The Kindness of Women (40 page)

“She's breathing … oh my God.” Cleo's fingernails had torn the fabric of my shirt. The girl was coughing. She choked and spat out the water in her lungs and windpipe. The bearded man watched her calmly with his bloodshot eyes, then sat her up with his strong hands and steadied her breathing. The girl gasped at the air, and her eyes focused on the circle of people. She leaned against her distraught mother, coughed, and rubbed her nose, sucking great gasps of air over her swollen tongue.

Two cars had backed to the edge of the stone ramp, the drivers discussing the fastest route to the hospital at Windsor. As the water streamed from her cotton dress, the mother carried the child to the nearer of the cars. Cleo smiled at me through the tears that blurred her mascara. Everyone followed the child, but I was watching the bearded man who had saved her. He made sure that the child was breathing comfortably in the car, then slipped through the crowd and reclaimed his haversack, thanking the couple who had placed it on their card table. Before the convoy left the car park he had already resumed his walk along the bank.

*   *   *

We passed him an hour later, striding towards Windsor. I wanted to thank him, which no one had managed to do, but I found it difficult to come up with the right words. I steered the cruiser close to the bank and reduced speed so that we kept pace with him. He strode along in his heavy boots, checking some detail on his map. On his tartan shirt I could see the dry stain of the ice cream that he had expressed from the child's stomach. I guessed that he was a schoolmaster or civil servant, but I knew that he might just as well be a ship's purser or a day-release psychiatric patient. The heavy knapsack cut into his narrow shoulders, but he seemed unconcerned by the weight. Tied to the back of the knapsack was a pair of drying socks that I had not seen before and which I assumed he had washed in the river soon after saving the child.

Cleo waved to him, and he gave her a friendly but quick smile, lengthened his stride, and moved away from us. He was enjoying his holiday and preferred his own company. Cleo's contingent world, the bare knees and the ice cream stain and the drying socks, moved past the cabin cruiser and the dozing swans. I had thought of asking him who he was, but I realised that, for all practical purposes, I already knew.

17

DREAM'S RANSOM

Guests were arriving in fancy dress, for a party of a very special kind. Hundreds of vehicles lined the quiet Buckinghamshire lane, and as I searched for a parking space I was overtaken by a studio van carrying two Marie Antoinettes, a pirate chief, and a trio of Roman senators. Their rouged cheeks and painted lips gave them the look of plague victims on their way to a fever hospital.

My dream of Shanghai had materialised, like all dreams, in the least expected place, among the imposing houses built around the golf course at Sunningdale, little more than a fifteen-minute drive from Shepperton. I had lived for thirty years within sight of the studios but had never stepped inside the huge sound stages and was unprepared for the scale of a major Hollywood production. A genie had sprung from the pages of my novel and was busily conjuring the past into life, working with an extravagance more than a match for the original Shanghai.

The city of memory whose streets I had redrawn within the limits of the printed page had materialised in a fusion of the real and the super-real. Memory had been superseded by a new technology of historical recovery, where past, present, and future could be dismantled and reshuffled at the producer's whim.

I had set out from Shepperton at seven that morning, expecting to find a small location crew at the Sunningdale mansion. Rented by the film company, the house would play the part of my childhood home in Amherst Avenue. Much of the film had already been shot in Shanghai, where the banks and hotels along the Bund stood unchanged since the Communist seizure of the city in 1949. But the houses in Amherst Avenue were semi-derelict, turned into tenement apartments crammed with Chinese families and makeshift offices. No. 31 Amherst Avenue now contained the New China Electronic Import and Export Agency. Its drive was overgrown, its rotting window frames were supported by bamboo scaffolding, and the swimming pool had been roofed over to provide a damp-proof warehouse.

Fortunately, a reasonable replica of Amherst Avenue lay to hand on the other side of the world, a few miles from the studios at Shepperton. These handsome, half-timbered mansions, built in the 1930s beside the golf course, had served as the models for the houses which the British émigrés like my parents had built in the suburbs of Shanghai—houses whose Tudor exteriors were themselves façades, hiding American bathrooms, kitchens, and air conditioning.

