The Japanese Lantern by Isobel Chace Page B

that I’m not capable of choosing my own escorts. Edward was extremely charming, if you want to know! And he didn’t put a foot wrong once!”
    “Meaning that you were half expecting him to?” Jason drawled maddeningly.
    “No !”
    “Then how come you lost him so easily? Are you sure you weren’t running away from him?”
    “So that’s what you think!” she exclaimed. “Well, it wasn’t like that at all. It was all my fault. I thought I saw Mitchi Boko in the crowd and I tried to get to her. It was I who lost Edward, not he who lost me.” In her anxiety to convince him she deliberately said nothing about her own feeling that he had already disappeared when she had turned to tell him that she had seen the Japanese girl.
    Unexpectedly Jason appeared to be quite willing to take her word for it.
    “I suppose you’d fly off the handle if I commended you for your good sense,” he commented dryly.
    In spite of herself she found herself smiling. “Probably,” she admitted.
    “Then I won’t,” he said disarmingly. “I’ll cry a truce for the drive home.”
    Tokyo never sleeps, but the streets were as quiet as they ever were as the big car purred its way past the many eating houses and the thousands of neon lights. The hundreds of banners that decorated the streets by day were transferred at night into so many coloured lanterns, mostly in the national colours of red and white, but occasionally with vivid splashes of green or blue. It made Jonquil think of fairyland. A land filled with little lights, some carried, others waving gently to and fro in the light breeze.
    Jason drove with confidence, taking the lesser known streets into his route to save time and to avoid the confusion of the late night traffic. Only once did he stop, and then it was apparently in the middle of nowhere.
    “Where are we?” Jonquil asked sleepily.
    “Are you hungry?” he asked.
    She blinked at him.
    “Not hungry exactly — ”
    “But you could eat something?”
    She nodded, wondering that he should ask.
    He smiled at her, a little mysteriously, and just at the same moment, her ears caught the sound of a flute being played in the street. A thin, wavering note that came and went, without much tune, but with fleeting promises of beauty.
    “What’s that?” she asked.
    But before he could answer a man trundling a barrow in front of him came round the corner, pausing every now and then to announce his progress on his tin flute.
    “The soba seller,” Jason told her. “He’s early tonight, for he does most of his business when all the other eating places, are closed. Do you want some?”
    “Oh, yes,” Jonquil agreed enthusiastically.
    She hurried after him out of the car and watched, fascinated, as the vendor served them with two helpings of noodles, piping hot and delicious. With a smile the man presented them with their bowls and two pairs of cheap wooden chopsticks that would be broken and thrown away when they had finished. Anxiously, he showed her how to hold them in the one hand and, to her surprise, she found that it was really quite simple, providing that one was content to take minute morsels at a time, rather than a proper mouthful.
    Some other people, all of them Japanese, joined them at the barrow, bowing to each other and to the two Europeans in their midst, whom they apparently accepted without any curiosity.
    At first Jonquil felt rather self-conscious, sure that they would notice and be amused by her timid efforts with the chopsticks, but she soon found that they paid her no attention at all, and by the end of the little meal she found that she was quite adept with the unaccustomed tools.
    “Hungry enough for a second bowl? ” Jason asked .
    She was tempted, not because she wanted any more to eat but because she was reluctant to go. Her indecision must have shown, for he grinned and nodded to the vendor to give them two more helpings.
    “Arigato, thank you,” he murmured as he took the bowls. The soba seller