Read Online Three Views of Crystal Water by Katherine Govier - Free Book Online Page B

to the pagoda and killed everyone in it except the woman and her servant, who escaped, while he watched over the destruction he had wrought.
    ‘Ready!’ called James.
    That day, they made their way down the few steps, next door to the flatiron building where Roberta presided, the Captain stepping gallantly but perhaps a little more slowly than the season before. Vera could see Roberta turn to warn the waiting others. Because by now it was known on Homer Street that the old merchant would come in. And he had an audience. There was the hatter, and a printer with inky hands, and another few traders, in rugs and fabrics. There was Kemp who also traded with Japan, and sometimes his son. There was Malcolm the mailman, if he’d finished his run. Vera and James nodded to the gathered audience, and went to their booth. Roberta’s fierce hand with herdamp cloth swept across the table; they watched her midriff at eye level against the tabletop and heard her voice asking what they would have.
    ‘The usual,’ James said. And then exclaimed ‘Wet!’ with fresh surprise, as if it had never been wet before. ‘Wet today, Roberta.’ He surveyed the other coffee drinkers, now studying their napkins or gazing out of one window or the other to one street or the other. ‘Quite a crowd here today! Afternoon, Kemp.’
    ‘If it isn’t Lowinger, of Lowinger and McBean,’ said Kemp. ‘Where’s that son-in-law of yours? I heard he was in Madagascar. No, it was Marrakesh.’
    They slid into their chairs. Vera was conscious that they made an odd pair, the old man and the girl.
    ‘I don’t know,’ said her grandfather. ‘He hasn’t been home for some time. Since …’ his voice trailed off. He always stopped talking when Belle or Hamilton Drew came to his mind. Soon after their marriage, they had moved here. Drew had been given the task of keeping the portside office open. The idea was to branch out from pearls. Canadian Pacific had plenty of steamships going to Japan and coming back with imported goods. Smart merchants bought them and divided them up and put them in new packages and sent them on. It was not easy to lose. But Hamilton …
    Vera tried to picture her father. Was he part of her distant childhood? It seemed to her there had been a pram, and a sweet tooth for toffee. ‘I turned around and he was absent.’ That’s what her grandfather said about his own father. She remembered her mother crying.
    This time James kept talking. ‘The trouble with my son-inlaw,’ he said dramatically. He knew he had an audience. ‘The trouble is he was too late.’
    ‘Too late for what?’
    ‘Just too late. For everything. He’s an imitator. Never had a thought of his own. Never could go his own way. Like the real people do.’ He sputtered to a stand still. Then he started again. ‘The trouble with your father was he was Scottish.’
    Vera laughed at that one. Just one more reason her grandfather gave for not liking him.
    He peered at Vera. ‘You’re thin, you’re pale, too, young lady. Are you eating properly? You know Keiko makes very good meals.’
    Vera smiled primly.
    ‘You don’t want to be sickly.’
    Unspoken words to follow were ‘like your mother’.
    She was branching out too, from white food. She ate the cinnamon toast: the sugar and bread were white at least.
    He laughed his pebbly laugh, the one she had come to love, the one of true mirth – as opposed to the other, hollow draining that was not a laugh but a view of the world.
    He sipped his coffee. He had developed a tremor, and it spilled in the saucer. ‘You’re not going to try to get me to talk about pearls today.’
    ‘Everybody’s here and waiting.’
    ‘Nonsense. They’re here to have their coffee.’
    James Lowinger liked to go out with the pearl divers, to see the stone go overboard and the men stand on it and let it carry them down to the bottom, like the lifts in the flat in London. They swarmed across the sea bed all arms and legs, as if they