Three Views of Crystal Water

The conjuror began with further charms, more exaggerated and bizarre contortions, ululations, screechings and mumblings. Finally, his adherents appeared to be satisfied. Only then did the owners begin to unload the oysters. They lay in heaps to be sold in lots, unopened. When the auction began the bids were fast; each lot went to the highest bidder who then came and hauled away the bags.

It was on that day, in Ceylon, that James saw one more extraordinary sight. A small girl about his age. Proper, dressed for a garden party in flounces of white all dotted with yellow. Sashed and bonneted like Little Miss Muffet on her tuffet, in all that sand and wind she held, over her small self, casting a useless pale shadow in which she was careful to stay, a red, ruffled umbrella.

His eye was drawn to the red umbrella. Red spot in the centre, making the whole scene revolve around it. She was the eye of the storm, that’s what she was. She was the heart of the matter.

‘Who is that?’ he asked his Papa.

‘That?’ his father replied, following his finger. ‘Don’t point!’

There were thousands of people on the beach. He had to point. ‘The girl with the umbrella,’ he said.

‘That,’ he said. ‘You mean she. She is the daughter of a man from the garrison. I believe he is called Mr Avery McBean.’

They were getting closer. She was plump and she pouted. She had a magisterial air about her. He knew as soon as he saw this child that she would make planets revolve around her.

‘Do you know her Papa?’ he asked.

‘I cannot say that I know her,’ said his father, ‘but I have been introduced. And so shall you be.’

And they set out across what seemed like the Sahara, this mile-wide expanse of dry sand. It grew softer underfoot the farther they went from the ocean’s edge. James’s feet sank into it, making each step a little harder than the previous had been, giving him the sense that even as he approached Miss McBean so also did he retreat from her, the sole of one foot moving backwards in the shifting sand and digging itself a little hole as he stepped out on the other. Slowly, ever so slowly, face into the wind and clinging to his hat, he made progress toward her.

Thus men approach their fate.

It was not quick enough. As mentioned, there were, in that area of Ceylon at that time, in the untrimmed jungles that lay behind that godforsaken beach, all manner of wild beasts. Elephants that came steaming out at road crossings, tigers whose golden eyes could be seen in the dark, and buffalos. The buffalos did not like red.

Just then one of these bad-tempered buffalos appeared out of nowhere. He caught a glimpse of the plump, pouting Miss McBean, and took exception to her red umbrella. He put his head down. A charging buffalo is not amusing. It was wide of shoulder with a bony ridge down its back and a tail with a point on it like the devil. Its hoary head was low with shiny black horns at the ready.

‘Papa!’ James cried. His heart began to pound. Had no one told Miss McBean about the colour red? Probably she would have paid no attention if they had. Or did she wear it as the soldiers did, with a fated desire to draw attention to herself?

The buffalo did not stop to think. He headed for her with murder in his eyes.

Dawdling and oblivious, she swung her umbrella over her head, then lowered it to waist level and then, holding it in front of her body as if she were a vaudeville dancer, twirled it. The animal bellowed straight at her.

James did not recall his Papa answering. But in a minute they were running in dry sand. The more they hurried, the deeper they sank. Papa held on to James with one hand and waved his hat with the other, hallooing like mad, though his words were lost in the wind. The buffalo ploughed on. A few men in the crowd shouted warnings. A soldier on horseback wheeled around and cantered toward the rolling red frills. A man who must have been the girl’s father appeared out of a tent and they suddenly were all, all – buffalo, horse and soldier, Papa and James, her doting dad – racing against sand and time toward the girl while she – surprised, but unflinching – got a whiff of danger, and lowered her lovely toy to the sand. She found herself staring down the nose of a charging buffalo.

And what did she do? She put one little fist on her hip and made as if to stamp a foot in a wee Scottish tantrum. But just as she lifted it off the sand, a long arm that might have belonged to a polo player grabbed her around the waist and scooped her up to hold her against a solid military thigh where she remained unbending and in full possession of her umbrella. The buffalo charged into empty space, looking foolish and disappointed.

