The Kindness of Women

by J. G. Ballard

  “I don’t think we need to. Let’s each of us take just one thing.”

  I was looking at the sunlit sky over Shepperton and remembering how Dick had talked about our perception of time. If our sense of time was an archaic mental structure, one we had inherited from our primitive forebears, perhaps Dick had made a first move towards dismantling it?

  Cleo leaned across the desk, sunlight on the pale crown of her scalp. She was one with the children of the carousel, motionless but forever moving past me. I had scarcely touched her, aware of the distance she had set between us, but I put my hands on her shoulders, embracing her in the light.

  * * *

  Later, Cleo watched me while I undressed her in the bedroom, her hands on my forehead, as if watching my temperature.

  “We don’t want you to explode. I’m glad we came upstairs—those beer mats are a bit unnerving. Like that terrifying film the two of you made.”

  “Poor man, he was trying to pull off a miracle. I saw him edit the thing, moving pieces of himself back and forth, trying to solve a jigsaw. He was literally editing his own life.”

  “Are you going to edit me?”

  I kissed her strong wrists as she tried to pull them away from me. “Absolutely. All arguments and disagreements will be wiped from the tape. Left profile only to be shown—”

  “But I like my right profile—it has more intellectual integrity…”

  “—flattering glances to be stressed, with deferential pauses…”

  “God, I never stop being deferential…!” She helped me with the zip. “Is this part of the editing?”

  “Absolutely.” I carried the zip down to the base of her spine and let the dress fall forwards from her shoulders onto the floor. “Think of it this way—I’m really dressing you, but you’re seeing the film run backwards.”

  “So it’s all the fault of the projectionist? If only I’d told my mother that…”

  She reached out and adjusted the wings of the dressing table, then opened the wardrobe door so that its full-length mirror multiplied our reflections. Satisfied, she glanced at me slyly to see if I approved.

  “I feel at home,” I commented. “It’s like The Lady from Shanghai.”

  “What have I done? She got shot!”

  * * *

  We stood naked together, surrounded by the images of ourselves, lovers who had found each other during an orgy in a house of glass. Naked couples stood around us, immersed in themselves, half-hidden behind the doors. We were watched by the lenses of a dozen cameras, multiplied and dismantled at the same time. I held Cleo’s breasts in my hands, touching the blue veins that ran past her broad nipples, and caressed away the pink grooves left by the wiring of her brassiere. I kissed a small scar in her armpit, relic of a childhood I had never known, and ran my lips through the shoal of silver stretch marks, like seeds of time spilled across her abdomen by Ceres herself as she sowed her fields. She held my penis in her hands, rolling it gently between her palms, her fingers drawing on my scrotum. Phallic corridors receded from us, an erotic labyrinth in an impossible palace. When I kissed Cleo’s nipples a battalion of lovers bent their heads. I sat on the bed as she knelt on the carpet between my knees, her forearms resting on my thighs. She took the head of my penis in her mouth, touching the tip of my urethra with her tongue, then sank deeper to hold the shaft between her teeth, biting lightly on the swollen muscle.

  I drew her beside me, kissing her thighs and hips. With her firm hands she pressed my shoulders to the pillows and knelt astride me, long hair falling across my chest. I lay back, happy to share Cleo with the mirrors, but she stretched out and kicked the wardrobe door with her heel. The house of glass vanished into the cupboard, a collapsing concertina of light.

  “Just you and me, Jim … I think that’s all we can manage now…”

  She returned to the pillows and lay beside me, brushing the hair from her eyes, knees raised in the air as I caressed her vulva. Engorged with blood, her labia rose like coxcombs around her clitoris. My fingers parted the mottled crests and moistened the stiffened nub. I soothed the hot pad of her anus, pushing back the soft upholstery of a small pile. Lying beside her, I masturbated her affectionately. When a sudden fluxus drenched the sheet she gasped at the ceiling and bit my shoulder, embarrassed at herself. She rested for a few breaths, held my hips, and drew me between her legs.

