An Exquisite Sense of What Is Beautiful (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

Glasgow, Scotland
•
1936

Edward was nine years old when he discovered the miniature sword in his father’s pipe-box. The ivory sheath was about eight inches long, simply but exquisitely carved with the figure of an Oriental maiden. Her robed body took up one side of the casing but her head was engraved on the handle of the blade so that when he withdrew the sword from its holder, it had the effect of decapitating the serene face from its body. He loved to let his fingers play along the groove of the carvings, to slip the blade from its sheath, to
guillotine
that poor young woman over and over again. Such a treasure in the Strathairn family household that contained no ornaments other than a silver-plated cigarette box and a swirly glass ashtray. He asked his father where it came from.

‘Japan,’ his father replied blandly. As if such an exotic artefact was merely one of an extensive Far Eastern collection housed in their Glasgow flat. ‘And be careful you dinnae cut yourself, Eddie.’

‘A gift from one of his exotic mistresses,’ his mother said in an interruption from her dusting of the sideboard. ‘What do you call them? Geishas. Aye, that’s the word. Geishas.’

‘Haud yer whisht, woman. You’ll no be putting nonsense like that in the boy’s head.’

‘I’m sure he has the sense to know what is true and what is nigh well impossible. Isn’t that right, Eddie?’ She laughed and shook her yellow rag at him, releasing a burst of dust to drift into the sunlight. He felt a warmth ooze through him, glad to somehow be involved in this easy banter between his parents. It was rare to see his mother laugh. She was normally so distracted by her constant fretting, gnawing the skin off her knuckles with her worry of everything until he feared the white of her finger-bones might shine through the red-raw scarring.

‘Dinnae listen to her, lad,’ his father said with a snap of his
newspaper
. ‘It was your Uncle Rob that gave it to us. A souvenir of his travels in the exotic East. Your mother wouldnae know the
difference
between a pair of geishas and a pair of galoshes.’

‘And you wouldnae know the difference between a pair of galoshes and a pair of washing-up gloves,’ his mother countered, still with laughter in her voice. ‘You big lump, sitting there like Lord Muck when there’s work to be done.’

‘I’ve done my share of the daily grind,’ his father said, slipping further down into his armchair. ‘It’s my hard graft that puts a roof over our heads. Isn’t that right, Eddie?’

Edward didn’t know if his father was right or not. All that he cared about was that everything for once seemed to be in order in his little family. That his mother wasn’t tense and angry, nor his father sullen and withdrawn. That there was this lightness dancing around the three of them like the shaken-up motes of dust playing in the sunbeams.

‘Well, lad, what do you say?’ his father insisted. ‘Who paid for that Meccano set you got for your birthday? Or the shoes on your feet? Your father with his diligence and sense of responsibility, that’s who. Diligence and responsibility. That’s what makes the world go round. Your father’s hard grind.’

Edward knew his father’s hard grind involved working in a
shipping
office on Clydeside. He’d been taken down once for a visit, recalling all those clerks on their high stools, running fingers down ledgers, inking in details here and there, while his father supervised from a desk at the far end of the long room. Then being escorted on
a tour of one of the giant cargo ships by a large, tanned man with an easy laugh and gold braid on his sleeves, helping his mother up the steep steps with a palm to her elbow.

‘Do all Japanese women dress like this?’ Edward asked.

‘Och. Are you still going on about that wee sword? Aye, so I believe. That’s how they dress over there. In Japan.’

Japan. If Edward ever reflected on his childhood, it was the only word he could actually hear his father saying in his aural memory. Of course, there had been many conversations between them,
pleasant
ones mostly, for his childhood had been a happy one until the shadow of the Second World War appeared. But these conversations were all vague noises to him, more a recollection of the overall sound of his father’s voice rather than any particular words said. Yet the word ‘Japan’ remained intact as an entity unto itself, a vocal insect trapped in an amber of sound. He could recall the exact tone and timbre in which it was articulated. Japan. A baritone with a Scottish burr roughed up at the edges by tobacco and malt. Japan. This clue. This signpost. As if his father’s sole existence in this world was to no more purpose than to point him eastwards with this one word.

