But much as I needed other women, I found it impossible to approach them. My friends were careful to invite me to their parties, but a chasm of time and pain separated me from the women I met. Tongue-tied and clumsy, I moved past them in a daze of sexual desire.
Once, standing among the coats in David Hunter’s bedroom, I found myself alone with one of his flying-club groupies, the young widow of an RAF sergeant killed in Cyprus. I guessed that he had assigned her the job of bringing me back to life. As David stood guard in the corridor and pretended to discuss the Mercury space flights with an aviation journalist, she leaned against the door and drew me onto her thighs. I held her small shoulders as if she were one of my daughters, frightened after a fall in the garden. I pressed my cheek to her mouth and felt her lips in my ear, teeth biting at the lobe. When I failed to respond she slipped her hand below the waist of my trousers, fingers probing between my buttocks. She tugged at my shirt and palpated me as she would have soothed a wounded lover. She waited patiently for my erection, but then gave up with a shrug, kissed me cheerfully on the forehead, and slipped through the door.
Had nature, through long trial and error, decided that I had failed as both husband and father and banished me before I could do any further damage? Certainly, many people thought that I should not be looking after the children. But Henry, Alice, and Lucy were all I had to believe in, and I was sure that I could make them happy. We cooked in the crowded kitchen, following the girls’ outlandish recipes, argued over television, and did our homework together. With longer memories of his mother, Henry was sometimes sad, and in the evenings I carried the TV set into my study and sat with him on the sofa, an arm around him while he quietly watched his favourite comedy programmes. One evening at last I heard him laugh.
Every day was an Aladdin’s Cave of schemes and enthusiasms. Alice and Lucy, seven and four, soon took charge of everything, deciding when we should go shopping or visit friends, whether I needed a rest from them or if it was time to hold a party. Already they were sizing up the mothers of their school friends, urging me into little flirtations and blithely waving aside the minor problem of their husbands. I collected them from school in the afternoons and felt a thrill of relief when they clambered noisily into the car, as if we had been separated for months.
What they most resented was any hint that there was something freakish about our family. Too many people, swayed by folk wisdom or modish child psychology, took for granted that the loss of their mother was a wound from which they would never recover, and that no father, however loving, could ever take the mother’s place. Even Peggy Gardner, now a paediatrician at Guy’s Hospital in London, seemed to hold this view. Whenever she visited Shepperton she gazed tolerantly at the untidy rooms cluttered with the children’s drawings and projects, as if the confusion reflected the deep crisis within this stricken family.
Peggy had never married, despite a long line of men friends and an easy knack with children. Miriam had vaguely distrusted her, aware that Peggy was the first woman I had ever needed and that our relationship went far beyond the possibilities of sex. At the same time she was curious to see behind the handsome self-control that Peggy showed to the world. Bourgeois life had claimed Peggy—good sense, tolerance, and understanding had totally corrupted her.
Six months after our return from Spain she called in to see us on the way back from a child-care conference in Bristol. Still in her professional mode, briefcase in hand, she sat smiling on the sofa while Lucy made room for her. Surrounded by Lucy’s full parade of dolls and bears, arranged in meticulous order of seniority, Peggy faintly resembled a stuffed toy herself. As always, I could see that my motherless children reminded her of our days together in Lunghua.
“That’s nice, Lucy.” Peggy beamed at the row of dolls. “I’m in the middle of a lovely little family.”
“You’re not in the family,” Lucy warned her. “But you’re the oldest.”
“And the wisest,” I added.
Lucy straightened a battered kangaroo. “Mrs. Roo’s much wiser—she told Daddy’s fortune.”
“And what was that, Lucy?”
“He’s going to live for a hundred years.”
“That’s wonderful. I think he’s going to live forever.”
“No,” Lucy said, her eyes fixed on mine. “He won’t live forever. But nearly forever…”
When Lucy had gone, Peggy smiled at the contingent of battered but cheerful dolls as if it were a model of my own family.
