Page 46 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

The Countess smiled, full of sympathy. ‘I said I’m feeling ill, not pregnant. I’ve got this absurd hacking cough I never get rid of til midday, it’s absolutely undignified.’

Takiko laughed and felt disproportionately relieved. She liked the theatre and the actors in their own tetchy way, liked talking to patrons, liked Mori, but Mori was more of a beautiful creature that lived in the same house than he was a husband. She saw him sometimes, and he still came up for tea in the attic at the Shintomi on Saturdays, but like he’d promised when they were first married, there wasn’t much else to it. He could be sitting just opposite, but he was still as separate as a siren watching from underwater. She had been sad about that for a while, more than she had expected. It meant she never came first for anybody, least of all the people who she would have liked to put first. Until, that was, she got talking properly to the Countess, who had come backstage once and congratulated her and asked if could she possibly have a copy of the play script to read. Ever since, even though Takiko wasn’t half as clever or half as funny, the Countess had shown every sign of putting Takiko first.

For the second time that evening, the Countess glanced down at the floor beside the table. Her accounting ledgers were there.

‘Are you really going to do it?’ Takiko asked. Mori had warned them earlier that the finance people from the Ministry were coming.

‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘I’m tired of living with a drunk.’

‘Well, cheers. To a long, long prison sentence.’

The Countess nodded and smiled, but she didn’t repeat the toast. Later, when she looked back on that moment, Takiko had an unbearable feeling that the Countess had known full well it could never go her way.

The doorbell rang half an hour later. Kuroda’s wife didn’t give Suzuki time to go, and answered it herself; she had a habit of treating any house she was in as her own kingdom. Home Ministry auditors liked their late-night visits. Kuroda was tempted to go out to them and ask if they expected to find a smoking ledger called Naughty Deals about his person, but that would have been dignifying them with the time. His wife simpered at them in the hallway. The auditors kept their answers to yes and no.

‘Just bring them in,’ he snapped towards the corridor.

The auditors were respectful, but not as much as they could have been, emanating clerkly precision and faint distaste to be standing under the sword over the door, the one he had taken as a souvenir for Mori when the Koreans surrendered. They wanted to look at some records. He told them that obviously the records weren’t here. They wanted him to go back to Tokyo. He said no. They wanted to talk. He said in the morning. But his wife hummed and hovered, and said ‘I wonder if …’ a lot, always trailing off into ellipses, and then produced the folders in a bundle and offered earnestly to make the auditors some tea while they read in the side office.

Kuroda wondered why he hadn’t just locked her in the attic instead of letting her set up here.

‘I don’t suppose you charmed them into buggering off, did you?’ he asked when she came out, trying to cover how much he wanted to demand why the hell she would feel the need to hand the ledgers over to Ministry auditors without a warrant.

‘Oh, no,’ she laughed, one hand over her mouth. She always pulled her sleeve well over her knuckles and it made her look like a schoolgirl. He didn’t know why women imagined men found that appealing. He couldn’t think of anything less worthwhile. ‘They seem awfully serious.’

Mori stood up and started to get between them like he always did, lifting his hand to brush her sleeve. But before he could touch it, he stopped and clenched his fist, then sank back against the wall. He looked sick. He must have decided he was going to have to let them have it out at some point, if he didn’t mean to spend the rest of his life shepherding them in opposite directions. The absence of the usual safety net made Kuroda feel odd.

‘So you just gave them everything?’

‘Well, it seemed much better not to try to hide anything.’

It was moronic even for her. ‘Fuck’s sake, girl – do you want to get me arrested?’

Her expression flickered, and then he understood. She did. Of course she did. She would love for him to be in prison and not blundering around her nice house, behaving like a commoner and trooping through with all his cheap, common friends.

Of course she didn’t have the guts to tell him to his face to get out of her house. He would have, if she’d done that. It was her house. But instead she’d run here and cowered behind Mori and Mrs Pepperharrow, and now she’d come up with this slimy little slug of a plan to stab him in the back.

She ran like she walked, knees turned inward and pigeon-toed, because the hems of her kimono were all fashionably narrow. Any normal person would have just torn the dress to run properly, especially when he went after her. But she didn’t. She kept on in that way and crumpled when she tripped. He picked her up again and banged her onto her feet and shook her. She wasn’t stupid. She wrote poetry, beautiful poetry. But she always pretended to be brainless, and he hated it, hated it like everyone hated concealed weaponry, and he had never understood why she had to pretend and sneak when there were people like Mrs Pepperharrow who showed you all their guns and gave you decent warning before they blew you out of the water.

On the back of his neck was an awareness that Mori hadn’t run out to stop him. All there had been from Mori’s direction was a thump that sounded like he’d punched the wall.

‘Don’t run away from me, you little coward. Explain why you thought telling them everything would be the clever thing to do,’ he hissed.

‘Oh, but you see, I thought it would be for the best. After all we have nothing to hide—’

‘No you didn’t! Just admit it! Just say it, you bloody worm, tell me to my face!’

‘I’m sure I don’t know what—’

He only meant to give her a bang on the head. When he questioned himself later, again and again, usually in the middle of the night, he was certain that was true. He had not meant for it to happen. He’d meant to hurt her, yes, give her a shock, jolt her into some kind of common sense. But he was drunker than he’d thought, and the base of the tumbler in his hand was heavy. It broke her skull. After she had collapsed onto the floor, he stared. The blow hadn’t knocked her out. She was feeling around for a comb that had fallen from her hair. It was right in front of her, but she couldn’t see it.

He was turning around to go back for Mori when Mori came through quietly of his own accord. If he felt an iota of surprise, he didn’t show it. He knelt down and gave her comb back, setting it into her hand, and then lifted her very gently upright. His knuckles were bleeding. He really had hit the wall, so hard the cuts were pale with plaster dust.

‘We need to hurry to catch the post,’ she said, sounding completely normal, ‘or we shall miss the matinee.’

Kuroda stared at her. He didn’t want to rage anymore. Instead he was seized with the need to get away from her. She wasn’t a person now – she was a thing, a grotesque, wrong thing that was only human-shaped, except for the star-shaped dent in her skull where the likeness failed.

Mori inclined his head at Kuroda and watched him hard, and held her still by her shoulders, and Kuroda realised that this was the punishment. He couldn’t blame it on rage in the moment or tell himself he had been drunk. He was stone sober now. Mori tapped her on the head. It wouldn’t even have hurt her usually; it was the kind of strike you aimed at someone good-naturedly to make him look up and laugh with you. But something terrible must have gone wrong inside her skull already. She folded. Mori caught her.