The Kindness of Women

by J. G. Ballard

  I listened to the pendulum-like motion of the waiter’s broom. Olga’s free hand had slipped under my jacket and was pressed against my abdomen. She was hesitating, as if aware that she might find herself cast again as my governess, reminded of her parents’ penury in their prewar tenement and the boring hours she had spent looking after this little English boy with his cycle and freewheeling imagination.

  From the hollows of Olga’s neck and the enlarged veins in the skin of her breasts I guessed that she had eaten as little as I had in the past three years. I put my arm around her waist, suddenly liking this tough young woman with her rackety ideas. Only the first-class private at the railway station had looked at me so intently. I wanted to tell Olga about the dead Chinese, but already the lost Japanese patrol was moving into the rear of my mind.

  “Are you going back to England, James?”

  “After Christmas—I’m sailing on the Arrawa with my mother.” This troopship, a former refrigerated meat carrier, would repatriate the British nationals in Shanghai. “My father’s staying on here.”

  “He’ll stay? That’s good. I’ll talk to him about my restaurant. Will you study in England?”

  “If I have to.” On an impulse, I said: “I’m going to be a doctor.”

  “A doctor? That’s very good. When I’m sick you can look after me. It’s your turn now.”

  As I left, promising to mention her to my father, Olga said: “Now you can play hide-and-seek in the whole world.”

  * * *

  A week after Christmas I left Shanghai forever. Some six hundred former internees, mostly women and children, sailed for England in the converted meat carrier. My father and the other Britons staying behind in Shanghai stood on the pier at Hongkew, waving to us as the Arrawa drew away from them across the slow brown tide. When we reached the middle of the channel, working our way through scores of American destroyers and landing craft, I left my mother and walked to the stern of the ship. The relatives on the pier were still waving to us, and my father saw me and raised his arm, but I found it impossible to wave back to him, something I regretted for many years. Perhaps I blamed him for sending me away from this mysterious and exhilarating city.

  When the last of the banks and hotels faded into the clouds above the Bund I carried my suitcase to one of the men’s mess rooms. At night we slung our hammocks across the open decks where the refrigerated carcases of New Zealand meat had hung. In the darkness the hundreds of sleeping bodies swayed together like sides of lamb packed in canvas.

  After our evening meal I returned to the stern rail, almost alone on the deck as the Arrawa neared the entrance to the Yangtze. Shanghai had vanished, a dream city that had decided to close itself to the world. The rice fields and villages of the estuary stretched to the horizon, with only the sea to separate them from the nearest landfall at Nagasaki.

  The Arrawa paused at Woosung, readying itself to join the great tide of the Yangtze as it flowed into the China Sea. As we waited on the swell, edging closer to the eastern bank of the Whangpoo, we drifted past a large American landing craft beached on the shore. A tank-landing vessel scarcely smaller than the Arrawa, its flat prow lay high on the streaming mud-flat, as if it had been deliberately beached on this isolated coast. The Arrawa was in no danger of striking the craft, but a signal lamp flashed from its bridge. American military police patrolled its decks, their weapons levelled as they waved us away.

  A fetid stench floated on the air, as if vented from an exposed sewer filled with blood. Leaning from the stern rail, I saw that the hold of the landing craft was filled with hundreds of Japanese soldiers. They sat packed together in rows, knees pressed against each other’s backs. All were in a bad way, and many lay down, crushed by the mass of bodies. They ignored the Arrawa, and only a group of handcuffed NCOs turned their eyes towards the ship.

  A loudspeaker barked from the bridge of the landing craft, and the American guards shouted at the British officers in the wheelhouse. Clearly the Arrawa had appeared at an inconvenient moment. The Japanese armies in China were being repatriated, but I wondered how this large body of men, almost a brigade in strength, would ever survive the three-day voyage to the Japanese mainland.

  Then, on a cliff above the mud flats, another group of armed soldiers caught my eye. Hundreds of Kuomintang infantry, in their peaked caps and leggings, bayonets fixed to their rifles, stood on the grass-covered slopes, waiting for the Arrawa to move away.

