The Kindness of Women

by J. G. Ballard

  Throughout our cheerful lunch Sally beamed fondly at her daughter. Pouring the wine, Edward reminisced about his year at Berkeley and their meeting, quite by chance, when Sally’s car broke down on the Bay Bridge. I was sure that this decent and responsible man had never even speculated that his life would have taken a different turn had he chosen not to drive to San Francisco on that particular morning. Watching them, I was confident that this loving house was not a façade. If anything, the daughter had strengthened the family, and Sally’s dream would endure.

  * * *

  The tide had begun to run through the estuary, slipping between the mud flats. Stranded by the falling water, sailing dinghies sat above us on the draining pedestals of silt. A cabin cruiser creaked against its mooring line, waking from its deep riverine sleep into the open air. When we set off in the rowing skiff, the last of the tidal water ran into the channel, carrying away the reflection of the house.

  I lay back comfortably among the cushions while Sally pulled on the oars, scarcely glancing over her shoulder as she navigated expertly through the maze of waterways. Two hundred yards from the house we left the main channel of the river and entered a parallel realm of small islands and tributary streams. Edward and Jackie had driven to the railway station at Norwich and would join us at the excavation site, which we could reach more easily by boat.

  “Where are we?” Sally rested on the oars and shielded her eyes from the gleaming mud. “They only dig at low tide. If you can manage to stand without falling in, try to spot a church spire. It should lean to the left.”

  “I see it.” I stared across a lake of grass. An entire air force could have disappeared into this world of forgotten creeks. “There’s some kind of crane on a barge.”

  “Norfolk Lighterage. One of the directors is an aircraft buff.” Sally pulled away with strong arms, knees spread beneath her swelling abdomen. Her smock rose in the shifts of air to reveal her long brown legs. Minute pearls of scar tissue were all that remained of her old needle ulcers.

  “What sort of plane is it? Are they sure it’s a Spitfire?”

  “Edward thinks so—because of the engine. Usually that’s all there is left. You’ll be impressed, Jim.”

  “It could be a Mustang … that used a British engine.”

  Watching the mud flats slide past, I listened to the plash of Sally’s oars and wondered why Sally was so keen that David and I visit the excavation site. I thought of the Mustangs that had strafed the airfield next to Lunghua camp and the downed pilots hunted by the Japanese soldiers in their dilapidated trucks. In some ways the banks of mud reminded me of the Whangpoo and the crashed aircraft lying by the irrigation ditches.

  “I’m beat.” Sally decked the oars and let the skiff drift on the water. “Time for my rest.”

  “I’ll take over.”

  “No. Too risky. It’s good for me, anyway.”

  Taking my hand, she left her seat, stepped along the trembling boat, and sank beside me onto the cushions. She wiped away the sweat that matted her blond hair to her forehead. We drifted on the ebbing water, sealed off from the world by the wild grass and the slopes of silky mud.

  “That sounds like Jackie.” Sally raised her head to the warning hoot of a disturbed waterfowl in the reeds. “No, too far.”

  “She’s gorgeous, Sally … you’re very lucky.”

  She leaned her head against my shoulder and held my hand, tracing my palm lines with a cracked fingernail as if to remember my strange life. “She’s great. Edward adores her. She’s getting on really well at the remedial classes and made masses of friends.”

  “And she’ll have company soon. Is it a boy or girl? You can choose these days.”

  “No, thanks! I don’t want to know. Boy or girl, it’s going to decide.” She pressed my hand to her belly and chortled when I felt the child kick. “Beware of pregnant women, Jim. You’ve spent a lot of time with them.”

  “I loved every minute—let me know if you ever get bored with Edward.”

  “I won’t get bored.” She closed my hand around my lifeline. “Do you remember when Miriam was pregnant?”

  “I never knew her when she wasn’t. Believe me, she was twice your size.”

  “Happy to hear it. I’m going to be thrice my size. Do you think I’ve changed?”

  “Completely. David’s going to be amazed.”

