The Kindness of Women (33 page)

“He never wanted to resist. Can't you remember him at Cambridge?”

“I tried to avoid him. He was always so attentive and flattering.”

“He was just waiting for television to come along.”

“He was waiting for you.” Peggy paced over to the mantelpiece and stared at me through the mirror, as if the reversed image might give a clue to my sinistral dreams. “Sometimes I think he set up that bogus experiment just to meet you.”

“He didn't know I existed.”

“Someone like you. Obsessed with the Third World War, your head full of all those American bombers and Lunghua…”

“I never talked about them.”

“You didn't have to! You were desperate for violence! It made sense of everything, but you needed television to fill the air with it, play all that horror and pain over and over again. That really excited Dick. He gave you Miriam as the only way of holding on to you.”

“Isn't that a little callous? He'd have found his way to television if he'd never met me.”

“The Vietnam War, the Kennedy assassinations, the Congo, those ghastly ratissages … they might have been invented for you.”

“Peggy, that makes me sound like a war criminal.”

“Miriam used to say you were. And you love your children.” Peggy pressed her hands against the mirror, touching the secure glass. “Before we left on the
Arrawa
you took me to a film in Shanghai, about an American aircraft carrier…”

“
The Fighting Lady
—a collection of newsreels.”

“I thought you might get carried away in the dark, but I needn't have worried. Your mind was up there, moulded against that screen. I was so amazed I couldn't stop watching you.”

“It was the only film in Shanghai. Anyway, I was fascinated by flying.”

“You told me you'd seen it ten times!”

“The Americans brought it with them and gave us all free tickets. I had nothing else to do.”

“Nothing else? In the whole of Shanghai? You'd been locked up for three years and all you wanted to do was sit in the dark and watch those suicide pilots crashing into American ships?” Peggy turned from the mirror, ready to face me. “Tell me, you know that Dick has a copy of that film?”

“I think he does.”

“You know he does. Miriam told me that you used to watch it together in his garage at Cambridge.”

“Once or twice. Dick had a pilot's licence and I'd flown in Canada. Besides, it's a remarkable film—those American pilots were brave men. And the Japanese.”

“Of course they were. No braver than the Russian pilots or the British pilots. What the Americans had was more style and more glamour.”

“Like everything American. So?”

“And that's exactly what you've always needed—glamorised violence. That terrible afternoon on the railway line near Siccawei—you'd seen dozens of atrocities by then.”

“We all had. That was Shanghai.”

“But for once you were too close. A part of it actually happened to you. All those car crashes and pornographic movies, Kennedy's death, they're your way of turning it into a film, something violent and glamorous. You want to Americanise death.”

“Peggy…” She had spoken with surprising force. Patiently, I followed her as she carried the drinks tray into the kitchen. “As a matter of interest, Dick's institute did come up with some original research. I never watch pornographic films, and I've had a single car crash in my entire life. You have one every year.”

“I know. You live in Shepperton and you've brought up three wonderful and happy children. How, I don't know.”

I leaned against the refrigerator, looking around the little kitchen with its elegant spice jars and expensive French saucepans, so different from my own, where scarcely a piece of crockery matched and half the glasses had been given away at filling stations. Peggy's house was a boudoir designed for the charm and excitement of men. She had been through many affairs but had kept herself untouched by them. There were no holiday photographs to remind her of the men who had taken her to Florence and San Francisco, shared villas over the years with her at Vence and in the Lot. Not a masculine gift stood on the immaculate desk in her office.

She had never married, as if afraid that she might bear a daughter who would one day grow to be twelve and remind her of the years of separation from her parents. Curiously, the one person who had helped to sustain her had never been allowed to share her bed, and was the person whom she continued to reprove and reproach in the way she had done when I played pranks in the children's hut.

“And what about you, Peggy?”

“Me?” She stowed the glasses in the dishwasher. “Are you trying to recruit me into your repertory company?”

“I was thinking of the dedicated paediatrician who's never dared to have a child.”

