The Crane Wife (8 page)

She was smaller than average without actually being
small,
long dark hair cascading down to her shoulders, pale brown eyes watching him, unblinkingly. He couldn’t have put a finger on her nationality just then if you’d asked him. She wore a simple white dress, the same colour as the coat draped over her non-suitcase carrying arm, also like a train-bound forties heroine. Finally, she wore a small red hat perched on the top of her head, an anachronism that somehow fit with all the rest.

Her age was as difficult to fix as her origins. She looked younger than him, possibly thirty-five? But as he stared at her, his speech momentarily having left him, something about her stance, something about the
exact
simplicity of her dress, about the steady eyes still watching him, seemed suddenly from a figure out of time: a lady of vast estates and influence during an ancient Scottish war, a dauphine dispatched to marry in the wilds of South America, the patient handmaiden to a particularly difficult goddess . . .

He blinked, and she was a woman again. A woman in a simple white dress. With a hat that looked both ninety years out of date and a harbinger of the latest thing.

‘Can I . . . ?’ he finally managed to say.

‘My name,’ she said, ‘is Kumiko.’

No one in the twenty-one year history of the print shop had opened an order this way. George said, ‘I’m George.’

‘George,’ she said. ‘Yes. George.’

‘Is there something we can help you with?’ George said, very, very much not wanting her to leave.

‘I was wondering, please,’ she said, lifting her small case up to the counter, ‘if you could possibly offer advice on how best to print facsimiles of these.’

On closer inspection, the suitcase looked both as if it was made out of paper and as if it was the most expensive piece of luggage George had ever seen. She opened it, undoing small leather straps, and pulled out a stack of large card tiles, each roughly A5-sized and each one black, similar to some of the ones George used for his own book-cut creations.

She set five of them down, one by one, in front of George.

They were pictures, evidently her own work from the way she regarded them, that odd artist’s combination of shy and bold, so expectant of a reaction, good or bad. On one level, they were nothing more than pictures of beautiful things placed against the background of a card. But on further viewing, on a deeper look . . .

Good Lord.

One was a watermill, but nothing nearly so twee as ‘watermill’ suggested. A watermill that seemed to be almost turning from the brook that ran through it, a watermill that existed not in fancy but somewhere specific in the world, a real watermill, a
true
watermill, near which the great and terrible tragedies of life might have recently happened. And yet also merely a watermill, too, and pretty with it.

There was a dragon in the next one, partially Chinese in style but with the wings of European myth, caught in mid-flight, its eye staring back at the viewer in malevolent mischief. Like the watermill, it was on the border of kitsch, of the sort of tourist tat you could buy for next to nothing from a street vendor. But it didn’t cross that border. This dragon was the one those fake dragons dreamed of being, the meaty, heavy, living, breathing animal behind the myth. This dragon might bite you. This dragon might
eat
you.

The others were the same, so near easy vulgarity, yet so clearly not. A phoenix rising from the bud of a flower. A stampede of horses cascading down a hill. The cheek and neck of a woman looking away from the artist.

They should have looked cheap. They should have looked tacky and home-made. They should have looked like the worst kind of car boot sale rubbish, the work of a plump, hopeless woman with no other options than an early death by drink.

But these. These were breathtaking.

And what tumbled George’s heart, what made his stomach feel as if he’d swallowed a fluttering balloon, was that they weren’t drawings or carvings or paintings or watercolours.

They were cuttings. Each was made with what looked like slices of an impossible array of feathers.

‘These are . . .’ George said, unable to think of exactly what to say, so he simply said it again. ‘These are . . .’

‘They are not quite there yet, I know,’ Kumiko said. ‘They lack something. But they are mine.’

She seemed to hesitate in the face of George’s intense consideration of the pictures. He looked at them as if he were a kidnap victim and they were his long-sought ransom. He felt as if he was losing his balance, as if vertigo had given his ears a thump, and he raised his hands to steady himself on the counter.

‘Oh!’ Kumiko said, and he saw her smiling down at his left hand.