There was something odd in the notion that the home of a near-neighbour could serve so plausibly as my childhood house, as if these Thames Valley towns formed part of Greater Shanghai. While I followed the studio van carrying the party of costumed extras I looked up at the familiar mullioned windows and realised how shrewd an eye the art director had brought to his job. He had convincingly re-created the exotic city of memory from materials far nearer to me than I cared to accept.

In place of the small location crew that I expected, a fleet of vehicles had taken over this quiet corner of Sunningdale. At first sight the scene resembled the evacuation of London—dozens of trailers sat in the surrounding fields, huge marquees stretched their canvas over miles of duckboard, double-decker coaches, restaurant buses, and lavatory trailers were parked in lines, generators drummed at the cold morning air, sending their current through a maze of cables to the location three hundred yards away. A private police force controlled the traffic, and a bus service ferried cast and crew from the trailers and makeup vans.

Not one house, I discovered, but four of the mansions had been rented by the film company, each contributing a segment of my childhood home—one provided a drained swimming pool, another the reception rooms and lawn where the fancy-dress party on the eve of Pearl Harbor would be held, while the third and fourth would re-create the kitchen, the dining room, and my own bedroom. Later that day, as I walked around the site, I stared through the windows of the mansions around the golf course, wondering what other segments of my childhood were hidden among the bridge tables and billiard rooms.

I parked my car on the edge of a commandeered tennis court and watched a team of scene-shifters unloading the 1930s props—Chinese screens, Art Deco lamps, tigerskin rugs, and white telephones. All these technicians, I realised, from the barber who had given me a period short-back-and-sides to the carpenters, lighting specialists, and costume designers, were working to construct a more convincing reality than the original I had known as a child.

The clock of my life had come full circle, in all sorts of unexpected ways. In a kindly gesture, the director had invited me to play the part of a guest at the costume party. Grateful to him, I had accepted with all the nervousness of a passenger volunteering to parachute from an airliner. A benign conspiracy was already in motion. Many of my neighbours had worked for years as part-time extras and had been hired to play internees at Lunghua camp. Only the previous afternoon, leaving the wine store in Shepperton High Street, I was greeted by the mother of a girl who had gone to the same school as Lucy and Alice.

“Jim, I've just heard. We're in the camp together! Tim Bolton and the Staceys are going to be there…”

Not only the mother but her daughter, now twenty-five, would play a Lunghua prisoner. I almost believed that I was dreaming, and that my sleeping mind was recruiting my Shepperton neighbours into the narrative of the dream. Walking home, I wondered why I had come to live in Shepperton in the first place. Thirty years earlier, Miriam and I had picked the town at random, but perhaps I had known even then that one day I would write a novel about Shanghai and that it might well be filmed at these studios, using my own neighbours as extras and the nearby mansions that had inspired the houses in Amherst Avenue. Deep assignments ran through our lives; there were no coincidences.

“Jim, you made it!” One of the American producers waved to me through the electricians and lighting men who were moving in and out of the house. She held my arm, as if suspecting that I might lose my nerve and escape. “We weren't sure if you were going to turn up.”

“How could I miss it? I don't mind saying, Kathy, it feels pretty strange…”

“I bet it does. It's a good thing you decided against coming to Shanghai with us. How does the house look?”

“Uncanny.” White pigeons released during the shooting of the children's party the previous day still strutted on the lawn, and a security man sent them fluttering into the roof. “I should have bought it thirty years ago.”

“Then you'd have had nothing to write about. And we wouldn't be here … We're shooting the party in about an hour, so you'll have to change. The dresser's waiting for you upstairs.”

