This is how you remind me …
The portrait was glaring at him again.
After two hours of incessant code-breaking, two flat, lifeless black eyes staring at the back of his head could get quite annoying. Brushing his work aside, he folded his arms on his desk and rested his head on them, twisting slightly so that he could glare back at the portrait on the wall behind him. It was a painting of his father, strangely lifelike in its very lifelessness, framed and laminated with the sort of care he didn't think a picture of his father deserved. His mother had had it framed and hung up in his room when he had been a little boy, and he hadn't had the heart to take it down. It was only at times like these that he wondered why he bothered to be so sentimental.
He closed his eyes, hoping no one would come and knock on the door. His head was pounding, probably from lack of sleep, or perhaps the endless hours spent staring at the patterns of numbers before him. The code was eluding his grasp in a way that made him think that he was trying to catch smoke in his hands. It was there, he knew it, he just couldn't hold onto it. Perhaps he wasn't concentrating enough.
The sound of laughter drifted in through the open window. He massaged his temples and walked to the sill, leaning his hands on it as he looked out from his second-storey window. The moors spread before him, wide and unchanging, with wisps of fog away in the distance. Closer, within the boundaries of the manor gardens, he could see Misao and another girl – the one who came to clean, he thought – standing on the wide patch of lawn below his window. Misao was holding a rusty-looking rake, gesturing towards the leaves that had been piled into the corner with wild hand movements. The other girl was laughing, bent over almost double as Misao continued to relate whatever story she was narrating, still gesticulating comically. He looked down at them, wondering why he had never fit in so easily when he had been that young.
Misao obviously felt someone watching her, because after a while she frowned and glanced around. Catching sight of him looking down at the two of them impassively, she called, "'Morning, Shinomori-san!"
He couldn't remember the last time he had had a shouted conversation from his second floor window. "Good morning, Misao-san," he said calmly, not raising his voice too much.
"Isn't it great weather today?" she said happily, as the other girl – Kaoru, he thought her name was – slunk off, looking uncomfortable. "I think autumn's coming, ne, Shinomori-san?"
He hadn't really noticed the weather, but now that he thought about it, it was indeed a lovely day. The air was cool but not biting, and the sun warm but not glaring. The leaves had just begun to change colour, lending a sophisticated beauty to the atmosphere that was rarely to be seen in other seasons. "Yes," he said.
"I haven't seen you for a while," she continued, digging the prongs of her rake into the ground and leaning on the staff. "Were you busy?"
He wondered if he could possibly be more eloquent before saying, "Yes." She didn't look put off, though. She simply went on with her good-natured questions.
"You're always working, aren't you? Do you ever come outside? I mean, I don't understand how you can possibly stay in on a day like this." She took the rake in one hand and spun around, arms spread out wide. "I couldn't!"
He breathed in deeply, wondering exactly how he was supposed to reply to that without sharing some sort of information. Strange that when all he wanted to do was contribute to the conversation, he quailed at the opportunity to do so. Coldly, he said, "I take a walk in the mornings, usually."
Her face brightened instantly. "You do? That's great! Then you're not missing the weather after all! I hear it's going to get terrible very soon – winter will be all dry and cold and dead. They say that snow isn't nice here, not really." She paused for a second, then asked curiously, "Do you like snow, Shinomori-san?"
Did he? He had never thought about it. He compared it to all the other seasons he didn't object to, and decided that snow was quite pleasant. "Yes," he said finally.
Her smile was dazzling. "You do?" she said, almost hopping in excitement. "So do I! Wow, that's so cool! I love snow! Does it snow a lot here?"
Ah, a variation. He could actually say something apart from 'yes' without contributing markedly to the talk. "No," he said.
Her face fell. "Aw … Oh well. Do you think you could come outside right now and help me, Ao – Shinomori-san? Because, see, Omasu-san and Okon-san are pretty busy, and Shiro broke his ankle – the idiot – and he isn't here today, and Kuro has the day off, and Kaoru just left, and I can't do all these leaves alone."
