The Kindness of Women

by J. G. Ballard

* * *

  From that moment Sally Mumford became my guide to a new world. At the start she seemed keen to make a new life for us all in Shepperton, to be the wife and mother we had left among the Spanish cypresses. Part big sister and part friendly witch, and capable in the children’s eyes of unlimited amazements, Sally brought all her good cheer and wayward flair to our suburban retreat. I tried to calm and steady her, as she relived her childhood like an exciting roller-coaster ride. Despite playing the role of her father, I felt surprisingly dependent on her and hoped that I could give her the happy childhood that she was helping to give to my own children.

  At the same time I knew that I could learn so much from her. Sally was a true child of the 1960s, and my guide to the secret logic that I saw unfolding. After years of domesticity in my marooned suburb by the Thames I had stepped into the middle of a decade that had started without me. I had woken from a dream of the Second World War into an England that seemed like the aftermath of the Third.

  In this overlit realm ruled by images of the space race and the Vietnam War, the Kennedy assassination, and the suicide of Marilyn Monroe, a unique alchemy of the imagination was taking place. In many ways the media landscape of the 1960s was a laboratory designed specifically to cure me of all my obsessions. Violence and pornography provided a kit of desperate measures that might give some meaning both to Miriam’s death and to the unnumbered victims of the war in China. The demise of feeling and emotion, the death of affect, presided like a morbid sun over the playground of that ominous decade, to which Sally seemed to hold a key. The brutalising newsreels of civil wars and assassinations, the stylisation of televised violence into an anthology of design statements, were matched by a pornography of science that took its materials, not from nature, but from the deviant curiosity of the scientist.

  At an Arts Laboratory party launching an exhibition of work by a fashionable woman artist—a display of used sanitary towels—I proudly introduced Sally to Dick Sutherland, who had left Cambridge and now led a research team at the Institute of Psychology. In the hard months after our return from Spain he had been a generous friend. Often he drove to Shepperton in the evenings with bottles of bourbon and the latest traveller’s tales from Cape Kennedy, Tokyo, or Los Angeles. “You’ll bounce back,” he told me confidently. Television had kept him young. Roaming around the world with his BBC crew, he was one of the first of the airport thinkers, always available to give an executive-lounge interview.

  Sally took to him instantly, and Dick could see that she was everything I needed: wayward, affectionate, and perverse. When he invited us to visit his laboratory I remembered that I had first met Miriam while volunteering to take part in a bogus experiment. True to form, Dick was still playing games with illusion and reality. He took us on a tour of his laboratory, charmed Sally with a series of well-rehearsed optical tricks and paradoxes, all the while keeping up his smoothly practised patter. His real talent, I realised, was to make all those he met feel that they were on a television programme.

  Dick’s infatuation with television made him as much a true citizen of the 1960s as Sally and Peter Lykiard. He was fascinated by the way in which television theatricalised everything while anchoring it firmly to the domestic and mundane. Since leaving Cambridge he had jettisoned his own past and begun to float free into this electronic realm that, like a kindly sky, taught the audience to admire itself. In an unguarded moment, he told me of his childhood in Scotland, the son of a stony Edinburgh architect and his devout Presbyterian wife. Wartime evacuation to relatives in Australia had opened his eyes to the charms of a beach culture where affection and approval came, not from within the family, but from the world around it.

  Not surprisingly, Dick had never married. Without the ever-present autocue and monitor screen, a close relationship would have seemed a little unreal. But his awareness of his own flaws made him an astute psychologist, and he was an endless fund of ideas, many at my expense. The house in Shepperton always intrigued him.

  “You’ve been to Jim’s place in Shepperton, Sally?”

  “Of course. It’s a shrine.”

  “Absolutely. Freud’s primal cave furnished with wall-to-wall carpeting and a million years of love. In the long run, suburbia will triumph over everything, though it’s hard to tell if the suburbs are a city’s convalescent zone or a kind of petting zoo. In fact, they may be where a city dreams—Jim’s like a sleeper poised at the onset of REM sleep. But before he wakes, let me show you round the lab. Nothing is quite what it seems, rather like reality in a way…”

  In a darkened lecture theatre a volunteer panel of housewives, secretaries, and off-duty firemen stared at the photographs of unnamed men and women projected onto a screen, trying to identify which were murderers and which victims.