“I've left it a little late.” She dried her hands and placed them forbearingly on my shoulders. “Besides, I had you. I think I looked after you rather well.”

“You still do—is that why you became a paediatrician?”

“Christ, don't say that!” Without thinking, she slapped my mouth, then caught herself and winced at my bruised lips. “Oh damn—there's blood on your teeth. Jim, I didn't mean to upset you over Miriam…”

I kissed her, for the first time since we sat alone together in the circle of the Grand Theatre in the Nanking Road. I could feel her tongue tasting the blood in my mouth. The scent of her body had changed, and her greying hair reminded me of her mother's as she stepped from the American landing craft after the journey from Tsingtao. I placed my hands around her, feeling for the thin bones of the girl I had known in Lunghua. The soft arms against my chest were those of another woman.

Then I felt her shoulder blades and the strong ribs of the hungry twelve-year-old who had firmly lifted me from my sickbed. I slipped my hands around her waist, touching the familiar broad crest of her pelvis. Kissing her again, I ran my fingers along the shy chin that had lengthened as the war progressed, always set to one side as she pondered my latest scheme for finding food. She smiled at me in the kitchen mirror, trying to apologise for my bruised mouth. I gently raised her upper lip with my forefinger, feeling a rush of memory and affection for her worn but still even teeth, now marked with my blood.

“It's stopped bleeding.” She slipped between my hands. “Jim, you're not demonstrating the skeleton to a class of freshers—let's move upstairs.”

She drew the curtains, folded back the bedspread, and began to undress at a leisurely pace, neatly hanging her clothes on the chair beside the wardrobe. I expected her to be shy, but she was staring proudly at her handsome body in the mirror. Still smiling to herself, she stood in front of me as I struggled with my cuff links, and massaged away the pressure lines below her breasts. She held in her stomach, hiding her plump abdomen and teasing me with the reminder of a very different body that had once hung from these bones.

Sitting on the bed in front of her, I placed my hands on her hips and began to kiss the small freckles on her abdomen and the spiral scar whose pearly silver curved around the small of her back and ended below her appendix. This marked her kidney operation ten years earlier, the Anderson-Hinds resection of the renal pelvis. When I collected her from the Middlesex Hospital she had walked unsteadily with me down Charing Cross Road, and in the medical section at Foyles I had bought for her the surgeon's monograph, the book of her operation. I felt the eroded surface of the scar, trying to catch up with the thousand small bumps and bruises her body had known. I could see her clasping the monograph as we stepped from the bookshop, smiling at me with all her hot temper and exasperation.

I held her tightly, sucking back the blood from my mouth, unsettled as if I were embracing a sister. She calmed me with a hand and began to caress my chest as we lay together, settling the movements of my diaphragm. Decades of need and dependence surged from me to her breast as I held it to my mouth. I moved her knee onto my hip and eased myself between her legs, wishing that we had once conceived a child together.

She wiped my blood from her nipple and raised it to her lips. “Quiet blood … that's good, Jim. Now I can remember…”

I moved inside her, in that deep interior embrace, glad that I could no longer feel her bones.

“Peggy … I wanted to do this thirty years ago.”

“Poor boy, you couldn't have managed it then.” She kissed my forehead, cleaning her lips and leaving a damp bow of blood that I could feel on my skin. “This is the last time—you'll have to wait another thirty years.”

“I'll wait…”

I rested within her as she began to make love on her own. Her eyes watched her breasts as they rose and fell, and she touched her nipples to excite herself and then steered my fingers to her pubis, letting herself into some reverie of lust as private as a dream. Her mind was far away, beyond this little house and the King's Road rooftops. She gazed at her strong ribs against my chest. Her brisk interrogation in the sitting room had been her devious courtship of me, and the blood in my mouth allowed me to play the sick child again. For a few moments we were lying on my bunk in the children's hut. In her roundabout way she was making her own return to the war, to her first desire for me. Now that her parents had died, she and I had taken their place and we were free to go back to Shanghai. Once again we were twelve-year-olds who had made a small marriage of need among the rags and malarial straw.

