The Phoenix Tree

That night she made her monthly report to the US Signal Corps station in the Aleutians. She said she had nothing to report, but the station had a message for her. A man would soon be on his way to Japan and would contact her on arrival. His code name was Joshua. She took down the message, decoded it and sat wondering at how, on this otherwise ordinary day, the world was suddenly contracting.

2

‘One should never waste one’s time trying to impress those lower than oneself,’ said Professor Kambe. ‘One should only try to impress one’s peers or above. That, as the commercial men say, is where the dividends are.’

Natasha had heard this sort of mock heresy at parties at the university, but she had not expected to hear it in a house as grand as General Imamaru’s. The small group of men round the professor, however, raised their whisky glasses and laughed at his wisdom. One or two of them glanced at her to see how she had responded, but she kept her face blank and moved away to a safer distance; from the moment she had entered the general’s mansion she had felt she was under intense scrutiny. Her beauty, her different beauty, was a handicap, like an ugly birthmark; she was an outsider, the one foreigner in the room. Except for Madame Tolstoy, who had greeted her politely and without surprise.

‘We are pleased that Professor Kambe has brought you, Mrs Cairns. My friend, General Imamaru, is a great admirer of what your late husband did for Japanese art history. When Professor Kambe asked if he might bring you, the general was delighted.’

Natasha had been in a dilemma for several days before hitting on the idea of asking Professor Kambe if he would take her to a reception where she might meet Madame Tolstoy. She had shied away from the idea of going direct to Madame Tolstoy and introducing herself; the woman might just have refused to see her. Alternatively, if Madame Tolstoy had agreed to see her, there would have been no prior opportunity to study her and decide if she was a mother worth claiming. In the present circumstances there was as much decision in accepting a mother as deciding to be one, a sort of reverse pregnancy.

‘Why do you want to meet her?’ Professor Kambe was a widower, in his sixties and susceptible to pretty women. He had studied at Oxford and Heidelberg and had some Western attitudes; but he came of an aristocratic family and if anyone thought critically of him, they did not voice those thoughts. It was he who had brought Keith Cairns to Tokyo University and he had maintained an avuncular interest in Natasha since Keith’s death. ‘She is just another one of General Imamaru’s fancy women.’

‘I understand she is the one.’

‘Well yes, I suppose so. She has lasted longer than most. But you still haven’t told me why you want to meet her?’ He looked at her reproachfully. Though he knew nothing of Natasha’s background, he guessed that, since Keith Cairns had never mentioned it, it was not impeccable. ‘I hope you are not looking for a model.’

Natasha tried to blush, but she had had difficulty doing that even as a child. ‘Of course not, Kambe-san. It’s just curiosity, that’s all. I have heard so much gossip about her …’ Though she had never been disrespectful towards Kambe, she had never been able to practise the ‘respect language’: it always lay on her tongue like a mockery. So she spoke to him as she had always spoken to men, on their level but with just a hint of flattery when it was necessary. Though she knew that a woman’s flattery always put her above the man. ‘And she is like me, an outsider.’

He had smiled understandingly: like a true aristocrat he knew that most of the world was made up of outsiders. ‘Tomorrow night then. General Imamaru is having a reception for a fellow general who has just come back from a glorious retreat somewhere in the Pacific’

She was never sure whether to smile or not at Kambe’s sardonic comments on the military; he came of a family that had supplied generals to the army for several centuries, but he seemed to have an academic’s contempt of them; perhaps that was why he and Keith had always got on so well together. But she was not prepared to take the risk of sharing the joke.

Now, at the reception, she moved round the room towards where Madame Tolstoy was seated with two of the generals’ wives. This was Natasha’s first venture into Tokyo’s high society and she was surprised at the lack of respect for the Palace’s austerity policy. There was none of the depressingly drab dress one saw everywhere else; Professor Kambe had warned her that she did not need to look as if she were on her way to work in a coffin factory. Most of the women wore kimonos, but several of them, the younger ones, were in Western dress. Natasha had been careful about what she wore, choosing one of her more discreet dresses, a peach-coloured silk that threw colour up into her cheeks. She had come in by train from Nayora in the standard dress of baggy trousers and quilted jacket. She had brought the silk gown and her fur coat with her in a large cloth bag and changed at Professor Kambe’s house.

