The Kindness of Women (10 page)

“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 presided 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.

*   *   *

Every afternoon, as I left the dissecting room, I passed the blue Chevrolet parked outside the Psychology Department, owned perhaps by some visiting Nobel Prizewinner from Harvard or M.I.T. Admiring the car, and the Stan Kenton gramophone record on the rear shelf, I noticed a windshield sticker inviting volunteers to take part in a new experimental project. Almost all the department's volunteers were medical students, who could be counted on to walk the treadmills with electrical leads taped to their chests and ride exercise bicycles without gagging into the mouthpieces.

I hesitated before pushing back the swing doors of the designated office, wondering if I would rather spend the afternoon with one of the physiology demonstrators and her cracked nails. A lecturer knelt on the floor, hard at work repairing an electric coffee percolator. He ignored me until he had finished and handed the machine to a tall, dark-haired schoolgirl in her late teens who was standing beside the secretary's desk.

“Good … Coffee first, psychology second.” Looking up at me, he asked: “Another victim? We need all the volunteers we can get. Miriam, fill out his death certificate.”

Already I had recognised the rising star of the Psychology Department, Dr. Richard Sutherland, presumably the owner of the Chevrolet and the Stan Kenton record. More like a film actor than a Cambridge don, he was a handsome Scotsman with a shock of red hair that he combed out to maximum effect. He wore basketball sneakers, tartan shirt, and jeans, clothes seen in Cambridge only on off-duty American servicemen. On the wall behind him were the wooden propeller of a Tiger Moth, a New Jersey licence plate, and a framed photograph of himself with von Neumann. Sutherland had taken his doctoral degree at Princeton, and it was even rumoured that he had appeared on television, inconceivably fast behaviour for a Cambridge academic.

He cast an affable eye over me, as if he already had a serviceable grasp of my motives. “You're a first-year med…? How did I guess? The formalin—you all smell like Glasgow undertakers. Let me show you what we're testing.”

Watched by the schoolgirl's approving but arch eyes, he took me rapidly through the experiment, which would test the persistence of after-images in the optical centres of the brain.

“You'll find it fascinating—you can actually see the brain working—assuming you medicos have a brain, something Miriam inclines to doubt. First we'd like you to fill out this questionnaire. We need to get an idea of your psychological profile. Do introverts have more persistent after-images than extroverts? Nothing personal, we don't need to know if you lusted after your grandmother.”

“She lusted after me.”

“That's the spirit. Miriam, take over, he's ready to confess.”

“I'm looking for the thumbscrew, Dr. Richard.”

Sutherland lifted an American ski jacket from the door peg. “Miriam's in the sixth form at the Perse School, she's helping out while my secretary has a baby. See you after my lecture.”

He left us while Miriam took me through the questionnaire. She read out the entries in a mock-solemn voice, strong eyes watching me without expression as I fumbled over my replies. Her fingers played with the beads of her bracelet, as if adding up her first impressions of me. A modest score, I guessed. Despite the school uniform, she was only a year younger than me, and in complete command of the office, handling the bulky folders like an experienced bookkeeper. Her loosened school tie, creased tunic, and the laboratory stain on her cotton shirt gave her a kind of dishevelled glamour. Had she just left the unmade bed I could see in the inner office? Already I wondered if she and Dr. Sutherland were lovers.

Only when she checked the details of my birth in China did she properly notice me for the first time.

“Shanghai? Were you there during the war?”

“I was interned by the Japs. Do you know Peggy Gardner?”

“Of course—we're all in awe of her.”

“She was in the same camp.”

“Peggy? How strange. Why doesn't she talk about it?”

“Nothing very much happened.”

“I can't believe that. How long were you and Peggy there?”

“Three years. I never think about it.”

“Perhaps you should.” Using an American ballpoint pen shaped like a silver rocketship, she checked off my entries, eyebrows raised as her fingers flicked through the beads. “Then you came to England and went to the Leys School—I can imagine how you felt about that.”

“It was fine. Just like the camp, only the food was worse.”

“God, I know, school food. I refuse to eat ours. I practically led a riot last week.” She lowered her voice. “I only come here for Richard's chocolates. He calls me his Hershey bar girl.”

