Free With My Little Eye by Francis King

exasperation and despair I found it better to be silent. Instead I said, ‘She gave me some tickets for the Noh theatre. It’s for the day after tomorrow. You’ll come, won’t you?’
    ‘Oh, God. Do you really expect me to go? Everyone says what a shattering bore it is. Worse than Kabuki.’ Only a few days before we had gone to the Kabuki theatre. After it, Laura said that, had we not been the Ansons’ guests, she would have walked out.
    ‘Oh, do come with me! If you don’t like it, you don’t have to stay. It could be interesting.’
    ‘ Interesting ! Are you crazy? No, no, you go but don’t expect me to go with you.’ She stooped over Mark in his cot, and then turned:
    ‘How about your Miss Morita? Why not take her?’
    ‘Because I’d so much rather take you.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Really.’
    ‘No bloody chance.’
    I rang Miss Morita later, when Laura had gone out for a walk with Mark in his pram. It was her mother who answered the phone. Having little English, she kept repeating ‘Go out! Go out!’ in mounting exasperation until I gave up without leaving a message.
    I was working up in my tower room when I heard footsteps on the stairs. I knew at once that they were Laura’s, just as Smoky, so many years later, always knew that it was my footsteps mounting the front-door steps of the house. I turned, half apprehensive and half pleased.
    ‘Sorry. Sorry.’ She stood in the doorway, hands clasped before her and head lowered, as though she were a schoolgirl appearing before her headmistress.
    ‘Sorry for what?’
    ‘Oh, for being so snappish about the Noh. I’d really like to go with you.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Really and truly. It might cheer me up.’
    ‘I doubt it. Kyogen is cheerful – that’s the farce – but the kind of Noh that we’re going to see never is. It’s all death, ghosts, love thwarted, children lost, that kind of thing.’
    ‘Never mind. I want to go with you.’

    The unrelenting rain pattered on our umbrellas as we scrambled out of the Cadillac and made a dash for the theatre. I was wearing what I called my outsize French letter, a light-blue plastic mackintosh that Laura hated. Her bare legs were spattered with water; my once light-brown suede shoes were dark with it and squeaked as I walked in them.
    The audience was sparse. Between the high stage and theunraked wooden seats under their canvas canopy, the rain was a shimmering screen through which one peered at the hieratic figures up above one on the stage. The play was Kenzo Motomasa’s Sumidagawa. Since this was years before Benjamin Britten’s Curlew River made the story familiar in the West, I was totally ignorant of it. I had brought with me a clumsy English translation, made by an obscure Japanese scholar and locally printed. Miss Morita had lent it to me. The combination of reading the text in the subaqueous light diffused through the falling rain, and at the same watching and listening to the actors was as difficult as nowadays coping with both surtitles and what is transpiring on stage at the opera.
    With difficulty I followed the story. A crazed woman travels what is then a vast distance from Kyoto to the banks of the Sumidagawa River near Tokyo, in search of her lost son. The boatman who ferries her across the river gives her the shattering news, vouchsafed to him in a vision, that her son is dead. On the opposite bank a group of Buddhist votaries are chanting a prayer on behalf of the dead child. Mad with anguish, the mother joins them, banging wildly on a drum while she joins in their prayer. Suddenly the ghost of the child appears and then no less suddenly disappears as dawn begins to break.
    From time to time I glanced sideways at Laura, fearing that at any moment, exasperated, she would jump to her feet and hurry off. But leaning forward in her seat, she was rapt. On two occasions I attempted to share the text with her, edging it towards her knees, but each time she pushed it aside. When the play ended, I