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…”
* * *
After saying goodbye to David I made my way down to the lodge, glad to see the empty lawns and the car park. “Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one,” David had counted as he returned the pieces to the box. He locked the catch and added: “Thirty-two.” He smiled at me, fully aware of the game we were playing. Find the key was David’s game, but he had never found it, and the search had led him to Summerfield, while Doreen had found her own in a moment of faith and imagination. I thought of this simple woman protecting herself from the world with her cordon of flowers, solving a pressing mystery of time and space with a brave gesture.
I gave my name to the orderly and stepped into the sunlight. In a curious way I felt that I was being discharged from Summerfield. David and all the patients in this Victorian asylum had put their heads together, trying to solve the puzzle from whose board an essential piece had been stolen.
I walked to my car, across the damp asphalt that never dried after the night’s rain. Before I started the engine I made a note to visit David in the following fortnight and to bring daffodils for Doreen. Summerfield fell behind me, an empty labyrinth hoarding its exits and entrances.
PART III
After the War
14
INTO THE DAYLIGHT
The telephone call from Sally Mumford surprised me. Four years after returning to America for good—she had sent farewell postcards from Berkeley, California, and a retreat somewhere in Idaho—she was in England again, with a young husband, a small daughter, and a house in the Norfolk countryside. In a cheerful, almost matronly tone she told me that she had been back for six months, squirrelled away in what sounded suspiciously like a hippie commune left over from the sixties. She had invited David to visit them and suggested, on hearing of his lifetime driving ban, that I come, too, and give him a lift.
“We have a goat, I grow beans and cauliflower and bake our own bread. You’ll be amazed!”
My heart couldn’t decide whether to sink or soar.
The trip, three weekends later, got off to a confused start. David failed to appear as agreed in the lobby of the Heathrow Penta Hotel, delayed by a late flight from Brussels. After waiting for an hour I headed towards the North Circular, wondering if David shared my second thoughts. I was glad to be seeing Sally again, at last with a child of her own and expecting her second—or so she had seemed to mention in an earth mother’s vague afterthought, as if she now intended to be permanently pregnant for the rest of her life.
But the thought of returning to an intact piece of the sixties was as daunting as trying to re-enter the previous weekend’s hangover. Eight years after the decade’s end there were all too many sixties casualties still around, a walking wounded like the veterans of an unpopular war, who had no compunction about nagging at the public conscience. They clung to the fringe life of provincial universities, edited books on the occult or alternative life-styles, or sat entombed in remote offices of the BBC, always ready to waste a lunch hour with talk of programmes on some nineteenth-century herbalist or forgotten friend of the Pre-Raphaelites.
The dream of the sixties lay dead in their eyes, and probably in my own, along with the hopes for a millennial world of peace and harmony—hopes, curiously, that had been propelled aloft by the cruel excitements of the post-Kennedy era and a million drug overdoses. My children had set off for their universities, leaving a vacuum in my life that would never be filled. The house in Shepperton was like a warehouse discarded by the film studios, along with the plywood candy bars and toilet roll of Magic World. The old toys and model aircraft that crammed the cupboards were the props of a long-running family sitcom which the sponsors, despite its high ratings and loyal audience, had decided to drop.
The sense of being pulled out of the schedules pressed on me as I mooned around the empty bedrooms, looking at the old holiday snapshots lying in the debris. Wiping away the dust, I stared at these pictures of the girls cutting a swathe thro
ugh the Greek and Spanish waiters, Henry arm-wrestling with a captain of pedalos and learning to water-ski. I missed our shared childhood that had once seemed to go on forever. When they came home on their brief visits—eerily like cast reunions—I knew that I was the last of us to grow up. They accepted adult life, while I was still thinking of our happy days watching the televised moon landings and Miss World contests, anachronisms that belonged to a vanished decade.
As I left London I ran deeper into the past than Sally’s commune near Norwich. I could have chosen a more easterly route, avoiding Cambridge altogether, which I had not visited for twenty years. But the old university town, where I had first met Miriam and Dick Sutherland, was worth a detour, if only to see if my mixed feelings towards the place had survived intact.
