The Kindness of Women (28 page)

Towards the evening's end the party took an uglier turn. Sally was nearly raped in the rear seat of the Continental by an overboisterous tableau sculptor for whom she was mimicking the postures of the President's widow. Carried away by the excitement, David urged the topless girl to interview her during the heat of the assault.

“Sally, this is live TV! Tell the viewers how you feel!” David dragged the cameraman after him, snatched the microphone, and rammed it through the passenger window into Sally's enraged face. “Over to you, Sally! Let's have a commentary in your own words…”

By the time Cleo Churchill and I had rescued Sally, the party was spilling into the street, the guests searching for an even larger exhibition. Straightening her torn dress, Sally lunged at the drunken sculptor with her shoe and hobbled away on a broken heel through the scattered wine bottles. She grimaced at the image of herself on the television screen and disappeared with a cry into the night.

“Is Sally safe?” Cleo avoided the wine dripping from the roof of the Lincoln and slammed the passenger door with relief. “You've proved something, Jim—though I don't know what. Was it worth it?”

“As an experiment? I think so.” I knew that she disapproved of the exhibition and had gamely come along to give me support. “At least they never stopped looking at the cars, which is more than you can say for most gallery openings. Dick Sutherland wants to film all this for his new series. When he gets back from the States they'll stage the party again at the Television Centre, with studio extras playing the guests.”

“Heaven forbid … Don't let him use you all the time.” Unsettled by the violent evening, Cleo wiped the wine from her hands. She pointed to the monitor screen transmitting a picture of the empty gallery. “You're on TV now—isn't that enough?”

“Broadcast TV, Cleo—Dick feels the idea deserves an audience of millions.”

“I thought it had one. You know, out in the streets, the real thing?”

“Cleo, this is the real thing … But I'm glad you came. Can I give you a lift home?”

“Jim dear, I think not. This is one evening when I wouldn't trust your driving…”

Cleo stood in front of the camera, using the screen as a mirror as she checked the wine stains on the sleeves of her dress. The electronic colours had separated slightly and reminded me of my acid vision when I had seen Cleo robed in a train of light as she strolled through the trees beside the river. My Moreau princess, who turned the starlings into peacocks and calmed the air with her graceful hands. I wanted to invite her to Shepperton again, drawn by her intelligence and forthright mind.

But Cleo was nervous of me, aware that I was doggedly following a dangerous logic of my own. If death had outstared life, which the world seemed to believe, I could rest my case. In a desperate sense Miriam would be alive again, Kennedy would drive triumphantly through Dealey Plaza, the casualties of the Second World War would rest in their graves, and a Chinese youth at a rural railway station would at last have conveyed his desperate message to me.

*   *   *

The exhibition ran its four-week course. During this time the cars were continually abused by outraged visitors. A Hare Krishna sect stormed into the gallery and threw a tin of white paint at the Lincoln. Meanwhile, Sally and David continued their courtship, hunting each other across the city in the same way that David and I had once played hide-and-seek in the streets of Shanghai, a game too important to be brought to an end.

On the evening that the exhibition closed I was driving back to Shepperton along the Hammersmith flyover, when I saw Sally's MG speeding down the exit ramp in front of me. I had spent the afternoon at the gallery, supervising the removal of my battered exhibits, whose distressed condition—they were covered with paint and graffiti, their seats soaked in urine—shocked the hardened car-breakers when they arrived with their tow truck. At first they refused to accept the vehicles, their eyes opened to the barbarities of modern art. The cars might be destined for the compactor and the blast furnace, but as they dragged them into the street they were already cleaning them protectively.

While I drove along the flyover I wiped the last of the white paint from my hands and watched Sally's sports car speeding through the traffic, a defective taillight winking at the dusk. In the past, whenever I saw her on the roads to the west of London, I was sure that she was on her way to Shepperton. Now I guessed that she was off to see David at Fair Oaks airfield, and for a moment I felt a small part of that loss I had known after Miriam's death. Sally at least would smile at me again; we would make love and remain as fond of each other as ever. But the last things she wanted were sympathy and affection. She needed David's unresolved aggressions and his outbursts of erratic humour when he would slap her face for her if she played the difficult child.