  “In fact, they’re photos of the previous panel,” Dick whispered to Sally. “People have remarkably strong prejudices about certain facial characteristics. The smallest cues convince them that they’re looking at a child rapist or a Gestapo killer.”

  In the laboratory next door a second group of volunteers were completing a confidential questionnaire about the effect of violent newsreels on their sex lives.

  “Of course, there’s no influence at all,” Dick assured us, “and the footage we show them is much less violent than we tell them it’s going to be. What’s interesting, though, is that most people assume it does improve their sex lives. Everyone says there’s too much violence on TV, but secretly they want more.”

  “So, thanks to TV, everything is the opposite of what it seems?” I commented.

  “It does look like it.” We had returned to Dick’s office, and he lay back in his chair, sneakers on the desk, letting Sally admire his long legs and actor’s profile. “It’s obviously true in politics. We’ve studied the TV commercials put out by Governor Reagan of California. You can see that all this fierce right-wing stuff is the complete opposite of his reassuring body language. But people believe the body language—generally we’ve summed a person up long before he opens his mouth. We think Reagan knows this, thanks to his Hollywood experience. His whole political career is one long reaction shot with an irrelevant voice-over, as you can prove by deleting the sound track and asking people to guess what he’s saying. They trust the friendly sportscaster manner. On the other hand, once he’s sitting in the governor’s mansion in Sacramento he has his mandate…”

  “You’re saying that the Führer shouldn’t have ranted and raved but come on like … the Cowardly Lion?”

  “Exactly. The totalitarian systems of the future will be docile and subservient, and all the more threatening for that. Though there’ll always be a place for out-and-out madness. In some way, people need the notion. The agnostic world keeps its religious festivals alive to meet the vacation demands of its work force. By the same token, when medical science has conquered disease certain mental afflictions will be mimicked for social reasons—I’d put my bets on schizophrenia. It seems to represent the insane’s idea of the normal.”

  “And not the other way around?”

  “Probably not—a disease that flatters our vanity has a huge advantage, like most venereal complaints.” Dick turned to the film projector behind his desk. “Speaking of schizophrenia, we’ve been going through some wartime German film stored in the basement. One of the cans is a Waffen SS instructional film on how to build a pontoon bridge.”

  Sally almost swooned at this. “God, that’s so weird—it just says everything…”

  “Doesn’t it?” Pleased by her attention, Dick reluctantly lowered the blind, uneager to put himself in the shade. “Perhaps we could show it at the Arts Lab? I’d be happy to introduce it.”

  We sat sipping wine in Dick’s darkened office, surrounded by American licence plates and photographs of him at the controls of his Cessna, while the SS film fluttered through his projector. Was the film yet another fake? It looked convincingly real, and Sally held tight to my arm, mesmerised by the strong, white-skinned young men good-nature
dly singing their work songs. Dick smiled to himself through the flickering light, murmured into the telephone when a BBC producer called, and watched Sally approvingly. He seemed glad that I had become the lover of this rapt and aroused young woman, and well aware of the rich and fierce sex we would have that evening as Sally replayed the film in her mind.

  When we left he confided: “She’s right for you, Jim. Just what you need.”

  * * *

  Although Sally depended on me, in most respects I was her pupil, and the most important lesson she taught me came at the New Year’s Eve party that she held at her flat in Bayswater. For some reason the place always unsettled me, filled with the debris of Sally’s past, like those abandoned houses in wartime Shanghai where clock-time had been suspended for a little too long and one returned to be confronted by the invisible stranger of one’s younger self. I strolled around the Persian carpets stained with wine and cigarette ash, past the sofas with their unwashed covers reeking of stale incense, and thought of my children asleep in Shepperton as the middle-aged baby-sitter read her travel guide to British Honduras.

