The Kindness of Women

by J. G. Ballard

  Lykiard had put on his jeans and sandals. He spoke quickly to the Jouberts and brought out a bottle of fundador, but Miriam waved it away. She was reassuring the children, her face as small as theirs, her eyes staring at the staircase as if she had mislaid part of herself on the damp steps.

  “I’d take her back to your flat,” Lykiard suggested. “We’ll drive the kids in the car. She’ll be more comfortable in the dinghy.”

  Sally and the Jouberts helped me to lift Miriam into the inflatable. We pushed off, leaving our hamper and beach equipment on the sand, where the waves were already soaking the towels. Miriam waved to the children climbing into the back of the Citroen, her hands awkwardly gripping the sides of the inflatable. During the short journey the sea air seemed to revive her, and she smiled at me confidently, raising her damp eyebrows to apologise. But she collapsed when I pulled the dinghy onto the beach and had to lie down among the lines of parasols and the watching sunbathers until she recovered her breath.

  She was strong enough to walk to the lift, but when I opened the door to the flat I sensed that only half her mind recognised it. I called the bureau for the telephone number of a local doctor, and Miriam wandered onto the balcony, blinking at the crowded beach.

  An hour later, when the Spanish doctor arrived, she was lying on our bed, smiling wanly at the sound of the children on the Nordlunds’ balcony. The doctor examined her in a slow but scrupulous way. Afterwards he patted me encouragingly and spoke in Spanish to Lykiard. The practicante, a visiting male nurse, would keep Miriam under observation until the doctor called again that evening.

  While the practicante sat beside Miriam in the bedroom I went into the kitchen and prepared the children’s supper, then carried the tray to the Nordlunds’ apartment. When I returned, the practicante was on the telephone. He spoke to the doctor and then told me to be calm while he summoned an ambulance. I went into the bedroom and held Miriam’s forehead. She had lost all feeling from her left leg and arm and was moving in and out of a shallow consciousness, smiling in a faint way as she seemed to recede from herself. She frowned at me with one side of her face, touching her numbed body with a small hand.

  When the ambulance arrived I was already dazed with panic. The driver and his attendant were trying to assemble the collapsible wheelchair. While they argued with each other I lifted Miriam from the bed and carried her in my arms to the elevator. Her eyes stared vaguely at the falling lights of the floor buttons, and her body was cold, as if she had spent hours in the sea. We eased her into the ambulance, waving away the tourists returning from the beach, watched by the expressionless children on the Nordlunds’ balcony.

  Miriam could no longer see them. I heard the rear doors close behind me and saw Lykiard smiling stiffly, with a fist clenched in encouragement. I crouched on the jump seat behind the attendant as he secured Miriam under the blanket and readied his oxygen cylinder. We sped along the Figueras road, siren wailing, and began to swerve in and out of the traffic. I massaged Miriam’s calves, trying to feel the pulse in her legs. The oxygen from the mask had driven the sweat from her face, which seemed as small as Lucy’s at the moment of birth. Only her right eye was focused, moving across the lace curtains on the windows of the ambulance. She was forcing herself to breathe, but her ribcage had collapsed.

  We stopped behind a bus that blocked the road to the bullring. The attendant opened the rear doors and remonstrated with the driver, who slowly reversed out of our way. We reached the hospital ten minutes later, as the last crowds dispersed from the football stadium. The flower sellers by the ticket office were wrapping up their unsold blooms, and the news vendors were taking down their metal racks. But by then Miriam was already dead.

  8

  THE KINDNESS OF WOMEN

  The kindness of women came to my rescue, at a time when I had almost given up hope. Within a few weeks of her death I discovered that I had lost not only Miriam but all the women in the world. An unbridgeable space separated me from Miriam’s friends and the women I knew, as if they had decided to isolate me within a carefully drawn cordon. Later I realised that they were standing at a distance, in the nearby rooms of my life, waiting until I had faced my anger at myself. Then they came forward and did everything to help me. The kindness of women and the affection of my children steered me safely through those first long months.