Japan. The name of that country had meant nothing to him at the time. A group of islands on the right-hand side of the map that hung in his school classroom. It was not coloured pink like the rest of the Empire, but remained unshaded, anonymous, like the large mass that was China. In fact, Edward thought Japan was part of China until a small part in the chorus of a school production of
The Mikado
opened him up to a world of Lord High Executioners, Celestial Highnesses, women with knitting needles in their hair, schoolgirls with names like Yum-Yum, Pitti-Sing and Peep-Bo.

This participation in
The Mikado
was just one of the benefits of his senior secondary school. At eleven years old, he had been streamed away from an education by belt and Bible, deemed ‘
excellent
at English’ and eligible to spend five years pursuing a Leaving Certificate and the possibility of a university education. It was a time for studying, reading newspapers, listening to the radio as the Germans marched on Europe. And suddenly Japan was there too. And this Japan had a face, but it wasn’t the face of three little maids
all contrary, come from a ladies’ seminary with knitting needles through their hair. This was a cruel face. Fuelled by comic books and newspaper propaganda. He trembled as these Oriental
warriors
in their airplanes sunk His Majesty’s warships, as they scurried through Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Sumatra, Borneo, Ceylon and Burma. The map was changing colour. The pink-shaded countries of Australia and India were threatened. And he was
threatened
too. As the Japanese and Germans advanced so did his age towards enlistment. Passing time closed around him like a death, like the nights of the dark winter of 1944. But then, there was light. The Germans were in retreat, the British recaptured Mandalay and Rangoon, the American forces landed in Okinawa. And then there was blinding, extraordinary light. Followed by a terrifying heat, branding its victims with its deathly radioactive shadow. First
Hiroshima
. And then Nagasaki.

The news then was all about numbers, numbers, numbers. Edward heard them tumbling from the radio every night in that disembodied voice. First there were those numbers coming out of Europe. Those many millions. And now these numbers from Japan. When did a number just become a number and no longer a human being? After ten, twenty, a hundred deaths?

‘How can we kill so many people?’ he asked his father. His mother had gone to lie down with the splitting headache that always seemed to coincide with the evening news.

‘We didn’t kill anyone, lad. It was Truman and the Yankee bombers that did it.’ His father tapped his pipe hard on the wooden chair-arm as if to drive a wedge right through the wartime alliance.

‘But they’re talking about over one hundred thousand dead. In five days. Almost all civilians.’

‘It’ll bring the war to a swift end, you’ll see. Save the lives of countless American soldiers. And Japs too.’

‘But that would have been in combat,’ Edward protested. ‘This was just… I don’t know… a… a massacre. A massacre of innocent people.’

‘You’re just over-sensitive to these things, Eddie,’ his father said kindly. ‘Just like your mother.’

‘But…’

His father raised a hand to stop him. ‘Those bombs could have saved your life too, lad. In far-off Asian places. You’ll be old enough to enlist in a couple of months. Your mother and I will be glad if we don’t have to worry about that.’

His father was right. The war in the Pacific ended six days later.

Edward went on to take an MA degree at the University of
Glasgow
, with no more imagination or ambition other than to be an English teacher. He was quite happy to set the rudder of his career firmly on course with his parents’ expectations, not realising he had any desires to the contrary nor any choice in the matter until he and his father were called to the reading of his late Uncle Rob’s will.

‘I still dinnae understand what this is all about,’ his father
grumbled
. ‘Rob’s got a fine family of his own to be his legal heirs and descendants.’

‘Perhaps he’s left you a keepsake, father. A memory of your childhood together.’

‘To tell you the truth, lad, your Uncle Rob had more of a
fondness
for you than he did me, his own younger brother. Maybe it was because he only had lassies of his own.’