  A siren thundered over my head, almost splitting the funnel. Its echoes hunted the vast brown swells of the Yangtze. We steered ahead, the single propeller churning the water and sending its spray into my face. The forward ramp of the landing craft was being lowered from the prow, and the first Japanese soldiers were stumbling onto the mud flat.

  PART II

  The Craze Years

  4

  THE QUEEN OF THE NIGHT

  Women dominated my years at Cambridge—fellow medical students, the cheerful Addenbrookes nurses I took drinking on the Cam, and the moody demonstrators in the Physiology Department, forever polishing their cracked nails behind the jars of embryos—but none more than Dr. Elizabeth Grant. During my first term at the university I saw her naked every day, and I knew her more intimately than any other woman in my life. But I never embraced her.

  I remember the October morning in the Anatomy Department when I first met Dr. Grant. With the hundred freshmen joining the medical school, I took my seat in the amphitheatre for the welcoming address by Professor Harris, the head of anatomy. I sat alone in the topmost row, marking my distance from the other undergraduates. Exempt from military service, and rugby fanatics to a man, they were mostly the sons of provincial doctors who in due course would take over their fathers’ practices. Already I was depressed by the thought that in forty years’ time, when I needed their help, it would be these amiable but uninspired men who held my life in their hands. But in 1950 I knew nothing about medicine and had yet to learn that inspiration and amiability played next to no part in it.

  Professor Harris entered the theatre and stood at the podium. A small, puckish Welshman, he gazed at the tiers of beefy young men like an auctioneer at a cattle market. He spotted me sitting alone under the roof, asked for my name, and told me to put out my cigarette.

  “Come and join us—there’s no need to be standoffish. You’ll find we need each other.”

  He waited as I crept red-faced to the seats below. Despite the humiliation, I admired Harris. He and his brother, both now eminent physicians, had been born to a poor Swansea family, and each had worked for six years to support the other until he qualified. Despite the late start, Harris had rapidly propelled himself to the professorship of anatomy at Cambridge. His idealism and lack of privilege struck me as unique in the university, and I identified myself closely with him. Needless to say, the privileges of my own childhood escaped me altogether.

  Welcoming us to his profession, Harris took us through a brief history of medicine from the days of Vesalius and Galen, stressing its craft origins and low social standing—only in the present century, in response to the emotional needs of his patients, had the physician’s status risen to that of the older professions, and Harris warned us that in our own lifetimes its status might fall. In China, I remembered, physicians were paid only while their patients enjoyed good health. The payments were suspended during illness and only resumed when the treatment succeeded.

  Lastly, Harris stressed the importance of anatomy as the foundation stone of medicine, and warned that a small number of us would be unable to face the long hours of dissection. Those repelled by the sight of a cadaver should call on him privately and would be assigned to other degree courses.

  How many did? None in my own year. I can remember the sudden silence and uneasy jokes as we entered the dissecting room, part nightclub and part abattoir, with an illuminated ceiling of frosted glass. Waiting for us, lying face up on the dissection tables, were some twenty cadavers. Steeped in formaldehyde, they were the colour
of yellow ivory. More than anything else, the richness of their skins marked out the dead, as if their personalities had migrated hopefully to the surface of their bodies. Every kind of blemish stood out in the harsh light, moles and operation scars, warts and faded tattoos, an amputated big toe and a pair of supernumerary nipples on the barrel chest of a cadaver with a prizefighter’s physique. Each body was an atlas recording the journeys of an entire life.

  I took my place at the glass-topped table assigned to me and set out my dissection manual and instruments. Already I noticed a few curious stares. Alone among the cadavers, mine was that of a woman. For purposes of dissection, the human body was divided into four sections: thorax and abdomen, head and neck, arm, and leg. Each would occupy a term and be dissected by a team of two students. I knew no one at the medical school whom I could partner, apart from Peggy Gardner, now in her final year at Cambridge, and decided to select a cadaver at random. Then, scanning the list of numbers I noticed that one was identified as “17F.” Without hesitating, I wrote my name alongside.

  Sure enough, I found myself sitting beside the bald head of a strong-shouldered woman who had died in her late middle age. Fine blond hairs rose from her shaved eyebrows, lips, and pubis, and her face had the firm set of a headmistress or hospital matron. In most respects she was indistinguishable from the male cadavers—her breasts had subsided into the fatty tissue of her chest wall, while the genitalia of the males had shrivelled into their groins—but she was already an object of attention. Most of the students had spent the war in their boarding schools relocated far from the bombed cities and had probably never seen a naked body, let alone that of a mature woman.

