Dreaming Spies (12 page)

“One cannot talk about English literature without mentioning William Shakespeare, and he is indeed one of my choices. The other is Matthew Arnold, a poet who captures, not a Romantic vision of England, but one in which intellect wrestles with doubt and faith.”

She spoke for a quarter of an hour, and although she kept her eyes on the pages before her for much of the time, when she looked up, it was mostly towards the side of the room where our Japanese passengers sat. I was not sure if this was good manners, or for fear that the sympathetic eyes of the English would loosen her composure.

She was no scholar, but nonetheless spoke quite competently on the freedom and dedication to the intellect in Arnold’s “Scholar Gipsy,” glancing at Miss Sato as she made note of the similarity between Arnold’s poem and the ever-wandering Bashō.

For her prose work she chose
Henry V
, probably because the shipboard reading-aloud group was working through that play. Here, her impromptu attempt to link her talk with Miss Sato’s was less than successful since, unlike Murasaki’s
Tales of the Genji
, the
Henry
marriage theme is little more than a tune played to the drums of war. Fortunately, she abandoned the analysis and returned to the idea of her cousin, a junior officer (and yes, how many of those had died on the Front!) who shaped his picture of being a leader of men around that one glorious prologue to action, where Henry’s fearful army is buoyed by his presence:

Upon his royal face there is no note

How dread an army hath enrounded him …

That every wretch, pining and pale before
,

Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks;

A largess universal, like the sun

His liberal eye doth give to every one
,

Thawing cold fear …

A little touch of Harry in the night
.

She described a letter in which cousin Edward spoke of his keen desire to give his men even a pale imitation of Henry’s comforting touch. Then a second letter, this one from the regimental sergeant after Edward’s death, to say how good the young officer had been with his men. No one was snoring when Lady Darley finished. The applause that rang out was fervent, and her colour was high—although curiously there was no sign of tears in her eyes.

After the room had cleared, I approached Miss Sato. “I’d like to put my name down for borrowing the Murasaki book,” I told her. It had been claimed within seconds of the talk’s end.

“Certainly,” she said. “But in the meantime, this is for you.” She handed me a small, cheaply printed booklet called “A Travel-Worn Rucksack.” “I saw it in a stall in Singapore, and thought you might enjoy it.”

I opened it, and read:

Kono michi ya

Yuku hito nashi ni

Aki no kure
.

All along the road

Not a person is walking
.

Just autumn’s evening
.

“The first poem is one of the last Bashō wrote. The rest of the book concerns a trip he made along the Kisokaido Road, that still connects the Shogun’s capital, Edo—now Tokyo—with the Imperial capital of Kyoto. For Bashō, the road was both a way of life and a … how you say, paradox?”

“Paradigm?” Although paradox, too, perhaps.

“Paradigm, yes. In Buddhism, the road and the Way are the same.”

“That is true in other religions as well,” I told her. “In the Christian Bible, Jesus calls himself ‘The Way.’ Literally, the path.”

“You have an interest in religion, Mrs Russell?”

“It is my area of academic interest. Mostly Western religion, but I look forward to seeing something of the East as well.”

Miss Sato smiled. “You will find Shinto and Buddhism difficult to miss, in Japan.”

I thanked her for the book, and went in search of my own partner on the Way.

“Lady Darley did have to explain it a bit, for the Japanese speakers,” I was telling Holmes, later that afternoon. He had been in the Marconi room catching up on the latest in wireless technology—for once, his clothes were not impregnated with coal dust. “Although the thing that confused them most was, who is Harry? She ended up admitting she didn’t know how the English get ‘Harry’ or ‘Hal’ out of ‘Henry.’ ”

“Not being an expert in Medieval English,” Holmes commented. “But overall, you got the impression of her distress being something by way of a performance?”

“Not performance, exactly, although eight years is a long time to mourn a cousin. I would say that the emotions themselves might be genuine, but she does not care to lay them out for the appraisal of
hoi polloi
.”

“Although she will present them in a manner suitable for her audience.”

“Many women hide behind a public face, Holmes. Particularly women who marry into a position.”

The third overheard conversation took place following tea that same afternoon, when I carried the day’s grammar notes to a quiet corner where I might enfold a few more verbs into my brain. The sun deck, up at the top, tended to be less popular in the heat of the day, and even when the sun was going down, it was still too exposed for anyone who wanted to be fresh for dinner. Still, there was a shelter, and some of those chairs were free. I chose one near a trio of older women, who were sure to go down to change for dinner soon, leaving me in peace.

I greeted them politely, took the furthest-away chair to indicate that I was not actually joining them, and settled down with my notes.

Their voices quieted politely for a few minutes, but it was only a matter of time before a mosquito-buzz of a voice rose above the endless grumble of the engines, the sing of the wires, and the flutter of the flags overhead, drilling itself into my ear and pushing aside the verbs.

“… my
dear
husband, on one of his trips to Manhattan—or was it Chicago? Or maybe Philadelphia. Oh, he took so many trips, he used to joke that it was the
only
way he could get away from my voice, what a
jester
the man was, it made him friends all over! What was I saying?”

“Your hand-mirror.”

