With My Little Eye Read Online Free

around both houses and a low wall between them. The lodgers had their own side entrance and used what had been the servants’ staircase in her father’s time. She was clearly a woman who both valued her own privacy and respected that of her tenants.
    We had thought it odd that, when I had spoken to her on the telephone, she had instructed us in her piping child’s voice not to ring the bell of her own house, but to go to the entrance of the other one, where she would be outside waiting for us. Why wait for us outside? As we approached down a long, narrow lane, we saw far off the diminutive figure standing motionless in front of the embossed arch of a wooden door set into the forbidding wall. Sunlight glinted on the bunch of keys that she was holding out in one hand, as though even at that distance she were already proffering it to us. She was wearing a brown, near-black kimono with an obi almost as dark, and elaborately embroidered brocade silk zori on her tiny feet. Her hair, which must have been dyed, was so black and stiff that it might have come from a horse. During a subsequent conversation that we had had with him, Erwin Shott had described her as ‘a Japanese of the old school – and all the better for that.’ Now we at once saw what he had meant.
    As at our telephone call, I was again surprised both by the childlike timbre of her voice and an American accent so near-perfect that one might have mistaken her for a Nisei. Later we would learn that between the wars she had spent three years in Seattle, as the ward of a childless aunt and uncle long settled there, and had attended an American college. Later still she would even show us and her two American girl student lodgers an album of photographs of a time that, we at once concluded, had been extremely happy for her. In all of them she was a pretty, short, plump teenager in Western clothes, often a dark-blue pleated skirt with a white sailor blouse above it. She was almost always smiling to reveal gleaming, overlarge front teeth.
    She stood back, bowing slightly, to let Laura and me through the gate ahead of her. Having not yet become used to this convention of man preceding woman, I hesitated. ‘ Please ,’ she insisted. The child voice had suddenly strengthened and deepened . The forward tilt of her head and her sideways glance at me now projected a compelling authority. ‘Thank you,’ I muttered , and followed Laura, who had already passed through the gate into the garden.
    ‘Oh, what a lovely garden!’ Laura cried out. It was not the sort of cramped garden, full of dwarf bushes, irregularly shaped areas of sand and artfully matched and arranged stones to which we had already become accustomed on our walks around the city and in our visits to people to whom I had had introductions.
    ‘An English garden. That’s what I wanted. If you decide to live here, you’ll feel at home. Won’t you?’ Suddenly she glimpsed a shiny fragment of wrapping paper – perhaps from a cigarette packet, perhaps from a bar of chocolate, blown there by a gust of wind – on the perfect lawn ahead of us. With a shake of the head, clearly vexed, she hastened over and stooped to pick it up. She retained it in her small fist until we had entered the house. Then she murmured, ‘Excuse me,’ and briefly vanished, no doubt to deposit it in a dustbin. Later, we discovered that she had a mania for tidiness and order.
    What we had not realised from our first view from the road was that, built on to this Western-style villa there was a low, Japanese-style extension, with paper shutters and a wooden veranda that ran its whole length. In front of the veranda there was an irregularly shaped pond, in which carp glinted momentarily and then vanished. Mrs Kawasaki began to explain thisjuxtaposition of two such different styles of buildings. After her years in the States, she had become a lover of a Western way of life, indeed of everything Western. But she had also inherited from her