The Kindness of Women (11 page)

Every moment with her produced some surprise. She told me that the optical experiments devised by Richard Sutherland were no more than a blind, part of a larger test to determine the psychological profiles of students who volunteered to take part in medical experiments. Research workers had always assumed that casually recruited volunteers formed a typical cross section of the student population.

“But that isn't true. Richard says that the only ones who apply are either aggressive extroverts or neurotic introverts.”

“And where are the sane ones?”

“They never apply. They're either getting drunk or necking on the river.”

“Call Professor Harris…” We were lying in bed together, and I searched below the sheet. “Where does that leave me?”

Miriam pressed my head to the pillow and brushed the hair from my eyes. “Jim, you're a war criminal.”

“What?”

“Or you think like one. Richard and I were talking about you.”

“Another bogus test…”

“Listen, if you take away the war you behaved just like a schizophrenic child. Richard has a patient whose son was schizophrenic. He spent twenty years quietly trying to kill himself. It's all he wanted to do.”

“And?”

“I forget. Anyway, you aren't going to kill yourself. I need you for at least the next three weeks.” She sat up on one elbow, laying her right breast on my chest, and drew lines with her fingernail around her nipple. “Tell me, is it strange to dissect a woman? You say she's the only one there.”

“Speak softly, she's the queen of the dead.”

“I know she's my biggest rival. Can you imagine dissecting me? Where would you start?”

Smiling, I turned to face Miriam, drawing back the frayed sheets so that the firelight warmed her broad hips and ribcage. “I don't know … in a way, dissection is a kind of erotic autopsy. We could start with the cervical triangle, save me having to wring your neck…” I kissed the small mole under Miriam's chin, savouring the taste of her mother's perfume. “Or a nasal resection, you have been getting a little toffee-nosed…” I pressed my tongue into her nostril with its scent of decayed lavender until she snorted with laughter. “Or what about an augmentation mammoplasty, not really necessary in your case…” I ran my lips from the musky sweet hollow of her armpit to her full breast with its heavy nipple. Veins ran below the white skin, asps waiting to sting a princess. I tasted the skin of her breasts, hunting for the scent glands, running my tongue against the hard pippin of her nipple. I moved down to her abdomen. “Your navel smells of oysters…”

“Wait a minute. You haven't dissected the abdomen yet.”

“The only tool I need here is a slice of lemon.”

“So this is what you get up to in the DR. My mother always warned me about unqualified doctors…”

I embraced her, pressing my lips against her nipple. The only women I had made love to, apart from David Hunter's Chinese girlfriends in Shanghai, were the middle-aged landlady and her daughter who ran the small hotel in west London where I had stayed during my mother's return to the Far East, and a Cambridge prostitute who thought I was an American serviceman posing as an undergraduate, a shrewd guess in the circumstances. With Miriam, sex for the first time brought with it a sense of the future. I hoped that she and I would make love many other times, and that an unlimited store of affection lay waiting for us in some bonded warehouse of the heart.

Miriam's fingers were snipping across my chest, scissoring at my breastbone. She tapped down to my stomach, bypassing my navel with an elegant swerve, and with a cry caught my testicles in a lobster's claw. Laughing, I raised her thigh and placed it across my hip. She sat astride me and rested her vulva against my penis, teasing me as she held the tip between her labia. I entered her vagina, needing her so much that I could happily have dissected her. I imagined a strange act of love performed by an obsessed surgeon on a living woman, in a deserted operating theatre in one of those sinister clinics in the Cambridge suburbs. I would kiss the linings of her lungs, run my tongue along her bronchi, press my face to the moist membranes of her heart as it pulsed against my lips …

“Jim…” Miriam paused, a forefinger on my nose. “What are you thinking about?”

“It's probably illegal.”

“Well, stop…”

I held her tightly, forgetting the dissecting room and its cadavers, the nuclear bombers and the November fens.

