Julia Paradise

by Rod Jones

  He had come out onto one of the main thoroughfares of the Concession—he thought it was the Avenue Edouard VII but couldn’t be sure in the absence of streetlamps. This was not his usual territory. The tumbledown buildings had given way to blocks of apartments and bigger houses. From the dim windows of the houses came sudden snatches of conversation, a song, an argument, the cry of a child. The shopfronts were covered with sheets of corrugated iron, the more prosperous establishments barred with heavy iron grilles. When Ayres turned the next corner she was gone.

  He knew she must have disappeared into one of those low dark buildings which had been divided by greedy landlords into warrens of single rooms in which often two or three families were crammed.

  He walked back along that street of evil aspect, feeling cold and alone and frightened. The buildings all looked the same to him now, and the occasional window high up lit with the weak wobbly light of a kerosene lamp was not reassuring. He could not completely get rid of the feeling that the figure of the woman had lured him into some danger, or an ambush, that at any moment now someone would step out of the shadows in front of him.

  There was nothing he could do but quicken his pace along the street to the comparative safety of the French patrol post, find a taxi, and begin the chore of haggling a fare back to the Astor House. He rapped on the window of the first car on the rank. The driver suddenly shot up, startled from sleep, thinking Ayres was one of the French policemen, perhaps.

  He saw her several times round the city after that, always dressed in the same old raincoat, the same scarf tied over her head, the shopping basket on her arm. A casual observer who happened to know of her vocation might have assumed that she was ministering to the poor of the city, arranging food and shelter for the derelict.

  Usually she was far away, or sufficiently caught up in the movement of the crowds not to have to acknowledge Ayres. Only once did he see her in the company of another person. It was on a Sunday afternoon. They were strolling arm in arm along the Bund in the sunshine. Her tall companion wore a man’s hat and carried a briefcase and from across the road Ayres assumed it was her husband. Then, as the couple crossed and walked towards him, he saw she was a woman whose expression was serious under the brim of her hat. They passed close enough for him to see the silver crosses glinting on the collars of their blouses. He followed them idly as far as the grim building which housed the YWCA and the Women’s Institute, successor to the Anti-Footbinding League. They climbed the steps and disappeared into the gloom inside.

  Then, early one morning when Ayres was still in his evening clothes from a party at the Black Cat nightclub and making his way home in the fresh air, he spotted the Paradise woman strolling through the vegetable markets.

  He was standing quite near her when she looked up and saw him. She jumped with the recognition, thrust her head down and began to push her way through the shoppers, looking wretched in the raincoat and scarf she always wore. Ayres had drunk enough that night to steel his determination to catch up with her this time, and he shouldered ruthlessly through the crowds of early morning shoppers. When she saw how close he was the woman stopped and waited, and he could see the strain in her eyes.

  She had her basket on her arm just as though she had come among these women of poor Chinese families to buy her vegetables. Then he caught a glimpse of a rather expensive-looking camera inside it. She saw him looking and snatched the basket away.

  ‘I photograph,’ she said simply.

  Yet it was not such a simple thing to say. Surely one said—‘I take photographs’? But the little missionary woman had used the verb strongly, almost defiantly. Then her eyes had become vague and unfocused again and she looked away from him, shifting the weight from one foot to the other. There remained between them unspoken her ghostly disappearance outside Morgan’s rooms. And Ayres was still drunk and determined enough to want to exact the revenge of an explanation to the full. He compounded her discomfort by asking her to join him for breakfast.

  Perhaps it was her embarrassment, or perhaps she couldn’t think of a plausible excuse to refuse. In either case, she accepted. She said that she would join him—but only for a bowl of tea.

  Now breakfast was of custom an occasion for Ayres. He liked to build his day on a foundation of all varieties and combinations of offal and eggs. He was especially partial to a bit of liver or kidney with his chops and bacon to set off the blandness of the eggs. To breakfast on a bowl of China tea was inconceivable to this man, yet he followed her meekly through the crowds, in his silk top hat, tails and white silk scarf.

  Dotted among those market streets were numerous tea houses. They were not visited by Europeans normally, and were rough and ready shops designed to give fast service and to send the workingman on his way. But the missionary’s wife seemed to have one tea shop in particular in mind. As they entered, the coolies seated along the wooden benches with their tea bowls and cigarettes, stared at them. Just as incongruous were they, with Ayres in his evening clothes, as those coolies might have been if they had arrived in their singlets and padded jackets to take high tea in the dining room of the Astor House Hotel.

  Julia Paradise did not seem much inclined to talk with her tea. She looked around the mean surroundings—the grimy green paintwork of the tables and benches, the steam from the urn dripping down the window in rivulets, the sawdust on the floor and everywhere the thick pall of cheap tobacco. Her eyes met Ayres’ from time to time and—this surprised him—she seemed to be laughing. The working men on their benches were all silent, watching the interlopers with fear and suspicion: the devil himself might have walked in. Perhaps the woman was amused to have lured Ayres in his evening clothes into this monkey cage. Ayres said, after a while, ‘If you’d rather we left and took our tea in more congenial surroundings—’

  She shook her head once. ‘It isn’t that.’