  Watched by a single mirror, we made love through the afternoon. As I lay deep within her, I was certain that this act of sex would endure far beyond these summer hours. Time had refused to yield to Dick Sutherland, a Janus locked within his own relentless self-regard. Cleo had been right to seal away those silver screens. With every glance in the mirror a small part of us died. Images of ourselves formed the real walls of our lives. The tyranny of the lens shored its fragments against us, an infinity of recorded selves that shut out the world beyond. I held Cleo tightly, trying to fuse the scent of her body into my skin. One day we would find the key to the mirror and enter it together.

  * * *

  At the end of September, Cleo telephoned me from her office to say that the documentary on Dick’s death would be shown on television.

  “I thought they’d scrapped it,” she said, sounding unsettled. “Are you going to watch?”

  “No.” I knew that she had always disapproved of the film, suspecting that Dick had invited me to take part as a means of binding me to him forever. “We’ll remember Dick when he was alive.”

  “Good. I feel a lot better. Let’s take a boat for the weekend and sail up to Henley. You haven’t been out of Shepperton for months.”

  This was literally true. Cleo had been happy to leave London at the weekends, cook in my Third World kitchen, and drink double gins in the gardens of the riverside pubs. Sitting with her at the water’s edge, as she tore up her sandwiches and threw pieces to the aggressive swans, I felt more contented than I had for twenty years. Sally had given birth to her second child, a healthy daughter, and bombarded us with invitations. Peggy Gardner’s surprise marriage to an architect young enough to be her son (a fourteen-year gap, Cleo noted, Peggy’s age when I had left the children’s hut in Lunghua), and the orphaned Malaccan boy whom David and his Belgian wife had adopted, together convinced me that the past had been laid to rest.

  Before we collected the rented cabin cruiser Cleo asked the marina operator to remove the miniature TV set in the saloon. Filled with riverside gin, we would be sleeping soundly when the late-night documentary was transmitted. As we moved through Shepperton lock, Cleo at the helm, I stood beside her with my arm around her waist.

  “Cleo, we’ve never done this before. Why?”

  “Why, indeed? You’ve been a prisoner in Shepperton.”

  “We’ll stop at Cookham and see if it’s changed.”

  “Not Cookham—and it won’t have changed.”

  “Why not?” I was surprised, knowing that she admired Spencer’s visionary paintings. “You always liked Cookham.”

  “Too many angels dancing in the trees. Be honest, do you really want to hear Christ preaching again at the regatta?”

  “We’ll have lunch at Runnymede. We can visit the Kennedy Memorial.”

  “Do I approve of that? I’ll think about it…”

  These talismanic zones disturbed Cleo. She distrusted their hold on me, for the soundest reasons. My decision not to watch Dick’s documentary struck her as a promising first step in my rehabilitation, a return to the contingent world. I looked back at Shepperton, at the great elms in the park by the war memorial, at the film studios and the riverside hotels, receding from me like the Bund at Shanghai.

  “Jim!” I felt Cleo gripping my arm. “Relax, the place will still be there when you get back.”

  “I know. I’ll get a drink for us.”

  “We don’t need a drink. You always behave as if Shepperton only exists thanks to an act of will on your part.”

  Laughing, I embraced her, almost sending the cruiser into the bank. “Cleo, I dream the pl
ace…”

  “And a wonderful dream, too. Alice and Henry and Lucy. Now and then, though, wake up.”

  “I will…”

  * * *

  Two hours later we moored at Runnymede and walked across the meadow towards the hills that rose through the woods. In a sentimental gesture, a British Prime Minister had bequeathed an acre of soil to the American nation, and the limestone monolith of the memorial to John F. Kennedy overlooked the site of Magna Carta. During the Vietnam War the memorial had been continually defaced and vandalised, and on one occasion cracked by a bomb.

  Arm in arm, we climbed the pathway towards the memorial. The crack that divided the limestone was freshly cemented. Ancient graffiti had left their blurred traces in the face, overlaid by slogans and swastikas aerosolled in Day-Glo paints. Litter and beer cans were strewn about the site, and the remains of a takeaway meal in silver foil had been pushed under the memorial stone. Fifty feet away, partly concealed by a magnolia shrub, a middle-aged man with a shock of pale grey hair was copulating with a twenty-year-old woman. Trousers loosened around his waist, he lay between her raised legs, moving in hurried spasms as if urged on by the presence of this morbid stone.