Later that trip he must have met her. He must have heard her piercing little voice and seen her dimples and righteous blue eyes and pale protected skin. But the voice and the eyes desert him; he has no memory of them. He only remembers the untouched froth of her, the childish form of her, there on that mystic and desolate beach. He remembers her innocent and altogether misplaced lack of fear.

That was the charm. It was not the one his father meant to put on him, a bondage to the business of pearls. To pearls James became an ambivalent servant. To Miss McBean he became a slave, and remained so for many years to come.

The coffee was drained from their cups.

‘It’s all in the past,’ said James Lowinger. ‘You mustn’t be so interested,’ he chided, gently. ‘And not you, Vera, for certain. And a good thing it is that there are no pearls left in the oceans and rivers of the world, my darling,’ he said then with an irresistible and roguish look of tenderness. ‘You can be the first of our family to be free of it.’

Roberta fussed getting James Lowinger’s coat. He shambled to the door, this big man, and pulled his umbrella from the corner where he’d propped it, and paused on the step to open it skyward and herded Vera under it on to the street. She walked him carefully back to the warehouse. Fifteen minutes later, Vera stood waiting for the streetcar in the rain. The first in the family to be free of it. That meant the others were not free. Her grandfather was a captive, she saw that. His father too, from the sound of it: pearls were his religion. Her father must be a captive as well. It must be that which kept him in the Far East and away from her all her life so far. Even her mother, dead now, must have been a slave. The Lowingers were all that way, set apart. And so would she be. Vera Lowinger Drew: the last of a line of men and women whose lives were governed by the pearl. It was sad but glorious. She got off the streetcar and began to walk home. And now the pearls were gone, as the family was almost gone; it had come down to the two of them.

Or three.

She entered the house by the front door, throwing it behind her so that it slammed. Keiko emerged from the kitchen, smiling.

‘Vera.’ Probably she practised the name half the day. Vera was filled with scorn. She let Keiko take her bag. She could see behind her in the kitchen the shells and bowls of water that betrayed the various weeds and molluscs that would be her dinner.

‘Can’t we have meatloaf like everyone else?’

Keiko set the book bag on the side table. In her halting English she offered to learn how to make it, if Vera would teach her. Vera said never mind, she would only eat the rice. Rice was white and so was she.

Then she took her bag and went into her little room to read. Within an hour, the front door opened again and her grandfather’s step resounded in the little stucco house. Coming out to greet him, Vera was stopped by the vision of Keiko on her knees in front of him, pulling off his shoes. ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ she began to mutter, but the old man’s eyes, the one so bright and the other whitened, met hers and she subsided in shame.

And she went back to her room and did her schoolwork, biding her time, biding her time.

2

Ushiro

Attacking from behind

Two years passed this way. Vera, James, and Keiko. Now it was 1936.

Vera was thin, pale, and possessed of a ferocious will. Her features had sharpened, and her eye sockets were deeper. Her nose was longer, sharper, and had a bone. It was a patrician nose, her grandfather said, looking at it askance. ‘God knows you didn’t get it from me.’

Keiko tended to both her charges in the morning, seeing Vera off to school and bundling James to the streetcar to his warehouse. Then she washed every item that had been used since the night before; cutlery, dishes, towels, clothing. The fabrics she put out on bushes to dry, running out to collect them when it rained. Once her housework was done she too set out on foot, for the end of the street.

She went in the same direction as James Lowinger, but farther, down to the east end, to the shops in Japantown. Here she would learn the news about her country – never good, because of the war in China – and find the fish, radish, and seaweed she liked. She had a few friends there. One was a dressmaker who made tunics and jackets for Vera. The other was a fishmonger. She would return home before either Vera or James appeared. On the clothesline she pinned the squid to dry; it was transparent, at first, but slowly, as it hung, it turned brown. She cooked eels and little fish on a small charcoal burner on the back step.

She did not seem unhappy; she giggled often and ate heartily, smacking her lips. She smiled directly into the eyes of the neighbour ladies who had yet to think of one single thing to say to her other than, ‘Lovely morning isn’t it?’ They didn’t know what to call her; nobody had told them her name. So that when the first one, the most kindly, called her Mrs Lowinger and Keiko bowed in acknowledgement, that became her name. In this way Keiko was ensconced in the family and on the street. Days and weeks and months went by and Vera continued courting her grandfather and taunting his young wife, his not-wife. The word for Keiko, which Vera was to learn later, was aisho.