  During our final days in Rosas, as the Nordlunds helped me to pack, I looked down from the balcony at the tourists stretched out on the beach, playing their parts in the eerie imitation of reality that life had become. The sun shone on the same parasols and pedalos, but everything had changed. In the hours since Miriam’s death the entire female race had mutated into a different species. The women eating their gambas in the beach restaurants avoided my eyes, talking among themselves as they licked their red-stained fingers. When I cashed the last of my traveller’s cheques I noticed that the bodies of the women queuing at the counter had lost their scent. Even Mrs. Nordlund, with her determined smile and affection towards the children, stared at me with the gaze of a relief worker from a foreign country.

  Only Señor Robles’s German-speaking secretary was still herself. Checking the inventory, she peered into the darkened bedroom, clearly assuming that here Miriam had died at my hands. She opened the mirrored cabinet in the bathroom and ran her fingers along the tooth glasses.

  “Nix kaputt?”

  “Kaputt nix.”

  She glanced at me in that way I would come to resent, a mixture of curiosity and distance, like a spectator at the scene of a crime. I wanted to take her wrists and raise her elbows so that I could inhale the scent of her armpits, press my fingers into her natal cleft. I disliked this cocksure young woman enough to have sex with her while the children waited in the car with the Nordlunds. I wanted to prove that at least one woman still existed. But she moved away from me to the hallway and took the stairs rather than be alone with me in the elevator. In her mind my wife’s death had let a rapist loose upon the world.

  Rosas and the lizard-ridged rocks of Cape Creus fell behind us as we set off for Figueras and the French border. The resort beaches of the Costa Brava, the hotels and cafés slid past through a dream more lurid than any of Dalí’s paintings, a vision of the world’s end seen in terms of polluted sand, the stench of sun oil, and terraces of overexposed flesh. We passed the entrance to the municipal cemetery at Figueras and the long corridor of cypresses leading to the whitewashed walls and the ornate porticos of the family tombs. Miriam was buried in the adjacent Protestant cemetery, a flowerless boneyard where a few anticlerical Spaniards rested under modest stones beside an English youth drowned in a yachting accident. Looking back for the last time, I turned north towards the Pyrenees, France, and home.

  The children sat behind me, playing compulsive games all the way to the Channel. Henry was too stunned to speak, but Alice and Lucy soon took charge. Already they were more concerned for me than they were for themselves. Mile after mile, they helped me with the road maps and chose hotels for our overnight stops, and kept a careful watch on the whisky bottle I held between my thighs. Their good sense and cheer laid the foundation on which we rebuilt our lives together.

  During the drive I could remember only my last moments with Miriam and the burial service at the cemetery. Nature had committed a crime against my young wife and her children, and I felt a deep, confused anger not merely at myself, for bringing Miriam to Rosas, but at the vine-covered hills, the plane trees, and the grazing cattle. An hour after she died a fierce peace had come over Miriam as she lay in the emergency room at Figueras hospital. Her head was flung back, her chest braced upwards, and her lips gaped in a rictus that exposed the livid muscles of her mouth and throat. Her jaw thrust itself at me from the blue skin, teeth set in a scream of death. Steadied by Nordlund, I walked to the cathedral-like Figueras undertakers. We moved through the lines of ornate gothic coffins that resembled pews facing a profane altar of black marble headstones. Thinking of Miriam, I decided it only fitting
that she should be consigned to the earth in a casket like a prop from a horror film.

  But later that evening, when I returned to the hospital, a complete change had come over her. All the pain and fear of her last moments, as her stricken brain collapsed inwards upon itself, had passed. Her face had relaxed, and her skin was soft and white again. A nurse had combed her hair for me, and her cheeks and lips were as small and neat as a little girl’s, giving me a last glimpse of her vanished childhood.

  At the burial service the next day, the coffin was wheeled on its cart into the Protestant cemetery. The iron rims rang across the dusty rubble. The children stood beside me in their best party clothes, and I hoped that they would never hear the rage of death below the coffin lid. The young Spanish clergyman abandoned his broken English and spoke in a thick Catalan, once banished by General Franco, whose dark consonants were the language of the dead, which Miriam would now be speaking. Sally Mumford stood with Lykiard and the Jouberts. None of them could look at me. Smoking her reefer, Sally stared at the graves as if she expected the stone lids to be flung back and the angry occupants to leap out and seize us.