He stared at her. She was asking him to come outside? With her? Who was the last person who had asked him to do something, apart from his seniors at the government offices in London? He knew what he wanted to say, and he knew even before he spoke that he would not say it. "No, I am sorry, Misao-san," he said detachedly. "I have work to do."
She made a face before smiling brightly once more, but he could see that she was disappointed. "Yeah, I thought you would. Thanks for thinking about it, though. Well, see you, then, Ao – Shinomori-san!" she said, turning back to her raking, her mouth pursed up as she whistled cheerfully.
He had just returned to his desk and was reaching for his papers when he realised that she hadn't said 'sorry for bothering you' before she turned away. Definitely an improvement. And, he had made her smile when he had said that he liked snow. Oh yes. There had most definitely been progress.
"Telegram for you, Aoshi-sama," came Okon's voice, punctuating the knock on the door.
He sighed and leaned back in his chair. Was he never going to get any peace? He had to turn the code in by Friday, and it was Wednesday already and he had gotten nowhere. Not even a single pattern had been marked out. No primer, no nothing. "Come in," he said, trying not to let the weariness in his voice show.
The door opened and Okon entered, tucking her hair behind her ears as she did so. She held a yellow envelope in one hand, which she placed on his desk and waited for him to read it. They always did that, Okon and Omasu, in case he wanted them to do something regarding the contents of any telegram or wire he received.
He flipped the envelope open and pulled out the neatly folded piece of paper it contained, suppressing the urge to sigh as he skimmed through the contents. "It seems I forgot to pay the income tax for last month," he said quietly. "I'll write you a cheque, which you can take from me tomorrow and have paid. That will be all."
Okon bowed and left, shutting the door behind her softly so that it wouldn't bother him. They were all always so quiet and considerate – out of genuine respect, yes, but also because they felt sorry for him. He could feel their pity, feel it emanating from each of them – Omasu, Okon, Kuro, Shiro, the gardener's son … even the two girls who came to clean. He despised it, but there was nothing he could do. They kept up the place, were willing to live there regardless of how the townspeople must repulse them because of it, and he was grateful for it, even if he never let it show. But they knew him well – they probably did know.
He looked at the patterns spread out in front of them, wondering why they didn't make sense. He was thinking about them constantly – before he slept, when he ate, even while he was talking to someone. It couldn't be such a tough code – he'd cracked harder ones, he knew he had. He could sense what was difficult and what was not. And this was not. So why …?
Perhaps he ought to take the portrait off. It's flat, dull eyes were boring into his back, making him feel as if he was guilty of all the crimes and atrocities the villagers accused him of. He swung his chair around to face it, glaring back at the face that seemed so like his own. The same black hair, slicked back from the forehead unlike his, the same kind of face cut and closed, sharp look. Just the eyes were different – Japanese eyes, black and flat and penetrating. Even in the portrait, they bored into you. In real life, they had been terrible. His own eyes were like his mother's, he knew … she had been English, fair-haired and blue-eyed. He wondered where the grey tint in his own had come from, and the cold glitter. But no, he knew the last bit. He had seen the same iciness in his father's eyes so many times.
Why did his mother ever marry him? The question haunted him. It always had. His mother had had the whole of London at her feet, he had been told – she was rich, pretty, well-mannered and good company … there was nothing she didn't have. So why did she marry a cold, self-possessed young man, a foreigner, no less, who didn't have half a penny to his credit? He didn't doubt for a second why he had married her … it was the money, obviously. But why had she fallen for him? It was like – it was like Misao marrying him.
His mind went completely blank at that thought. He refused to believe, refused to accept that he had used that analogy. He refused to think any further, just in case he thought something worse, like – no. Stop. Do not think. Do not think. She was a child, for God's sake! A sixteen-year-old little girl who simply didn't mind talking to him. Which is more than anyone else has ever – do not think! No wonder he couldn't concentrate on his codes. If he was perpetually trying to not think, how could he possibly figure them out? But he couldn't let his mind function …
Meditate, damn it! He spread his palms flat out on the table in front of him, letting his mind blank out again. That was it. Blackness. Orderliness. No confusion. No uncertainty. Ah, good, good … patterns. Yes, that was the way – no, to the left, a little – 30 degrees higher would – perfect. An overlap. He opened his eyes, focusing on the random figures dancing around on the page before him. Damn. It didn't work. He switched the papers around, arranging rows of the digits the way he had in his mind, but the overlap was useless – it wasn't a primer. It was the same thing that had been happening all along.