*   *   *

Soon after, Miriam returned to her Trinity friends and her work for Richard Sutherland. She was unsettled by my obsessive visits to the American bases and aware that I was still ensnared in a past from which I made little effort to free myself. She realised, too, that I was under the sway of a woman whose body I knew even more intimately than her own. Concerned for me, she tried to make me talk about Shanghai and the war, and even asked another medical student to smuggle her into the dissecting room, ready to confront her rival. But I cared for Miriam too much to risk exposing her to the past.

So, in her wise and kindly way, she kissed me against the mantelpiece, formally turned my Surrealist paintings to the wall, and with a friendly wave closed the door of my rooms behind her.

I was sorry to see her leave, but she was right in thinking that a strange duel was taking place between herself and the dead physician who had begun to dominate my waking hours in Cambridge. Through the milky eyes of this silent woman I felt that I was joined once again to the Shanghai I had left behind, but which I still carried with me like a persistent dream that gripped my shoulders. Inside my head hung the façades of the Bund and the Nanking Road. When I looked from the windows of the Anatomy Library at the flat Cambridgeshire countryside, with its American air bases and their glowing vision of a Third World War, I could see the abandoned paddy fields near Lunghua. The railway lines that carried me back to Cambridge after my weekend visits to London seemed to lead to the small country station where the four Japanese soldiers still waited for me.

Without speaking to me, the woman doctor on her glass table had identified herself with all the victims of the war in China and with the young Chinese clerk I had seen murdered against the telephone pole. By dissecting her, exploring her body from within, I felt that I was drawing closer to some warped truth which I had never been able to discuss with anyone since sailing from Shanghai on the
Arrawa.
Its refrigerated meat holds had carried a secret cargo back to England. I had left Shanghai too soon, with a clutch of insoluble problems that postwar England was too exhausted and too distracted to help me set aside.

The British had known their own war, a conflict with clear military and political goals, so unlike the war in China. They had coped with its unhappy memories and their reduced status like the adults in Lunghua camp. Over the rubble of bombed streets and the deflated hopes of a better world they had imposed a mythology of slogans, a parade of patriotic flags that sealed the past away forever, far from any searching eye.

Even the ex-servicemen I met in London bars, who had experienced real combat during their years in the British forces, seemed to have taken part in a different war, a bloody pageant not too far removed from the Military Tattoos which one or two of them, bizarrely, had helped to stage in Shanghai. But war, which had widowed and maimed so many of them, had never touched their imaginations. In Shanghai, from 1937 to the dropping of the atom bombs, we had been neither combatants nor victims but spectators roped in to watch an execution. Those who had drawn too close had been touched by the blood on the guns.

I tried to shut my eyes, dozing in the cramped flats of the hard-drinking physiology demonstrators, but the past endured. More and more, the cadavers in the dissecting room reminded me of the severed limbs I had seen in the Avenue Edward VII.

*   *   *

On the last Thursday in November I drove out to Cambridge airfield. I knew that Miriam often skipped her sports afternoon at school and sneaked away to watch Richard Sutherland practise aerobatics in his Tiger Moth. As I guessed, she was waiting in the Chevrolet when I arrived, running the car's powerful heater. Cheerily, she waved me towards her and threw open the passenger door. Glad to be with her again, I sat next to her in the car, listening to the exhilarating drone of aircraft engines.

Comfortable in her untidy school uniform, Miriam held my cold hands. Her breasts trembled as the antique biplane flew over the car park, propeller wash drumming at the Chevrolet's windshield.

“So, how's everything in the dissecting room?” she asked. “There must be some news from the dead.”

“I'm still working on the arm—I'd like to get away from the place, but it has a kind of hold…”

“Jim, have you thought of giving up medicine?”

“Not yet. This is my first term. I'll wait until I've finished the head and neck.”

“That might be too late. See your tutor, say that you want to read English.”

“After medicine? Why bother?
Gray's Anatomy
is a far greater novel than
Ulysses.
”

“It's making you worse, not better. Cutting up all those bodies—it reminds you of the war.”

