The Japanese Girl Read Free

Mr Armitage, but after a bit I thought, she’s just not going to swallow this much longer, so I told her one night I was going to the races in Plumpton on the next Saturday. I knew it would shock her because she didn’t approve of gambling, so I knew there was no risk of her wanting to come with me. I’d chosen racing partly for that reason and partly because I thought if she ever does find out about the £300, saying I’d lost it at the races was an easy way out.
    Because I still hadn’t really thought of leaving her.
    Well, she was shocked, in her quiet rather listless way; but she also said: ‘How long have you been going?’
    â€˜Going?’ I stared at her. ‘Why this is …’ and then I sensed that it was better not to say it was the first time. ‘This will be the third Saturday. Before that I went to see Armitage every week – honestly.’
    â€˜I knew there was something different,’ she said. ‘There was something different about you. There has been – even for longer than three weeks.’
    â€˜What d’you mean?’ I laughed. ‘I don’t feel any different.’
    â€˜Well, you are. More excited, like. Excitable. Edgy.’
    â€˜Not bad-tempered. You can’t say I’ve been bad-tempered.’
    â€˜No, no. I wouldn’t say that. But edgy. Half the time you don’t listen when I talk to you. You don’t read the evening paper the way you used to. It’s – something I can’t describe. Oh, Jack …’
    â€˜Yes?’ I was fearful then that she might have guessed.
    â€˜How much are you betting on the races? It’s the craziest way of losing money. You get nothing for it – nothing at all. You might as well throw it down a drain!’
    I laughed again. ‘You can set your mind easy about that! I never put more than ten bob on any race – more often it’s five! Honestly, Hettie, since Armitage was taken ill I’ve been working late nearly every night, you know that. I’ve been at a stretch. And I find this going off and watching horses, it’s a sort of relaxation. You ought to come sometime.’
    She shook her head dubiously, as I hoped she would. ‘It’s such a bad habit. There are such awful people at race meetings. And anyway, even if you only put ten shillings on a race, it might mean you losing three or four pounds in an afternoon.’
    â€˜Oh, really!’ I patted her hand, almost in affection, though now she meant nothing, nothing to me. ‘I’ve never lost more than two pounds yet. And I win sometimes. So far I’m not a pound down on three meetings.’
    â€˜Three meetings,’ she said quietly. ‘You told me it had only been two.’
    The next day, the next afternoon, Yodi and I went and sat on the beach for an hour or two before we went back to the little room in Kemptown. We talked about beaches. Neither of us had ever been out of England, but these days everybody has a good idea what foreign places look like: the Mediterranean towns, the surfs of Australia and Honolulu, the glimmering domes of Venice, the temples and magnolias of Kyoto, the painted fishes of the Caribbean. We talked about them and wished we could visit them together. She was mad keen to travel – even keener than I was – and as soon as her brother was earning his own keep she meant to get a job, if she could, which would enable her to. Japanese airlines, she thought, might welcome a girl who could speak good English.
    But of course at heart that was not the way she wanted to travel, whisked by jets from place to place, boarded at hostels, on a rigorous time-schedule. Nor did I. The essence of travel as I saw it, even if only perhaps for two holidays a year, was leisure to enjoy the places one visited and money to visit them in comfort.
    Just then I began to see a tremendous opportunity ahead. Armitage was no better and was not going to get