  Yet the next day Sally would be washing Alice’s hair and helping Lucy to stitch a miniature wardrobe for her trolls. Now she reeled about, amphetamines in her left hand, between the Marat/Sade posters and the blown-up photographs of Diane Arbus dwarfs, shrieking at Peter Lykiard as he arrived with a po-faced Japanese artist who had recently filmed their buttocks.

  Sally proudly held my arm, hiccupped, and left a fleck of vomit on my shoulder. She recovered with a flourish, cleared her mouth into a glass of wine, and kissed me happily on the lips.

  “Jim, I’ve found some wonderful crepe de chine! Lucy’s going to adore it…”

  She careened away, swinging from shoulder to shoulder like a gymnast on the overhead rings.

  * * *

  Shortly before midnight, remembering the baby-sitter, I decided to leave for Shepperton. Searching for Sally, I pushed my way through the noise and smoke. Couples embraced among the unwashed dishes in the kitchen, and a party within a party was taking place as six guests camped on Sally’s double bed. Two acolytes of the Japanese artist were taking a shower together in Sally’s bathroom. I searched the other bedrooms and the second bathroom, filled with her friends’ art-school lumber, and then glanced into her little dressing room.

  When I reached the door Peter Lykiard asked me for a cigarette, clearly trying to distract me, as if I were a child about to stray into the adults’ bedroom.

  “Sally’s busy, Jim—before I forget, I wanted to ask you about this Waffen SS film. Dick Sutherland is keen to do a presentation…”

  Pushing past him, I opened the door. Sally was sitting on the quilted seat of the laundry basket, her skirt raised to her waist. Her bare legs were crossed around the hips of a young Spanish photographer whom we had met briefly at the Arts Laboratory. His unzipped trousers had slipped around his thighs, and his strong hands had pulled down the bodice of Sally’s dress to expose her breasts. With their awkward and almost abstract movements, he and Sally seemed to be rehearsing a pornographic circus turn in which they somehow swapped their clothes during an intense sex act. As he sucked at her right breast Sally kissed his forehead, her strong legs drawing his penis into her. Seeing me, she held the Spaniard’s shoulders and gave me a frank and happy smile.

  While I drove back to Shepperton I thought of Sally’s affection for me and her thousand kindnesses towards the children. Deep affection and the most casual disloyalty coexisted, separated by that tolerant smile. I remembered seeing the Vincents making love in their tired way on Sunday afternoons in Lunghua, and Mrs. Vincent’s knowing eyes when she saw me watching her through my curtain. I could almost believe that Sally had deliberately exposed herself to me, urging me to take the next step in my unsentimental education. I had been drawn to Sally because she offered a key to this strange decade, but the only stable element in Sally’s world was instability. By isolating my emotions, by separating feeling from action, I might perhaps even learn to enjoy Sally’s infidelities.

  I thought of her near-drowning at Brighton beach, when she had allowed me to bring a second wife back from the waves. I could still feel the sombre power of the dark rollers striking my thighs and chest as I waded into the deep water where death ran and the black foam through which I had dragged her onto the shingle.

  Images of pain and anger floated free, like the billboards advertising the endless deaths of the murdered President, messages of violence and desire that alone could assuage the bereaved.

  I sped on past the oncoming headlights, crossing the moonlit Thames to where Shepperton lay asleep in my children’s dreams.

  10

  THE KINGDOM OF LIGHT

  “Think of LSD as the kaleidoscope’s view of the eye.”

  While Dick spoke I sat in my study by the open French window, looking down at the glass of water in my hand and the sugar cube exposed beside the BBC tape recorder. A sinister glitter rose from the foil wrapper.

  “Dick, are we ready?” I asked over my shoulder. “This is starting to feel like a suicide attempt.”

  “Give me a moment—you are going to heaven…” Dick adjusted the tripod of his cine-camera, aiming its ferocious little lens at my face. Already I resented the camera, staring at me like a deformed robot. Summer light filled the garden, playing among the broken toys and the clothesline with its waving pyjamas—the usual cheerful mess that I had offered to clear away. But Dick had been adamant that I change nothing.