  Only Peggy Gardner was unimpressed when she entered the dissecting room and found me working with my partner, a Nigerian dentist in his thirties, who was taking an anatomy degree.

  “There’s a lot more work there,” she said reprovingly. “You’ll have to cut away all the fat before you reach the fascia.”

  “It was the luck of the draw.” Embarrassed, I added: “For some reason I got the Queen of the Night.”

  “Rubbish. And that’s awfully flippant, Jamie. You’re still trying hard to be different. You haven’t changed since Lunghua.”

  “Peggy, that sounds like a death sentence.”

  I may not have changed, but Peggy had transformed herself from the thin-shouldered sixteen-year-old who had sailed to England with me on the Arrawa. I remembered how she had started to mimic the fine-stitched mannerisms of the widowed Mrs. Dwight. Peggy had spent her first years in England in a world without men. Behind her handsome stride I could see the self-confident spinsters who had taught Peggy at her boarding school near Brighton. Stylish but well-buttoned, she sailed through the young demonstrators who tried to flirt with her.

  But Peggy, at least, seemed at home in England, which for me was a zone of transit between my past life in China and a future that, annoyingly, showed no signs of arriving. I was marooned in a small, grey country where the sun rarely rose above the rooftops, a labyrinth of class and caste forever enlarging itself from within. The English talked as if they had won the war, but behaved as if they had lost it. My years at school had made me realise how much I was an outsider—the other boys were friendly, but left me alone, as if they found me threatening in some undefined way. I thought all the time of going back to Shanghai, but that escape route had closed in 1949 with Mao Tse-tung’s takeover of China.

  Soon after arriving at Cambridge I invited Peggy to my rooms at King’s, with their windows onto the noisy, organ-weary chapel. Happy to see her again, I watched her stalk around my sitting room, shaking her head over the Magritte and Dalí reproductions on the mantelpiece and the novels by Camus and Boris Vian. I remembered our days together in the children’s hut at Lunghua when she had carefully explained, in at least twelve stages, the right way to sew a button onto my shirt. Sensible housewifery could hold any demons at bay, any hunger.

  “Why do you read all this stuff? You aren’t going to the Sorbonne. Nobody’s heard of them here.”

  “Peggy, they haven’t heard of anything in Cambridge. The dons are only interested in their damned madrigals and getting onto the Brain’s Trust. The whole place is fake gothic pageant with a cast of thousands of bicycles.”

  “It isn’t gothic and it isn’t a fake.” Peggy turned the novels face down on the mantelpiece, clearly worried for me. “When they built King’s Chapel it was more modern than Corbusier and stood for something weird enough even for you to believe in. Go to the Cavendish—Rutherford split the atom there.”

  “You make it sound like Anne Hathaway’s cottage. I have met E. M. Forster—he tottered into the provost’s sherry party yesterday. Whiskery old gent with sad eyes, like a disappointed child molester.”

  “Good.” Peggy nodded approvingly. “At last you’re meeting the real King’s. Did he put his hand on your knee?”

  “I waited, but no luck. The real King’s, all right. If you listen carefully you can hear the choir boys sobbing. That’s why they play the organ all day long.”

  “You’re too old for him, that’s all. Those Addenbrookes nurses are more your line. They’ll completely corrupt you … all this brave talk about psychoanalysis.”

  “Psychoanalysis? If I talk about it ever, it must be to myself. Here they see it as a rather strained kind of Mittel European joke.” I stared through the window at the American tourists outside the chapel. “Yesterday I saw a Chevrolet in the Psychology Department car park—it must be the only Chevy in Europe. God, it made me think of Shanghai and all those Americans.”

  “Why? Stop thinking about Shanghai and Lunghua. It’s all over.”

  “I don’t think about it, actually. But it isn’t over.”

  Peggy took my hands, as if we were back in the children’s hut and she was warning me not to provoke Sergeant Nagata. “Jamie, try to remember—you’re here, in England.”

