The Kindness of Women

by J. G. Ballard

“And you’re married…?”

  “Mrs. Edward R. Weinstock—my husband is a nose and throat surgeon, very influential.” She nodded darkly, scrutinising with only marginal approval a photograph of Cleo and myself. “But you were nearly a doctor yourself? I read an interview—I couldn’t understand…”

  “I gave it up after a couple of years—I wanted to be a writer.”

  “A writer?” Her nostrils twitched doubtfully, as if only the plushness of this Beverly Hills hotel suite prevented her from criticising a disastrous career move. She was wearing an expensive gown with a gleaming lamé thread that she might have worn to the opening of a Las Vegas casino, but as she turned to and fro on her rapier heels I found myself glancing under the arms for the telltale tear. I remembered the brief glimpse of her breast that had so dazed my adolescent mind. Despite her expensive hair and jewellery, there was still something slatternly about Olga, as if her body were a disposable tool to be used as necessity dictated. I thought of her in postwar Shanghai, a tank trap full of vodka, lying in wait for the young American servicemen.

  “So this film, James. Is it good?”

  “I’m sure it is. They say it’s his best. I haven’t seen it yet.”

  “You haven’t?” This was clearly a serious omission, one I should have rectified before signing the film contract or, more sensibly still, before writing a line of the book. She shook her head, as if I were still the odd little boy who had cycled all over Shanghai in search of a war. “Anyway, it’s a big help for your career. You were always telling stories. Your poor mother didn’t know what was coming next…”

  “This is the only book I’ve written about Shanghai—for some reason, it took a long time.”

  “Too much to forget, people don’t realise … the things I could tell about Shanghai. You and I should write a book, James, a real bestseller. My ideas and your—”

  “One is enough, Olga. I might write a sequel about my life in England.”

  “England?” Doubtfully, Olga sniffed her Scotch. “Is it so interesting? I read about your wife—that’s sad for you.”

  “That was a long time ago. I’ll treat you to lunch, Olga, and you can bring me up to date.”

  “Listen, it’s never long enough. When my mother passed away…” As an afterthought, she added: “My second husband died. An English dentist in Hong Kong, so I understand.”

  On our way to the rooftop restaurant she held my arm in a genuine show of sympathy, evoked almost entirely by her feelings of pity for herself. Responding to the attentions of the restaurant, she was soon as animated as a teenager, showing off her smooth cheeks and trimmed nose. The young Olga I remembered, whose body I had tried to glimpse as she undressed in the bathroom, seemed to beckon across the years from this ageing but still glamorous woman. She spoke with scarcely a pause for breath about her years in Hong Kong and Manila, battling her way to the top of the social hill as husbands died under her like horses under a cavalryman at Austerlitz.

  When we returned to the suite she said: “James, your book made a lot of interest in San Francisco—many people from Shanghai are living there. Perhaps you could give a talk to us. You could say I was your family’s friend. Maybe in the diplomatic service…”

  “Olga, I’d like to, but even writing about Shanghai was difficult enough.”

  “Of course. I know your feelings. We were always close, James. You never told your mother about those things I took—the silver and the jade horses … I always wanted to thank you for that.”

  “Olga, I never knew.”

  “Maybe you forgot. They had so much, and my parents were hungry every day. My father lost all his hope, sitting in that little room. It’s lucky he died before the war came. My mother forgave me—women understand—but a father? Never…”

  Olga held my arm, the scent of her hair, throat, and breasts overrunning my senses. She stood beside me, staring at the mansions of Beverly Hills as if seeing the vanished façades of Amherst Avenue. I remembered how, forty years earlier, I had felt her strong hip pressed against mine as we stood in the glass-strewn ballroom of the Del Monte nightclub. During the dark days at school in England I had often thought of Olga. We would have made love on one of the roulette tables if I had been less intimidated by her, and particularly if I had offered a shortcut to my father’s office.

  I embraced this exotic female chimera, with her dream’s ransom of a face lift. Her body was even older than mine, but her face was that of the White Russian teenager who had first looked after me.

  She smiled to herself, perhaps amused by the memory of some childish exploit in the garden at Amherst Avenue.

  “And your friend, James?” Her fingers loosened my tie and shirt. She ran her nails across my chest, making sure that my nipples were still there. “Is she back soon?”