  “It was time to change. For you, too, Jim. Those were wonderful years, but … I keep looking at Edward and little Jackie and I’m so glad. We must have been very, very sane to act so crazily and get away with it.”

  “Not everyone did.”

  “Like David? I know.”

  “You’ll be surprised. David’s a lot better—he runs his air-freight company in Brussels. He and his girlfriend are trying to adopt an Asian child…”

  “David’s dead.” Sally dropped her hand into the water. “I heard it in his voice. He died years ago.”

  “That’s unfair. And it’s not true—you could say that about me. Peggy Gardner frequently does…”

  “No—everyone knew what you were looking for. But David? Still, I’m glad he’s all right.” She smiled to herself, avoiding my eyes. “I tried to call Dick Sutherland—we keep seeing him on a children’s programme. He’s Jackie’s favourite doctor.”

  “He’s the same matinee idol he always was. People who go on television never grow old—or they grow old in a different way. Some sort of kidney trouble has slowed him down; he wants to give up TV and become a serious psychologist again.”

  “Hey, you always said that television was serious! Don’t tell me Dick’s started to think for himself. I used to feel that he was totally under your thumb … Now tell me about yourself. All those books?”

  “There’s nothing to tell—that’s the problem. I spent the whole of my adult life with children. Suddenly, when I’m fifty, there’s this colossal vacuum. Mothers feel the same way. Nature hasn’t provided a contingency plan—or, as Dick would say, nature’s contingency plan is death.”

  “Rubbish. You’re not going to die. Not this afternoon, anyway. Besides, you’ve got the children, even if they’re not at home. It must be a bit of a relief—how you coped with teenage girls I’ll never know.”

  “I always did exactly what they told me. Actually, fathers can be better mothers than you think. It’s mothers who make a hash of their teenage daughters—some of Alice’s and Lucy’s friends went through hell.”

  “Well, think about it—all these young men ringing the bell, daughters on the pill, the poor mother finds she’s practically running a brothel. No wonder Peggy disapproved of you. Besides, she wanted to keep you forever in that awful hut … but Miriam would have been proud of Henry and the girls. Do you still think about her?”

  I drew my name on the surface of the water. “Now and then—the damned thing is I’ve started to forget what she looked like. Sometimes I try to remember her and it’s like watching someone else’s home movie. I know I shouldn’t say that. Memories of the people you love are supposed to last forever, but often they’re the first to go…”

  Sally moved my hand to her breast. She held it there for a moment and then placed it on her lap. The women I had loved were saying goodbye. We lay together in the sun, as the water carried us through the clicking reeds.

  * * *

  The diesel tapped against the deck plates of the lighter, sending its smoky exhaust into the clear estuary air. Cables unwound from the winch and the crown block descended from the sky. Sally and I sat in a saddle of dry sand between two hillocks of grass, the picnic hamper open in front of us. Still wearing her party frock, Jackie squatted between her mother’s legs, smiling in her straight-faced way at the swaying boom of the crane.

  Below us, in the bed of the drained creek, Edward and his team were digging out the last silt from the fuselage of the entombed aircraft. Sections of flat steel piling had been driven into the bed, forming the walls of a metal chamber. Their interlocked edges held back the silt from the rema
ins of the aircraft six feet below the surface. When the estuary flooded, the excavation site filled with water, which drained away at low tide and allowed the team a brief two hours to resume their patient work.

  I stood up and searched for any sign of David, who had become bored with the slow preparations. Delighted to see Sally again after so many years, and bemused by her transformation from sixties hippie into career housewife, he happily played hide-and-seek with little Jackie among the dunes. He ignored the excavation site, clearly disapproving of this morbid interest in old war wrecks.

  “It’s like your bloody car-crash exhibition—Jim, you really started something there…”

  “David, hold on. They were digging these planes out during the war.”

  “Maybe—the next thing they’ll be hiring Olympia and laying out the debris of a 747 for everyone to pick over … You could help to arrange an Arts Council grant.”