  Cleo lowered her gaze and frowned at the litter. “Doesn’t anyone ever clean the place? You’d think Kennedy was completely forgotten.”

  “I suppose he is—in a way, that’s a good thing.”

  I thought of the role that Kennedy and his assassination had played in my own life, and how his televised images had shaped the imagination of the 1960s. Stills from the Zapruder film had seemed more poignant than a Grünewald crucifixion. Now only the graffiti endured, like the bird droppings on the statues of Victorian generals and statesmen in the squares of London.

  We walked down to the gate and crossed the meadow to the car park beside the jetty. Groups of people leaned against their cars, watching a family recover a motorboat from the river. A father and his teenage daughter manoeuvred a two-wheel trailer down a stone ramp. When they had submerged the trailer in the shallow water the father released the speedboat from its mooring by the bank and steered the craft onto the metal cradle. Above them, on the ramp, his wife sat at the controls of their car, waiting to tow the trailer from the water. A younger daughter sat behind her, eating an ice cream and engrossed in a comic.

  The current pulled at the speedboat, trying to draw it into the centre of the stream. The father struggled with the metal cradle as his wife raced her engine, watching him through the rearview mirror. When he signalled, she engaged bottom gear and edged up the ramp in a blare of noise and exhaust. The tow rope tightened and the trailer moved forward, its tyres emerging from the water. But the speedboat had floated away, and the man shouted to his wife, who switched off her engine. Oblivious of all this, the girl in the rear seat read her comic, now and then remembering to lick her ice cream.

  A youth in swimming trunks strode down the ramp and helped the man pull the speedboat onto the trailer. The wife reversed a few feet, releasing the tension in the rope. As Cleo and I boarded our cruiser they were fastening the craft to its cradle. The wife restarted her engine, released her hand brake before engaging gear, and fumbled with the controls when the car rolled backwards down the slope. Everyone began to shout in warning, and the car park attendant left his ticket booth and remonstrated with the hapless driver.

  “What’s going on?” Cleo asked, as I waited to cast off. “Are they driving into the river?”

  “It’s starting to look like it…”

  The car’s rear wheels had disappeared below the water. Flustered by the attendant and the shouts of the onlookers, the woman had lost control of the car. The girl in the rear seat cried out and lifted her feet from the water covering the floor. Her mother opened the driver’s door, allowing her impatient husband to take the controls. But as she stepped into the shallow water there was a shout from the young man in the swimming trunks.

  Buoyant now in the deeper current, the speedboat had floated into the stream, dragging the trailer with it and pulling the car down the ramp. People were leaving their parked vehicles, cups of tea forgotten in their hands. Two men waded into the river and gripped the door pillars of the car, trying to hold it against the current.

  “Cleo, wait here!”

  As I stepped into the water I could see the white-faced child screaming in the rear seat, the water already up to her armpits. Trying to reach her, the mother floundered into the river, the skirt of her cotton dress floating into her face. Her husband seized her arms and pulled her onto the ramp. Already exhausted, he plunged into the water, face below the surface as he tried to disconnect the tow rope.

  I gripped the left-side door pillar, trying to reach the girl, who held the ice cream over her head. Her shoulders were covered by the water, and she screamed at her mother, surrounded by loose tissues and aerosol containers, road maps and cigarette stubs that had risen from the ashtrays and glove pockets.

  Before I could seize the child, the car began to tilt to one side, dragged back by the speedboat. Everyone was shouting as the water swilled over the roof, a white spiral of ice cream floating on the surface. Knocked from my feet, I found myself swimming beside the father as he fought his way to the speedboat. He released the metal catches on the cradle and the craft swung away across the stream, bumping into the hull of a passing cabin cruiser, whose crew stared at us from their sun deck, glasses of wine in hand.

  Finding our footing, we pushed the car onto the stone ramp. The father pulled open the door, releasing the last of the water, only to find that the rear seat was empty. He plunged through the water beside the bank, slapping the waves with his hands as he searched for his daughter, but the car park attendant had found her lying on the floor below the steering wheel.