  “Yes … in a weird way Lunghua was a small version of England. I used to wonder why no one tried to escape.”

  “Where would they have escaped to?”

  “That wasn’t it. Lunghua reminded them of home. Remember all those signs? WATERLOO STATION, PICCADILLY CIRCUS, THE SERPENTINE? That was a stagnant pond that gave everyone malaria.”

  “It kept people’s spirits up. Besides, you’ve forgotten that some people did escape. You were the one who wanted the war to go on forever. While David and the Ralstons were trying to break out, you were trying to break in. People thought it was very funny.”

  “The food store? So everyone knew? I wanted us to live there forever. Hansel and Gretel, I suppose. God, I loved you so much…”

  But when I placed my hands on her waist, trying to thank her for all she had done in Lunghua, she slipped away from me. I sat down in my armchair, as the organ blared insanely from the chapel, thinking of the elderly lechers who had made Peggy’s last year in the camp such a trial. Something about my books and reproductions disoriented her; perhaps she feared that Cambridge might be dismantled like the Tsingtao of her childhood. The French novels and my feigned world-weariness were not merely frivolous and adolescent but dangerous, like my decision to dissect a female cadaver. Peggy had been my first love, but sadly not my first lover. She had known me too closely in Lunghua, washing and feeding me when I was ill, and sharing too much emotional stress, to want us to come together again.

  * * *

  During the following weeks, as I began to dissect the dead woman, I realised that my decision had been correct. I took part in undergraduate life, getting drunk on the river with the Addenbrookes nurses, playing tennis with my fellow Kingsmen, but in every other sense the university remained a foreign city. Sometimes I would wake in my rooms, roused by one of the endless voluntaries, and be unable to remember where I was. Then I would smell the faint traces of human fat and formalin on my hands and think of the woman in the dissecting room. I imagined her lying on the darkened table, as deep as pharaoh in her dream of death. Her calm presence p
resided over the cadavers and students alike. Exposing herself to young men with knives in their hands, she set a kind of order on my memories of the dead Chinese and Japanese I had seen during the war.

  As the four student teams began to dissect this unknown woman, opening flaps of skin in her limbs, neck, and abdomen, she seemed to undress in a last act of self-revelation, unpacking herself of all the mortal elements in her life. Sitting beside her, I pared back the skin of her shoulder, dividing the muscles and exposing the nerves of her brachial plexus, the strings that had once moved her arms as she caressed her husband, brushed her hair, cradled her child. I tried to read her character in the scars beneath her chin, traces perhaps of a car accident, the once broken bridge of her strong nose, and the mole on her right temple which she may have disguised with a handsome blond wave. Pretending to read my Cunningham, the dissection handbook whose pages were now stained by the dead woman’s skin, I stared at her matronly hips and at the callouses on her left fingers, those of an amateur cellist…? As we opened the doors of her body, students and demonstrators working on other cadavers would pause behind us, drawn to this solitary woman among the dead men. She alone was treated to none of the lewd dissecting-room humour.

  Hoping to identify her, I talked to the assistants in the preparation room and learned only that she had once been a physician. Almost all the cadavers were those of doctors who had donated their bodies before their deaths—it moved me to think that these dying men and woman had bequeathed themselves to the next generation of doctors, a great testimony to their spirit.

  Aware of her hold over me, and eager to get out of Cambridge for a few hours, I bought a Triumph motorcycle and began to ride into the flat countryside to the north of the city, a realm of fens and watercourses that vaguely resembled the landscape around Shanghai. Behind the hedges lay forgotten wartime airfields, from which the bombing offensive against Germany had been launched, but there were new and larger bases where nuclear bombers were parked in their fortified dispersal bays. American military vehicles patrolled the runways, and the Stars and Stripes flew from the flagstaffs by the gates. Chryslers and Oldsmobiles cruised the country lanes, sudden dreams of chromium, driven by large, pensive men with their well-dressed wives, who gazed at the surrounding fields with the confident eyes of an occupying power. From their closely guarded bases they were preparing England, still trapped by its memories of the Second World War, for the third war yet to come. Then the atomic flash that I had seen over Nagasaki would usher these drab fields and the crumbling gothic of the university into the empire of light.