Fortunately, any uneasy memories were forgotten in the roar of heavy traffic that filled the approaches to the city. Cambridge had expanded into a complex of industrial and science parks, ringed by monotonous housing estates and shopping precincts. At its centre, like the casbah in Tangier, was the antique heart of the university, a stopover for well-disciplined parties of Japanese tourists stepping from their TV-equipped German buses. As an undergraduate I had prayed for a new Thomas Cromwell who would launch the dissolution of the universities, but mass tourism had accomplished this, overwhelming the older European universities as it would soon destroy Rome, Florence, and Venice.
I parked my car near the backs, crossed the Cam, and joined a column of Japanese as they wound through King’s. Undergraduates lolled in their punts like bored film extras hoping to catch a producer’s eye. Dons with their faux-eccentric manners posed outside the chapel with the self-consciousness of minor character actors, waiting as a Spanish TV crew set up its lights. The spirit of the Disney Corporation and the ethos of the theme park hovered over the gothic stone. Listening to a tour guide’s commentary, I waited to be told that the entire chapel was a fibreglass, tourist-resistant replica and that the original structure was now in the more enlightened care of the Ford Foundation in some warehouse on Long Beach.
The Cambridge of old, of Rutherford, Keynes, Ryle, and Crick, had long since departed to the American universities that had superseded it, leaving behind a TV academia with its eyes on its script-consultancy fees. Meanwhile, the more real world that I had first glimpsed on my motorcycle rides still existed. Away from the tourist cameras and the posing dons presided the enduring realities of American power. Beyond the hedges and the chain-mail fences the nuclear bombers stood at the ends of their runways, guarantors of the civilised order upon which the university so preened itself.
Hearing the sound of American engines, I turned off the road near Mildenhall as a huge bomber swept over the trees. A car passed me, carrying an off-duty American airman and his family. They wore civilian clothes when they ventured from their bases, like the keepers at a nature reserve maintaining a discreet watch on their unpredictable charges. I parked in a narrow lane and stared through the perimeter fence at the worn concrete beside the nuclear weapons silos. The unsung and unremembered cement was more venerable than all the primped and polished stone of the university. The runways were aisles that led to a more meaningful world, gateways of memory and promise.
* * *
“Jim! You haven’t changed … you should have warned me!”
“Sally…? Dear, you’ve—”
“I’ve changed. My God, yes!”
She embraced me fiercely, arms strengthened by tethering goat, child, and husband. Her hair was cut short, swept back to reveal a plump, cheerful face that might have belonged to Sally’s sensible younger sister, married to a Philadelphia surgeon. Her skin gave off a rainbow of scents that set my mind reeling back to the first years of marriage—baby lotion, disinfectant, kitchen herbs, a recently potted geranium, warm breasts and armpits, topped up with a dab of best perfume brought out to greet the occasion.
I put down my presents and surveyed her fondly, amazed by the sight of this robust Anglo-American housewife. She was only three months pregnant, but seemed to have doubled her weight, a handsome, strong-legged woman with a warm flush of a complexion.
Surrounded by this pleasant farmhouse overlooking the tidal mud flats of the river, I had the feeling that I had strayed into another film set. A few minutes earlier, driving up the rutted farm track towards an old metal barn, I had expected to find an encampment of tepees, with a troupe of former account executives and record industry dropouts picking the fleas from their caftans as they mumbled mantras and smoked their pot. But the farmhouse, with its Chinese carpets and deep sofas, seemed more like a dream of the eighties. Even its coffee table was stocked with genuine coffee-table books and not with highbrow biographies. Its comfortably lived-in air and children’s toys heaped in a corner might have starred as the backdrop to a wholemeal bread commercial.
“Well, what do you think?” Sally was watching me with a look of her old mischief.
“Sally, it’s bliss—I’m thrilled for you. It certainly isn’t what I expected.”
“Of course, it isn’t. But do you recognise it?”
“In a way. Don’t tell me it’s been on television?”
“I hope not. Think hard.” When I gave up, she cried triumphantly: “It’s just like Shepperton!”
“Where? My old dump?”
“Yes! Don’t look so stunned. I thought of you and the pixies when we furnished it.”
