The Kindness of Women (23 page)

Passersby were watching us from the promenade. I covered Sally with my jacket and helped her back to the car and the silent, astounded children. Sally sank gratefully into the front seat.

“Well,” she said to the children, brushing away the flecks of seaweed. “How many lengths did I swim?”

*   *   *

Later that evening, when the children were asleep, Sally sat on the sofa among the stuffed toys, her good humour returned. During our silent drive she had slumped against the door inside my jacket, eyes fixed on the sodden dress between her feet. At the time I wondered if this had been a halfhearted suicide attempt, prompted by the glimpse of Lykiard in the deck chair, or perhaps a bravura piece of exhibitionism by which she hoped to regain the centre of the stage. But when I mentioned Lykiard she scarcely recognised his name. Her near-drowning had been nothing more than an impulsive Channel dip.

Wearing my dressing gown, she breathed the fumes rising from a tumbler of hot whisky. When I sat beside her among the stuffed toys she laid her head on my shoulder.

“Are the pixies asleep? I didn't mean to frighten them.”

“They're fine. They think you went for a swim.”

“I did! Until right at the end. When you reached me I was thinking what it would be like.”

“Drowning?”

“Those last moments before the end … I had the strange feeling they would go on forever.” She pulled away from me and stared hard at a stuffed toy. “I want to live my whole life like that.”

“Sally, you do…”

She opened my palm and carefully read its lines, then slipped it under the lapel of the dressing gown and placed it on her breast. Despite the hot bath her skin still smelled strongly of brine. A depraved and innocent Miranda had been washed ashore on the island of Shepperton. When I caressed her breast she smiled at me in a conspiratorial way, as if we were two lubricious children in a treehouse.

“My nipples aren't very sensitive—probably less than yours.”

She watched me as I undressed her, curious to see how I would discover her body, beckoning me towards her with a ready smile. When I stroked her clitoris she lay back with her legs wide, her face between the soft toys. She took my fingers and moved them to her anus, rhythmically pumping her rectum like a soft accordion.

“Don't bother to fuck me. Just bugger me.”

She knelt on the carpet, her chest and shoulders across the cushions. Spitting on her fingers, she pushed the saliva into her anus with one hand, testing my penis with the other. I hesitated to enter her, nervous of tearing her scarred anus, but she pressed my penis into her, adding more spit between the gasps of pain. When I was fully inside her she at last relaxed, and her rectum was as soft as the vagina of a child-bearing woman. She buried her face among the teddy bears and brought her wrists behind her back, inviting me to force them to her shoulder blades. I moved carefully, trying to control her prolapsing rectum, gently forcing her arms as she wanted, picking the hairs from her mouth as she shouted to me, an eager, desperate child.

“Bugger me, Daddy! Beat me! Pixie wants to be buggered!”

*   *   *

From that moment Sally Mumford became my guide to a new world. At the start she seemed keen to make a new life for us all in Shepperton, to be the wife and mother we had left among the Spanish cypresses. Part big sister and part friendly witch, and capable in the children's eyes of unlimited amazements, Sally brought all her good cheer and wayward flair to our suburban retreat. I tried to calm and steady her, as she relived her childhood like an exciting roller-coaster ride. Despite playing the role of her father, I felt surprisingly dependent on her and hoped that I could give her the happy childhood that she was helping to give to my own children.

At the same time I knew that I could learn so much from her. Sally was a true child of the 1960s, and my guide to the secret logic that I saw unfolding. After years of domesticity in my marooned suburb by the Thames I had stepped into the middle of a decade that had started without me. I had woken from a dream of the Second World War into an England that seemed like the aftermath of the Third.

In this overlit realm ruled by images of the space race and the Vietnam War, the Kennedy assassination, and the suicide of Marilyn Monroe, a unique alchemy of the imagination was taking place. In many ways the media landscape of the 1960s was a laboratory designed specifically to cure me of all my obsessions. Violence and pornography provided a kit of desperate measures that might give some meaning both to Miriam's death and to the unnumbered victims of the war in China. The demise of feeling and emotion, the death of affect, presided like a morbid sun over the playground of that ominous decade, to which Sally seemed to hold a key. The brutalising newsreels of civil wars and assassinations, the stylisation of televised violence into an anthology of design statements, were matched by a pornography of science that took its materials, not from nature, but from the deviant curiosity of the scientist.