Madame Tolstoy had also been discreet, though she had not been prepared to take discretion too far for fear of being disbelieved: she wore what could only be described as a missionary version of a cheong-sam. It was not too tight, the slit in the leg was not too high: even a priest would only have been aroused to venial sin.

Madame Tolstoy introduced her to the two women, one of whom was the wife of the general who had beaten a glorious retreat in the Pacific. She had the look of a woman who knew what a retreat, glorious or otherwise, was. The other woman, plump and pale as a thick rice ball in her kimono, was the wife of yet another general. Natasha felt like a novice camp follower.

‘Mrs Cairns lives out at Nayora,’ said Madame Tolstoy. ‘She is so fortunate to be away from Tokyo. She is interned there.’

‘How nice,’ said the first general’s wife and looked as if she wished she might beat a retreat to Nayora.

‘I’d be just as happy here,’ said the plump wife and looked around the large room where they sat. General Imamaru’s mansion had been built for the general’s father by a Japanese apostle of Frank Lloyd Wright’s who had lost his nerve. Cohesiveness seemed to dribble away in corners; solidity and fragility confronted each other like figures in a Hall of Crazy Mirrors. The general had not improved the interior by furnishing it with what appeared to be a furniture album of his travels; some day it might be preserved as a museum of bad taste. The plump wife loved it. ‘I don’t know why you don’t move in here, Madame Tolstoy.’

‘One has to be discreet,’ said Madame Tolstoy, and looked as coy as only a madame could. ‘General Imamaru prefers me to live in the house across the garden.’

‘Did you furnish the other house yourself?’ said Natasha. ‘I have heard you have beautiful taste.’

‘People are so complimentary,’ said Madame Tolstoy, and looked at her with benign suspicion.

‘I should love to see it.’ Natasha saw the other two women look at her with sudden cool disapproval. She knew she was being forward and disrespectful, but she was speaking to another outsider, not to them. Still, she backtracked, if only for Madame Tolstoy’s sake: ‘That is, if I should not be rudely intruding.’

She had spent the last half hour studying her alleged mother and had decided that she had to know more about her, even at the risk of – what? She had not even begun to contemplate her future with a newly-found mother. But she sensed now that Madame Tolstoy was puzzled and intrigued by her. Could it be that the mother in her had already recognized the daughter?

‘Come to my house later,’ said Madame Tolstoy. ‘General Imamaru wants the ladies to retire early. He and the other gentlemen have matters to discuss.’

Natasha smiled her thanks, bowed to the three older women, though not as low as their position deserved, and moved away. She had never been able to bring herself to descend through the various bows of respect; a slight inclination of the head, more European than Oriental, was as far as she ever went. Though, if ever she met the Emperor, which was as unlikely as meeting God, she knew she would go right to the ground, even if only to save her neck. Having turned her back on the God the nuns had given her, she was still amazed at the reverence the Japanese gave to the Emperor.

She found a seat, a monstrous Victorian chair looted from a house in Hong Kong, and took note of the gathering; after all, she was supposed to be a spy, working for two bosses. She had never been to a reception as top-level as this, not even with Keith. Here were men who ran the country and the war. She recognized, from photos she had studied, Admiral Yonai, who was bigger than she had supposed and who seemed to be the life of the small group surrounding him; he was the Navy minister and had just been appointed assistant prime minister, but he looked as if he had no more worries than running a home for pensioned sailors. She saw others: Admiral Tajiri; the War minister General Sugiyama; Prince Mikasa, a brother of the Emperor: a bomb on this house tonight would be an exploding fuse that would blow out most of the power of Japan. She caught snatches of conversation from the various groups of men and was shocked at the frankness; defeats and retreats were being discussed here as they were never told to the public. She thrilled at the prospect of what she might hear and then pass on to the wireless operators in the Aleutians. But for this evening she had the more immediate, personal problem that had brought her here.

The groups of men began to break up and Professor Kambe came across to her. ‘You have been a success, Natasha. All the men were most complimentary.’

‘I did nothing but stand around.’

‘It was enough. Military men, unless they are using them otherwise, like their women to stand around like regimental runners.’

Natasha glanced around nervously. ‘One of these days, professor, the military men will stand you up against a wall and shoot you.’