*   *   *

When we had dressed she straightened my tie and jacket, brushing away a fleck of dandruff in a wifely way. She said goodbye on the doorstep and kissed me robustly, sending me out into the world.

“Talk to David's lawyer,” I reminded her. “He'll telephone you.”

“I'll see what I can do—I can tell the magistrate he was abused by the Japanese.”

She embraced me for a last time in front of the passersby. A window into our childhoods had opened and closed.

*   *   *

“Teatime—thank God.” David sat up, our chess game forgotten. “The biscuits are good here, the best in Summerfield.”

Pushed by a tall Jamaican nurse, the trolley bearing the tea urn advanced towards the polished table, on which some forty cups and saucers were laid out in ranks. Five minutes earlier, a barely perceptible movement of patients had begun. Dressing gowns fastened, spectral figures appeared from the lavatories and dormitories. Other patients stood up without a word and drifted away from their relatives, pausing to shake the shoulders of the sedated men and women asleep in their chairs. None dared to approach the table, waiting as the nurse, with much officious rattling of the tea urn, set out the biscuit plates.

“It's kind of you to come, Jim.” David held my arm, but the black king had temporarily left the board. “To be honest, I don't get too many visitors.”

“David, I'm glad to come. Peggy and I are doing everything we can. We're trying to get you released as an outpatient.”

“The old Shanghai firm—never escape from that. It's interesting here—I thought it might give you a few ideas.”

“It has…”

Beside us, the young woman with the plump calves and everted eyes slept in her deep largactil stupor, unaware of the wraith-like figures advancing past her. They froze whenever the nurse glanced imperiously over her shoulder, as if all the ordeals of their lives obliged them once again to play a childhood game. Still unaware of the tea urn, the elderly woman in the nightdress was laying a row of daffodils along the strip of carpet that separated the recess of the bay window from the rest of the dayroom. Watching her, I tried to guess at the significance of this floral threshold, perhaps a gateway through which her lost children might one day appear.

“Doreen! Stop messing with those daffs!” The nurse banged the lid of the tea urn, glaring at the row of dripping flowers taken from their vases. “Now help me with these teas.”

Reluctant to leave her handiwork, Doreen began to line the cups beside the urn. David leaned back in his armchair, stretching towards the tea trolley, as if about to put his hand up the skirt of this imposing Jamaican woman. He was looking at the tray of biscuits, his hand moving to and fro like the head of a cobra. Every eye in the ward was fixed on him, and even the drowsing young woman had straightened her eyeballs to watch him.

“Doreen, you're getting behind.” The nurse stepped forward, her massive legs putting an end to David's dream. Doreen was holding a cup filled with tea, eyes fixed on the brimming liquid. She stared at the trembling surface, clearly struck by the unbearable contrast between the infinitely plastic fluid and the polished hardness of the table. She held the cup at arm's length, unable to bear the contrast between these opposing states of geometry. At last, testing a desperate hypothesis, she inverted the cup in a defiant gesture.

“Doreen…!” Tea was splashing everywhere, soaking the biscuits and racing across the table to pour in a steaming torrent onto the carpet. The nurse indignantly turned off the tap, her skirt and starched apron damp with the flying drops. “Doreen, why did you do that?”

“Jesus told me to.” Doreen spoke matter-of-factly. She gazed happily at the mess before her, pleased that she had been able to resolve these irreconcilable natures. Her moment of insight had seemed divinely inspired.

“Get to your room!” The nurse bore down on her. She seized Doreen's wrist and elbow and pitchforked her violently across the floor, shaking the old woman so severely that I feared she would break an arm. No blows were struck, but a dose of corporal punishment was being administered. Doreen stumbled to the carpet, and I rose from my seat to help her, ignoring the outraged nurse and the shocked stares of the relatives. Doreen's body was as light as a child's. She clung to her injured arm, sobbing to herself. When I left her at the door of her dormitory she stared at the rows of deserted beds and spoke to them plaintively: “Jesus
told
me to…”