If he had been the sort of person to give into urges, he would have ripped up the documents and thrown them across the room. Being who he was, he stacked them up neatly and locked them away in the top drawer of his desk, then walked to the window and leaned out, breathing in the night air. He remembered the last time he had stood in this window – it had just been yesterday morning, and he had been talking to Misao as she raked leaves and chattered on about things she knew nothing about – winter in England, and snow, and him being busy …
The air was cold today. He could see nothing – just darkness stretching away in front of him, and – far away – the twinkling lights of little buildings on the edge of the moor lands. The gardens were dark and invisible in the black night. There were no stars out, and no moon. It was clouds that were hiding them, he presumed. The night his mother had died had been something like this. The air had been cold and biting, the night pitch black … all that was missing was the screams. Those screams still haunted him – he was used to waking up, covered in cold sweat, his ears still reverberating from the shrieks that he heard in his nightmares.
Sometimes he hated his mother for dying, and for leaving him and his father to cope with each other. She had always been a buffer between them, absorbing the enmity and hatred they radiated, breaking down the icy barriers they both set up. Perhaps it was that which had slowly killed the brightness in her soul, so that in the end she simply did not want to live. The illness had had it easy when it came to resistance.
Or was it truly the illness that had killed her? He doubted it. He had wondered many times why she had not been able to fight off a simple fever, even given that she had no more will to live. And had she truly loved him so little that she was prepared to leave him all alone in this world, with just his father? No, she hadn't. She had loved him enough to save him from all the beatings his father ached to administer, enough to sacrifice so many of her own pleasures for him, so much so that she had nothing left in her life anymore, and in return he had loved her with a ferocity that alarmed him even now. He had never shown it, never appreciated it, but he knew that she knew.
So then why had she died? The question pounded in his brain, like it had for almost twenty years. As a child, he had asked the same question, screaming it out at his father as his father beat him until he was black and blue. Even now, he asked it, mouthing it at every empty room and every blank wall, but the response was about as fruitful as his father's had been. No, he had no explanation; he couldn't quite bring himself to believe, like the townspeople did, that his father had murdered her himself – for he had been utterly devastated after her death, in a way that could not be faked.
He had never thought twice about his father's death, on the other hand. He had passed away in the night, quietly, unobserved. He'd had heart problems, they'd always known, and it had probably just been a heart attack that had killed him. He hadn't been very old, about fifty-five or fifty-six, but the doctor hadn't been surprised. And no one had been disappointed. Least of all him. He'd been working, by then, work he'd never told his father about. Government work, picked up while he'd been at university, work that his father would never have approved of. He had still been studying when he'd died – it had been his last year – and had never had to hide his paperwork from him once he got back home.
He'd never enjoyed university, but it had been a welcome change from home. He had never made friends, but he did have many close acquaintances, who, even though they didn't understand him, didn't have any issues with his background or family history … probably because they didn't know it. He hadn't kept in touch with anyone over the past couple of years, except for those who'd followed something similar to his line of work, but he never felt the need for any more personal correspondence.
He glanced back at his desk, at other papers stacked neatly on it. Letters from an associate in France, one of his subordinates in Delhi, an old acquaintance from school who'd ended up in his department. Nothing containing personal information, nothing he'd reply to with anything more than cursory politeness. He didn't mind, didn't feel like there was anything missing in his life because of his lack of friends – but then, you couldn't miss something you'd never had.
He looked out at the starless sky, at the pitch blackness before him. And at the far-away lights at the edge of the darkness. He remembered looking out like this a long time ago – last winter, perhaps. There had been no lights then. Just blackness, swallowing him, creeping in through his window, settling in the room, choking him.
But there were lights now. Lights at the end of the blackness.
Maybe that meant something.