‘Possibly. Unless they are too busy avoiding being shot themselves by the Americans.’

‘Are they all as pessimistic as that?’

But Professor Kambe wasn’t going to stand himself up against the wall; he knew when enough was enough, especially in a general’s own house. ‘Don’t worry your pretty head about it. Shall we go?’

‘May I be excused, professor? Madame Tolstoy has asked me over to see her house.’

He gave her a quizzical look. ‘Is that wise? You don’t want the gossips painting you with the same brush they’ve used on her.’

‘I shall be careful, Kambe-san.’ She was grateful for his concern for her. With other men in other lands, she would have put a hand on his arm; but not here, not with so many in the room watching them. Such an intimacy would offend, though not Kambe himself. ‘Thank you for bringing me.’

‘Report to me tomorrow.’ He was not a gossip, but he enjoyed hearing it. Like sex, it is one of the pleasures of all classes. ‘And do be careful.’

How else could one be with a probable mother who was an almost total stranger? ‘I shall be.’

A servant took her across the garden to Madame Tolstoy’s house. The garden was large, one of the largest in the Koji-Machi district. Close to the Imperial Palace, which the Americans had evidently decided should not be bombed, General Imamaru’s mansion and the smaller villa of his mistress were as intact as they had been since first built. Water trickled into pools, suggesting tranquillity; the white stones of the paths were raked each day so as not to offend the general’s eye; a gardener worked here all day every day, as if flowers were an essential crop. But even as she walked through the garden, Natasha wondered if the general, from tonight’s conversation, really believed it could all last.

Madame Tolstoy was waiting for her in the villa. The gossip about her taste was true: the rooms were an ideal marriage of comfort and formalism. Madame Tolstoy had learned from her travels, had done her own looting of ideas.

There was a man with her, Colonel Hayashi. Natasha had seen him at the reception, standing in the background, never intruding on any of the groups; she had assumed that he had been an aide to one of the generals. He was tall and muscular, a man who looked as if he would enjoy the physical side of life. But it would not be an extrovert enjoyment: his face would show nothing, even his eyes had a bony look.

‘Colonel Hayashi has been admiring you all evening. He wanted to meet you.’

Dammit, surely she’s not a procuress, too?

But if Colonel Hayashi had designs on her, he did not show them. In a soft yet harsh voice he said, ‘Why haven’t we seen you before, Mrs Cairns?’

‘I am interned out at Nayora. I am allowed only one pass a week to come into Tokyo.’ That was not true: she now had Major Nagata’s promise of a pass any time she wished it. ‘I usually spend the day with friends at the University.’

‘We must see you more often at General Imamaru’s.’ He glanced at Madame Tolstoy, who tilted her head as if to say ‘maybe’. Natasha wondered if he was Madame Tolstoy’s lover; then she further wondered what General Imamaru would think of that. ‘You are a close friend of Professor Kambe’s, Mrs Cairns?’

She hedged on that one, suddenly wondering if he was one of Major Nagata’s superiors from the kempei. But if he were he would not be wearing his present uniform; he was on the General Staff. ‘The professor was a close friend of my husband.’

Hayashi nodded; not understandingly but more as if he appreciated a shrewd noncommittal answer. He gazed steadily at her for a long moment, then abruptly picked up his cap from a nearby table and bowed to both women.

‘I must be going,’ he said and left, going out so quickly and without ceremony that he might have been alone when he had decided to leave.

Thrown off-balance by his abrupt departure, Natasha blurted out, ‘Who is he?’

‘A friend,’ Madame Tolstoy had not even glanced at the door through which Colonel Hayashi had disappeared. She stood very still and composed, the straight lines of the cheong-sam seeming to accentuate her stillness. ‘The point is, Mrs Cairns, who are you?’

It was a frontal attack and it made up Natasha’s mind for her. All evening she had been wondering how she would approach Madame Tolstoy about their relationship. At every opportunity, when she had felt she herself was not being observed, she had looked closely at the other woman. She could see a resemblance to herself: they had been cut from the same fine but strong bone, their lips had the same fullness (‘inviting kisses’, Keith had said of hers), each had a trick of holding her head so that the curve of the neck was gracefully emphasized. Only the eyes were different: Madame Tolstoy’s had more slant to them, they were darker and more calculating. Natasha did not think her own were calculating, but the last thing one ever did was look deeply into one’s own eyes. Or at least she never had, and now she wondered if it had been cowardice, not wanting to see the truth.

