The Kindness of Women (20 page)

The gravediggers bent over their spades. The first stones struck the lid like a fist beating against a door. Nordlund handed a spare spade to me and I cast two blades of the nutty soil into the grave. Together we walked from the cemetery and drove through the football crowds, as if leaving a crime behind us.

*   *   *

After three days to cross a country and a sea, we returned to Shepperton. The long French roads helped me to straighten the perspectives of my mind. The past, on which I had turned my back on the day of my marriage, had rushed up and now stood behind me. Miriam's death joined me once again to all those nameless Chinese who had died during the Second World War. I remembered the dusty dead beside the crushed motorcars in the Avenue Edward VII and the straining jaw of the Chinese clerk at the rural railway station, first rehearsals for an afternoon at Figueras. Images of the bone-white paddy fields came back to me, like the pearly light that lay over Lunghua after the explosion of the atom bomb at Nagasaki. Kennedy had outstared Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis, but American bombers were still parked under the flat skies of Cambridgeshire, and the kingdom of light waited to be born from those concrete aprons among the fens.

Miriam's sister, Dorothy, and her husband were waving cheerfully by the gate when we arrived home. They had treats and surprises for the children, a cold roast lunch fit for a wake, and bottles of wine open on the table. I was grateful to them and held Dorothy tightly in my arms. But the echo of Miriam's bones in her sister's face, and the Cambridge crispness in her voice, made me feel that I and the children had returned to a parallel world that tried too hard to mimic its original.

While the children opened their presents I left Dorothy and Brian and climbed the stairs. The untidy rooms, strewn with toys and clothes, with favourite teddy bears rejected at the last minute, fixed the exact moment of our departure four weeks earlier. I stood by Miriam's dressing table, looking down at the clutter of hairbrushes and cosmetics and a discarded tube of the previous summer's suntan oil with its broken cap. Her fingerprints were set in the film of talc that covered the glass top, the ghost of her mouth in the red smear of a crushed tissue.

I opened the centre drawer, crammed with old phone bills, tampons, and school reports, faded brassieres held together with safety pins, and her faithful Dutch cap, like an unreliable family servant, for years the home of the spare car keys. I tipped the wastebasket onto the floor and sifted through the hair balls and tubes of contraceptive jelly, the torn suspender belt and fishnet stockings that she liked to wear at parties and later vamp around the bedroom. I lifted the stocking to my lips, smelling the scent of Miriam's thighs, the same body scent that rose from the pillows and greeted me when I opened the wardrobe onto the racks of her dresses. Her hundred presences filled the house like a chorus of ghosts.

I needed to let them go. I opened the windows and watched the clouds of talc and dust drift through the air, repatriating themselves to Figueras. In the garden the children were chasing their old toys while Brian mowed the lawn. Alice was rearranging the furniture in the treehouse, casting out the cardboard tables and chairs as if spring cleaning before the arrival of a new domestic regime. Henry had found a still-inflated party balloon and was trying to stamp on it, while Lucy tested the swing, taking it up to a wild new altitude.

Watching them, I felt the first smile cross my lips. I knew that the children were braver than I was—during the long drive home they had never once mentioned their mother, the first of the many unspoken pacts which we made in the coming months. I sat on the bed, as the scents of Miriam's body floated on the summer air.

Dorothy was carving the cold roast in the kitchen. She was three years older than Miriam, the more serious sister, a partner in a firm of Cambridge solicitors. At our wedding she had smiled and shaken her head as I kissed the bride, clearly doubting whether I would ever be a match for the high-tempered Miriam.

I drank a tumbler of duty-free whisky and hesitated before pouring another. Dorothy pressed my hand, refilling the glass.

“Go on—you've earned it. That must have been the most tremendous drive.”

“We were totally lost near Poitiers. I can tell you, Henry's French saved the day. For one moment I thought of turning back.”

“You should have done. No, what am I saying?” Dorothy checked herself, surprised by her tongue. “Brian wondered if you were going to move?”

“From Shepperton?”

“From this house, at least—you ought to make a fresh start somewhere.”

