The Phoenix Tree

Keith Cairns was that rare man, an academic with the proper flair for courting a woman. He was forty-two years old, roughly good-looking, had had no wives but a succession of mistresses and, at his first sight of Natasha, decided then was the time to settle down with a wife, one who would also be his mistress. He was a romantic, which was one reason he had become an agent for MI6, and though he did not sweep Natasha off her feet, since she was on her back beneath him when he asked her to marry him, he overwhelmed her with his passionate persistence. She married him for a variety of reasons: she liked him; she had a sudden, if fleeting, yearning for respectability; she knew that the war in Europe would soon spread to Asia. Keith Cairns told her that Japan would probably enter the war, but that he, and she, would be safe in Tokyo.

‘Tokyo is my home,’ he told her, ‘even though I’m a Scot. I live there and I’ll probably die there because, whatever the Japanese have done outside Japan, in their own country I find them honourable and admirable and I want to go on living amongst them.’

Later she would find that frame of mind at odds with his being a spy; but then she would also find him a mixture that, because of his early death, would always remain a puzzle to her. He was kind and cruel, romantic and hard-headed, daring and cautious; he was a mass of contradictions, which perhaps was why the Japanese, a nation of contradictions, liked him and he them. But he loved Natasha as none of her patrons ever had and eventually, but too late, she loved him. She took over from him as an MI6 agent as belated payment for what he had meant to her. Having no country of her own, she was neither friend of Britain nor enemy of Japan. She was, as Keith Cairns had been, a romantic, seduced by the thought of danger, trying to prove, without any hope that the proof would be made public, that life for her was more than bed, board and baubles. She was, in the most hazardous way, still looking for respectability.

‘I got some extra fish on the black market,’ said Yuri Suzuki, coming up from the village. ‘But we are running out of money.’

She was a round little woman, a dumpling spiced with iron filings; Natasha had never discovered her age: she could have been anything between forty and sixty. She had been Keith Cairns’s housekeeper for five years when he had brought Natasha home; they had met like two wives over the still-warm body of a bigamist. But when Keith had died, Yuri had, as if there was no longer anything to fight over, abruptly changed her attitude; she had taken over as Natasha’s surrogate mother. Short-tempered, ungracious, she nevertheless had a motherly instinct she could not deny: she had a need to take care of someone.

‘I have nothing else to sell,’ said Natasha.

She had already sold the jewelry that her admirers in Hong Kong had given her. She had always kept it hidden while Keith had been alive, not wanting to remind him blatantly of what she had been before she had met him. After his death she had brought it out and, piece by piece, had found buyers for it. Now all she and Yuri had to live on was the small pension that the university, with punctilious regard for its dead professor, still paid her. Keith had died after a bungled operation for appendicitis, a mundane death for an agent, and the university authorities had suffered a loss of face in that it was one of their own medical professors who had performed the fatal operation. The pension payment arrived each month like a penance.

‘You should ask your friends to send money.’

Yuri knew of the short-wave radio hidden in the secret cellar of their house. She had never made any comment on Cairnssan’s extracurricular work as a spy, as if it were just another bachelor’s peccadillo, on a par with his drinking and his bringing home women who were no better than they should have been. When Natasha had taken over the broadcasting, Yuri had continued to make no comment, treating it as if it were the normal pan of running a household. Natasha sometimes felt uneasy about her, but she had no alternative but to trust her.

‘Yuri, how can they do that? Cable it to the General Post Office? One hundred pounds payable on the order of the British Government?’

‘They should pay you for what you are doing,’ said Yuri stubbornly. She was not thinking of the risk, but only of the actual work being done. ‘Work should be paid for.’

‘You sound like a trade unionist.’ Natasha had learned from Keith, a born Tory, of the blight one could find in Britain.

‘What’s that?’ sniffed Yuri, and on the other side of the world Keir Hardie and company went on strike in their graves.