  Morosely, he wandered off to a small inn four hundred yards across the mud flats where the cars were parked. Since leaving Summerfield he had become almost puritanically strict towards himself and the world, with all the zeal of the recent convert. I sensed that he disapproved of his entire past life and felt that he was responsible, not only for having spent his childhood in Shanghai, but for my being born there as well. No penance could atone for this historical crime; a logic triggered in that cruel city had led inevitably to the death of the woman cellist on the Hammersmith flyover.

  Leaving Sally, I strolled to the edge of the sand cliff and looked down into the pit. Buckets of silt were being hoisted from the watery bed, and Edward stood knee-deep in the dark ooze, ready to hose away the last debris from the engine and canopy of the aircraft. Most of the wings and tail were missing, lost when it plunged into the creek, but I could see the typical nose-heavy bulb of a single-engine World War II fighter.

  As it emerged for the first time into the daylight everyone fell silent. Edward hosed the intact canopy, watched by the small group of locally recruited workmen and the two-man crew of the lighter. Even after nearly forty years it was easy to imagine the immense force with which this stricken machine had plunged into the creek. The exposed engine block, a black bull’s head of unrecognisable metal, was a fossil of pain. We waited for it to give its last cry as Edward hosed the silt from the valve jacket and propeller boss. His boyish face revealed a clear-eyed seriousness that must have swept everything from Sally’s heart when he parked behind her on the Bay Bridge and changed the flat tyre of her VW.

  A warped propeller blade appeared, bent into a graceful arc. Edward wiped the mud from his arms and chest. Leaning against one of the ladders lowered into the pit, he ran his hands over the engine, searching for the carburettors and exhaust ports. Behind us, David had left the inn and was wandering across the mud flat, a tray loaded with beer glasses in his hands, attention distracted by a child with a large dog.

  “It’s a Spitfire,” someone said. One of the excavation team, a Norwich surgeon, turned and gave a thumb’s-up to Sally and nodded encouragingly at me. I waved to David, who approached through the grass, watching the froth on the glasses. Edward was hosing away the mud from the top of the fuselage, exposing the cockpit canopy and the ragged metal plates where the tail had been torn away. He was frowning at something he had discovered and turned off the hose, shaking his head to himself.

  There was a shout, followed by a further moment of silence as everyone stared into the pit. The Norwich surgeon signalled to the lighter men, and the diesel ceased its tapping. The workmen stepped closer to the pit.

  “What is it?” Sally asked. “Is Edward all right?”

  “He’s fine. The canopy’s closed.”

  “And? Does that matter?”

  “The pilot’s probably still in there.” I lowered my voice. “If he’d bailed out the canopy would have shattered on impact.”

  “Dear God.” Sally grimaced, holding tight to her daughter as David arrived with the tray of drinks. “Jim, I’m sorry, we shouldn’t have come. I thought you and David might—”

  “No…” I touched her shoulder, trying to calm her. “I’m glad we did.”

  “What’s going on?” David stepped past us and made his way down to the site. “Is someone hurt?”

  “No, but…”

  I followed him to the edge of the pit. Pints of ale were passed round, but no one drank. Wrenches in hand, Edward and the surgeon straddled the fuselage, like sailors unfurling a shroud. The canopy, its black panes intact, lifted without any effort, revealing a solid mass of ancient silt moulded to the glass and windshield.

  I waited as buckets of water were lowered and the suction hose drew off the liquefied silt. David stood beside me, face set, sipping his pint. His fair hair raced across his forehead in the breeze, a frantic semaphore. I watched his lips tasting the malty foam. White beads clung to the fine scars, miniature balloons celebrating these residues of his accident.

  Dials had appeared in the cockpit, their last readings registered after all these decades. The trim wheels and throttle mounting emerged, a few fragments of blackened leather and the pilot’s harness straps.

  “The cockpit’s empty—he must have bailed out,” I said to David, but he shook his head and put his glass into my free hand. Edward was pulling at a leather parcel, bound by rotting straps, that lay below the seat on the floor of the cockpit, perhaps a spare parachute left behind by the pilot.