“No…” I watched Alice and Lucy vigorously cleaning the treehouse. A flurry of leaves was followed by an old stuffed toy, loyal companion of years, that plunged head-first to the newly mown grass. Women were ruthless from an early age, and needed to be. “We've made a fresh start. It's best if we stay here and face things.”

“You'll keep the children?”

“Of course. It was part of the deal.”

“It's quite a challenge. Brian and I could have the girls.”

“Thanks, but no. We'll stick it out together.”

*   *   *

After lunch, when Brian had taken the children to Chessington Zoo, Dorothy and I began to tidy the rooms. As we put away the scattered toys and clothes I had the sense that we were scene-shifters changing a set of props. Everything tilted at an unfamiliar angle. Even Dorothy's resemblances to her sister, the echo of Miriam's broad cheekbones and small hands, strong walk and determined hips, made me feel that we were extras rehearsing a scene to be played by others.

“Would you like me to do the bedroom?” Dorothy was staring at the cluttered dressing table and wardrobe. “Heavens, it's sad. Jim, throw it all away. Clear everything out. Give the clothes to the jumble people.”

“I will, don't worry. I need a little longer. It's all that's left.”

“It isn't.”

Dorothy held my shoulders, trying to pull me back into the present. I put my hands on her waist, desperate to embrace her. After the spectral women of Rosas beach, Dorothy with her firm hips and comforting breasts was wholly alive. I pressed my hands to her shoulder blades, searching for the familiar contours that Miriam had trained me to recognise. Dorothy stiffened and moved away from me, unsettled by my trembling hands. Then she leaned against me, pressing her cheek to mine, calming my agitated face.

“All right. We'll go into Henry's room.”

“No … stay here. In Miriam's bed.”

Trying to control myself, I untied her apron and slipped my hands beneath her shirt, feeling the smooth skin of her back and her strong ribs. I sat on the untidy bed, the sheets still marked by the creases of the last night before the holiday, and placed my head against her thighs. Dorothy stood calmly in front of me as I undressed her, palms lightly on my cheeks, running her fingers into my mouth as I tasted their scent. An unfamiliar mole marked the skin of her left shoulder, but for a moment I could believe that she was Miriam. I kissed her labia and then sat her on my knees, caressing her vulva as if I had parted its lips on countless afternoons in this bedroom of a loving husband. When I pressed my mouth to her nipples she smoothed away the sweat on my forehead and pushed me back onto Miriam's pillow.

For these few minutes her duty to her dead sister's children overrode her loyalty to her husband. She knelt across me, adjusting her knees to my heavier torso. Exhausted and overexcited, desperate for this kindly woman, I tried to press my limp penis into her vulva. Smiling in a distant but reassuring way, Dorothy took it from my fingers and began to massage the head between her hands. She forced a little spit onto her fingertips and moistened the mouth of her vagina. She eased my penis into her, glanced through the window at a passing car, and put her breast to my mouth, looking down at me like a wet nurse caring for a neighbour's feverish child. When I came, and sank back onto the pillow, she lay beside me and held my diaphragm until my breathing had steadied. I let my fingers into her vulva and tasted the sweet moisture, making sure that I would remember it in the empty months ahead.

She waited until I was ready and passed my clothes to me. Without speaking, she began to tidy the dressing table, lining up the cosmetics and hairbrushes and polishing the finger-smeared mirror. I gratefully embraced her before she left the bedroom for the last time.

*   *   *

From that afternoon I was celibate for nearly a year. Although the children and I often visited Dorothy and her husband, I never again made love to her. She had met her obligations to her dead sister, calming the widowed husband and reminding him that Miriam endured within our affection and shared memories. Greeting us, Dorothy would hold me briefly, keeping alive the link between her lost sister and the women I would know in the future.

But much as I needed other women, I found it impossible to approach them. My friends were careful to invite me to their parties, but a chasm of time and pain separated me from the women I met. Tongue-tied and clumsy, I moved past them in a daze of sexual desire.

