Julia Paradise (2 page)

Chekhov—Freud's contemporary and fellow writer-physician—believed that ‘man will become better when you show him what he is like.' But Ayres is not made better by what Julia has revealed to him, only wretched and despairing. Though he continues his work, he has ‘lost faith in his calling, in the whole scientific approach of psychoanalysis'. He is adrift and broken. Only when the mysterious Gerthilde re-enters his life and shows him how he might be—how the world might be—does redemption become possible.

As for the truth about Julia Paradise: well, this is a novel to be read and read again. Convictions about her honesty, her knowingness and her motivations dissolve, re-form, solidify and fade as you notice missed details and realise the import of seemingly trivial asides. But her madness, at least, is not in doubt. Julia is mad, just not in the way Ayres or her husband think she is. It is an appropriate reaction to the horror of being female in a society that uses and discards women and girls, and the horror of being forced to listen as the justifications of the powerful drown out the cries of the weak.

Twenty-seven years after Rod Jones's elegantly crafted novel was published, and eighty-six years since the start of the Chinese Civil War, that madness continues to be recognisable and relatable. It will remain so for as long as the world is divided between those who do whatever they wish while telling themselves that such indulgences are ‘seldom absent from the lives of normal people', and those who must remain silent while subject to those indulgences, lest they be condemned as troublemakers or hysterics.
Julia Paradise
stands as a stunning exploration of consciousness, empathy, and the murky intersections between the personal and political.

 

 

 

 

For Chris

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. Some events and settings are based on historical material but no resemblance is intended between the characters and any person alive or dead.

 

 

 

‘In not a few cases, especially with women and where it is a case of elucidating erotic trains of thought, the patient's co-operation becomes a personal sacrifice, which must be compensated by some substitute for love...'

FREUD,
Psychotherapy of Hysteria.

 

 

 

‘Yes, stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth...'

FLAUBERT,
Letters.

 

 

 

 

For several years a Scottish physician named Kenneth Ayres, popularly known as ‘Honeydew' Ayres, had made his living from British expatriates in the International Settlement and, more particularly, from travellers stopping at the Astor House Hotel. A newcomer soon discovered that it was Honeydew because of the tobacco to which Ayres was addicted, Gallaher's Honeydew, and with which he was habitually filling his pipe. He might later hear whispers that there was another, more sinister source of this appellation.

In the spring of 1927 Ayres was thirty-four, and he made a considerable impression, not least because of his physical appearance. He was a huge man, some eighteen stones of him, wrapped uncomfortably into a starched collar and a blue serge suit. As he propelled his bulk from the Club and back to his hotel (his apartment on the third floor of the Astor House Hotel contained his consulting rooms) Ayres had to stop often, panting, for little rests. Rickshaw drivers had to struggle to get Ayres' weight into motion in a stream of Shanghai afternoon traffic.

You might have come across him at the Shanghai Club, to which he had been given a temporary membership which never quite became permanent and never quite expired, where he took up his allotted station half way down the Long Bar, in the ill-defined ‘professional' ranks between the managers of business houses and the chief clerks. Or you might have found him upstairs, in one of the Club's deep leather armchairs with his brandy and post-prandial pipe engaged in talk with another young man, perhaps recently arrived in the East. For, apart from his bulk, the other thing which impressed one about Ayres was his conversation.

There were three things he loved to talk about: the City of Edinburgh, where he had spent his childhood and attended university; Sigmund Freud, under whose aegis Ayres had studied for a year in Vienna, and to whom, with his beard, Ayres bore a vague resemblance; and finally Ayres loved to talk about his countryman, J. M. Barrie, whose play
Peter Pan
Ayres had seen in its premier season in 1904 as a lad of eleven up in London on a school holiday with his father, and in which he had promptly fallen in love with the actress who had played Wendy. (Barrie, entirely by the way, was to become Chancellor of Edinburgh University in 1930.)

Ayres was a success by any standards but his own. He was the son of a Scottish Colonel, and after school he had disappointed his father when he refused to join the regiment, turning instead to the study of medicine. It was while he was at university in Edinburgh that he first became interested in the treatment of nervous disorders.

He had spent the war in a military hospital in Herefordshire, where he had worked with the shellshocked. In the nurses' station at the hospital he had met, then married, a local girl. After the war, when her family, solid Hereford gentry, began casting around the district for a secure practice for him, his Caledonian restlessness surfaced and for a time Ayres and his young wife travelled on the Continent. At first he had thoughts about returning to the hospital to continue his work with the nerve cases, but found himself instead, as effortlessly as if it were an accident, spending the next year in Vienna, enrolled as a member of Freud's graduate seminar.

Ayres was no genius, but he was a talented and conscientious student. He was overshadowed by the fiery leading lights in Freud's circle, but even mediocre men have their year, when their lives seem to take on a coherent direction—and that year in Vienna was Ayres'. But he was about to be touched by something larger in that winter of 1919: the Spanish influenza epidemic. His wife fell ill in Vienna and by the time they had returned to London she was dead.

For three years. Ayres worked to the point of exhaustion to forget his grief; could not; and determined upon that other classic palliative of the English—a steamship ticket to the East. He sailed for Sydney, Australia, but on a whim disembarked in Shanghai, and had been there ever since.

Ayres had remained something of an outsider in Shanghai. He spent his time at the Racing Club and in the Long Bar, but among all his acquaintances there he could count none as a friend. Socially, the British there treated him with a polite and deferential suspicion. It was as though, with his appointment book full of the names of their wives and their daughters and their cases of petit mal, hysteria and the nervous collapses which followed broken love affairs, he had learned quite enough of their secrets, and they tended to exclude him.