Edward had really liked his uncle – a towering, tree-trunk of a man with sunny cheeks and a flat cap of sandy hair. A rugby fanatic, always with a sweet in his pocket for his young nephew and a word of advice about getting a decent education. His uncle had also been a traveller in his younger days, setting off for the Orient at a time when Edinburgh was the furthest east most Glasgow men ever went. He had returned armed with a network of Asian contacts that he later leveraged into a highly successful trading company. He also brought back with him an eclectic collection of artefacts. There had been the ivory knife, of course, several miniature toggle-like carvings, cloisonné vases, lacquer bowls and a series of Japanese woodblock prints. Some of these prints Uncle Rob had hung up on his study wall – actors on the kabuki stage, beautiful courtesans running combs through their hair, birds perched on cherry blossom branches. But others he kept in a drawer.

‘I see you have to shave the hair off your chin,’ his uncle had commented after a rare invitation to join him in his study. ‘That means you’re old enough.’

‘Old enough for what, uncle?’

‘These.’ And he had unlocked the drawer, taken out a folder wrapped up in a silk cloth, spread the prints across his desk. ‘Just dinnae tell your Aunt Cathy.’

Edward had just stood there staring. He knew his cheeks had flamed up but his embarrassment had not been enough to drag his eyes away from what lay in front of him. Naked women
bathing
, naked women pouring water over each other, naked women douching themselves between their legs. Women with breasts
poking
out slyly from beneath robes, a fully clothed courtesan pulling on a naked man’s penis. He had to press his groin against the desk to hide his own erection.

‘Just a taste of what’s in store,’ Uncle Rob had sighed. ‘Oh, how I envy the young.’

A heart attack had now taken his uncle at fifty-five, leaving his Aunt Cathy a widow with two married daughters. Edward
wondered
what she would think when she found the prints.

‘What we have here is a substantial legacy bestowed upon your son for the purposes of his education,’ announced Mr Wilson Guthrie, Practitioner of Law at the legal firm of Guthrie, Henderson & Co.

‘He’s already finished his education,’ his father said.

‘Is that true, Edward?’ Guthrie asked, whirling in his swivel chair to confront him across the large desk. ‘Is that true?’ the man persisted, as if somehow his father’s word was not to be believed. ‘Is that true?’

‘Yes it is, sir. I graduated with an honours degree from Glasgow University. And I just completed a year at teacher training college. I already have a teaching position lined up.’

‘I see,’ Guthrie snapped. ‘Well, the instructions are very specific. And as executor to your late uncle’s estate, I must ensure that funds can only be released in response to receipts issued entirely relating to your educational process.’

‘But my brother wrote this will years ago. When Edward was still at school. Surely he would have intended the money to go to him anyway. If he was aware the lad had completed his education.’

‘That may well be true, Mr Strathairn. But intention is of no relevance in the case of wills and testaments. Only the written or printed word as authenticated by the testator in the presence of two witnesses.’

‘Very Dickensian,’ his father grunted. ‘And so what will happen to the legacy?’

‘It will be returned to the estate and re-distributed among your late brother’s family.’

‘Excuse me, sir,’ Edward said. ‘May I suggest something?’

Both his father and the lawyer turned to look at him.

‘Go on,’ Guthrie grumbled.

‘What would happen if I should want to continue my education?’

‘Then I shall be obliged to release the funds to you,’ the lawyer conceded in a stare over his spectacles. ‘Provided, of course, I receive the necessary receipts.’

And in his own distorted reflection, mirrored by a slant of light in the lawyer’s spectacles, Edward recognised this moment for what it was. A moment of great clarity. It was like taking part in one of those colour blindness tests when everything appeared as a mass of strange blobs and then, out of the panic of the challenge, a number finally emerged. The truth. There it was all along. How could he not see it? Waiting to be discovered by someone with the correct vision. And here in this solicitor’s office, it was not any great
decision
he had to make, but merely to admit to himself what was
obvious
. What had been there all along.