  The gravediggers bent over their spades. The first stones struck the lid like a fist beating against a door. Nordlund handed a spare spade to me and I cast two blades of the nutty soil into the grave. Together we walked from the cemetery and drove through the football crowds, as if leaving a crime behind us.

  * * *

  After three days to cross a country and a sea, we returned to Shepperton. The long French roads helped me to straighten the perspectives of my mind. The past, on which I had turned my back on the day of my marriage, had rushed up and now stood behind me. Miriam’s death joined me once again to all those nameless Chinese who had died during the Second World War. I remembered the dusty dead beside the crushed motorcars in the Avenue Edward VII and the straining jaw of the Chinese clerk at the rural railway station, first rehearsals for an afternoon at Figueras. Images of the bone-white paddy fields came back to me, like the pearly light that lay over Lunghua after the explosion of the atom bomb at Nagasaki. Kennedy had outstared Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis, but American bombers were still parked under the flat skies of Cambridgeshire, and the kingdom of light waited to be born from those concrete aprons among the fens.

  Miriam’s sister, Dorothy, and her husband were waving cheerfully by the gate when we arrived home. They had treats and surprises for the children, a cold roast lunch fit for a wake, and bottles of wine open on the table. I was grateful to them and held Dorothy tightly in my arms. But the echo of Miriam’s bones in her sister’s face, and the Cambridge crispness in her voice, made me feel that I and the children had returned to a parallel world that tried too hard to mimic its original.

  While the children opened their presents I left Dorothy and Brian and climbed the stairs. The untidy rooms, strewn with toys and clothes, with favourite teddy bears rejected at the last minute, fixed the exact moment of our departure four weeks earlier. I stood by Miriam’s dressing table, looking down at the clutter of hairbrushes and cosmetics and a discarded tube of the previous summer’s suntan oil with its broken cap. Her fingerprints were set in the film of talc that covered the glass top, the ghost of her mouth in the red smear of a crushed tissue.

  I opened the centre drawer, crammed with old phone bills, tampons, and school reports, faded brassieres held together with safety pins, and her faithful Dutch cap, like an unreliable family servant, for years the home of the spare car keys. I tipped the wastebasket onto the floor and sifted through the hair balls and tubes of contraceptive jelly, the torn suspender belt and fishnet stockings that she liked to wear at parties and later vamp around the bedroom. I lifted the stocking to my lips, smelling the scent of Miriam’s thighs, the same body scent that rose from the pillows and greeted me when I opened the wardrobe onto the racks of her dresses. Her hundred presences filled the house like a chorus of ghosts.

  I needed to let them go. I opened the windows and watched the clouds of talc and dust drift through the air, repatriating themselves to Figueras. In the garden the children were chasing their old toys while Brian mowed the lawn. Alice was rearranging the furniture in the treehouse, casting out the cardboard tables and chairs as if spring cleaning before the arrival of a new domestic regime. Henry had found a still-inflated party balloon and was trying to stamp on it, while Lucy tested the swing, taking it up to a wild new altitude.

  Watching them, I felt the first smile cross my lips. I knew that the children were braver than I was—during the long drive home they had never once mentioned their mother, the first of the many unspoken pacts which we made in the coming months. I sat on the bed, as the scents of Miriam’s body floated on the summer air.

  Dorothy was carving the cold roast in the kitchen. She was three years older than Miriam, the more serious sister, a partner in a firm of Cambridge solicitors. At our wedding she had smiled and shaken her head as I kissed the bride, clearly doubting whether I would ever be a match for the high-tempered Miriam.

  I drank a tumbler of duty-free whisky and hesitated before pouring another. Dorothy pressed my hand, refilling the glass.

  “Go on—you’ve earned it. That must have been the most tremendous drive.”

  “We were totally lost near Poitiers. I can tell you, Henry’s French saved the day. For one moment I thought of turning back.”

