The Kindness of Women

by J. G. Ballard

  The next day she allowed me to take her to our family doctor, who referred her to an American physician at the London Clinic. She then moved to a specialist nursing home on the Thames near Marlow, one of those private prisons in which the rich, with the connivance of the medical profession, confine their elderly or embarrassing relatives. When I visited her there she was calm and sedated, smiling from a waking sleep as she spoke of our first meeting on the sand island near Rosas ten years earlier. She seemed a child again, the kindly and generous young woman who had come to the help of my own children when they most needed her. Only when I mentioned Dick Sutherland did she frown and turn away from me.

  Dick, alone, had made a triumphant exit from the sixties. As I guessed, science and pornography at last made their long-awaited rendezvous under the lens of his laboratory camera. His successful TV series on the paranormal—ESP, astrology, and telekinesis—was sold to an American network and brought him to the attention of a progressive New York magazine tycoon who had recently founded an institute of sexual research. On its governing body sat many of the gurus of the counterculture—evangelists for LSD, trend-hunting neurologists, Zen philosophers, and Marxist popularisers. With much fanfare, the tycoon announced that the institute would continue the pioneering work of Masters and Johnson, Kinsey, and Havelock Ellis.

  At first, its researchers devoted themselves to scientific films of heterosexual intercourse, using the latest fibre-optic technology and miniaturised body-orifice TV cameras, all in pursuit of the white whale of modern sexology, the female orgasm. Soon, however, as graphic stills from these exploratory films were published in the parent company’s magazines and pushed the circulations to record heights, the research broadened to include more wayward forms of sexual activity. The institute was discreetly relocated in London, avoiding the scrutiny of the U.S. Justice Department and any possible threat to the professorial tenure of its academic board members.

  Dick became the institute’s scientific director at its new headquarters, in a former hotel overlooking the Regent’s Park canal. Here, under the neutral gaze of the rostrum camera, a recruited force of volunteers had explored every legal permutation of lesbian, homosexual, and heterosexual intercourse. The cans of undeveloped film were air-freighted to the magazine offices in New York, and selected stills appeared beside the centerfold nudes with Dick’s scientific commentary.

  When I mildly suggested to Dick that he was producing something indistinguishable from pornography he had readily agreed.

  “Except for one thing—our aim is to analyse, not arouse. Think of this vast human activity, common to the whole biological kingdom, and you realise that surprisingly little is known about it. What actually happens when a woman fellates you? Do you know, Jim?”

  “Dick, you make me doubt it…”

  “Well, what more is there to say?”

  “But why do I need to know?”

  “Because sex is the last great frontier.” Dick had gestured at the horizons of Regent’s Park like Cortés grasping the immensity of the Pacific. “One thing we can say for certain about the future of sex—there’s going to be a lot more of it. Already we can see that new forms of social structure will emerge to cope with the sexual imagination. What you and everyone else think of as the pornographic mind may well allow us to transcend ourselves and, in a sense, the limits of sex itself.”

  “Your new series should be fascinating, Dick.”

  “You’ve already heard about it? Good.”

  I hadn’t, but I saluted him ungrudgingly. Thinking of our journey to Rio, I realised that the evening with Carmen and Fortunata had been a brave attempt to step down from the television screen into a lost world of emotion and desire. He had discarded the image of the hoodlum scientist—part rock star, part Robert Oppenheimer—that had sustained him since his Cambridge days. Out went the leather jackets and gold medallions, in came tweed suits and woollen ties. He was at ease with me now, happier and more confident, at last engaged on the original research that had always eluded him and unaware that he himself was the victim of a bogus experiment.

  But Sally had been hurt. Along with the other volunteers who worked at the institute, she had been beguiled by Dick’s evangelical ardour. She told me that she had been amazed by the unedited films screened for the volunteers in the institute viewing theatre, of the cathedral-like interior of her own vagina, moisture beading on its cavernous walls like jewels dripping in a grotto. As she lay with her laboratory partner, a remote-controlled camera recorded the involuntary movements of her facial musculature, the flushing of her breasts and abdomen, the skin tremors on the backs of her thighs.

  Seeing these abstracted portions of herself had led to a growing numbness, a fading sensitivity of her skin to pain and feeling, as if her nervous system had been connected, not to the familiar nerve endings of her hands and lips, but to the screen in Dick’s viewing theatre. She would turn the pages of the men’s magazines in the waiting room before the laboratory sessions and find detached parts of her anatomy between the covers, the moist escarpment of her pubis like a remote mountain range viewed from the window of an airliner.

  A progressive dismemberment of herself was taking place, until she reached the point where she expected to find the skin of her breasts and thighs stretched across an advertising billboard or upholstering the seats of a modish nightclub. When, like most of Dick’s volunteers, she dropped out of the programme, she never fully reintegrated herself and would wander the streets in her heroin daze searching for the lost parts of her face and lips.

  Soon after, the Home Office became interested in the institute, and its work was suspended. Across the Atlantic, the magazine tycoon announced that the sexual revolution was over and that he had donated the miles of cine-film to the Kinsey Foundation. Leisure industries represented the wave of the future, and investment would be moved to new vacation sites in Hawaii and the Caribbean. Sex, with every regret, was left to fend for itself.

  The setback was a blow to Dick. As he admitted in a moment of surprising frankness, he had naïvely hoped that the institute’s original work would be accepted for what it was. He knew that his reputation in the scientific community had been damaged and that the doors of most laboratories would be closed to him. Trying to help him, I introduced him to an interested publisher, and at my suggestion Dick quickly wrote the text of a pop-up guide to human psychology. Later, reading through this colourful bestseller, which seemed to have strayed from the back of a cornflakes packet, I was struck as always by Dick’s shrewdness, intelligence, and wit. Since its sales far exceeded those of my own books, Dick could continue to patronise me in his friendly way. I was still his gauche student, making the coffee in his laboratory and allowed to flirt with his secretary.

  But had the rat in the Skinner box always controlled the experimenter? When I thought of David Hunter, of Dick and Sally, I sometimes wondered what part I had played in plotting the course of their lives, steering them towards goals that I had set many years earlier. I had never consciously manipulated them, but they had accepted their assigned roles like actors recruited to play their parts in a drama whose script they had never seen.

  Peggy Gardner had no doubts about my responsibility. I visited her small Chelsea house after seeing David remanded in custody at the magistrate’s court, hoping that she might later testify as a character witness. She sat away from me in a straight-backed chair, surveying me as if I had been at the wheel of the Jaguar and she were a police psychiatrist called to give her assessment.

  “Poor David. The last of your troupe. First Sally, then Dick…”

  “Dick? I’ve had nothing to do with him.” I lowered my tumbler of whisky with such force that I cracked the enamel of her blackwood table. “Peggy…?”

  “That tawdry institute and all those TV programmes.”

  “He’s an actor at heart, who happened to stray into psychology. Dick’s … a shaman for the TV age.”

  “For years you’ve been encouraging him to buy
all those American cars, telling him—what was it, some nonsense?—that he’d make the first scientific discovery on television. How could he resist?”

  “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.”