Vera was conscientious at school. She too had friends, ordinary girls in tunics and curled hair and rolled stockings; girls who were taking stenography courses and already had boyfriends. But like Keiko she did not like her friends to come to the house or perhaps they did not like to come to the house. Perhaps they had been told not to come. She was never certain. The girls didn’t tease her, just as the neighbours didn’t shun Keiko; that would be too obvious and they were all good Christians. They admired the old man they called Captain James. They were a little afraid of Vera: she was austere and thin. People did whisper that she had changed. It was an irregular situation, as her teachers said, in that house. They praised the girl for her English composition and her skill at volleyball. For being good to her grandfather. They did notice that she grew thinner and whiter (nothing but rice in that house!), and that she lost interest in her friends, and ran off to the warehouse every day when the bell rang. She’d taken it to heart they said, the death of a mother. What could be worse for a girl that age?

But Vera did not think of Belle. She did not, she believed, miss her mother. She could see past her mother now. Where once Belle had loomed, billowy and anxious-eyed, in the doorway between childhood and real life, now there was an absence, an exhilaration. The passageway was visible. Every day after school she parted from her schoolmates at the gate. She ran past the boys for the streetcar along Granville. On the boisterous streets of Gastown, still running, she neatly dodged little gangs of sailors and men with carpets braced over their shoulders and policemen who might ask her why she was at large. It was cold and the rain penetrated her coat; the sleeves were too short because she was growing so fast. The sky was glowering with low clouds; at the edge of the water in the reflected neon lights, red and green, bark and kelp floated on oily smears. She breathed in the air through her nostrils and felt free.

It would be twilight as she climbed the stairs on Homer Street. Through the fogged glass of the window in the upper half of the door she could see the green shade of Miss Hinchcliffe’s desk lamp. She tossed down her bag of books on the chair with the curved wooden arms and bade an offhand hello to Miss Hinchcliffe. Miss Hinchcliffe might have been about to leave for the night, but now that Vera had arrived she’d stay on. And from down the hall came the dry roll of her grandfather’s voice. ‘Is that you, Vera?’

‘It’s me all right!’ She shed the wet coat and hoisted it to the coat tree, and sitting in the captain’s chair, prised off her Oxfords one by one. In her sock feet she slid on the green linoleum to his door and peeked in. Her grandfather’s long narrow jaw seemed to hang a little nearer the blotter, as the curve in his spine deepened.

‘Hello, dear.’ He put his hands on the arms of his chair and pushed himself to his feet. He wavered halfway up, and then, with an extra push, stood.

She kissed his cheek. He smelled sweeter now. Like an old thing. It was death approaching, or maybe all the fish Keiko fed him. He smelled like a grandfather, not a sea captain. Of clean cotton and sweet tobacco and only a hint of the ocean.

‘Just let me deal with Miss Hinchcliffe and I’ll be back,’ Vera said.

Her presence at Lowinger and McBean had changed from being that of a visitor and a child to that of a watcher, and a keeper. Vera had adopted a bustle, as if she actually had jobs to do in the office. She stood in front of Hinchcliffe’s desk. ‘Did the shipment come in? Did he meet the man from Birks?’ She wanted to make sure that these visitors conveyed their needs to him, and not to the secretary.

Miss Hinchcliffe faced Vera with an ironic twist to her mouth. She protected the old man, but he refused to be endangered. Her expression said that Vera was a child and childhood was a phase; it would end, and she would go on to another passion, while she, Hinchcliffe would remain permanently on guard at her desk.

While Vera stood wishing she could get rid of Hinchcliffe. The secretary was like a foreign power. Her grandfather would find this ridiculous, of course. If she complained he would only chuckle; he would never say a word against anyone. He said the office couldn’t be run without her. Hinchcliffe sometimes complained of Vera as well.

‘She doesn’t need to come here day after day,’ the older woman said. ‘She’s taking up a great deal of our time.’

And James chuckled over that, too.

‘Did he have lunch?’ Vera asked.