Then Natasha saw the local sergeant of police and a stout man in civilian clothes coming up the path towards them. Nayora was a private resort village that had been developed by a group of upper-middle-class professionals just before World War One: government officials, lawyers, doctors who did not want to have to mix in their holiday time with the rapidly expanding lower middle class. All the villas stood in what had once been carefully tended gardens; now, in the present war, one elderly gardener ran an arthritic-gaited race against galloping grass and exploding shrubs. Some of the old families still lived here, though they did not mix with the alien residents who had been foisted on them. Nayora had always been a law-abiding community and even with the advent of the aliens the authorities had seen no need to enlarge the village force of Sergeant Masuda and his rather dull-witted constable.

Sergeant Masuda, who had got where he was by being obsequious, almost contorted himself in his deference to the man he brought to the gate of Natasha’s villa. ‘Major Nagata is from Tokyo, a very important man. We are honoured that he should visit us.’

Nagata, who wrote bad poetry, saw all this as snow falling on Mount Fuji: praise, if taken with proper grace, can only make a man look better. He smiled at Natasha as if to make her feel she was properly honoured by his arrival. ‘Mrs Cairns, forgive my manners. I should have warned you I was coming. But, unfortunately, in my profession warnings are often misunderstood. Or taken advantage of.’

‘What is your profession, Major Nagata?’

‘He is from the kempei,’ said Sergeant Masuda, rolling his eyes as if he were introducing one of the Kuni-Tsu-Kami, the gods of the earth.

‘It is difficult for the secret police to be secret when one is accompanied by a Greek chorus,’ said Nagata. ‘Go and arrest someone, sergeant. Leave me alone with Mrs Cairns.’

Masuda backed off with a bow that bent him double, then went lolloping down the path with his peculiar loose-kneed gait. Nagata looked after him, then turned back to Natasha and Yuri.

‘You may dismiss your servant.’

Yuri snorted, showing what she thought of the police, secret or otherwise, then, without a bow, she turned and marched up into the house. Nagata looked after her too.

‘Does she give you any trouble?’

‘If she does, I tolerate it.’ Natasha felt far less comfortable than she sounded. ‘What do you want, major?’

It suddenly struck her that, for all his fawning towards Nagata, Sergeant Masuda had taken a grave risk in identifying the secret policeman. The kempei was never spoken of openly; certainly not between an official and a woman like Natasha. The sergeant owed her nothing and she wondered why he had put himself at risk by warning her who Nagata was. Did he know about the radio set in the secret cellar?

‘Do you have a pass to leave Nayora, Mrs Cairns?’

‘Yes, a twelve-hour one, once a week. I report to Sergeant Masuda before I leave and when I return.’

‘Where do you go to?’

‘To Tokyo.’

‘What do you do there?’

‘Go shopping, mostly.’

‘On the black market?’ He smiled, to show he did not think it was a major crime. Though his teeth were not coated, they had a yellow tint, like an old man’s.

‘Of course.’ She also smiled.

‘Do you visit anyone? Friends?’

She thought of only Professor Kambe as a friend; the others had been friends of Keith’s and still tolerated her, mainly because the men amongst them admired her beauty and some of them, she knew, had dreams that some day she might be their mistress. Her vanity was very clear-sighted, enabling her to see others’ weaknesses as well as her own assets.

‘Some people at the university.’

‘Some who work for the government and the military?’

‘They may.’ She knew exactly who did; but she was certain that Nagata also knew them. She had the sudden feeling that he knew all about her, that his questions were designed not to give him information but to trip her up. ‘But you know, major, that men never discuss their work with women, especially women who are not their wives.’

‘Did Professor Cairns ever discuss his work with you?’

‘Never. He was Scottish – they are as bad as the Japanese. Do you discuss your work with your wife?’ She was uneasy, but she had always believed that attack was the best form of defence. Especially if it was accompanied by what Keith used to call her whore’s smile. In his cruel moments he could be as loving as a rugby forward, which he had once been.

‘Hardly,’ said Nagata, with a policeman’s smile. Then, still showing his yellow teeth, like a bamboo blade, he said, ‘Do you ever visit a woman called Eastern Pearl?’

Natasha frowned, wondering where this question was supposed to lead. ‘Eastern Pearl? Is she a geisha or some sort of entertainer?’

‘You might call her an entertainer. She is the mistress of one of our military leaders, General Imamaru. I thought you must have heard of her. People gossip about her.’