  “Not till tomorrow—she’s gone to see publishing people she knows in Santa Barbara. Olga, this has nothing to do with her.”

  “Publishing? Then it’s okay…” She raised her face in front of me, a small screen on which was projected the image of a young woman.

  I wondered why she had bothered to see me—perhaps out of pride, and to remind me that she could still dominate my life. Certainly, she would have felt no debt of honour for stealing from my parents before the war. But she knew that we were both victims in our different ways of Western rule in Shanghai, which my parents represented for her. We had once been wounded and corrupted by Shanghai, insofar as children could be corrupted, and by making love in this California hotel we would prove to each other that the wounds had healed.

  “Good … you know, James, I never waited long for a man. This could be a bad example for me…”

  She held my wrists in the same firm grip she had used half a century earlier to steer me towards the bathroom. Standing beside the bed, she closed the wardrobe mirrors so that no reflection of her back would reach my eyes. She began to undress me as if preparing me for a party, her fingers never leaving my skin as they moved around my body.

  Delaying herself deliberately, she stood against me, playing the moody governess unsure whether to accord some trivial privilege to her charge. I kissed her affectionately, glad that she had come through and was happily married to her influential surgeon.

  The film of our life rushed backwards through the projector, devouring itself as it hunted for some discarded moment that held the key to our earliest selves.

  * * *

  On our final day in Los Angeles, a week after the film premiere, Cleo and I decided on a last visit to the ocean. Waiting for our car, we stood in the entrance of the hotel, looking up at the black skyscrapers of Century City a few hundred yards away. This cluster of sightless towers emerged through the low-rise sprawl of the city like a harsh, obsidian Manhattan.

  Cleo stared at the razor cornices and gave a shiver. “Is it all going to look like this when we come back? Please, God … what sort of heaven circles those spires?”

  “None I want to wake into. But face it, Cleo—modernism is the gothic of the information age. Dreams sharp enough to bleed, and no doubts about man’s lowly place in the scheme of things. Let’s head for the beach…”

  Venice, by contrast, was ramshackle and comforting. An intact fragment of the sixties survived along its promenades. The wide sands stretched past roller-skaters and muscle-builders, break dancers and beggars posing as Vietnam psychos. Its modest stands were hung with flower-power T-shirts and mystic jewellery. Driftwood fires were burning on the sand beside the shelters which the groups of hippies had erected. The sea seemed far away, a glimmer of waves along the horizon, as if the Pacific had decided to withdraw for the day. I could almost believe that we were walking on the bed of a fossil sea, with ancient cigarette ends, ballpoint pens, and beer cans embedded in its scarred surface, all that remained of some earlier race.

  I slipped my arm around Cleo’s waist, happy to be with her and glad that we would be going together to New York. The premiere had been a great success, presented with effortless Hol
lywood professionalism, like a vast good-natured hallucination—the hundreds of limousines, revolving searchlights, and sealed-off streets lined with red carpet and security guards. The audience of film actors seemed to have absconded from reality for the evening, ambling down the aisles of the theatre with their sable coats and popcorn cartons.

  As it happened, my small role had been edited out of the finished film, much to my relief, though I survived as a brief blur seen as the camera followed my younger self playing with his model aircraft. But this seemed just, like the faint blur which was all that any of us left across time and space. Besides, the film had served a deeper role for me—seeing its masterly recreation of Shanghai had been the last act in a profound catharsis that had taken decades to draw to a close. All the powers of modern film had come together for this therapeutic exercise. The puzzle had solved itself; the mirror, as I had promised, had been broken from within. In my mind the image had fused with its original, enfolding it within its protective wings. Looking at the great hotels along the Bund, unchanged after fifty years, I could almost believe that my memories of Shanghai had always been a film, endlessly played inside my head during my years in England after the war.

  * * *

  “They’re launching some kind of ship.”

  Cleo pointed to the crowd of people at the water’s edge. A caterpillar tractor backed across the sand, pushing a trailer loaded with a bizarre sailing vessel. A single mast rose above a cabin that resembled a thatched hut. As we approached across the sand we could see that the hull was built entirely of papyrus reeds, bound together at stem and stern like the handle of a wicker shopping bag.