There was his own cutting, utterly dismal, painfully amateur in comparison, still gripped in the hand that had tried to hide it from Mehmet. He moved to hide it again, but her eyes were already on it, and they weren’t scornful, weren’t mocking.

They were delighted.

‘You’ve made a crane,’ she said.

She was from ‘all over’, she said when he asked her over dinner that night, and had been a sort of teacher. Overseas. In developing countries.

‘It sounds noble,’ she said. ‘I do not want it to sound like that. Like some great woman offering her services to poor, adoring unfortunates. Not at all. It was not like that. It was like . . .’

She trailed off, looking into the dark wood panelling that overpowered the ceilings and the walls. For reasons he couldn’t fathom, George had taken her to a self-consciously old-fashioned ‘English’ restaurant, such as men in morning suits might have eaten at anywhere from 1780 to 1965. A small sign above the door read ‘Est 1997’. He’d been surprised she’d accepted his invitation, surprised she’d been free at no notice whatsoever, but she said she was new to this place and not, at the moment, overflowing with friends.

She’d used that word. Overflowing.

‘The teaching,’ she said, furrowing her brow, ‘the
interaction
, I should say, was like a hello and a goodbye, all at once, every day. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Not even a little,’ George said. She spoke in an accent he couldn’t place. French? French/Russian? Spanish/Maltese? South African/Nepalese/Canadian? But also English, and possibly Japanese like her name but also neither or any, as if every place she may have travelled hadn’t wanted her to leave and insinuated itself into her voice as a way of forcing her to take it along. He could understand the feeling.

She laughed at him, but nicely. ‘I do not like talking of myself so much. Let it be enough that I have lived and changed and been changed. Just like everyone else.’

‘I can’t ever imagine you’d need changing.’

She pushed some roast beef around her plate without eating it. ‘I believe you mean what you say, George.’

‘That was too much. I’m sorry.’

‘And I believe that, too.’

She’d had a relationship, perhaps even a marriage, that had ended at some point, though it didn’t seem amicably so, like his had with Clare. She didn’t want to talk about that either. ‘The past is always filled with both joy and pain, which are private and perhaps not first date conversation.’

He’d been so pleased she’d called it a ‘first date’ that he missed several of her next sentences.

‘But you, now, George,’ she said. ‘You are not from here, are you?’

‘No,’ he said, surprised. ‘I’m–’

‘American.’ She leant back in her chair. ‘So you perhaps do not quite belong either, do you?’

She said she’d taken up the cuttings on her travels. Paints and brushes were too hard and too expensive to truck around from place to place, so she’d first started using local fabrics – batiks or weaves or whatever was to hand – and had moved, more or less by chance, to feathers, after coming across a market stall in Paramaribo or Vientiane or Quito or Shangri-La perhaps, that sold every colour of feather you could imagine and beyond, some concoctions so unlikely they hardly seemed to have come from an animal at all.

‘And looking back on it,’ she said, ‘what an impossible market stall to find. Feathers are difficult to source, and expensive. Yet here they were, pinned to the walls of a poor market seller in melting heat. I was bewitched. I bought as much as my arms could carry, and when I went back the next day, the stall was gone.’

She took a sip of mint tea, an odd thing to have with roast beef, but she’d declined all offers of the red wine George was desperately trying not to drink too quickly.

‘Your pictures are . . .’ George started, and faltered.

‘And again, the sentence you cannot finish.’

‘No, I was going to say, they’re . . .’ Still the word failed him. ‘They’re . . .’ Her face was smiling, a little shy at an incoming critique of her work, but beautiful, so beautiful, so beautiful and kind and somehow looking right back at George that to hell with it, in he went, ‘They’re like looking at a piece of my soul.’

She widened her eyes a bit.

But she didn’t laugh at him.

‘You are very kind, George,’ she said. ‘But you are wrong. They are like looking at a piece of
my
soul.’ She sighed. ‘My as yet incomplete soul. They lack something. They are nearly there, but they . . . lack.’

She looked into her cup of tea as if what she lacked might be there.

She was impossible. Impossibly beautiful, impossibly talking to him, but also impossibly
present
, so much so that what else could she be but a dream? The soles of her feet must be hovering a centimetre above the ground. Her skin would turn out to be made of glass that would shatter if touched. Her hands, on closer inspection, would be translucent at the least, clear enough to read through.