Natasha had indeed heard of the woman, but had paid no heed to the talk; Tokyo, she guessed, was like all capitals in wartime, full of mistresses. They were part of the fortunes, or misfortunes, of war, a compensation, for those who could afford them, for rationing and other inconveniences.

‘I’ve heard of her vaguely. But my friends in Tokyo are not the sort who gossip.’

‘Oh? I thought gossip was a major discipline amongst university people.’

‘You never went to university, major?’ Natasha had been well coached by Keith: she recognized the prejudice.

‘Just once,’ said Nagata. ‘In Mukden. To arrest one of the professors.’

‘I hope you got a good pass.’ She knew she was being impolite, keeping this policeman out in the cold waste of the garden, but she could not bring herself to invite him into the house.

‘I think so. The professor was executed.’ Nagata was enjoying the company of this young woman, though he wished she would invite him into her house. He did not like standing out in the open; he suffered from agoraphobia, the disease endemic to secret policemen. ‘I believe you have Swedish papers, Mrs Cairns.’

The change of tack was too abrupt. Natasha felt that her eyes must have squinted, as if she had been slapped. ‘Ye-es …’

‘Your father was Swedish?’

Three months after he had brought her to Tokyo, Keith had come home one day with the papers. She had had none up till then other than a badly forged British passport given her by one of her benefactors in Hong Kong. She had queried Keith where he had got the papers and why she should be Swedish.

‘Because before very long Japan is going to be in the war and if you and I are separated it will be best if you are a neutral.’

‘But why should we be separated? If they send you back to England, why won’t you take me with you?’ For the first time she had wondered if England was like Hong Kong, where driftwood, no matter how beautiful, was not displayed in the best houses.

‘I’ll take you with me, darling heart – if they send me back—’ It was another year before she had learned of his espionage work. ‘In the meantime you had a Swedish father – a ship’s captain—’

‘Swedish? But I have black hair and brown eyes—’

Physical features Major Nagata now remarked upon: ‘You don’t look Swedish, Mrs Cairns.’

‘My father came from the far north, Lapland.’ Keith had told her to say that; she had no idea whether Laplanders were blond or brunette. ‘Or so my mother said. I never knew him.’

‘No, of course not.’ Nagata was accustomed to liars; the secret police could be reduced by half if everyone told the truth. He did not resent the lying: he did not want to be put out of a job. He sighed contentedly, assured of a continuing supply of liars, including this charming one. ‘Mrs Cairns, we have made a few enquiries about Eastern Pearl. At one time she was married to an Englishman named Henry Greenway. We also have a file on you, courtesy of the Hong Kong police. They left so many things unattended to when we took over from them.’ He made it sound as if the conquest and rape of Hong Kong had been a business merger. ‘The file shows that your father was not a Swede. He was Henry Greenway and you were born in Shanghai, which was where Eastern Pearl married Mr Greenway and then left him.’

Natasha felt as if she were about to shatter into small pieces. She turned slowly, afraid that her legs would buckle under her, and went up the short wide steps to the verandah of the house. Beneath the steps she imagined she could see the small hole in the stone foundations through which she ran the aerial cable when she was broadcasting; everything was suddenly enlarged in her mind’s eye, the hole a gaping tunnel into which Major Nagata was about to push her. She led Nagata into the house and into the drawing-room. She sat down, waited for Nagata to take off his overcoat and seat himself opposite her. It struck her, oddly, as if her mind were seeking distraction, that he was the first man to sit in that particular chair since Keith died.

‘I’ve shocked you, haven’t I, Mrs Cairns? What did that? Finding out that we know all about you?’

It had been partly that; she had never really thought about how efficient the secret police might be. But the major shock had been learning who her mother was. She had often thought of her mother, but her father had brusquely silenced any questions she had asked. He had let slip that her mother had deserted them both but he had told her no more than that. As she grew up she had dreamed of some day meeting her mother, who would be a rich beauty, perhaps a Mongolian princess who had run off with a Rumanian oil tycoon; the reunion would be tearful and happy and very profitable for herself, since she also dreamed of a rich life. Now the thought that she might be about to meet the woman who could be her mother had the chill of a dream that could prove to have gone all wrong. She was a tumble of curiosity, puzzlement and fear; but so far the thought of love hadn’t entered her mind. She had always guarded against harbouring any love for a ghost.