Beyond Twickenham the traffic began to open out. As we passed the rugby stadium Sally moved into the fast lane, forcing an overtaking car to brake. Headlights flared against the bounding tail of the MG, and Sally pushed a derisive finger through a tear in the canvas hood, sending a shower of embers from her cigarette into the night air. Reluctantly, she moved over to allow the faster car to pass her, then swerved back into his slipstream, her headlamps flooding the driver's mirror.

Left behind in a line of slower cars, I waited until we reached the next roundabout, accelerated past an idling truck, and set off after Sally. She glanced in the rearview mirror, and I wondered if she had seen me, but she was repairing the makeup to her eyes and lips.

I thought of her with David, making love on his air bed, as she had often told me, under the wings of his Cessna in the silent hangar. A reverie of jealousy and desire filled my mind, regret that I had lost Sally to this winged man, anger at myself for being so prudishly afraid of her needle ulcers and thieving …

Escaping from my hands, the car leapt across the road and touched the tail of the MG. Our fenders locked as we careened along the carriageway. Startled, Sally crouched away from the wild headlights and the hurtling mass of the car that had leapt out of the night. Cigarette in her mouth, she pulled away to my left, overran the soft shoulder, and then swerved in front of me as she lost control of the small steering wheel.

Trying to avoid a collision, I braked sharply into the fast lane. As the car veered to the right I felt a front tyre burst and deflate. The wheel wrenched itself from my hands. The car side-slipped across the dual carriageway, and the flattened tyre struck the central reservation, hurling the vehicle onto its side. It demolished an illuminated traffic sign, rolled onto its back, and carried on along the oncoming lane.

Hanging from my seat belt, I saw the asphalt rush past a few inches above my face, a ceiling of racing gravel lit by my headlights. The windscreen exploded in a burst of glass chips. The roof collapsed, and the rearview mirror struck my forehead.

The car had stopped and lay in the centre of the oncoming lane a hundred yards beyond the demolished traffic sign. I listened to the wheels spinning in the night air. Around me cars were slowing, horns competing with each other. Already I could smell the fuel dripping from the engine onto the glass-covered road. Drivers were running from their cars towards me. I switched off the engine and tried to free myself, but the collapsed roof had locked the door into its frame. Fuel pooled against the window as a dozen people rocked the car, trying to loosen the door. A man's fist drummed against the pillar. I wound down the window, released my seat belt, and sank onto the warped ceiling.

Hands seized my shoulders and dragged me from the cabin. Stunned by the blow to my head, I lay on the grass verge as a crowd gathered around my car. I could still see the rushing asphalt in the glare of headlights, as if death itself were speeding towards me, passing a few inches above my eyes.

An ambulance man knelt beside me, frowning over his first-aid kit. He seemed uninterested in me and complained to the driver about some missing piece of equipment. A police vehicle, its beacon flashing, stopped within thirty feet of my car, which a group of young men were rocking from side to side. Two teenage girls in party frocks looked down at my face, moving from one dance slipper to the other on the cold night grass. They hummed the melody of a recent pop song, gazing at me as if I were a drunk at a party who had fallen at their feet.

A cigarette lighter flared in the night air. Before I could speak Sally Mumford pushed between the girls. Drawing protectively on her cigarette, she peered over the head of the ambulanceman and lowered the lighter flame to my face, curious to see the driver of the car which had nearly killed her.

*   *   *

Four months later, in the last days of the 1960s, I stood with the cheering crowd in a disused soccer stadium in east London, watching the battered saloon cars of a demolition derby lumber around the muddy track. In the centre of the arena, helmet on her hip, Sally stood in white jeans and a crimson rally driver's tunic. She was shouting angrily at David Hunter, now out of the race and resting behind the wheel of his demolished car. As Sally urged him on, whistling through her broken teeth, he lay back in his silver suit and stretched his arms, gazing contentedly at the rusty impacts around him.

