamio sat in his boat, caulking, and sanding, and whistling a tune that came from a radio, a long time ago. In the days, because the wind was high, the women dived
kachido
with their baskets from shore on the far side of the island.
But on the fourth night, it changed.
That night Vera came to see Tamio in the harbour. His boat was usually pulled up with all the others on the draining mud and sand, but he had moved it away, farther down, to the end of the line. None of the flickering oil lamps of the village reached here. The sea was tame; its flat tongues licked their feet, and then withdrew. The sky was alight with stars. Tamio’s hand was as strong as a clamp on Vera’s. His passion was silent and furious.
But she was the one with the power: here was a man’s life for her to crush, or keep.