  Cleo joined me as they laid her on the wet grass.

  “Dear God—do you know any first aid?”

  “No, but I think…” The cold river water streamed from my chest and legs. When the attendant lifted the child, her body hung from his hands like a dead rabbit, her eyes unfocused, her blue arms trailing across the grass. The sobbing mother smoothed the child’s hair, and the attendant began to move her arms rhythmically across her chest. Soon tired, he lowered his face to her blanched cheeks, trying to detect her breath, and then resumed his to-and-fro motion as if exercising a doll.

  Stunned by the suddenness of the tragedy, Cleo was weeping into her hands. I held her head against my shoulder. Trying not to look at the child, I searched the Windsor road, hoping to see a passing ambulance. A coach loaded with Middle East tourists sped past, but too late it occurred to me that at least one doctor would have been among the party.

  Fifty feet away, a tall man in hiking boots strode along the footpath, approaching us at a brisk pace. He carried a bulky haversack on his shoulders and his bare knees brushed aside the long grass. Between his heavy beard and the hair that crowded his forehead was a narrow face with red-rimmed eyes, as if he had spent too much of his hiking holiday reading in an unlit tent. A paperback guidebook to Eton and Windsor protruded from the pocket of his tartan shirt, and he seemed more interested in finding the historic site of Runnymede than in this tragedy on the riverbank.

  As he neared us, he caught sight of the little girl. Before anyone could speak he slipped the haversack onto the ground, asked a middle-aged couple to keep an eye on it, and stepped through the circle of onlookers. He ignored the sobbing mother and knelt on the grass, taking the arms of the inert child from the exhausted attendant.

  His bony fingers moved like a conjuror’s over the child. He lifted her shoulders, so that her head fell back, forced apart her jaws with his thumb, and with a deft hooking movement of his forefinger released some obstruction in the back of her throat. One hand held her ribs and the other compressed her diaphragm. Instantly there was a gush of water from the child’s mouth. Carefully smoothing his beard, he bent down and placed his lips over her mouth and nose. He began to breathe slowly but strongly, stopping to pump the child�
��s breastbone. As he worked, the crowd of some thirty people was silent around him.

  “She’s breathing … oh my God.” Cleo’s fingernails had torn the fabric of my shirt. The girl was coughing. She choked and spat out the water in her lungs and windpipe. The bearded man watched her calmly with his bloodshot eyes, then sat her up with his strong hands and steadied her breathing. The girl gasped at the air, and her eyes focused on the circle of people. She leaned against her distraught mother, coughed, and rubbed her nose, sucking great gasps of air over her swollen tongue.

  Two cars had backed to the edge of the stone ramp, the drivers discussing the fastest route to the hospital at Windsor. As the water streamed from her cotton dress, the mother carried the child to the nearer of the cars. Cleo smiled at me through the tears that blurred her mascara. Everyone followed the child, but I was watching the bearded man who had saved her. He made sure that the child was breathing comfortably in the car, then slipped through the crowd and reclaimed his haversack, thanking the couple who had placed it on their card table. Before the convoy left the car park he had already resumed his walk along the bank.

  * * *

  We passed him an hour later, striding towards Windsor. I wanted to thank him, which no one had managed to do, but I found it difficult to come up with the right words. I steered the cruiser close to the bank and reduced speed so that we kept pace with him. He strode along in his heavy boots, checking some detail on his map. On his tartan shirt I could see the dry stain of the ice cream that he had expressed from the child’s stomach. I guessed that he was a schoolmaster or civil servant, but I knew that he might just as well be a ship’s purser or a day-release psychiatric patient. The heavy knapsack cut into his narrow shoulders, but he seemed unconcerned by the weight. Tied to the back of the knapsack was a pair of drying socks that I had not seen before and which I assumed he had washed in the river soon after saving the child.

  Cleo waved to him, and he gave her a friendly but quick smile, lengthened his stride, and moved away from us. He was enjoying his holiday and preferred his own company. Cleo’s contingent world, the bare knees and the ice cream stain and the drying socks, moved past the cabin cruiser and the dozing swans. I had thought of asking him who he was, but I realised that, for all practical purposes, I already knew.