Watching these desultory collisions, I remembered my own crash and the exhibition at the Arts Laboratory. I still assumed that the exhibition had been designed to test the psychology of its audience, but David took for granted that its sole purpose had been to incite myself. Was my accident, in which I was lucky not to be killed, an attempt to die in an erotic death pact with Sally?

David had suggested as much, when he and Sally visited me in Roehampton hospital. Looking up from my bed at this deteriorated couple, of whom I was so fond, I realised that I had exploited them in the same way that Dick Sutherland and Lykiard had exploited me. I wanted to help them, but the insane roller-coaster of the sixties had seized our lives and swept us headlong between its screaming rails.

The last cars on the circuit heaved against each other like the bored bison wallowing in the mud pit beside the railroad bridge at Moose Jaw. I thought of the Hell Drivers in Shanghai before the war and the spectacular collisions staged by the casual Americans. Across the years their spirit seemed to hover over this modest track, and over the greatest of all motorised tragedies, Kennedy's death by motorcade. I could still remember individual frames of the Zapruder film, endlessly anatomised on television and in a thousand magazine exposés. Had the events in Dealey Plaza been no more than the most elaborate of a series of staged accidents prefigured on that Shanghai race course of my childhood?

Chilled by the winter air, the spectators shuffled their feet on the wooden stands. Nostrils quickened in the drifting smoke and engine fumes. The advertised highlight of the afternoon was the re-creation of a spectacular road accident, a multiple collision on a Manchester overpass in which a dozen vehicles had been involved.

As a curtain-raiser, there would be a women's event, and the crowd moved forward for a closer view. Sally and a group of women drivers, all in striped silk jackets, faces made up like streetwalkers, were gripping the roof sills of their cars and sliding their legs through the drivers' windows. The spectators, heavy men in leather coats, pushed past me to the rail. They settled their hands deep in their pockets. They had come only for the women's event, a figure-of-eight destruction course filled with jolting impacts, when every penis in the arena would be clenched within a hand.

12

IN THE CAMERA LENS

“A film festival,” Dick Sutherland remarked over our third rum collins at the Copacabana Palace Hotel, “gives you a fair idea of what the future will be like.”

“Beautiful but unapproachable women, frazzled men, and a million dreams held together by hype?”

“That sort of thing. Lang's
Metropolis
reshot in Las Vegas. It's not that illusion takes the place of reality, but that out-and-out hallucination takes the place of illusion. Activities of the human brain it's needed the whole of evolution to control are here let out to play. I love it.”

“Dick, I thought you might. And what about our congress of science films?”

“The same thing applies. In many ways, more so.” Dick smiled knowingly, always happy when he could provoke me. “Sooner or later, like everything else, science is going to turn into television.”

“Does that sound sinister?”

“Very. Exciting, though. What's that idea you're always trotting out…?”

Dick liked me to repeat this weather-worn prophecy of mine whenever his confidence flagged or he found himself in a place where no one recognised him, the ultimate in sensory deprivation for the TV personality.

“I forget … that you might be responsible for the first major scientific discovery to be made on television?”

“That's it. It could happen here. Rio is a total media city.”

From the air-conditioned bar he gazed contentedly at the procession of giant floats that moved along the Avenida Atlantica advertising the star film of the festival, Stanley Kubrick's
2001.
Through the crowded traffic edged a fleet of silver spacecraft, resembling the demonstration models of an interplanetary nightclub. In their abbreviated foil space suits, the crews of hip-rolling young women flashed cocktail-waitress smiles at the crowds of tourists. For some reason, only the beggars and cripples squatting outside the beach hotels bothered to watch them. Waves of amplified music rose above the clamour of police sirens and the cries of lottery salesmen. Two light aircraft flew above the beach, and towed pennants advertising rival film attractions. Challenging them, giant fragments of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” drummed against the façades of the hotels and rolled out to sea to wake Poseidon himself.