  Reaching into the cockpit, Edward eased the parcel onto the seat and applied water and suction hose. Calling to him, David pushed through the watching workmen. He climbed over the steel palings and stepped onto a ladder, still wearing his grey worsted suit. One of the workmen pointed to the mud that already smeared his trousers, but David ignored him and sank to his knees in the wet silt that filled the bottom of the excavation pit. Arms inside the cockpit, he helped Edward to release the contents of the leather parcel. I realised that they were holding the remains of a flying suit, jacket, and helmet. Already I could see the notched teeth and nasal bones of a small skull. Without thinking, I sipped at David’s beer, surprised by its coldness.

  * * *

  They buried Pilot Officer Pierce two weeks later, in the churchyard below the tilting steeple, within sight of the creek into which he had plunged on a June morning thirty-eight years earlier. His grave lay among the worn memorial stones of the local villagers and of six RAF aircrew who had been interred during the war. None of Pierce’s relatives was present; the only surviving member of his family was an elderly cousin living in New Zealand, but the RAF provided the honour guard that attended the burials of recently discovered wartime aircrew, and two former pilots from his squadron made the journey to attend.

  Standing behind these elderly men, their blunt and polished medals on their dark lapels, I found it difficult to believe that Pilot Officer Pierce, had he parachuted safely from his Spitfire, would now be over sixty. The small skeleton in the leathery parcel of his flying suit seemed to be that of a teenage boy, some child pilot who had bluffed his way into a wartime fighter base.

  I remembered how Edward and the Norwich surgeon had laid the flattened parcel on the wet floor of the excavation pit, beside the exposed mass of the Merlin engine. As they carefully prised away the mummified leather they found a few small bones, a shoulder blade and several ribs, scarcely enough to constitute a grown man. Wearing his mud-drenched suit, David had climbed into the cockpit and sat in the pilot’s seat, searching with his hands through the silt on the floor of the fuselage.

  As he felt under the instrument panel and between the brake pedals, I imagined him at the controls of this Spitfire, sitting on its grass airfield somewhere in southern England in 1940. Had he or I been a few years older we would have returned to England to fight in the war, and our bones might well have been brought to light by these weekend archaeologists. I thought of the crashed Japanese and Chinese planes at Hungjao aerodrome, and of how as a ten-year-old I had often climbed into the cockpit of a forgotten fighter lying in the long grass.
I had played with its rusty controls at about the same time as P. O. Pierce sat in his Spitfire at the bottom of this Norfolk creek.

  With luck, the burial of his bones had laid to rest more than one young pilot. David had been reluctant to leave the excavation pit. Sitting in the cockpit, his arms black with mud, he had looked up at the daylight as if newly born into the fresh air of the Norfolk estuary from the deep memories of decades. He stood beside me through the service, wearing his RAF uniform for the first time in twenty years. Head back in the light breeze, he was smiling and handsome again, mouth working in the ironic way I remembered from the japes of our childhood. He had looked at the Lunghua commandant, Mr. Hyashi, with the same insolent grimace.

  I worried that he might create a scene, but I realised later that his real recovery dated from that chance moment when he had returned with the tray of drinks across the mud flats. He had brought with him a friend from the aviation world, a burly South Korean who had once been a JAL pilot and now worked at London Airport. I was puzzled why David should have invited this impassive, middle-aged executive all the way to a modest churchyard in Norfolk, but it then occurred to me that a retired Korean pilot was as close as David could come to asking a Japanese to witness the interment of all his resentments of the past forty years.

  15

  THE FINAL PROGRAMME

  From the start, everyone I knew felt uneasy at the very thought of Dick Sutherland’s last television project. Cleo Churchill urged me not to take part—the proposed documentary struck her as ghoulish in the extreme, pandering to the exhibitionist strains in Dick’s character. More tolerant of Dick, and admiring his courage, I had tried to sidestep his invitation for different reasons. In later years, countless similar programmes were to be shown on television, and the making of these films became part of the therapeutic process by which the dying prepared themselves for their deaths. But in 1979 the idea of an explicit filmed record of the last weeks running up to one’s death seemed virtually pornographic.