The Kindness of Women (32 page)

“Of a rather special kind, dear sport.”

“I know—it always amazes me that they let the men and women wander around together.”

“No one's got pregnant yet.” David stared at the young woman asleep on the sofa beside him, the hem of her nightdress around her plump calves. As he set out the chessboard I noticed that the black king had failed to appear, a modest penalty I had incurred. “Besides, the medical staff trust us completely. For them, we're the normal ones. They know our names and faces and little ways of doing things. It's you people who seem genuinely weird.”

“We probably are.”

David hunched over the chessboard, watching me through the pieces. He was waiting for me to catch up with my real self. He regarded my visits to Summerfield as an educative process; gradually I would accept my responsibility for the events that had brought him to this grim institution. At the end of my visits, when he accompanied me to the staircase, he clearly expected me to decide to stay. I would move into a spare bed in Hyacinth ward and our games of chess would continue until all the pieces had been stolen from the board.

“Have you seen Sally yet?” he asked offhandedly. “I think she'd like to hear from you.”

“We talked on the telephone—she's staying in Scotland with some rich woman friend of her father's, while they try out this new methadone treatment. She sounded a lot calmer.”

“She ought to go back to the States. I can see her strolling around Haight-Ashbury…” His hand was trembling over the board, as he fixed his eyes on some wayward dream of the past. When I reached out to reassure him, touching his wrist, he pulled away from me and I saw that he had replaced the black king.

“David, all that's over now—the GIs are back from Vietnam, and Nixon's gone to China.”

“I know. Thank God I'm here, everything's so earnest. You'll miss Vietnam.”

“Will I? Why?”

“All those newsreels every night? I used to wonder why you never came back to Shanghai with me. You didn't need to—they started the Vietnam War for you instead.”

“I wasn't ready to go back.” I watched the old accountant hovering over his solitary pawn. “It would have been too much like returning to the scene of a crime.”

“I know what you mean, Jim. I looked for that little railway station of yours.”

“On the Hangchow–Shanghai line?” I tried not to sound sceptical. “I'm surprised you never told me.”

“Well … Miriam had died. You had enough things on your mind. Anyway, the damned taxi driver couldn't find it. Those tourist guides are doing their best to turn Shanghai into a riddle.”

“It's probably gone, I shouldn't worry. Let's play some chess—black or white?”

“No, it's there.” David ignored my raised hands, his eyes fixed on mine. “It's marked on the Greater Shanghai Transit Company map. And inside your head.”

“Not anymore.”

“No? Your crashed-cars exhibition—no one realised it, but that's what you were staging there.”

“At a few removes.”

“At no removes. Jim, I understand…”

Not for the first time he had linked his own last accident to my exhibition, implying that I had served as the catalyst for his erratic driving. But, if anything, the exhibition had been inspired by David. I remembered him hunting the streets of London, driving in the same dangerous way that he had practised for the first time on the long, straight road from Moose Jaw to the air base. At the demolition derbies in the shabby stadiums of east London he and Sally had willed themselves towards death.

One-way streets excited them to play a desperate roulette. Late one evening, two years after the exhibition, David had driven the wrong way down the westward lane of the Hammersmith flyover, headlamps flashing as he forced the oncoming cars against the safety rail. A middle-aged cellist and her husband, confused by the siren of the pursuing police car in the parallel carriageway, had failed to stop in time. The wife had been killed over her steering wheel, and only David's deranged behaviour after his arrest and his active RAF service in Kenya had saved him from a manslaughter charge.

Under a section of the Mental Health Act he had been sent, first, to the special custody unit at Rampton, and then to Summerfield for observation. Six months later, as he crouched with his largactil shudders in this sunlit room filled with entranced and grumbling women, the memory of the cellist's death still pushed at the door of his mind. I felt nothing but concern for him and his younger self, now the same age as Henry, who had emerged from his Japanese camp into the postwar world. David had understood my needs but failed to read his own. He had tried, hesitantly at first, to re-create the cruelty he had known in wartime China, not realising that the postwar world was only too keen to do this for him. The psychopath was saint.