‘Madame Tolstoy, did you ever know a Mr Henry Greenway in Shanghai?’

It was as if they had collided, though the older woman did not move. But the impact was there in her face, the eyes were no longer calculating: they had had a calculated guess confirmed. Her lips thinned, then she nodded.

‘You’ve been troubling me all evening. Yes, I knew Henry. You’re his daughter.’

Natasha had had no experience of motherhood or mother love, but she had not expected an answer like that. As if Madame Tolstoy, or Mrs Greenway, or whatever she had called herself in those days, had been no more than a vending machine, delivering a baby like those chocolate machines one found on railway stations. She laughed, though she did not feel in the least humoured.

‘Yes, I’m his daughter. And yours too.’

It only struck Natasha later that, though neither of them wanted the relationship right then, neither of them denied it. Lily Tolstoy was capable of emotion, though for most of her life she had manufactured it as the occasion demanded. But she had never experienced an occasion like this, indeed had never even contemplated that it might arise. She had occasionally thought of the child she had abandoned, but never with a true mother’s regret or grief. But now, if only for the moment, she felt what she had once felt, just as fleetingly, for Henry Greenway.

They had been speaking Japanese, though neither of them was really comfortable in the language. Now abruptly Lily said in Mandarin Chinese, ‘Do you want some tea?’

‘Not if we have to go through the ceremony,’ Natasha replied in the same language. She was amused that her mother should have reverted to her native language, as if it was the tongue she had taught Natasha at her knee. Since Lily had deserted her when she was only three months old, it was hardly likely they had exchanged any intelligible words. ‘Let’s have it English style. As a gesture to Father.’

Lily’s face had been almost masklike; but now she smiled. She liked ironic humour: she wore it as armour, to protect herself against some of the knights who had pursued her. She rang a bell for a servant. ‘English tea it shall be. I believe I have a tin of Earl Grey somewhere.’

She led Natasha into a side room furnished with the proper austerity of a tasteful looter: some French elegance from a banker’s home in Saigon. Only the walls were Japanese: Natasha, who had learned a little from Keith, recognized the two Sanraku prints. It was not a room for a warm reunion, and Natasha was glad.

‘General Imamaru treats you well,’ she said, looking about her.

‘He is charming.’ Never so much as when he was absent. Lily had early recognized the general’s drawbacks, but he was a general and he had wealth. One, not even a high-class mistress, could not ask for everything. ‘Mrs Cairns? That means you were married?’

‘My husband is dead. He worked with Professor Kambe. Father died too, you know. He was killed in 1938. A warlord up in Sikang shot him.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ For a moment Lily was indeed sorry; not that she would miss Henry but that he should have died violently. He had never been a violent man. ‘I liked Henry. I just should not have married him. If your husband is dead, what do you live on?’

‘A small pension.’ And, as of this week, an informer’s pay from Major Nagata.

‘You’re very beautiful,’ said Lily, and for a moment felt slightly queasy with a mother’s pride. ‘You could do better than that.’

Natasha had never thought of herself as a whore; consequently, she did not think of herself as a reformed whore. So she did not feel sanctimonious, a consequence of reform. ‘Possibly – do you mind if I call you Mother?’

‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ said Lily. ‘I’d never get used to it. Call me Lily.’

Natasha didn’t mind the rejection. She was still trying to sort out her feelings. She assumed she would have felt differently had her mother proved to be something like the romantic figure she had dreamed of; she might even have settled for one of the dull, motherly exiles from the Home Counties she had seen in Hong Kong. She could not, however, come to terms with the acceptance of Lily Tolstoy as her mother, though she knew now that it was a fact.

A servant, who must have had water boiling on call, brought in a silver tea service and exquisite bone-china cups and saucers: more loot. The tea was poured, without ceremony, and Lily offered a silver salver of Peek Frean’s biscuits. Henry Greenway would have felt right at home in the family circle.

‘I think I’d rather wait till the end of the war before I start accepting any favours,’ said Natasha. ‘My late husband taught me to take the long view.’