  Sipping at the water, I noticed the collapsed wigwam which Alice and Henry had built from an old tartan blanket and the cucumber frame. Banished from its dark interior for some breach of childhood protocol, Lucy had demolished the wigwam with her pedal car. The others had threatened a terrible revenge, forgotten the moment that Cleo Churchill and her daughter Penny arrived at the front door. Friends of Dick, they would take the children down to the river while he and I embarked on a trip of our own, a short safari across the width of my skull.

  “Dick, the garden’s a mess—I ought to clear it up. Let’s face it, your TV audience isn’t going to be on acid.”

  “Just what the ratings need. I’ll suggest it to the BBC. They can put a gift pack in Radio Times.”

  The four children were shouting in the hall, clamouring for ice cream, comics, and bubble-gum wrappers. Cleo Churchill put her head around the door and grimaced cheerfully.

  “There’s a riot brewing. I’ll have to leave you to it.”

  “That’s fine, Cleo. Jim’s eager to go. Give us a couple of hours.”

  “Two hours? You ought to be filming me.” She frowned at the camera and microphone, the blood-pressure kit, and my straight-backed chair. “Jim, it looks genuinely weird—are you going to be all right?”

  “Don’t worry. Dick’s monitored a lot of trips.”

  “Even so. Never trust the ferryman.”

  I could see that she disapproved, taking the view that there were more than enough adult excitements in the world; the experiment that Dick and I were about to make with my brain chemistry was a boy’s game scarcely different from those that Henry played in the garden, when he lit a cigarette stub inside the wigwam or exploded a box of matches. Cleo, with her quick smile and shy glamour, was an editor of children’s books whom I sometimes saw at Dick’s parties. Aware, a little uneasily, of her concern, I guessed that she was worried about more than Dick’s credentials. As she withdrew her hand reluctantly from my shoulder she glanced from the perspiration on my face to the untidy study and garden. Beyond any thoughts about the wisdom of experimenting with LSD was a thirty-second guess at my character and whatever flaws this potent hallucinogen might expose.

  “Okay…” Dick set a dial on his aviator’s watch and started the tape recorder. “It’s 15:05 on June 17, 1967…”

  Meeting Cleo’s warning eyes, I placed the sugar cube on my tongue and let it rest there in a small show of defiance. As the children flung back the front door and rushed towards the
gate I hesitated for a last moment. When Cleo had gone, slamming the door after her, I swallowed a mouthful of water.

  “Right,” Dick told me. “You’ll feel something in about half an hour, so sit back and relax. We can play chess.”

  “I’ll look at the garden.” I could usually beat Dick at chess, but this was one game he would enjoy losing, as the pieces turned into dragons. I listened to the children’s shouts fading down the street, followed by Cleo’s strong, cheerful voice. Herself a single parent, she had implied that I was stepping out of character, a responsible father taking this questionable drug, still legally available in England, though there had been frequent calls to have it scheduled.

  I stared at the toy-cluttered garden, a moraine of happy memories that the past three years had deposited on this suburban plot. The glacier had moved on, Miriam sleeping calmly within its deeps. The children had almost forgotten their mother, something I had tried to prevent, mistakenly. If they remembered her it was on other levels, in their good humour, resilience, and confidence in unearned affection.

  Strangely, Miriam had begun to recede even from me, while at the same time standing out more clearly in my memory. She seemed like the statue of a madonna suspended above the nave of a cathedral, rising into the air as I stepped away from her. The perspective lines of my life still led back to Miriam, but I owed a great deal to the women I had known since her death, above all to Sally Mumford, who had helped me to face head-on the pressures of pain and obsessive sexuality. Curiously, Sally’s open infidelities had helped to ease my memories of Miriam, as if her death had been an infidelity of a special kind.

  However, Dick had not been keen on having Sally present when he offered to supervise my LSD experiment. Her sudden swerves of mood, her muddled enthusiasms, might derail the hallucinatory locomotive. Eager to make the experiment and explore the locked doors of consciousness, I agreed that Cleo Churchill should look after the children. The amphetamines and drinamyls I had sometimes taken seemed less mind-altering than the average double Scotch, but Dick assured me that LSD was pushing against the limits of the brain.