With My Little Eye by Francis King Page A

to listen to this lecture, turned and faced us. She lowered her open umbrella: ‘I’m afraid I’ve had enough of this. I can’t take any more rain and I can’t take any more moss.’ I half expected her to go on: ‘And I can’t take any more of these lectures.’
    ‘But you must complete circuit,’ Miss Morita protested. ‘Everyone completes circuit. We have done only half. Please!’
    Laura’s only response was, ‘I’ll wait for you in the car.’ She began to march back the way that we had come. Then, no doubt repenting of her rudeness, she turned: ‘I’m sorry. So sorry. Don’t pay any attention to me. Enjoy yourselves. I have a copy of The Times in the car. More than a week old but never mind.’
    ‘She is making a mistake,’ Miss Morita said, looking after her, head tilted to one side. ‘I am sorry.’
    ‘There’s nothing for you to be sorry about. This incessant rain is getting her down.’
    ‘Getting her down?’
    ‘Depressing her. She hates it. But I love it,’ I added.
    ‘Maybe in a previous life you were Japanese man.’ She said it as though she really believed that this might be possible. ‘You understand us. We are different – and, like us, you are also different. Not like most Western men.’ She shook her head. ‘No, no. Not at all.’
    I wanted silence, so that I could not merely hear the birds but also listen in vain for the sound of those globules of water falling endlessly down on to the iridescent moss. Fortunately, perhaps at last sensing this, Miss Morita stopped her endless chatter, as she stepped out beside me in her cumbersome, flat-heeled shoes – sensible shoes, my mother would have called them – a garish paper umbrella open above a grey felt hat with jauntily upturned brim.
    Then all at once she halted and her hand shot out to my arm. She grasped it. ‘Look!’ she whispered. ‘ Look !’ She raised her umbrella with her other arm and pointed. ‘Frog.’ Underneath a cherry tree, its bole black with rain, I eventually discerned, screwing up my eyes, a small frog motionless but for a constant throbbing in its swollen throat. It seemed to be staring at us with eyes made of jet beads. Its body, like the bodies of those lizards that would now rest motionless in our boarding -house bedroom and now scuttle up its walls, seemed to be encrusted with emeralds.
    We stood there looking at it for what must have been almost a minute. All that time her hand rested on my arm, and all that time I became increasingly conscious of it. The gentle pressurehad an astonishingly disconcerting and yet also astonishingly transforming effect on me. I was not in the least excited or aroused by the contact, as I might have been from a similar contact with a woman sexually desirable, as Miss Morita certainly was not. But it transmitted to me a feeling of overwhelming tranquillity and, yes, at the same time of the joy that I have so rarely and so fleetingly felt in the course of my life.
    The frog gave one leap, a second, a third, before vanishing from sight. I let out an involuntary gasp and realised that I had been holding my breath for several seconds before that.
    Miss Morita removed her hand.
    We walked on, once more in silence.
    ‘Did I miss a lot?’ Laura asked, as I opened the car door for Miss Morita to enter.
    ‘Only more of the same. But that light – and that stillness! I’ve never experienced anything like it.’
    Laura put a hand to the ignition. The engine thudded into life. The whole vast car shook, a prehistoric beast arousing itself from slumber.

(15)
    I am sealed in a tube. I might be a mummy.
    ‘What sort of music would you like?’ the handsome, tall woman with the thin lips asked me before I entered it.
    ‘What can you offer?’
    ‘Oh, almost anything.’ She put her head on one side and surveyed me. ‘You wouldn’t opt for pop, would you? Jazz? Yes, you might opt for that. Or Gilbert and Sullivan. We have a nice CD of The Mikado .’
    ‘No. Not that. Mozart