Once, standing among the coats in David Hunter's bedroom, I found myself alone with one of his flying-club groupies, the young widow of an RAF sergeant killed in Cyprus. I guessed that he had assigned her the job of bringing me back to life. As David stood guard in the corridor and pretended to discuss the Mercury space flights with an aviation journalist, she leaned against the door and drew me onto her thighs. I held her small shoulders as if she were one of my daughters, frightened after a fall in the garden. I pressed my cheek to her mouth and felt her lips in my ear, teeth biting at the lobe. When I failed to respond she slipped her hand below the waist of my trousers, fingers probing between my buttocks. She tugged at my shirt and palpated me as she would have soothed a wounded lover. She waited patiently for my erection, but then gave up with a shrug, kissed me cheerfully on the forehead, and slipped through the door.

Had nature, through long trial and error, decided that I had failed as both husband and father and banished me before I could do any further damage? Certainly, many people thought that I should not be looking after the children. But Henry, Alice, and Lucy were all I had to believe in, and I was sure that I could make them happy. We cooked in the crowded kitchen, following the girls' outlandish recipes, argued over television, and did our homework together. With longer memories of his mother, Henry was sometimes sad, and in the evenings I carried the TV set into my study and sat with him on the sofa, an arm around him while he quietly watched his favourite comedy programmes. One evening at last I heard him laugh.

Every day was an Aladdin's Cave of schemes and enthusiasms. Alice and Lucy, seven and four, soon took charge of everything, deciding when we should go shopping or visit friends, whether I needed a rest from them or if it was time to hold a party. Already they were sizing up the mothers of their school friends, urging me into little flirtations and blithely waving aside the minor problem of their husbands. I collected them from school in the afternoons and felt a thrill of relief when they clambered noisily into the car, as if we had been separated for months.

What they most resented was any hint that there was something freakish about our family. Too many people, swayed by folk wisdom or modish child psychology, took for granted that the loss of their mother was a wound from which they would never recover, and that no father, however loving, could ever take the mother's place. Even Peggy Gardner, now a paediatrician at Guy's Hospital in London, seemed to hold this view. Whenever she visited Shepperton she gazed tolerantly at the untidy rooms cluttered with the children's drawings and projects, as if the confusion reflected the deep crisis within this stricken family.

Peggy had never married, despite a long line of men friends and an easy knack with children. Miriam had vaguely distrusted her, aware that Peggy was the first woman I had ever needed and that our relationship went far beyond the possibilities of sex. At the same time she was curious to see behind the handsome self-control that Peggy showed to the world. Bourgeois life had claimed Peggy—good sense, tolerance, and understanding had totally corrupted her.

Six months after our return from Spain she called in to see us on the way back from a child-care conference in Bristol. Still in her professional mode, briefcase in hand, she sat smiling on the sofa while Lucy made room for her. Surrounded by Lucy's full parade of dolls and bears, arranged in meticulous order of seniority, Peggy faintly resembled a stuffed toy herself. As always, I could see that my motherless children reminded her of our days together in Lunghua.

“That's nice, Lucy.” Peggy beamed at the row of dolls. “I'm in the middle of a lovely little family.”

“You're not in the family,” Lucy warned her. “But you're the oldest.”

“And the wisest,” I added.

Lucy straightened a battered kangaroo. “Mrs. Roo's much wiser—she told Daddy's fortune.”

“And what was that, Lucy?”

“He's going to live for a hundred years.”

“That's wonderful. I think he's going to live forever.”

“No,” Lucy said, her eyes fixed on mine. “He won't live forever. But nearly forever…”

When Lucy had gone, Peggy smiled at the contingent of battered but cheerful dolls as if it were a model of my own family.

“Lucy's a dear—they all are. You've done an amazing job. How on earth do you manage to write?”

“They go to school.”

“But when they're home? It's a perpetual riot.”

“I like it.” I felt myself being pushed into a familiar corner. “Some writers listen to Vivaldi. I like to hear my children playing. There's nothing abnormal in that.”

“It seems to work. You've been very brave.”

“Peggy!” Irritated, I pulled the glass of wine from her hand. “For God's sake, men are capable of loving their children.”