‘He won’t eat the sandwiches,’ said Miss Hinchcliffe. The sandwiches came around every day from a man with a cart; they’d been coming to everyone in the block for years. ‘That Japanese housekeeper has got him used to noodles. That’s all he wants.’

Vera bridled. Keiko was Vera’s to insult, not Miss Hinchcliffe’s.

‘She is not the housekeeper,’ Vera said.

‘What is she then?’ said Miss Hinchcliffe daringly.

Vera ostentatiously let her jaw drop open. You dare to ask?

‘Does she not cook the meals?’ Implied was, such as they are. A long pointed stare at Vera’s concave midriff.

‘Yes,’ said Vera. ‘She doesn’t actually cook much. Mostly we eat raw fish.’ She said this to annoy.

Miss Hinchcliffe rolled her eyes. ‘It isn’t my place—’ she began, but Vera could see that she did think it was her place.

‘I don’t think that—’ Vera flipped her plank of long, thin, blonde hair.

No one finished what they began to say.

Vera retreated to the table where the woodcut prints were kept. Someone had put out a set of three. She wondered if her grandfather had been looking at them. Or if he had left them there for her to look at.

‘Did you see those?’ he said, appearing at the door of his office, poking his head in, his large sinking head with the handlebar moustaches still hoisted to the horizontal. ‘Quite lovely. You can spend plenty of time lost in there.’ Idly, as if it didn’t really matter, he turned away.

The three prints had been enclosed in a folder, which lay beside them. On the front of the folder was written, in fading blue ink, in a hand that Vera did not recognise, Three Views of Crystal Water.

James disappeared back into his office, telling her they’d go for coffee in a few minutes, and she was left alone with the pictures.

The first view was of a seashore, seen from the top of a dune, as if an observer were crouched there unseen. Near the edge of the water was a circle of women, standing and sitting. They had built a small fire and it was this that drew them together, as if they were warming themselves. They did not huddle and shiver, but stood, tall, and elegant, revelling in their beauty. The women wore only a loose fabric draped over their hips, leaving belly and breasts bare. They were wet, hair dripping down their bare backs. Around their feet were baskets.

It was strange to name this a view of water, because the women were the interesting part, an even dozen of them, with their gently curved arms and their modesty, which she could feel, despite their nakedness. There was a child with them. The child had a small string bag of shells in her hand and a little three-pronged rake. The child’s clothing matched the women’s red underrobes. They had all covered their heads with a white kerchief with blue leaves. They had been in the water and had come out, and these baskets held their catch, perhaps seashells, or fish, although Vera could see no means of catching fish in the picture.

Yet, she realised, as she continued to look, more than half the picture was water. It was flat and turquoise close in, and, where rocks stood up from the surface, transparent: you could see through to the base of the rocks beneath. But out from this shore, the sea reached from one side of the paper to the other and up to a flat horizon. There were waves drawn on it, hard white lines marching relentlessly one after another. The sea was not easy for the small boats that dotted it.

She put the print aside. In the second print the crystal water was black and without waves. The sky was dark, but Vera guessed it was nearly dawn. There were stars, like pricks of white; the artist had copied these stars into asterisks of white in the water as well. Two people, their faces hidden in travelling robes that half covered kimonos of orange and peacock blue, were on a graceful, arched bridge that crossed a stream of water. Drawn together by equal forces from opposite sides to the highest point of the arch, they seemed to tremble there. They were not facing, but back to back: each had walked a few steps past the other, as if they had tried to pass by, but could not. There was danger in the air, and yearning. The woman reached back, a long tapered hand emerging from her robe; she handed the man a letter.

Vera gazed long and hard at this one. It was a very satisfying picture, with the deep black and the royal blue, and the orange patterns of both the kimonos, and the white letter changing hands. Whatever secret was here was successfully passed; she felt relief.

She lifted that print and put it to the side, revealing the last of the three.