When I first visited him at Summerfield he had said, setting out the rules of our relationship: “Remember, Jim—all I did on the flyover was what you did in your exhibition…”

Now the casualties of the sixties were coming home, to the veterans' hospitals, the mental institutions, and the private clinics. In a drawing room above a cold Scottish lake Sally Mumford was measuring out her days in methadone. When I telephoned her she sounded flat but rested, unlike the confused and hyper-irritable woman who had arrived at Shepperton one evening two months earlier, needing my help but refusing to speak to me. Fortunately the children had been away, staying with their aunt. I tried to sleep on the sofa as Sally spent the night weeping and striding around the empty bedrooms, ransacking the cupboards for old toys which she stuffed into her bag.

The next day she allowed me to take her to our family doctor, who referred her to an American physician at the London Clinic. She then moved to a specialist nursing home on the Thames near Marlow, one of those private prisons in which the rich, with the connivance of the medical profession, confine their elderly or embarrassing relatives. When I visited her there she was calm and sedated, smiling from a waking sleep as she spoke of our first meeting on the sand island near Rosas ten years earlier. She seemed a child again, the kindly and generous young woman who had come to the help of my own children when they most needed her. Only when I mentioned Dick Sutherland did she frown and turn away from me.

Dick, alone, had made a triumphant exit from the sixties. As I guessed, science and pornography at last made their long-awaited rendezvous under the lens of his laboratory camera. His successful TV series on the paranormal—ESP, astrology, and telekinesis—was sold to an American network and brought him to the attention of a progressive New York magazine tycoon who had recently founded an institute of sexual research. On its governing body sat many of the gurus of the counterculture—evangelists for LSD, trend-hunting neurologists, Zen philosophers, and Marxist popularisers. With much fanfare, the tycoon announced that the institute would continue the pioneering work of Masters and Johnson, Kinsey, and Havelock Ellis.

At first, its researchers devoted themselves to scientific films of heterosexual intercourse, using the latest fibre-optic technology and miniaturised body-orifice TV cameras, all in pursuit of the white whale of modern sexology, the female orgasm. Soon, however, as graphic stills from these exploratory films were published in the parent company's magazines and pushed the circulations to record heights, the research broadened to include more wayward forms of sexual activity. The institute was discreetly relocated in London, avoiding the scrutiny of the U.S. Justice Department and any possible threat to the professorial tenure of its academic board members.

Dick became the institute's scientific director at its new headquarters, in a former hotel overlooking the Regent's Park canal. Here, under the neutral gaze of the rostrum camera, a recruited force of volunteers had explored every legal permutation of lesbian, homosexual, and heterosexual intercourse. The cans of undeveloped film were air-freighted to the magazine offices in New York, and selected stills appeared beside the centerfold nudes with Dick's scientific commentary.

When I mildly suggested to Dick that he was producing something indistinguishable from pornography he had readily agreed.

“Except for one thing—our aim is to analyse, not arouse. Think of this vast human activity, common to the whole biological kingdom, and you realise that surprisingly little is known about it. What actually happens when a woman fellates you? Do you know, Jim?”

“Dick, you make me doubt it…”

“Well, what more is there to say?”

“But why do I need to know?”

“Because sex is the last great frontier.” Dick had gestured at the horizons of Regent's Park like Cortés grasping the immensity of the Pacific. “One thing we can say for certain about the future of sex—there's going to be a lot more of it. Already we can see that new forms of social structure will emerge to cope with the sexual imagination. What you and everyone else think of as the pornographic mind may well allow us to transcend ourselves and, in a sense, the limits of sex itself.”

“Your new series should be fascinating, Dick.”

“You've already heard about it? Good.”