At an Arts Laboratory party launching an exhibition of work by a fashionable woman artist—a display of used sanitary towels—I proudly introduced Sally to Dick Sutherland, who had left Cambridge and now led a research team at the Institute of Psychology. In the hard months after our return from Spain he had been a generous friend. Often he drove to Shepperton in the evenings with bottles of bourbon and the latest traveller's tales from Cape Kennedy, Tokyo, or Los Angeles. “You'll bounce back,” he told me confidently. Television had kept him young. Roaming around the world with his BBC crew, he was one of the first of the airport thinkers, always available to give an executive-lounge interview.

Sally took to him instantly, and Dick could see that she was everything I needed: wayward, affectionate, and perverse. When he invited us to visit his laboratory I remembered that I had first met Miriam while volunteering to take part in a bogus experiment. True to form, Dick was still playing games with illusion and reality. He took us on a tour of his laboratory, charmed Sally with a series of well-rehearsed optical tricks and paradoxes, all the while keeping up his smoothly practised patter. His real talent, I realised, was to make all those he met feel that they were on a television programme.

Dick's infatuation with television made him as much a true citizen of the 1960s as Sally and Peter Lykiard. He was fascinated by the way in which television theatricalised everything while anchoring it firmly to the domestic and mundane. Since leaving Cambridge he had jettisoned his own past and begun to float free into this electronic realm that, like a kindly sky, taught the audience to admire itself. In an unguarded moment, he told me of his childhood in Scotland, the son of a stony Edinburgh architect and his devout Presbyterian wife. Wartime evacuation to relatives in Australia had opened his eyes to the charms of a beach culture where affection and approval came, not from within the family, but from the world around it.

Not surprisingly, Dick had never married. Without the ever-present autocue and monitor screen, a close relationship would have seemed a little unreal. But his awareness of his own flaws made him an astute psychologist, and he was an endless fund of ideas, many at my expense. The house in Shepperton always intrigued him.

“You've been to Jim's place in Shepperton, Sally?”

“Of course. It's a shrine.”

“Absolutely. Freud's primal cave furnished with wall-to-wall carpeting and a million years of love. In the long run, suburbia will triumph over everything, though it's hard to tell if the suburbs are a city's convalescent zone or a kind of petting zoo. In fact, they may be where a city dreams—Jim's like a sleeper poised at the onset of REM sleep. But before he wakes, let me show you round the lab. Nothing is quite what it seems, rather like reality in a way…”

In a darkened lecture theatre a volunteer panel of housewives, secretaries, and off-duty firemen stared at the photographs of unnamed men and women projected onto a screen, trying to identify which were murderers and which victims.

“In fact, they're photos of the previous panel,” Dick whispered to Sally. “People have remarkably strong prejudices about certain facial characteristics. The smallest cues convince them that they're looking at a child rapist or a Gestapo killer.”

In the laboratory next door a second group of volunteers were completing a confidential questionnaire about the effect of violent newsreels on their sex lives.

“Of course, there's no influence at all,” Dick assured us, “and the footage we show them is much less violent than we tell them it's going to be. What's interesting, though, is that most people assume it does improve their sex lives. Everyone says there's too much violence on TV, but secretly they want more.”

“So, thanks to TV, everything is the opposite of what it seems?” I commented.

“It does look like it.” We had returned to Dick's office, and he lay back in his chair, sneakers on the desk, letting Sally admire his long legs and actor's profile. “It's obviously true in politics. We've studied the TV commercials put out by Governor Reagan of California. You can see that all this fierce right-wing stuff is the complete opposite of his reassuring body language. But people believe the body language—generally we've summed a person up long before he opens his mouth. We think Reagan knows this, thanks to his Hollywood experience. His whole political career is one long reaction shot with an irrelevant voice-over, as you can prove by deleting the sound track and asking people to guess what he's saying. They trust the friendly sportscaster manner. On the other hand, once he's sitting in the governor's mansion in Sacramento he has his mandate…”

“You're saying that the Führer shouldn't have ranted and raved but come on like … the Cowardly Lion?”