‘I suppose I should have realized that eventually you would know all about me.’ Sitting down, she felt a little stronger: there is great strength in the bum, Keith used to say. Sometimes she had thought a lot of his philosophy had come from a rugby scrum.

‘Oh, we’ve known about you ever since Professor Cairns died.’

Natasha played for time. She called for Yuri to bring some saké, heard a grumpy response that told her the old woman would bring the drinks but in her own time. Natasha did not offer Nagata tea because that would have meant some ceremony and she was determined to keep his visit as short as possible.

She turned back to him. ‘I know nothing about this woman Eastern Pearl.’

‘Mrs Cairns, I am not suggesting you do. Madame Tolstoy knows nothing of you, I’m sure.’

‘Madame Tolstoy?’

‘It is the name she prefers to go by when she is with General Imamaru. It was down in Saigon, where he met her, that she was known as Eastern Pearl. Some people still use it about her in Tokyo. The gossipers, that is.’

‘I’ve only heard the name Eastern Pearl, never Madame Tolstoy.’

‘We must ask her if she has ever used Mrs Greenway.’

Yukio Nagata was an opportunist, a random spinner of webs. Not many babies are born to be secret policemen; he had been one of the very few. At school he had majored in intrigue; so devious was he that he was captain of the school before his fellow students realized how he had achieved it. Drafted into the army for his compulsory military training, he had spent more time studying the officers commanding him than on rudimentary military drill. When he was called back for service in Manchuria he had enough contacts to have himself placed in the secret police. If he had to fight a war, better to be out of range of the enemy. He had come to the conclusion that the present war was going so badly that Japan could not win it. So he had begun to gather evidence, most of it unrelated, that might stand him in good stead if and when the Americans came to claim victory.

‘Are you suggesting, major, that I go and meet this – this Madame Tolstoy – and ask her if she is my mother?’

Round her the house creaked, as if it had shifted on its foundations; she felt that she had no foundations herself. The house was like her, a hybrid, part-European, part-Oriental. It had two storeys and had been built by a doctor who had lived in Germany for four years before World War One; there was a heaviness about it that made it look like a tugboat amongst the yacht-like villas that surrounded it. Inside, the furniture was heavy and dark; the beds were meant to accommodate Valkyries rather than doll-like geishas. Till Keith Cairns had been sent here for internment everything about the house had dwarfed everyone who had stayed in it. Still, Natasha had been fortunate to be able to keep the house for just herself and Yuri and not have other internees forced on her.

‘I shouldn’t want you to force yourself on this woman.’ Nagata carefully arranged the creases in his trouser-legs. He usually wore uniform but today, calling on a beautiful woman, he had decided that his dark blue suit, bought at an English tailor’s in Shanghai, would make him look less threatening and more presentable. Besides, he was not here on official business. ‘I’d have thought you’d be curious to know about your mother.’

‘She may not be my mother,’ said Natasha, more stubborn against the prospect than against him.

‘True. But I have seen her, Mrs Cairns – you haven’t. I assure you there is a distinct resemblance between the two of you. She is a very beautiful woman. So are you.’

‘Thank you.’ His intimacy told her how confident he was. But then the kempei were perhaps always confident? ‘No, I need time to think about it.’

‘Of course.’

Yuri brought in the drinks, prompted more by curiosity than a desire to please. She looked at Natasha for some hint of what was going on, but Natasha was too preoccupied with her own thoughts to take any notice of her maid’s curiosity. Yuri shuffled her feet for a moment, gave a loud sniff and went back into the house.

Nagata sipped his saké. ‘It would be better, Mrs Cairns, if you didn’t think about it too long. You could be very useful to me.’

‘How?’

‘If Madame Tolstoy is your mother – and I’m sure she is – if you could be reunited with her, there could be advantages for both of us. In return for any gossip you could pick up in your mother’s circle, I can arrange that you have a pass to go into Tokyo any time you wish. That would help, wouldn’t it? I mean if you want to buy a few things?’