“Of course! Silly me, the
mirror
. So anyway, Bertie used to bring me a little something after his trips—not the short ones, of course, but whenever
he was gone for a night or two—and they were always
quite
lovely. Sometimes not very useful, he never could remember what size I wore, but thoughtful. And so one time it was this pretty little silver hand-mirror that he said reminded him of the silver brush he’d brought me a month or two before, which was
silly
because he’d never given me a brush, and when I teased him and said it must have been some other wife he gave it to he got
very
cross and tried to take the mirror back, but of course I just laughed at him and told him that he must have been
thinking
of buying me a brush, so of course he did so the next time he went to Manhattan, or maybe that was Atlanta, and that was
very
pretty, too, even though the bristles were really too soft for my hair, although come to think of it, maybe it’s not as thick as it was then, I should give it another chance when I get home again.”

She paused for breath, and her companion obediently gave her another nudge. “So what’s happened to the mirror? Did it break?”

“The mirror? Oh, no! It isn’t
there
. I mean, it
must
be somewhere, of course, but for some reason it’s not on my dressing-table. I sat down this morning to do my face and reached for the mirror, and I had such a start, because there on the table in place of the mirror was a little tennis racquet
instead
! Can you
imagine
?”

My eyes, which had been drifting shut under the soothing prattle, snapped open. She let loose a peal of brittle laughter that lifted the hair on my neck.

The poor woman was terrified. She thought she was losing her mind, and hastened to raise a wall of words against the fear. No doubt she’d done so all her life, using endless chatter to protect herself from the suspicion that her husband did in fact have another wife, that he travelled not for business or escape, but because something in those cities drew him. Now her nervous babble pushed back the suspicion that she had absent-mindedly exchanged two objects that shared a vague outline, and never noticed.

Her friend stoutly rejected the notion, made reassuring noises, and distracted her with a cheery question about the ship’s hair salon.

I folded away the pages and turned to look at the trio: the jolly one
was plump and emphatically groomed; the fearful one reminded me of Miss Sim, that long-ago tutor who’d got me through the Oxford entrance examinations. The third woman, stout and younger than the others, said nothing at all, either then or later.

“I beg your pardon.” I interrupted the jolly woman’s description of a disastrous permanent wave involving toxic chemicals and near-electrocution. “I couldn’t help overhearing something about a tennis racquet. Was it child-sized? With black tape on the handle?”

The frightened one’s eyebrows went high. “Yes! Is it yours?”

“No, but I overheard a boy talking about one that he’d misplaced. Perhaps he …” What? Went into a stranger’s cabin and traded his beloved racquet for a hand-mirror? “Perhaps one of the stewards made a mistake. Which cabin are you in?”

She looked pathetically grateful at the idea that her faculties weren’t at fault, and told me at length where her cabin was, how few children there were among her neighbours, what the hand-mirror looked like, and what her husband had said upon giving it to her. I cut her off before we could get into any further detail, shook their hands, and hastened away lest things grow any more complicated.

Yes, coincidences did occur. But three overlapping puzzles in such a short time suggested more beneath the surface of shipboard life.

It was time to hunt a poltergeist.

I hurried down the aft staircase and up the corridor to our rooms. To my surprise, Holmes was already there, and moreover, almost fully dressed, although dinner was not for another hour. He preferred a solitary drink in the cabin to the sociable scrum.

“Holmes, there is something—”

“—odd going on, I know. What have you heard?”

I gave him a quick review of the troubled lady. He frowned, dubious.

“Why would anyone replace a silver looking-glass with a child’s tennis racquet?”

“Exactly.” One thing Holmes had taught me well: the power of an enigmatic statement. He was not impressed, but picked up his tie and turned towards the more prosaic looking-glass bolted on the wall.

“It is more likely that your lady is indeed losing her grasp on both her possessions and reality.”

“I would agree, but for the ghost in the bilges and the lad’s missing tennis racquet. Don’t you think—?”

“—that it calls for a few judiciously placed questions? Yes. Hence my intention to take cocktails with the masses.”

Birds on the high wires
,

Chattering wind in the lines
,

Take flight in the dark
.

Cocktail hour was well under way, a wall of merriment and perspiring bodies. We split up, Holmes fixing his eye on our resident community of retired colonels while I ingratiated myself into a cluster of young wives. Both groups looked at us askance, since we were newcomers into these centres of social intercourse, but both promised to be rich sources of shipboard gossip.

My merry girls became a touch self-conscious at the addition of a person who had formerly given them wide berth, but a quick joke and a high-pitched giggle confirmed that I was nearly as tipsy as they. We were soon embarked on a hilarious conversation about the
oddest
things that can happen onboard a ship like this—honestly, one would never
think
that a possession would just
migrate
like that, or one might see a person in
such
an unlikely place, or …

As I maintained the mask of Young Thing, I was aware of Holmes’ voice booming among the retired males: something about racing stock.

The dinner bell was rung; the cacophony poured down the staircase towards the dining room. Holmes and I met in the centre of the now-deserted
lounge to compare notes. Eliminating probable duplicates, we ended up with the following:

1. A shadow seen among the lifeboat divots