“Lucy’s a dear—they all are. You’ve done an amazing job. How on earth do you manage to write?”
“They go to school.”
“But when they’re home? It’s a perpetual riot.”
“I like it.” I felt myself being pushed into a familiar corner. “Some writers listen to Vivaldi. I like to hear my children playing. There’s nothing abnormal in that.”
“It seems to work. You’ve been very brave.”
“Peggy!” Irritated, I pulled the glass of wine from her hand. “For God’s sake, men are capable of loving their children.”
“Not the ones I see at Guy’s.”
“Men have never been given a chance. Every social convention you can think of is against them, believe me.”
“I do—but conventions are hard to change.”
“Women don’t want them changed. It takes only one hand to rock a cradle, and they want that hand to be theirs.”
“The women I see are making a run for the nursery door.”
“Are they? Most women think it’s wrong of me to look after the kids myself. They feel it’s unnatural. Even you do.”
“It is unusual.”
“Look at men on a beach, where they’re allowed to play with their children. You’ll see all the care and affection in the world, while the women are busy fussing over their damn mascara.”
“I’ll think of you here as on the beach.” Peggy sipped her wine, surveying the posters on the wall, wild drawings of aircraft on fire, dropping their nuclear bombs. “How’s Henry doing?”
“He’s getting better. He’s much happier. We read and play a lot together. I try not to go out too often.”
“You must get out sometimes.”
“I’ve been out. It looks pretty much the same old scene. Every day here is a new adventure.”
“Even so, you can’t spend all your time mothering the children.”
I sat down on the sofa and took Peggy’s hand. “Peggy, I’m not ‘mothering’ the children. I can’t take Miriam’s place, and I won’t try to.”
“You still miss her—I can see that.”
“Of course … there are so many things I wish I’d done for her. In many ways I was a lousy husband.”
“At least you loved her. You should think about her as much as you want.”
“I do. Take it from me, the death of a wife is all about sex. I keep dreaming about her in a weird way—walking around the bedroom in Rosas, or in the bullring at Barcelona. Dreams full of blood and dead bulls. I even saw her in Lunghua, strolling along the railway line to that little station. In some peculiar way she was involved with that. All those meaningless deaths that mean everything.”
“Do you think you’ll marry again?”
“Not many women would marry a man with three children. Whenever I see a couple together in their car I really resent them. Almost as if they were to blame.”
Peggy put her hand on my arm. I looked at her capable fingers, unchanged since the days at Lunghua. During my fevers in the children’s hut she had talked to me in her sensible schoolgirl’s voice, trying to explain away the eerie visions of delirium. I felt the enlarged knuckle of her wrist, the condyle chipped when I darted into the hut and drove the door against her hand.
In the nursery the children were arguing over the Monopoly board, Alice delivering a magisterial lecture on the significance of passing Go. Henry was insisting on circling the board counterclockwise. Peggy smiled, still holding my hand, but when I touched her thigh she pushe
d me away.
“Peggy…”
“I know. Deep in the underwear something stirred. I have to go.”
“Stay the night. Why not?”
She picked up her handbag. “I’m due back at Guy’s. Besides, those dreams are just for you…”
I waited while she said goodbye to the children. Had she guessed that I would be impotent and decided to spare my feelings? We had been too close to each other in Lunghua, forced into a child marriage that revealed too many flaws and limits.
She held my hand through the window of her car, one of the first Japanese imports, an engagingly odd choice. “You’re fine—the children have looked after you wonderfully. I’ve talked to Alice and Lucy and they’re going to make sure you go out more often.”