“Sally … I can’t believe it. So all along I was a complete suburbanite without realising it.”
“Of course you were. If you’re going to bring up children there’s only one way to go about it.”
“Yes … the children decide that, all right. I can’t wait to see little Jackie.”
“She’s a love, I’d die without her. Edward’s bringing her back from a kiddies’ party.”
“And Edward, too.”
“You’ll be impressed. He’s years younger than me but he’s so mature. Sometimes I think he’s my father.”
“I’m glad…” She had spoken without any thought of the past, as if all memories of her Bayswater flat and the stock-car tracks of east London had vanished forever. “Sally, it’s wonderful here.”
“I’ve bought the whole package—station wagon, big dogs, sheepskin jackets, church fêtes. I should have moved in with you years ago. Now, tell me about the pixies.”
She poured tea, happily showing off her mother’s silver tea set. We settled back on the sofa and brought each other up to date. She had met Edward, a physics lecturer at the University of East Anglia, while he was on a year’s sabbatical at Berkeley. I imagined Sally as one of the morose, chain-smoking ex-hippies sitting on the kerb along Telegraph Avenue, but in fact she had been the manager of a small bookshop and had begun to settle down long before meeting her husband. Watching her, I felt that the past years had slid away down some chute in her mind. She was young again, confident of herself and the world, the sunlight and this cheerful, untidy room. In her middle thirties she had been able to rendezvous with the eighteen-year-old self she had last seen at Idlewild airport in 1962, catching a plane to Europe.
Another Sally Mumford had gone off to join the sixties, had taken too many overdoses and fallen into the doubtful company of arts administrators, TV psychologists, and impresarios of car-crash exhibitions. Happy for her, I listened as she described Jackie’s latest crazes. At the same time, I wondered how long all this would last, whether it was another momentary fantasy, a dream that would founder when it struck the first hard wave …
* * *
A battered Volvo estate car had turned into the drive, rolling in the deep ruts. A boyish-looking man with a shock of pale hair and strong footballer’s shoulders stepped from the car. He opened the rear door, released a harness, and swung out a little girl in a party frock.
“They’re here. Just look…”
Eyes bright with pride, Sally beckoned me to the door. She hoisted Jackie onto her shoulder, rubbed noses, and quizzed her about the party. She kissed h
er husband, who greeted me pleasantly but warily. When we followed Sally and her daughter into the sitting room he told me that David Hunter was due at Norwich station within an hour.
“I’ll collect him from the station, and we’ll join you at our site—we’re digging out a wartime Spitfire. Sally thought you’d be interested.”
“I am—my son should have come along.”
Sally had mentioned that Edward was a member of a local group of aircraft enthusiasts, excavating the remains of old planes that had come down in the estuary. Photographs of the aircraft stood on the mantelpiece—an ancient Heinkel and a wingless Messerschmidt encrusted with peat being lifted by crane from a mud flat. An almost intact Hurricane had pride of place. Edward and his team posed beside it with the curator of an aircraft museum to whom they had donated the Battle of Britain fighter.
But there were more important matters at hand than these forgotten aircraft. I took Jackie’s present from my bag and handed the box in its bright tissue and ribbon to the serious-faced little girl. I thought affectionately of the hundreds of hours that Sally had happily given to my own children. Jackie stood beside her mother, now and then raising her arms stiffly to remind herself of her taffeta dress, watching me with her sweet but empty smile. Her prominent knees and elbows, the hands that flexed so sharply that their palms touched her wrists, and her toneless face made me realise that the clouded mind of this handicapped child would never be aware of the loving home that Sally had created for her.
Already I regretted the overelaborate toy I had bought, a model kitchen with battery-powered lights and cooker far beyond Jackie’s grasp. She seemed almost to understand this, as Edward set out the toy on the coffee table and connected the batteries. She stared at her father with her trusting, fixed smile, as if she were crossing the world at a slight angle to the rest of us. Now and then she reached out in a tentative way, and then gravely withdrew when Sally held her hands, a child of nature who would forever play alone in a twilit garden walled by shadows she could never touch.
The Kindness of Women Page 26