In China, that pestilential dreamscape of suffering, he had no interest at all. He was not like those Englishmen who learned Mandarin and became scholars. The great thing about Shanghai for Ayres was its transience. Sitting at the Long Bar, or in the lobby of the Astor House Hotel, Ayres watched all those other foreign lives pass before him—the Englishwomen, even the healthy ones looking pallid and ill; the young adventure-seekers, the aspiring painters and writers on the cadge for a fiver; the fresh-faced young American missionaries who hoped, it seemed, to spread Christ in China by their sheer numbers. Some of these were insufferably boring. They were exhausted and fanatical and would talk of nothing else but Christianity and China in the same sentence. Others were frightened, the new ones whose only experience of a big city had been the three days they had spent in San Francisco before sailing, and who now, faced with the sights and sounds of eight million heathen people, suddenly felt their faith grow brittle and crack. They were sweaty-palmed and hollow-eyed, hoping the fear did not show on their faces. Sometimes they would turn up months later, broken men and raving women, reduced to being a part of the detritus of the city, and often victims of the various drugs of addiction.

It was into this foyer of the Astor House Hotel, late one Saturday afternoon, a woman flew, hesitated a moment, then turned and was gone behind the revolving glass panels of the still-spinning Berlin door as suddenly as she had arrived. Ayres caught just a glimpse of her face. Her eyes held him with their look of glittering disorientation. He saw that the desk clerk had noticed her too, suspecting perhaps that she might be a prostitute. All this took a second, no more; even as Ayres noticed her, she was on her way out.

A few minutes later, she was back again, this time clutching the arm of a reverend gentleman. He wore a hat, a celluloid collar, a dark suit, and carried his own cardboard suitcase, even though a porter had followed him through the door and was unoccupied. The woman was still panicky and disoriented. When the desk clerk, a Chinese, spoke to them she shrieked, felt behind her for one of the comfortable lobby sofas, sat down and promptly fell asleep, much to the desk clerk's puzzlement. The missionary gentleman shuffled shyly forward to the desk, still clutching his cardboard suitcase, to make his explanations.

Ayres followed all this with his usual detached interest and was surprised to see the desk clerk pointing in his direction; then to see the clergyman shuffling forward with his same uncertain gait and removing his hat.

He was a man of about fifty, Ayres judged, fair, balding with pale blue eyes. When he spoke up, Ayres discovered that his name was William Paradise, that he worked with the Methodist Missions in Shanghai and that, to judge from his harsh accent, he was an Australian.

‘My wife,' he said slowly, ‘has come in for a bit of a shock lately.'

Ayres did not appear to be very impressed. He threw the stub of the cigar he had been smoking into the brass spittoon, took out his bandana handkerchief, wiped a speck of phlegm from his mouth, inspected it, then put his handkerchief back in his pocket and began feeling for his pipe.

‘I'm afraid she's become over-excited about things.' The man paused and blinked at Ayres. ‘Things have been getting on top of her, rather. I'm afraid she has dropped her bundle altogether.'

Ayres looked across the hotel lobby at the calmly sleeping woman. She was small, plain, nondescript, of indeterminate age, dressed in a black woollen suit. The Reverend Paradise was saying, ‘You will consent to examine her?' Ayres found his pipe and examined the blackened tar on its bowl with apparent distaste.

‘You had better bring her upstairs. See if you can wake her. Or, if you like, I'll get a couple of boys to load her into a barrow and take her up in the luggage lift.'

The other man said apologetically, ‘My wife's case has perplexed several physicians before yourself.' He added as an afterthought, ‘I don't expect you to perform any miracles.'

Ayres' rooms were on the third floor of the building, connected with the ground by a notoriously unreliable lift, an iron cage which groaned and shuddered on its cables and pulleys even when it did work. It was the bane of Ayres' existence: as a heavy man he hated stairs. On this particular Saturday afternoon, already past the hour when Ayres customarily took his tea, the lift was working, although the lift porter was nowhere to be seen. He passed the little wooden alcove with its sliding window and saw the boy inside wrapped in a blanket, asleep in his chair. He climbed the three steps to the lift landing, opened the iron concertina door and ushered the missionary and his suitcase into the lift. The door closed and he turned the handle. The cables shuddered and whined and they began to ascend. As they did so, Ayres caught a glimpse of two porters loading the comatose little woman onto a wooden barrow.

At first the Reverend Paradise seemed uncomfortable imparting the intimate details of his wife's illness to a stranger but, once he had begun his story and got into his stride, he impressed Ayres as a kindly, intelligent man whose main concern was that his wife should get well again. As he spoke he nodded his head from time to time as if to reassure himself of the truth of his words. Ayres was able to piece together the following story.

During her first year in this country the young woman had been troubled by cravings for sleep during the daytime. She had formerly been extremely energetic in carrying out her teaching duties. In the course of these attacks of drowsiness she had taken to talking in snatches of German. As a child she had heard her father speak German at home, although to all intents and purposes English was her native tongue. Her husband spoke no German. These cravings for rest were accompanied by sleeplike states at odd times throughout the day—‘waking daydreams' the Reverend Paradise called them. Even during meals and conversations with visitors to the mission the missionary's wife would literally fall asleep on her feet.

On a long journey through the Interior on an evangelistic mission with a group of English teaching and medical missionaries his wife had begun to suffer from certain disturbances of her vision. The group had as one of their number an English doctor, who administered sedatives. But when this course of treatment was withdrawn, the disturbances of vision returned, and he called them by another name: hallucinations.