He reached forward impulsively and took her hand in his. She let him, and he examined it front and back. There was nothing unusual about it at all, of course, just a hand (but
her
hand,
hers
) and, embarrassed, he set it back down. She didn’t let him go, though. She examined his hand the same, looking at his rough skin, at the hair that gathered so unattractively across the backs of his fingers, at the nails chewed too short for too many decades to be little more than buried tombstones at his fingertips.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She gently let him go and reached into the small suitcase, placed down by her chair. She took out the small cutting of George’s crane, which she had asked if she could have at the shop. She held it in the palm of her hand.

‘I wonder if I might perform an impertinence,’ she said.

The following day was a nightmare. Retrieving the kitten t-shirts from the Brookman party had proven surprisingly difficult as they’d taken an equally surprising liking to them.

‘What’s funnier than ten army officers wearing way-too-tight light blue t-shirts with a wanking kitten on the front?’ Brookman had said on the phone.

George could think of any number of things. ‘It’s just that the O’Riley Hen Party were sort of
counting
on them. They’re personalised to each member’s–’

‘We know! We’ve already divvied up the names. The Best Man is
definitely
Boobs.’

George had ended up having an in-town t-shirt printer do a rush job at his own exorbitant expense to reproduce another batch for the hen party and hoped to God they hadn’t found any sudden EasyJet bargains to Riga as well. Mehmet, meanwhile, was feigning stomach illness to try and leave early, which he regularly did on Friday afternoons, and George had also spent the entire day toiling over the almost literally incredible news that Kumiko had yet to acquire a mobile phone that worked in this country, so he had no way of calling or texting her, or obsessing over calling or texting her, or obsessing over
not
calling or texting her and had reached a point of near-implosion about having nothing but her word that he’d ever see her again.

When, of course, in she walked.

‘My impertinence,’ she said, laying the suitcase on the front counter.

She removed her feathered tile of the dragon: white, tightly woven strands of feather and stalk on the plain black background.

And beside the dragon, she’d affixed his cutting of the crane.

‘Holy shit,’ Mehmet said, seriously, peering over George’s shoulder. ‘That’s amazing.’

George said nothing, because if he spoke, he would weep.

‘It’s a picnic,’ Amanda said the next morning, handing JP over to George in a pile of biscuit-smelling flesh.

‘
Grand-père
!’ JP shouted.

‘Bit cold for a picnic, isn’t it?’ George asked, after he’d kissed JP and taken him inside. Amanda followed him in but didn’t sit down.

He saw her glancing at the papers and clothes and books galore that made his sitting room not the most obviously child-friendly place in the world. It didn’t matter. JP adored George, and George adored his grandson. They could have been stuck in prison and made a day of it.

‘Not for Rachel and Mei,’ Amanda said.

‘Rachel?’ George asked.

‘You remember,’ she said. ‘The girl from work who came to my birthday a few months back. Mei, too. Both pretty, both vaguely evil-seeming. Rachel more so.’

‘Yes,’ George said, bouncing a giggling JP up and down in his arms. ‘I think I remember them.’

‘We sit in the sun. We look at boys. We drink wine.’

‘Sounds nice.’

‘They hate me. And I think I hate them.’

‘I met someone,’ he said, so quickly it must have been obvious he’d been holding it in. ‘She’s called Kumiko.’

Amanda’s face froze for a minute. ‘All right.’

‘Came into the shop. We’ve gone out the last two nights. And again tonight.’

‘Three nights in a row? Are you teenagers?’

‘I know, I know, it’s a lot all at once, but . . .’ He set JP down on the sofa, burying him in dusty, old cushions so that he’d have to escape, a game JP
loved.

‘But?’ Amanda asked.

‘Nothing,’ George shrugged. ‘Nothing. I’m just saying I met a nice lady.’

‘All right,’ Amanda said again, carefully. ‘I’ll pick him up before four.’

‘Good, because–’

‘Because you’ve got a date, gotcha.’