  A square-rigged sail floated from the mast, bearing a half-familiar red emblem.

  Cleo stopped and squinted through cupped hands. “It’s Heyerdahl’s papyrus ship—Ra. We published the book.”

  “I thought it sank in the Atlantic…”

  “He must be trying to cross the Pacific. Jim, you ought to volunteer. It’s the original slow boat to China.”

  “I don’t think it’s an original of anything…”

  Crewmen knelt in the shallow waves, examining the underside of the craft. We stepped through the children and dogs playing in the water around the tractor. The mock-papyrus superstructure, assembled from moulded plastic and fibreglass, was bolted onto a sturdy steel hull.

  “It’s the replica of a replica.” Cleo laughed at herself for being taken in. “They must be using it in a film.”

  “It looks like a real ship, though. If they’re making a TV commercial they’ll need something more seaworthy than Heyerdahl’s original. This one’s going somewhere.”

  “Jim, now’s your chance to get aboard.”

  A black Labrador ambled through the waves, licking our hands and ready to shake its coat over us. I patted its head, admiring the easy expertise of the American crew. A man in swimming trunks and straw hat filmed the launch with a handheld video camera. At least this vessel would not sink, and a trial cruise among the weekend yachts of Marina Del Rey might uncover more truths about the performance of crew and vessel than its original’s abortive mock-voyage across the Atlantic.

  I thought of Olga sailing serenely through the lobby of the Beverly Hilton after we said goodbye. As she pressed her cheeks against my own I kissed for the last time the face of my childhood governess. That youthful and ageless mask was her true self, which time had stolen from her, the innocent and unlined face she had never been allowed to know as an adolescent.

  The war had postponed my own childhood, to be rediscovered years later with Henry, Alice, and Lucy. The time of desperate stratagems was over, the car crashes and hallucinogens, the deviant sex ransacked like a library of extreme metaphors. Miriam and all the murdered dead of a world war had made their peace. The happiness I had found had been waiting for me within the modest reach of my own arms, in my children and the women I had loved, and in the friends who had made their own way through the craze years.

  The waves struck sharply at our ankles. A strong wind was gusting across the beach, and the papyrus craft had broken free from its crew. With only the cameraman aboard, fumbling at the mast as he ducked the swinging boom, the craft confidently rode the waves. The launch crew leapt through the deeper water, pulling on the mooring lines but unable to restrain the boisterous vessel. The replica of a replica it may have been, but it was buoyant and well-founded, more than capable of taking on the sea and setting its own course across the Pacific, with only its shanghaied cameraman as crew, perhaps ending with a last triumphant heave on the beaches of Woosung.

  “New York tomorrow. Then home to the children.” Cleo held my arm tightly as we walked back to our car, past the hippies and the fragrant beach fires, embers glaring in the freshening air. “Tell me—when they show the film in London, will they put back your little cameo?”

  “I hope not.” I watched the papyrus craft cresting the breakers that rolled in from the Pacific, its bow set towards the China shore. “Cleo, think where that might lead…”

  Also by J. G. Ballard

  The Drowned World

  The Voices of Time

  The Terminal Beach

  The Drought

  The Crystal World

  The Day of Forever

  The Venus Hunters

  The Disaster Area

  The Atrocity Exhibition

  Vermilion Sands

  Crash

  Concrete Island

  High-Rise

  Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories

  The Unlimited Dream Company

  Hello America

  Myths of the Near Future

  Empire of the Sun

  Running Wild

  The Day of Creation

  War Fever

  Rushing to Paradise

  A User’s Guide to the Millennium

  Cocaine Nights

  Super-Cannes

  J. G. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 and for more than three decades has lived in Shepperton, England. He is the author of numerous books including Empire of the Sun, Crash, The Day of Creation, and Super-Cannes.

  THE KINDNESS OF WOMEN. Copyright © 1991 by J. G. Ballard. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ballard, J. G., 1930–

  The kindness of women / J. G. Ballard.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42284-4

  ISBN-10: 0-312-42284-9

  I. Title.

  PR6052.A46 K5 1991

  823'.914—dc20

  91073730

  First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  First Picador Edition: December 2007

  eISBN 9781466856653

  First eBook edition: October 2013