I watched her drive erratically away. Of course she was right: it was the children who were bringing me up. They had come to terms with the past far more quickly than their father. I had emptied the wardrobes of Miriam’s clothes, but I sometimes noticed that prying little fingers had teased the hem of a skirt through the lid of the suitcases where I stored them. One afternoon, while repairing the fence, I was aware that the children were unnaturally quiet. Climbing the stairs, I saw them in my bedroom. They had found Miriam’s wedding dress, which Alice now wore, tottering on her high-heeled shoes as Lucy played a bridesmaid holding the train. Henry wore my old Panama hat and dinner jacket. Bursting with glee, they paraded around the bed, bowing and curtseying through a mock marriage ceremony. Then Alice stretched out on the bed and closed her eyes, while Lucy and Henry folded the bedspread around her, solemnly laying her to rest.
Watching them without a word, I crept down the stairs, knowing that they had recovered. An hour later the dress had been carefully returned to the suitcase. A few flecks of confetti shaken loose from its hem lay on the bedroom carpet beside my slippers.
My own recovery took longer, delayed by the well-meaning refusal of almost everyone to refer to Miriam’s death. A gentle conspiracy existed among my friends and publishing acquaintances, as they feigned not to notice that Miriam had vanished through a window of time and space. This silence reminded me of the cruel childhood game in which we pretended, without telling him, that one of our friends no longer existed—the poor victim would be ignored, stared through, excluded from any games. I envied the elaborate mourning rituals of the Chinese, the public wailing of the widow on which Europeans so looked down. Watching the national mourning of a stricken America after the assassination of President Kennedy, I almost envied his bereaved wife. Every moment of her grief was endlessly replayed and anatomised on television. Her husband’s death, like the murder of his assassin, was recapitulated in slow motion, frame by numbered Zapruder frame. She wore her blood-spattered skirt like a cry of rage at the world that had widowed her.
* * *
One evening, after eleven months of unbroken celibacy, I was taken on a tour of Soho’s strip clubs by a London publisher then living in New York. The worst kind of Manhattanised Englishman, he wolfed down his sole and Chablis and then dragged me from one backstreet club to the next. At first I tried to slip away from him, but I was curious to see my own reactions. On minute boudoir stages the young strippers worked through their routines, smiling in their overlit way at the wanfaced men who packed the narrow seats. Caressing their breasts and buttocks, masturbating as they exposed their vulvas for a ritual few seconds, they mimicked the audience’s lust in routines as formalised as the aircraft emergency drills rehearsed by air hostesses in the minutes after takeoff. I waited for them to arouse me, but the strippers seemed to parade their sexual possibilities with all the fervour of anatomy demonstrators in a dissecting room taking their students through the urino-genital system.
“How long since you had a woman, Jim?” the publisher asked.
“A long time.”
“Well, come on, then. Cheer up.”
He told me that this tour of Soho clubs was our appetiser before we booked into an exclusive Westminster brothel he had been recommended by a British criminal whose memoirs he was editing. But I knew that he was too drunk to do more than go back to his hotel. Watching him as he gazed at a cobra-eyed teenager stroking her anus with a forefinger, I guessed that it was this stylisation of sex that most appealed to him, not the act itself. The atrocity exhibition was more stirring than the atrocity.
When I left him at the door of his taxi he put a heavy hand on my shoulder, searching for some insight into my sad condition.
“Perhaps, Jim, you just don’t like girls anymore…”
* * *
I walked away from him under a cinema marquee advertising the first of the Mondo Cane films, bogus documentaries that cunningly mixed fake atrocity newsreels with genuine footage of human oddity. Next to the marquee was a newspaper billboard promoting a special supplement devoted to the Kennedy assassination, with a grainy enlargement of the Zapruder frame that recorded the last moments of the stricken President. Near Piccadilly Circus a group of CND members were canvassing support for an anti-nuclear rally to be held in Trafalgar Square. A well-nourished young woman pressed a leaflet into my hand bearing a photograph of a simulated nuclear attack, which showed hundreds of volunteers lying down together in a placid high street.