“Miriam…” I squeezed her shoulders reassuringly. “Real bodies don't look like dissecting-room cadavers. They look like the living—that is what's so strange.”

“I want to help, Jim. But there's nothing I can do.”

“Maybe not.” I watched Richard step from the Tiger Moth and stride towards us in his yellow flying suit. “I'll take up flying.”

“Good—then you can teach me. I need to fly!”

She kissed me and stepped from the car, holding Richard's helmet as I straddled the Triumph. We made a curious trio, the aviator, the schoolgirl, and the medical student. Richard watched me with his friendly actor's smile. Thinking of Miriam's American underwear, I wondered if this spunky young woman had been his gift to me, part of another experiment. He was always glad to see me, asking about the war in a casual but faintly prurient way, as if I were some kind of laboratory specimen exposed to too many images of violence. Sometimes in his office, while I waited for Miriam to finish her typing, he would watch me turning the pages of
Life
magazine, with its graphic photographs of the Korean War. Despite all this, I liked him for his energy and openmindedness, for Miriam and for his American car. He and his sister had been evacuated to Australia before the London blitz, and he had sprung free from the Sydney suburbs, a man with no past and only the present.

“Jim—Miriam says you're going to take up flying. Come out next week and I'll give you a spin. You can try some circuits and bumps.”

“Thanks, Richard. You trust me at the controls?”

“Of course.” Once, to his irritation, Miriam and I had overtaken him on the Triumph as he flew along the Newmarket road. “By the way, you've been to Lakenheath? The big American base?”

“A few times.”

“He goes every weekend.” Miriam took my arm, pressing her cheek to my leather jacket as if trying to read the wind in its bruised seams. “Jim will be the first to know when the war comes.”

“Absolutely. I've always taken that for granted. Jim, there's a chance of visiting the base, part of some Anglo-American community project, so that we don't feel left out when Armageddon begins. Come along—we might wangle a look at a nuclear bomber.”

“I'll pass, Richard.” I guessed that I was being tricked into another experiment and remembered the term “imposed psychopathy” that he had used in the lecture I attended. He had moved around the podium like an actor delivering Hamlet's soliloquy, ignoring the twenty students in the front rows of the auditorium and addressing himself exclusively to me as I sat high at the back under the fanlights, deliberately smoking under the
NO SMOKING
sign. Yet already he was appealing far beyond the empty seats, to a greater audience he had glimpsed from the air.

He watched me encouragingly while I kick-started the Triumph's heavy engine. Miriam waved as I drove between the parked aircraft.

“See you tonight, Jim! You can take me to a flick. And keep away from that woman!”

*   *   *

However, it was that dead woman doctor who set me free. As the weeks of dissection continued, the teams of students cut away the superficial muscles of their cadavers and reached the underlying bones. For convenience, each body was then divided into its constituent parts. The Nigerian dentist and I detached the woman's arm from her thorax and stored the limb in one of the wooden chests at the end of the dissecting room.

Arriving one morning, I was surprised to find that she was without her head. I hunted the tables and at last found the head at the bottom of a storage cabinet. It lay among a dozen detached heads, the name tags of their students stitched through their ears. The advanced stages of dissection had pared away the skin of her face and the flaps of facial muscles, so that each muscle layer folded back like the page of a book. I held her head in my hands, looking into the eyes still set in the dissected orbit. Someone nudged my arm, and the book of her face fell open to reveal her hungry bones and notched teeth, warning me away.

The doctor demonstrating the female urino-genital system asked the students at our table to detach the remaining arm and legs, and soon only the thorax and abdomen remained. The womb, fallopian tubes, and pelvic basin were displayed like a miniature stage set, a boudoir framed by the curtains of the abdominal muscles. The unneeded blood vessels and nervous tissue were discarded into a scrap pail. I tied together her shoulder blade and arm bones, and attached my name to her identification tag. I held her dissected hand, whose nerves and tendons I had teased into the light. Its layers of skin and muscle resembled a deck of cards that she waited to deal across the table to me.