“I need a disguise…”

While we spoke I became aware that a three-man film crew was quietly recording our exchange for a documentary about the production, a film within a film that took its place in the corridor of mirrors. This sense of illusions trapped within illusions persisted as I entered the large bedroom on the first floor. Here the principal actors were changing into their costumes, a cheery group whom I recognised from scores of films and television plays. Their faces seemed oddly different, but when they put on their makeup they grew more real. By contrast, I felt an impostor inside my John Bull costume of red tailcoat, top hat, and Union Jack waistcoat.

Later, in the long drawing room overlooking the garden, I stood with the party guests in a virtual replica of the house at Amherst Avenue. On the table beside me were copies of
Time
and
Life
dated December 1941, a week before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and I almost expected the white telephone to ring with a warning that we should leave on the next passenger steamer for Singapore.

Standing with a glass of whisky in my hand, I felt curiously like one of the intruders who sometimes gate-crashed my parents' parties—Axis agents posing as real-estate dealers, professional bridge players with a sideline in morphine, ex-nightclub hostesses on the lookout for my mother's jewellery box—whom Boy and Number 2 Boy would escort firmly to the door. I waited for my parents to appear and ask me to leave, failing to recognise me in this caricature costume.

“Hello…” An engaging twelve-year-old with a slim face and mature eyes stood in front of me, wearing Turkish slippers, spangled vest, and trousers. He introduced himself confidently.

“I'm you…”

As he extended his hand I could see him doubting if this overweight figure could ever have resembled himself.

“… and we're your mum and dad!”

An attractive couple in their early thirties, he in pirate costume, she dressed as a milkmaid, greeted me laughingly. While we spoke the lights filled the drawing room with a powerful glare. The dream was about to dream itself. The camera crew were ready for a tracking shot through the party. After talking to each other about the threat of war, the guests would say their goodbyes and step through the hallway into the drive, where a second camera would record our departure.

The director came up to me with a friendly word.

“All set, Jim?” He nodded encouragingly. “Just relax—put a hand on your hip. You look as if you know how to hold a glass of whisky.”

“I've had a little practice—but that's as far as it goes.”

“What about a line of dialogue? You can give yourself one right now.”

I stared at him, too tongue-tied to even say my name. He patted me reassuringly and walked back to the monitor. Everyone fell silent and the camera began to turn. I felt myself drifting into a trance, trying to imagine this line of dialogue missing from my earlier life, which I had spent my entire career trying to define.

Followed by the camera, we moved towards the hall. Lights were shining in the driveway, reflected from the polished roofs of the cars into which we would step. Drawn up on the raked gravel were a Buick roadster of the 1930s, a high-roofed Packard like my parents' car, a black gangster's Chrysler with running boards and white-wall tyres, and a 1940 Lincoln Zephyr convertible. Beside them stood Chinese chauffeurs in prewar Shanghai uniforms, caps under their arms as they opened the rear doors for the departing guests.

Staring at the scene, I tried to focus my eyes on the camera and the watching crowd beyond the gates. I stepped into the rear seat of the Packard, remembering in time to remove my top hat. The actor playing my chauffeur closed the door and took his seat behind the wheel. As the cars moved across the drive between the departing guests I felt that I was being carried away from this quiet Buckinghamshire lane, across another world and another time to the Shanghai of half a century earlier, towards the lights of the Bund and the department stores of the Nanking Road, through the French Concession to the tramline terminus at the end of the Avenue Joffre, to the barbed-wire checkpoints that led to the western suburbs and the high-gabled house where a small English boy played with his German toys, surprised by the white pigeons that had taken shelter on his roof.

*   *   *

The cabin stewards cleared away the last drinks before we landed, moving nimbly through the debris of the twelve-hour flight from London. Sitting beside Cleo in the front row, the cockpit of the 747 far above us, I peered over her shoulder at the northeast suburbs of Los Angeles. Vast highways busy with cars stretched across the sun-filled landscape, covered by a yellow haze as if the sand had begun to evaporate from the desert.

“Swimming pools…” Cleo pointed below. “Thousands of them. When the rains fail these people will survive. How do you feel?”

“Fine. I'll recover. As if I've taken too many amphetamines.”