I hadn't, but I saluted him ungrudgingly. Thinking of our journey to Rio, I realised that the evening with Carmen and Fortunata had been a brave attempt to step down from the television screen into a lost world of emotion and desire. He had discarded the image of the hoodlum scientist—part rock star, part Robert Oppenheimer—that had sustained him since his Cambridge days. Out went the leather jackets and gold medallions, in came tweed suits and woollen ties. He was at ease with me now, happier and more confident, at last engaged on the original research that had always eluded him and unaware that he himself was the victim of a bogus experiment.

But Sally had been hurt. Along with the other volunteers who worked at the institute, she had been beguiled by Dick's evangelical ardour. She told me that she had been amazed by the unedited films screened for the volunteers in the institute viewing theatre, of the cathedral-like interior of her own vagina, moisture beading on its cavernous walls like jewels dripping in a grotto. As she lay with her laboratory partner, a remote-controlled camera recorded the involuntary movements of her facial musculature, the flushing of her breasts and abdomen, the skin tremors on the backs of her thighs.

Seeing these abstracted portions of herself had led to a growing numbness, a fading sensitivity of her skin to pain and feeling, as if her nervous system had been connected, not to the familiar nerve endings of her hands and lips, but to the screen in Dick's viewing theatre. She would turn the pages of the men's magazines in the waiting room before the laboratory sessions and find detached parts of her anatomy between the covers, the moist escarpment of her pubis like a remote mountain range viewed from the window of an airliner.

A progressive dismemberment of herself was taking place, until she reached the point where she expected to find the skin of her breasts and thighs stretched across an advertising billboard or upholstering the seats of a modish nightclub. When, like most of Dick's volunteers, she dropped out of the programme, she never fully reintegrated herself and would wander the streets in her heroin daze searching for the lost parts of her face and lips.

Soon after, the Home Office became interested in the institute, and its work was suspended. Across the Atlantic, the magazine tycoon announced that the sexual revolution was over and that he had donated the miles of cine-film to the Kinsey Foundation. Leisure industries represented the wave of the future, and investment would be moved to new vacation sites in Hawaii and the Caribbean. Sex, with every regret, was left to fend for itself.

The setback was a blow to Dick. As he admitted in a moment of surprising frankness, he had naïvely hoped that the institute's original work would be accepted for what it was. He knew that his reputation in the scientific community had been damaged and that the doors of most laboratories would be closed to him. Trying to help him, I introduced him to an interested publisher, and at my suggestion Dick quickly wrote the text of a pop-up guide to human psychology. Later, reading through this colourful bestseller, which seemed to have strayed from the back of a cornflakes packet, I was struck as always by Dick's shrewdness, intelligence, and wit. Since its sales far exceeded those of my own books, Dick could continue to patronise me in his friendly way. I was still his gauche student, making the coffee in his laboratory and allowed to flirt with his secretary.

But had the rat in the Skinner box always controlled the experimenter? When I thought of David Hunter, of Dick and Sally, I sometimes wondered what part I had played in plotting the course of their lives, steering them towards goals that I had set many years earlier. I had never consciously manipulated them, but they had accepted their assigned roles like actors recruited to play their parts in a drama whose script they had never seen.

Peggy Gardner had no doubts about my responsibility. I visited her small Chelsea house after seeing David remanded in custody at the magistrate's court, hoping that she might later testify as a character witness. She sat away from me in a straight-backed chair, surveying me as if I had been at the wheel of the Jaguar and she were a police psychiatrist called to give her assessment.

“Poor David. The last of your troupe. First Sally, then Dick…”

“Dick? I've had nothing to do with him.” I lowered my tumbler of whisky with such force that I cracked the enamel of her blackwood table. “Peggy…?”

“That tawdry institute and all those TV programmes.”

“He's an actor at heart, who happened to stray into psychology. Dick's … a shaman for the TV age.”

“For years you've been encouraging him to buy all those American cars, telling him—what was it, some nonsense?—that he'd make the first scientific discovery on television. How could he resist?”