‘You think Japan will lose the war?’ Lily sipped her tea, little finger raised: she was a good secondrate actress.

Natasha took a risk: after all, Lily was her mother. Besides, tomorrow Major Nagata would ask her what she had learned and she would have to give him something for his money. ‘I listened to the men’s conversation this evening. None of them sounded optimistic.’

‘Natasha—’ It was the first time she had called her by name; it suggested she was prepared to be a little more intimate. ‘You probably have guessed what my life has been. Mistresses can never afford to take the long view. It is myopic for one to think one can.’

Natasha munched on a cream wafer; it was stale, but it tasted fresh and sweet to her after the years of wartime rations. ‘So what will you do when the war ends? If Japan loses?’

‘I still have my looks and my talents.’ She had those, but no modesty. ‘American generals, presumably, have mistresses.’

‘Does General Imamaru know how you feel?’ She sipped her tea, one pan of her mind thinking of Keith. He had admired the Japanese style of living, but he had had a Scotsman’s love of strong, sweet tea.

‘Of course not.’ Lily put down her cup and saucer and looked sternly at her daughter. ‘I can understand that curiosity brought you to see me. But what had you in mind to follow? Blackmail?’

‘Mother!’ said Natasha mockingly. She felt suddenly at ease, deciding that she felt no love, not even repressed, for her mother. ‘Of course not. As you say, it was curiosity …’

‘Are you disappointed in me or not?’

‘Ye-es,’ Natasha said slowly; she had had her dreams for so long, if only intermittently. ‘I used to picture you as a Mongolian princess who had run off with a Rumanian oil tycoon. Some day I was going to meet up with you on the French Riviera.’

Lily smiled. ‘How flattering. I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you.’

Natasha put down her cup and saucer. ‘I’d better be going. I have a long way to go, out to Nayora.’

For the first time Lily felt the situation was slippery. ‘If we go on seeing each other …’

Natasha wasn’t sure that that was what she wanted; but she had another role to play besides that of spurned daughter. She would never get another opportunity like this to move in the higher circles in Tokyo. She thought not of Major Nagata, but of Keith, who would have jumped at this same opportunity.

‘Perhaps I could be your niece. Would General Imamaru believe that?’

‘General Imamaru makes a pretence of believing anything I tell him.’ She knew her men: she never believed anything they told her. ‘I think he finds it easier, it leaves his mind free for problems of the war. The question is, will the women believe it?’

‘The generals’ wives I met this evening won’t. They’d wonder why you didn’t introduce me as your niece at once.’

‘True. But if General Imamaru accepts you as my niece, then they will have to.’ She had never bothered herself with respectable women’s acceptance of her. ‘Who is there to contradict us?’

No one but Major Nagata and the commandeered Hong Kong police files. ‘As you say – who? Goodnight – Lily.’

‘How are you getting back to Nayora?’

‘By train. The last one goes at 10.30.’

‘I can’t have a niece of mine going all that way at night by train. A moment—’

Five minutes later Natasha was being driven back to Nayora in one of General Imamaru’s two staff cars. The car had to go up a long curving driveway past General Imamaru’s mansion to reach the gates. As it went past the wide steps leading up to the mansion she saw Colonel Hayashi coming down the steps with General Imamaru. Their heads were close together and Hayashi seemed to be doing the talking. She wondered if he was telling the general about her.

The driver, fortunately, was not talkative. He sat up front as isolated from her as he would have been had he been driving General Imamaru; she was glad that army drivers knew their place. She had him detour to Kambe’s house, where without disturbing the professor, she collected the cloth bag containing her everyday clothes. She did not, however, change into them: that would be a too immediate drop from being Madame Tolstoy’s ‘niece’.

She lay back in the car, exhausted by emotion and the evening. Now, belatedly, she felt a deep disappointment at meeting Lily Tolstoy; she had really hoped for someone more like a mother. She was not disgusted at her mother’s profession; she knew as well as anyone that in the Orient of the Twenties and Thirties any woman of mixed blood had to make her way as best she could; flexible morals only improved the opportunities. She was, however, deeply disappointed (not hurt: that would have implied some sudden love on her own part) that Lily had shown no affection for her at all. She was not a sprat, to deserve such a cold fish of a mother.