“Exactly. The totalitarian systems of the future will be docile and subservient, and all the more threatening for that. Though there'll always be a place for out-and-out madness. In some way, people need the notion. The agnostic world keeps its religious festivals alive to meet the vacation demands of its work force. By the same token, when medical science has conquered disease certain mental afflictions will be mimicked for social reasons—I'd put my bets on schizophrenia. It seems to represent the insane's idea of the normal.”

“And not the other way around?”

“Probably not—a disease that flatters our vanity has a huge advantage, like most venereal complaints.” Dick turned to the film projector behind his desk. “Speaking of schizophrenia, we've been going through some wartime German film stored in the basement. One of the cans is a Waffen SS instructional film on how to build a pontoon bridge.”

Sally almost swooned at this. “God, that's so weird—it just says everything…”

“Doesn't it?” Pleased by her attention, Dick reluctantly lowered the blind, uneager to put himself in the shade. “Perhaps we could show it at the Arts Lab? I'd be happy to introduce it.”

We sat sipping wine in Dick's darkened office, surrounded by American licence plates and photographs of him at the controls of his Cessna, while the SS film fluttered through his projector. Was the film yet another fake? It looked convincingly real, and Sally held tight to my arm, mesmerised by the strong, white-skinned young men good-naturedly singing their work songs. Dick smiled to himself through the flickering light, murmured into the telephone when a BBC producer called, and watched Sally approvingly. He seemed glad that I had become the lover of this rapt and aroused young woman, and well aware of the rich and fierce sex we would have that evening as Sally replayed the film in her mind.

When we left he confided: “She's right for you, Jim. Just what you need.”

*   *   *

Although Sally depended on me, in most respects I was her pupil, and the most important lesson she taught me came at the New Year's Eve party that she held at her flat in Bayswater. For some reason the place always unsettled me, filled with the debris of Sally's past, like those abandoned houses in wartime Shanghai where clock-time had been suspended for a little too long and one returned to be confronted by the invisible stranger of one's younger self. I strolled around the Persian carpets stained with wine and cigarette ash, past the sofas with their unwashed covers reeking of stale incense, and thought of my children asleep in Shepperton as the middle-aged baby-sitter read her travel guide to British Honduras.

Yet the next day Sally would be washing Alice's hair and helping Lucy to stitch a miniature wardrobe for her trolls. Now she reeled about, amphetamines in her left hand, between the
Marat/Sade
posters and the blown-up photographs of Diane Arbus dwarfs, shrieking at Peter Lykiard as he arrived with a po-faced Japanese artist who had recently filmed their buttocks.

Sally proudly held my arm, hiccupped, and left a fleck of vomit on my shoulder. She recovered with a flourish, cleared her mouth into a glass of wine, and kissed me happily on the lips.

“Jim, I've found some wonderful crepe de chine! Lucy's going to adore it…”

She careened away, swinging from shoulder to shoulder like a gymnast on the overhead rings.

*   *   *

Shortly before midnight, remembering the baby-sitter, I decided to leave for Shepperton. Searching for Sally, I pushed my way through the noise and smoke. Couples embraced among the unwashed dishes in the kitchen, and a party within a party was taking place as six guests camped on Sally's double bed. Two acolytes of the Japanese artist were taking a shower together in Sally's bathroom. I searched the other bedrooms and the second bathroom, filled with her friends' art-school lumber, and then glanced into her little dressing room.

When I reached the door Peter Lykiard asked me for a cigarette, clearly trying to distract me, as if I were a child about to stray into the adults' bedroom.

“Sally's busy, Jim—before I forget, I wanted to ask you about this Waffen SS film. Dick Sutherland is keen to do a presentation…”