The Phoenix Tree. Jon Cleary
‘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.
3
Tom Okada had had great difficulty in persuading the servant woman to allow him into the villa. To begin with, he was not accustomed to dealing with servants. The Okada household in Gardena, California, had had a cook and a woman who came in every day to do the chores; but he had never had to assert any authority over them and he had looked on them as part of the family. When he had graduated from his law studies at UCLA he had gone into the office of the nursery and run the business side for his father; the nursery by then had forty employees but it had always been his father who had given the orders. Faced this evening with a tiny servant, and a woman at that, as obdurate as a career army sergeant, he had felt for a while that he was fighting a losing battle. Then he had said, in a moment of inspiration, that he had been a student of Professor Cairns.
Yuri had eyed him suspiciously, but at least she had stopped shaking her head. ‘Then why do you wish to see Mrs Cairns?’
‘I have some information for her.’
Ever since the appearance of Major Nagata, Yuri had been doubly wary. Was this good-looking young man also from the kempei?
‘Where have you come from?’
‘A long way.’
The distance had been nothing compared to distances in America; but he had had to change trains twice, waiting a long time in each case. Once he had had to walk six miles; the railroad tracks had been bombed out. As he had got further down out of the mountains he had seen more and more evidence of the American bombing; the war was being brought right home to the Japanese. He was tired and hungry and it was after dark before he reached Nayora.
‘I haven’t eaten since midday,’ he said.
Yuri was torn between suspicion of the stranger and the thought of offending the ghost of Cairns-san, the one man she had come close to loving. At last she stood aside and gestured for the stranger to come into the villa. Later, she