In the third view, there had been a catastrophe. It was snowing and the ground was white. But on the horizon, far back in the picture, a pagoda was in flames, turning the sky orange. A road wound through skeletal trees from the gates of that pagoda down to the centre bottom of the picture, and on that road were two hooded women. One was on horseback; the other stood beside her. They wore black and white cloaks with pointed black hoods that draped over the sides of their faces, half concealing them. The mounted woman held a long spear with a curved blade. Vera understood that she would journey through danger, and must protect herself and her younger charge. Behind them, outside the pagoda gate, was a fearsome warrior in laced armour, brandishing his sword. He was their scourge, or their protector. His skirts flew up revealing thick legs in sandals, and the scabbard from his curved sword.

At first Vera didn’t see the crystal water. But there, under the snow-laden branch of a tree was a stream. Unfrozen, the water bubbled over rocks. Aside from the roaring of the flames it would be the only sound. The women would follow its path to safety.

Vera wondered who had named these Three Views of Crystal Water’. The pictures belonged together, and therefore they must tell a story. But it was not clear where the story began.

She stared at the three prints, making up a story that would put them in order. Twelve women went to the seashore to fish and were seen by a stranger. The stranger fell in love with one of the women; but she was promised, or bound. Her trusted servant met him in the dead of night and gave him a letter telling him to go away, that all was lost. However, he would not go away. Instead he set fire to the pagoda and killed everyone in it except the woman and her servant, who escaped, while he watched over the destruction he had wrought.

‘Ready!’ called James.

That day, they made their way down the few steps, next door to the flatiron building where Roberta presided, the Captain stepping gallantly but perhaps a little more slowly than the season before. Vera could see Roberta turn to warn the waiting others. Because by now it was known on Homer Street that the old merchant would come in. And he had an audience. There was the hatter, and a printer with inky hands, and another few traders, in rugs and fabrics. There was Kemp who also traded with Japan, and sometimes his son. There was Malcolm the mailman, if he’d finished his run. Vera and James nodded to the gathered audience, and went to their booth. Roberta’s fierce hand with her damp cloth swept across the table; they watched her midriff at eye level against the tabletop and heard her voice asking what they would have.

‘The usual,’ James said. And then exclaimed ‘Wet!’ with fresh surprise, as if it had never been wet before. ‘Wet today, Roberta.’ He surveyed the other coffee drinkers, now studying their napkins or gazing out of one window or the other to one street or the other. ‘Quite a crowd here today! Afternoon, Kemp.’

‘If it isn’t Lowinger, of Lowinger and McBean,’ said Kemp. ‘Where’s that son-in-law of yours? I heard he was in Madagascar. No, it was Marrakesh.’

They slid into their chairs. Vera was conscious that they made an odd pair, the old man and the girl.

‘I don’t know,’ said her grandfather. ‘He hasn’t been home for some time. Since…’ his voice trailed off. He always stopped talking when Belle or Hamilton Drew came to his mind. Soon after their marriage, they had moved here. Drew had been given the task of keeping the portside office open. The idea was to branch out from pearls. Canadian Pacific had plenty of steamships going to Japan and coming back with imported goods. Smart merchants bought them and divided them up and put them in new packages and sent them on. It was not easy to lose. But Hamilton…

Vera tried to picture her father. Was he part of her distant childhood? It seemed to her there had been a pram, and a sweet tooth for toffee. ‘I turned around and he was absent.’ That’s what her grandfather said about his own father. She remembered her mother crying.

This time James kept talking. ‘The trouble with my son-in-law,’ he said dramatically. He knew he had an audience. ‘The trouble is he was too late.’

‘Too late for what?’

‘Just too late. For everything. He’s an imitator. Never had a thought of his own. Never could go his own way. Like the real people do.’ He sputtered to a stand still. Then he started again. ‘The trouble with your father was he was Scottish.’

Vera laughed at that one. Just one more reason her grandfather gave for not liking him.

He peered at Vera. ‘You’re thin, you’re pale, too, young lady. Are you eating properly? You know Keiko makes very good meals.’

Vera smiled primly.

‘You don’t want to be sickly.’

Unspoken words to follow were ‘like your mother’.

She was branching out too, from white food. She ate the Danish: it had white icing at least. She bit into it.

He laughed his pebbly laugh, the one she had come to love, the one of true mirth – as opposed to the other, hollow draining that was not a laugh but a view of the world.

He sipped his coffee. He had developed a tremor, and it spilled in the saucer. ‘You’re not going to try to get me to talk about pearls today.’