  ‘The breakfasts they give at my hotel are very good.’

  ‘I’m sure they are.’ There was irony in her expression now, and her prominent eye-teeth were bared, but whether in humour or in malice he couldn’t tell. He formed his next sentence carefully. ‘You know my hotel, I think. You visited me there several weeks ago.’

  She seemed not to have understood. He continued, ‘That was before I saw you that night outside Morgan’s.’

  She listened to his statement of the fact drily, unmoved. She did not deny it; how could she? She lowered her eyes but immediately shot them back to meet his gaze, the defiant expression which Ayres already thought of as characteristic. He feared for a moment that she would demand to know by what right he had followed her. But she went on quickly, ‘I spend some nights in the city. Looking for subjects for my photographs.’

  ‘In the dark?’

  ‘Yes.’ She did not condescend to explain further. He said slyly, ‘You know Morgan, then?’

  Ayres noticed that some of the old physical symptoms of strain had begun to creep into her face. The tic was back in her cheek, along the edge of one nostril. She began to speak in a voice that had taken on the tinge of a German accent again. Halting and lighting on an imaginary object, she paused from what she was saying, stifled a gulp of terror, and Ayres knew that she was seeing her animals again. At one point, looking at a fantastic creature rather than Ayres, she accused, ‘You killed her.’

  Ayres was at a disadvantage without his medical bag. Clearly, she was hallucinating, rocking back and forth in the wooden chair. He knew he had to get her out of there in a hurry.

  The Chinese working men had left and others had come in and taken their places. Their curiosity in seeing Europeans—even such bizarre Europeans who wore evening clothes to a market tea house—soon palled, and they paid no attention to the woman’s antics. There was nothing Ayres could do. He slapped a couple of copper coins onto the wooden table and, striding around behind her, lifted her bodily from the chair and slung her over his shoulder. Now the Chinese customers followed his movements with an intense curiosity. As he lifted her the basket to
ppled over and her camera rattled across the hard stone floor in the sawdust. One of the onlookers picked up the black object suspiciously, then the basket, and placed it into Ayres’ free hand. In this way he walked out of the smoky gloom of the tea shop and into the crowds on the pungent sunlit early-morning streets.

  That morning in his rooms at the Astor House Hotel Ayres discovered the most suggestible patient he had ever come across in his life. None of the ladies in Vienna whose cases he had studied, not even the legendary successes of the Master himself, had provided a subject whose other, ‘hidden’ self was so accessible through hypnosis, or so discernibly opposite to the face she presented to the world.

  Not that Ayres was taken in by the more excessive and ludicrous claims made in some quarters for hypnosis as a therapy. Hypnosis, as he had learned to practise it in Vienna, began with touch, with a laying on of hands. This proved to be his first indication of the extraordinary suggestibility of Julia Paradise. He began by massaging her trapezius muscles, down the back of the neck and along her shoulders. These muscles were in spasm and bunched up tightly. Several times she opened her eyes and asked in English for morphine. After a period of massage he allowed her to sleep for half an hour as a relief from her anxieties. Ayres took this time to have his bath drawn and to change into ordinary day clothes. He ordered coffee and eggs to be sent up and ate his breakfast in his consulting room, still watching over her.

  When he saw that the woman was awake and comparatively relaxed, he encouraged her to talk about her childhood in Australia. He questioned her gently, tempting her to answer. He allowed her talk to wander and did not interrupt to get her back onto her track. Gradually, over some hours, she built up for him a picture so vivid and disturbingly at odds with the details of her early life her husband had given him, that Ayres did not believe she was hypnotized in the accepted sense of the word. He put down as mere hallucinations these wild and often obscene flights of fancy into her world of the animals. He concluded that under hypnosis she was actually ‘speaking her dreams’ as they occurred in her subconscious mind. At the same time she was conscious enough to be talking to him.

  Later, when she was fully awake, she insisted that her childhood on her father’s plantation in northern Queensland, Australia, had been settled and happy. She told him that she had been a serious and religious girl, and that it had seemed wholly appropriate that she marry a preacher. Then Ayres told her some of the things she had said while under hypnosis. She did not slap his face, although initially she looked as though she might. In the end she simply said that she did not believe him.

  She agreed to return in three days’ time; by now the case had truly drawn Ayres’ interest. Before she left she mentioned that soon after her arrival in China she had suffered from a serious bout of illness which had necessitated a stay in the American Hospital. ‘I nearly died then, you know,’ she told him. This claim of hers of being mortally ill was contradicted after an hour’s struggle with the Shanghai telephone system. The American Hospital’s records confirmed that she had been admitted the year before last for three days, with an entirely routine case of gastroenteritis.

  Every Tuesday she travelled by train into the city and in the afternoons she visited Ayres’ rooms and let him hypnotize her. He was astounded by the stock of imaginative products she unloaded while in a relaxed state. He regularly administered doses of morphine to help induce sleep, and sleep was preceded by a state of intoxication which lasted several hours. Sometimes he used these periods of intoxication to encourage the description of her hallucinations in detail. It seemed to afford the woman tremendous relief to verbalize these frightful images and thereby render them harmless, and she invariably woke from these sessions feeling refreshed. But something else was happening: Ayres was convinced that he was finally being allowed to approach the psychic events of her childhood which lay at the root of her hysterical illness.