Food had become very scarce in the past few months and the ration available in the village had been barely enough to ease Natasha’s and Yuri’s hunger. There was a general shortage of food throughout the country, but the alien internees had been the worst hit. Without the food they had managed to buy on the black market, Natasha and Yuri would have gone hungry more than half the time.

‘I can’t buy anything if I have no money, major.’ She was stating a fact, not asking him for money.

He misunderstood her; or pretended to. He took a silk handkerchief from his pocket and opened it to show a heavy gold bracelet. Natasha recognized it at once; it had been given to her by a Chinese admirer in Hong Kong. She had sold it three months ago for three hundred yen, less than a third of its value.

‘I’ll continue to hold this as – shall we say, as collateral? I could have you arrested, Mrs Cairns, for dealing on the black market. I know every piece you’ve sold and what you got for it.’

‘Everyone does it. I mean, buys on the black market.’

‘Not everyone, Mrs Cairns, only those with spare cash. A lot of people commit murder, but it’s still a crime. So is dealing on the black market, whether buying or selling. I don’t want to see you in jail – you would be no use to me there. But if you just make yourself useful …’

‘You want me to spy for you?’ She suddenly wanted to laugh at the irony of what she was saying, but managed to restrain herself. All at once she no longer felt in any danger, Major Nagata was no longer threatening her.

‘If you want to be melodramatic – yes.’ He carefully wrapped the gold bracelet back in the handkerchief and put it away in his pocket. ‘I’ll see that you should not go hungry. Food for gossip.’ He chuckled at his play on words and Natasha gave him the smile he expected. ‘We’ll meet once a week and you can tell me what you’ve heard. It should not be hard work for you. It may even be enjoyable, if your mother welcomes you. Life at General Imamaru’s level is very comfortable, I’m told.’

Natasha had begun to feel a certain excitement at the prospect of meeting her mother after all these years; but she could not feel any enjoyment. She hesitated, then took the plunge, into the past as well as into the future: ‘I’ll work for you, Major Nagata. But I’ll need money. I am penniless.’

Nagata smiled at her without smiling, then he took out his wallet and handed her a fifty-yen note. Years of corruption had taught him that his bank account had to have a debit as well as a credit side; he suffered the debit side because less went out than came in. He reached across and dropped the note into Natasha’s lap, a further gesture of intimacy that told her exactly where she stood; or sat. She was his servant.

‘We’ll agree on the terms after your first month’s work, Mrs Cairns. In the meantime that will be enough to be going on with. If your mother welcomes you to her bosom, I’m sure she will also welcome you to her table.’

He stood up, all at once became formal. He bowed, gave her a yellow smile, said goodbye. She escorted him but of the house and he went down the steps, walking with the light step of a man half his weight and one who had got what he had come for.

Yuri came out on the verandah. ‘I was listening. He is a dangerous man. You should not encourage him.’

‘It’s not a question of encouraging him. Did you also hear what he said about my mother?’

‘Yes.’ Yuri was tough-minded, as one should be who wants to be a surrogate aunt. She tightened the sash of her brown work-kimono, making the action look as if she were tightening a noose round someone’s neck. ‘I had better come with you when you go to meet her. You will need my advice.’

She was a proprietary servant. She would have made a good trade union official. She went back into the house, leaving Natasha to contemplate the darkening day and, possibly, an even more darkening future. The chrysanthemum bushes were like twisted balls of faggots. The maple tree beside the house was a many-armed crucifix. Out on the bay, on the leaden sea under the leaden sky, the fishing-boats, sails furled, looked like floating scarecrows in fields that no longer had crops. She felt utterly depressed, though not afraid.

She had never felt afraid of the future; living the life she had led, she had accepted there was only tomorrow to worry about. To think further, to next year, or the next ten, would have spoiled the present; even Keith’s unexpected death had brought no fear of what might lie ahead. She could be afraid, terribly so, but the cause and its effect had to be immediate. She wore dreams like armour.

‘Ah well,’ she sighed, and folded the fifty-yen note Nagata had given her and put it in her pocket. At least she would be well fed if and when she went to meet her mother. She practised the word, but could hardly get her tongue round it: ‘Mother … ?’