Three Views of Crystal Water by Katherine Govier Page B

once.
    ‘You know I don’t want my stories falling on the wrong ears,’ he said, teasing.
    ‘Who do you mean?’
    He put his finger alongside his nose. ‘You know who I mean.’
    ‘You don’t mean Keiko?’
    Of course he didn’t. He held out his hand to her; his face was lit with the pleasure he felt in her nearness.
    ‘You mean Miss Hinchcliffe?’
    ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Vera. She is no more than a functionary.’
    ‘You mean my father then.’
    ‘Oh, interesting suggestion. My son-in law,’ he said. ‘My erstwhile son-in-law.’ James Lowinger took full responsibility for the error in judgement that had put Hamilton into the family: this weak link was his, not his beloved Belle’s and certainly not Vera’s. ‘What an unnatural cruelty! Do I still have a son-in-law when I have no daughter?’
    Some days he mentioned the book again. Some days he said he had already got it half written. But he certainly would not finish. The problem was, he said –
    ‘I know, Grandfather. It puts you into an impossible struggle between truth and loyalty. You told me.’
    ‘Good girl, you remember.’
    When James was ill Keiko nursed him and Vera went to school in a rage and fought with her friends and went after school to Homer Street, even though he was not there, to stare at the ukiyo-e. A silent Miss Hinchcliffe sat over her typewriter.
    ‘Where is Mr McBean?’ Vera asked her.
    ‘There is no Mr McBean.’
    Vera did not believe this.
    ‘But his name is on the door,’ she said stubbornly. ‘See? Lowinger and McBean.’
    Miss Hinchcliffe smiled in a pinched way. ‘I know it seems that way.’
    ‘Is he in the Far East, the way my father is?’
    ‘I told you there is no one called Mr McBean.’
    ‘Wherever he is, it is time for him to come back,’ said Vera.
    ‘Aren’t you going to go for coffee?’ Hinchcliffe would say.
    ‘Not by myself,’
    One day when James was ill in bed, Kemp came down from the office above and took Vera to the coffee shop with him. When they burst in through the door shaking rain from their umbrellas, Roberta looked up with hope that the Captain would be with them. Malcolm the mailman was there, at the end of his rounds. The hatter was telling stories about the sailors and how one would come ashore and buy a smart hat, a Borsalino, say. Then he’d go on a big tear and lose it. The hatter could go around the bars and pick up lost hats in the morning if he felt like it. And the next day, before his leave was up, the sailor would come back and buy the same one again.
    They murmured appreciatively at this homely story and then it was silent in the triangular café with its three booths.
    Roberta said, ‘How is he?’
    And Vera burst into tears.
    The men sat embarrassed while Roberta took Vera in her arms and patted her on the back.
    ‘What are we going to do with her?’ she said to the others.
    James Lowinger lay in his bed. His veins stood out under the skin on his head. Vera had not imagined that a head could get thinner, but his had. His flesh was clinging to his skull. He lay with his eyes shut but his voice did not change and he could still laugh so that it sounded even more as if his voice were gurgling down a drain. Day by day he grew lighter, his face more luminous. It was as if he were getting younger, on a cosmic timescale that had nothing to do with the days and the months and the years they were living through.
    He spoke to Vera in a valedictory way.
    ‘A longing, almost like lust, to tell the tale as we have lived it, grows stronger the older we are. God knows that man’s lust is a subject of which I have some experience. I mean only the lust for objects. I say “only”, as if this were more manageable,more civilised than sexual lust: it is not, only an expression that has a more public acceptance.
    ‘I have no greed for gems or gold, which may strike you as odd. Indifference is rare in my trade and the one aspect of my personality to which my survival can be