Fantasies of apocalyptic death fuelled the imaginations of these comfortable suburbanites. I was thinking of a different atomic bomb, which many of the Lunghua prisoners claimed to have seen above Nagasaki, the bomb that had saved our lives. In the rancid glare of the music arcades, as the hips of the young streetwalkers shook to Trini Lopez, I could almost believe that a Third World War might have saved Miriam and that the war to come after that might resurrect her from her grave. A secret logic that I had yet to explore seemed to connect her death with the dead in the Avenue Edward VII, as if the unconscious needs of the human race could only be fulfilled in an obliterating sexual apocalypse, replayed in an infinity of slow-motion photography. Fragments of deranged dreams veered across the night air above the raucous neon.
* * *
The lurid glare still hung in my eyes as I walked the children to the school gates the following morning. When I returned to my car I began to chat to a mother of two boys in Lucy’s class. We discussed the costumes for the children’s Christmas party, which she was helping to design. Keen to show me the patterns, she invited me for coffee at her nearby home.
As we sat at her kitchen table she explained that she and her husband had separated, but told me that he still brought his laundry home. Something about this admission seemed to amuse her. Without much prompting she added that they made love in the kitchen while the washing machine completed its cycle.
“Domestic routines survive everything,” I commented. “I like that. It’s rather touching.”
“Isn’t it…” Coming to the point, she switched on the washing machine. “By the way, you haven’t anything that needs washing?”
“No … except this handkerchief.”
“It looks a bit grubby. Let me do it for you.”
While the machine circled and the white flag of my handkerchief waved to us from its drowned world, I sat her on the kitchen table, scarcely smaller than the strip-club stages. Her knees were held tightly against my hips by her short leather skirt. Her hands rested on my chest, as if she were measuring me for a new life on which I was about to embark. I was grateful to her for the unforced references to Miriam, whom she had known well, and for taking the lead so expertly. She had realised that only a frivolous approach, as divorced from real feeling as the Soho clubs and marquee signs, could ever have reached me.
Her fingers lowered my zip, and I said: “I hope something happens … it’s been a long time.”
“Three weeks? Or three months?”
“Eleven months.”
“Time for a baby. Let’s see what we can do about that.”
She unbuttoned my shirt and pressed her hands against my diaphragm. “Heavens, you’re tense … deep breaths, now.” She laughed cheerfully, amused by
herself. “Still, at least we’ve met before. These days you have sex straightaway and the wooing starts later.”
“I’ll woo you.”
“Good. Something does seem to be happening. Now, can you remember what to do next?”
* * *
That night I dreamed of Miriam for the last time. I was walking down Shepperton High Street on my way to the shops when I saw her by the traffic lights at the crossroads. She was as young and beautiful as I ever remembered her, and I was filled with a deep sense of love for her and relief that we would meet again. I was glad that the nightmare of the past months was over and that we would be reunited with the children in our little house. I called to her as she strode confidently across the road, her skirt swinging at her knees. She looked back, recognising me with a cheery smile, and walked on. I called to her again, but she strode past the shops, and I saw her disappear among the cars and pedestrians.
Waking from the dream, I listened to my children sleeping in their rooms. I lay in the darkness and knew that Miriam had set me free.
9
CRAZE PEOPLE
“We’ll take the pixies with us! You can’t leave them behind!”
With a noisy swoop Sally Mumford lifted Lucy into the air and held the excited six-year-old against her shoulder, while gathering Alice and Henry to the folds of her floor-length dress.
“Sally…” I tried feebly to protest. “They’re too young for a pop concert. And I’m too old.”
“Rubbish! We’re going together. We won’t listen to him, will we?”
“No!” they yelled.
“Right! Coats and scarves, and earplugs for Daddy. I’ll make a picnic for us, if I can find anything in that mouldy fridge…”
Sally had taken charge. As always, I watched her with unstinted admiration as she rolled her skirt around her thighs, exposing her long white legs. She squatted, scowling, in front of the open refrigerator. Out came salami, brie, two bottles of white Burgundy.
“Right. That’s us. Now, what do you feed the monsters?”
The Kindness of Women Page 16