  She was not continually hallucinating. She was sometimes relaxed enough to talk without prompting about the little details of daily life at the mission school. Their mission was devoted to the ideal of giving girl children a Christian education. This activity had engendered opposition from some of the more traditional local families: it was not so very long before this time that footbinding had been legally practised. Julia Paradise talked about two or three of the girls she had taught the year before who had been withdrawn from the school by their families under pressure from others. One of the girls had died, apparently—in any case it upset her to speak of it and Ayres wisely desisted in his questions.

  But during relatively happy conversations she was still plagued by hallucinations. Even as she recited for him a poem—she had several of Keats and one by Coleridge learned by heart—the animals lay in wait for her in the corners of Ayres’ consulting rooms. She would hesitate a moment in the line she was reciting, and Ayres came to interpret this pause to mean that she had seen a mouse move under the bed. At odd moments she fell into ‘sleeplike states’ and Ayres became as used to these as anyone else who knew her. One afternoon she suddenly broke off from what she had been saying to complain of a large toad sitting squarely in the middle of the rug in front of them. They even managed to laugh about it.

  But more often the stress of coping with her hallucinations, of sifting through her perceptions, so to speak, to find which were real and which imagined, became too much for her and the old terror returned and with it an exacerbation of her hysterical symptoms.

  She described over the weeks these visions of the animals to Ayres in great detail. Delicate, whip-like snakes ‘the colour of red earth’; toads ‘as big as a man’s hand, horribly pale and skin-coloured’. Any sudden or unexpected movement in her peripheral vision—such as a curtain flapping in the breeze—had the power to turn itself into an animal for her.

  These neurotic symptoms were, of course, complicated by her narcotic addiction, which Ayres did his best to control. Sometimes she was able to prevail upon him to let her have an extra ampoule beyond her ration of five grains a day against the possibility of a very bad night. But she had apparently found another source of the stuff, and there were Tuesdays when he could see by the languidness of her movements, the apathy of her expression that his specified dosage had been exceeded. Ayres assumed that her husband was still ignorant of this matter; a state of affairs which suited Ayres, who knew only too well how false the non-addict’s view of addiction can be. Besides, she was a reasonably well-adjusted addict and Ayres was utterly convinced by now that it was not her addiction which lay at the root of her problem.

  Even under the influence of morphine she still had the capacity to talk lucidly and intelligently, and it was when she was physically groggy like this, with her hair tousled and eyes wild, she exercised upon Ayres a grotesque kind of sexual attraction. In fact her slim childish figure had begun to interest him a great deal. Her unremarkable freckled little face became dominated by her eyes, which glittered in her head as she tried to make him understand the intensity of her hallucinations. Commonly, their conversations held an element of ironic teasing.

  ‘How do you know these animals are not really there?’ she asked.

  ‘No one else sees them.’

  ‘But what if they’re really here and it’s just that at the moment neither you nor I can see them?’

  ‘Nonsense!’

  ‘But isn’t it possible that the animals are really there, but that they’re hiding in order to trick me? You will at least admit the possibility?’

  ‘No!’ he laughed. ‘They only want to annoy you. They have nothing against me.’

  ‘No!’ When she laughed her serious worried face changed completely. She took on the look of a young girl about to participate in some treat.

  ‘Or perhaps you’re not looking hard enough to find them.’

  ‘Only mad people think like that. Not doctors.’

  ‘How else are you to understand the complaints of your patients?’ She paused, then added, ‘I never think of you having other
patients, apart from me.’

  She looked at him intently, her lips pressed together. She had begun to sweat profusely, even though the day was not particularly hot.

  ‘Are you seeing the animals now?’

  She silently mouthed ‘No’ but the look of abstraction, of rapt intensity, inclined Ayres to disbelief.

  Whenever Ayres questioned her closely about her childhood the invisible barrier went up between them. It was not that she didn’t co-operate—she spoke of her childhood in such vivid and far-fetched detail that Ayres thought always that she was hallucinating.

  Then, just when he felt that he had reached a dead end in the case, one afternoon when she was quite relaxed and fully conscious, she said something to him in German. He remembered of course that her father’s language in her childhood had been German, and that her husband had said she had spoken in German during the initial stages of her breakdown.

  Ayres himself had become fluent in the language during his year in Vienna, so he understood perfectly what she had said: ‘Also sie haben noch einen Heizer geschickt.’ Instinctively, Ayres feigned ignorance and replied vaguely, ‘Eh?’ She laughed, and went on to talk in English about something quite unrelated. Ayres couldn’t help feeling that she was teasing him, and it occurred to him that perhaps she had been teasing him in other respects. But the fact that she had said the word Heizer, fireman, remained in his mind. They’d sent a fireman. It seemed a clue to something. When he had pretended not to understand he had caught her looking at him, momentarily but unmistakeably, with something like contempt.