“Why do you work for him?”

She picked at the stain on her tunic, showing off her breast for me. “I used to hang around here after school—it's easily the most interesting department. I go to a lot of lectures—Leavis, Ryle, Leach. Richard's are the best. One day he gave me a lift in his car.” She smiled at the memory.

“You're going to read psychology here?”

“No fear! I've spent enough time in Cambridge. My father's the bursar at Fitzwilliam Hall. I want to be a cocktail waitress in New York, or live on a desert island with three strange men. Anything to get out of here.”

“I have a motorbike. Why don't you?”

“I will!” Aware that I might be sceptical, she said with some pride: “I tried to join the RAF. Richard's taken me up in his Tiger Moth and says I have a real flair for flying. The RAF had the nerve to turn me down, something about the lack of toilet facilities in the V-bomber force. Jesus, if I can fly a plane I can learn to pee in a milk bottle.”

“Well … Professor Harris says anatomy is the basis of everything.”

“He's right. So why are you doing medicine?”

“I've forgotten already. I thought that I wanted to be a psychiatrist.”

“But why? What do you need to cure? Something to do with the war?”

I hesitated, unsettled by this bright schoolgirl and her shrewd questions. “That might be true. I haven't found out yet.”

“Well, you will.” She spoke with a robust confidence in me. “And now you're cutting up your first corpse. Treat him with respect.”

“Of course. In fact, it's a woman.”

“A woman?” She whistled through a chipped tooth. “You're my first necrophile.”

“In a way, that's not far from the truth.”

“Go on. This is being secretly recorded.”

“Nothing. You can get very close. It turns into a sort of weird marriage.”

“Hold on! Professor Harris is going to be bailing you out of the local clink.” She leaned back and put her feet on the desk, revealing her long legs and the white skin of her thighs through the holes in her black school stockings.

“So?” I asked.

“Instead of the dead, why don't you try the living?”

*   *   *

In her teasing way, this intelligent schoolgirl had seen through my undergraduate banter and realised that I was still preoccupied by wartime events that now seemed to be reimposing themselves on the calm Cambridgeshire landscape. The students poled their punts on the Cam, talked endlessly in the coffeehouses, and debated the issues of the day at the Union, mimicking the tones of the House of Commons. Meanwhile, on the airfields that ringed the university, American bombers were massing for a final nuclear countdown.

On Sunday afternoons I drove Miriam on my motorcycle to Cambridge airfield, where we watched Richard Sutherland circle the field in his Tiger Moth. Later I took Miriam out to the great American bases at Lakenheath and Mildenhall, and we walked together through the November wind to stare at the nuclear bombers. Once we came across a run-down British air base where World War II Liberators sat in parking bays far from their hangars. As Miriam kept watch, I climbed through the wire and approached one of the unguarded bombers. I swung myself through the ventral hatch into the equipment-cluttered fuselage. As the wind drummed at the bomber's hull and flexed its heavy wings I imagined myself taking off towards the east.

“Jim, you're trying awfully hard to get arrested,” Miriam told me when we returned to King's. “Where is your father now?”

“He's still in China.”

“You won't feel at home until he comes to England.”

“He's stuck in Shanghai for a while. The Communists put him on trial. Luckily, he'd read more Marx and Engels than the peasant judges, so they let him off.”

“There's a moral there…” Miriam took my arm as we stood by the fire, running her eye along the Surrealist reproductions. “Ernst, Dalí, the Facteur Cheval … they're your real syllabus. Don't let Peggy Gardner rubbish them. Hang on to your imagination, even if it is a bit lurid.”

“Miriam…” I had heard this too often at school. “The world
is
lurid. You've never had to rely on your imagination, thank God.”

“Any moment now, he's going to start tunnelling…”

I had described my attempt to break into the food store at Lunghua, which Miriam thought comical but oddly touching. Already I was infatuated with this quick-witted schoolgirl, with her bold gaze and outrageous enthusiasms. At times she would lose interest in me, preoccupied with some grudge against one of the women teachers at the Perse, or after the endless rows with her mother about her drinking in the undergraduate pubs. The proctors had complained to her father that Miriam had been seen in a punt with a crowd of Trinity men, threatening them with a pint of beer in each hand.