  “You should have done. No, what am I saying?” Dorothy checked herself, surprised by her tongue. “Brian wondered if you were going to move?”

  “From Shepperton?”

  “From this house, at least—you ought to make a fresh start somewhere.”

  “No…” I watched Alice and Lucy vigorously cleaning the treehouse. A flurry of leaves was followed by an old stuffed toy, loyal companion of years, that plunged head-first to the newly mown grass. Women were ruthless from an early age, and needed to be. “We’ve made a fresh start. It’s best if we stay here and face things.”

  “You’ll keep the children?”

  “Of course. It was part of the deal.”

  “It’s quite a challenge. Brian and I could have the girls.”

  “Thanks, but no. We’ll stick it out together.”

  * * *

  After lunch, when Brian had taken the children to Chessington Zoo, Dorothy and I began to tidy the rooms. As we put away the scattered toys and clothes I had the sense that we were scene-shifters changing a set of props. Everything tilted at an unfamiliar angle. Even Dorothy’s resemblances to her sister, the echo of Miriam’s broad cheekbones and small hands, strong walk and determined hips, made me feel that we were extras rehearsing a scene to be played by others.

  “Would you like me to do the bedroom?” Dorothy was staring at the cluttered dressing table and wardrobe. “Heavens, it’s sad. Jim, throw it all away. Clear everything out. Give the clothes to the jumble people.”

  “I will, don’t worry. I need a little longer. It’s all that’s left.”

  “It isn’t.”

  Dorothy held my shoulders, trying to pull me back into the present. I put my hands on her waist, desperate to embrace her. After the spectral women of Rosas beach, Dorothy with her firm hips and comforting breasts was wholly alive. I pressed my hands to her shoulder blades, searching for the familiar contours that Miriam had trained me to recognise. Dorothy stiffened and moved away from me, unsettled by my trembling hands. Then she leaned against me, pressing her cheek to mine, calming my agitated face.

  “All right. We’ll go into Henry’s room.”

  “No … stay here. In Miriam’s bed.”

  Trying to control myself, I untied her apron and slipped my hands beneath her shirt, feeling the smooth skin of her back and her strong ribs. I sat on the untidy bed, the sheets still marked by the creases of the last night before the holiday, and placed my head against her thighs. Dorothy stood calmly in front of me as I undressed her, palms lightly on my cheeks, running her fingers into my mouth as I tasted their scent. An unfamiliar mole mar
ked the skin of her left shoulder, but for a moment I could believe that she was Miriam. I kissed her labia and then sat her on my knees, caressing her vulva as if I had parted its lips on countless afternoons in this bedroom of a loving husband. When I pressed my mouth to her nipples she smoothed away the sweat on my forehead and pushed me back onto Miriam’s pillow.

  For these few minutes her duty to her dead sister’s children overrode her loyalty to her husband. She knelt across me, adjusting her knees to my heavier torso. Exhausted and overexcited, desperate for this kindly woman, I tried to press my limp penis into her vulva. Smiling in a distant but reassuring way, Dorothy took it from my fingers and began to massage the head between her hands. She forced a little spit onto her fingertips and moistened the mouth of her vagina. She eased my penis into her, glanced through the window at a passing car, and put her breast to my mouth, looking down at me like a wet nurse caring for a neighbour’s feverish child. When I came, and sank back onto the pillow, she lay beside me and held my diaphragm until my breathing had steadied. I let my fingers into her vulva and tasted the sweet moisture, making sure that I would remember it in the empty months ahead.

  She waited until I was ready and passed my clothes to me. Without speaking, she began to tidy the dressing table, lining up the cosmetics and hairbrushes and polishing the finger-smeared mirror. I gratefully embraced her before she left the bedroom for the last time.

  * * *

  From that afternoon I was celibate for nearly a year. Although the children and I often visited Dorothy and her husband, I never again made love to her. She had met her obligations to her dead sister, calming the widowed husband and reminding him that Miriam endured within our affection and shared memories. Greeting us, Dorothy would hold me briefly, keeping alive the link between her lost sister and the women I would know in the future.