The Kindness of Women (12 page)

On the last day of term she had gone. The tables were cleared, and the assistants polished the glass tops. When we returned after Christmas a new set of cadavers would lie under the overlit ceiling, and we would begin the dissection of a second body part.

Searching for a scalpel I had mislaid, I stepped into the preparation room, where the chief assistant was tying together the bones of each cadaver. Later they would be individually cremated or interred. Little more than clutches of gristle and joint, they lay on the workbenches like the remains of so many Sunday roasts.

I scanned the benches and recognised a familiar hand tied with a stout string to her ribs and hip bones. Together, they made up a parcel that might have slipped into a small suitcase. I read the name tag:
Dr. Elizabeth Grant.
This dead physician had not only offered her body for dissection but had reduced herself to a heap of fatty sticks, as if deliberately dissolving whatever power she held over me.

I threw my gown into the laundry basket, emptied my locker, and set out to find Miriam. If I needed to woo her from Richard Sutherland I would buy an American car, take up flying, cast myself as her Lindbergh, ready to fly the Atlantic with nothing but a packet of sandwiches and my own will.

5

THE NATO BOYS

As always, the sound of engines in the morning sent the slipstream racing through my mind long before I steered the Harvard from the parking apron. Snow lay across Moose Jaw airfield, draped like overnight laundry on the windsocks and the grilles of the landing lights. But the sky was a crystal summer blue, lit by needles of high-altitude ice, the flying weather of which we trainee pilots had dreamed as we waited among the dog-eared magazines in the flight room.

For four days the Saskatchewan fogs had put an end to all flying, and now every serviceable Harvard at the NATO training base was on the apron. The ground crews moved along the line of aircraft with their battery carts. The signal lamps flashed in a green fever from the control tower, and the first planes taxied towards the runway. As each engine choked and stuttered into life another layer of sound stiffened the air, the bull-throated roar of exhausts and intakes. The windows of the Canadian officers' mess and the cadet barracks trembled with the noise of propeller steel setting its edge against the wind.

A ground crew moved their battery cart under my starboard wing. Muffled like Arctic explorers in oilskins, goggles, and earmuffs, they plugged their cable into the starter motor. I completed the take-off check, signalled to them through the canopy, and pressed the worn brass ring of the ignition button.

The heavy engine snuffled and kicked, the cylinders trying to clear their throats, and the propeller threw a slice of wet ice across the windshield. The blades lurched in unwieldy staggers against the air. I cracked the throttle, increasing the fuel supply to the carburettors, and felt the harness pulling at my shoulders as the cylinders fired together. The slipstream whirled the ice from the windshield and buffeted the yellow wings and tailplane, jarring the control column against my knees. An organ loft of noise filled the aircraft and reached out to the frozen deserts of Saskatchewan, driving everything from my mind. As I waited for the battery cart I had been thinking of my overdue letters from Miriam, the drunken brawl earlier that week at the Iroquois Hotel in Moose Jaw and the penalty hours cleaning aircraft in the hangar, and the fifty dollars I owed David Hunter for stripping the second gear from his Oldsmobile. But all this was forgotten when the engine came to life and the Harvard thrust itself against the brake pedals.

To my left Captain Hamid of the Turkish army moved from the apron. He scowled at the odour in his open face mask, remembering the unspeakable ham-and-egg breakfasts in the mess. He steered his Harvard with a heavy hand, and forced the plane to left and right like a stupid horse on a parade ground. But I could eat the breakfasts and take the eventless winter wheatlands in my stride. Behind me a sharp-tempered Frenchman urged me on, flicking his flying gloves against the windshield. Harvards were taking off and making right-hand circuits of the airfield, solo trainees and student pilots with their instructors in the back seat, the junior air arm of NATO preparing itself for the even colder and more crowded high-altitude space above the north German plain. Within hours of my first solo I had decided to transfer to Bomber Command after my jet training. I saw myself at the controls, not of this antique World War II trainer, but of a nuclear, delta-winged Vulcan as it sped over the marshy forests of Byelorussia armed with pieces of the sun …

“Air Force two niner niner one…” A Canadian flight controller leaned against the tower windows, watching me through field glasses. Behind me a line of Harvards waited their turn to reach the runway, engines aimed at the back of my head.

“Moose Jaw tower, this is Air Force—” A crackle of squawks interrupted me. However clearly I spoke, trying to disguise my English voice and assume a Canadian accent, the RCAF flight controllers deliberately made their intercom messages as garbled as possible, venting all their irritation with the NATO training programme. The French, Norwegian, and Turkish pilots, despite the hours spent in the English-language classes, had virtually no idea what their instructors were saying to them. World War III could have broken out and ended before we disentangled ourselves and climbed through the babel of the Canadian skies.

Aligned at the foot of the runway, I waited for the tower's final signal and eased the throttle to its maximum setting. Released from its brakes, the Harvard lumbered forward like a shortsighted rhino, hunting for every crack in the worn concrete. At full throttle, the engine seemed to tear itself from the fuselage spars, and I waited for the elderly craft to disintegrate at the end of the runway. But the Harvard had trained generations of American fliers. I pushed the stick forward to raise the tail off the ground. At 70 knots I drew back on the column and the aircraft rose comfortably into the air, its broad wings breasting the thermals that rose from the heated runways. I climbed to three thousand feet, trimmed the elevators, and set the engine for cruise. The winter fields of southern Saskatchewan, its frozen lakes and empty highways, stretched to the horizon. Beyond Saskatoon, the vast wildernesses of northern Canada extended to the planet's edge, touched only by the aurora borealis and the condensation trails of military jets surfing on the upper limits of the atmosphere. Here the great radars of the Norad chain and the Russian defence system bayed at each other like lions staked to the ice.

Loosening my harness, I listened to the steady drone of the engine and watched the white land shift beneath me. Officially, I was to practise stalls and spins, and navigate a course to Swift Current before returning to Moose Jaw, but like most of the trainee pilots I had no intention of following my instructions. The evening at the Iroquois had left me with a two-day hangover and an infected shoulder bite. Neither would be helped by being thrown around thousands of feet of overlit air. As always, I went up into the sky to calm myself, to think of Miriam, to rest and to dream.

*   *   *

Flying, which had obsessed me since the war years in Shanghai, had brought me to this remote town in the Canadian West. I had left Cambridge after two years, completely cured of any need to become a doctor. Despite the Cavendish laboratory, the university was excluded from the more urgent world of the American nuclear bombers flying from their Cambridgeshire airfields, readying themselves for the final global war. The Berlin Airlift, the Korean War, a rearming Europe belonged to a realm I had seen born over the paddy fields of the Yangtze estuary. Dr. Elizabeth Grant had freed me from my dreams of the dead, but a far greater army of casualties was preparing itself for the planetary dissecting room.

I sat with Miriam in the Cambridge cinemas, compulsively watching the newsreels of the hydrogen-bomb tests. The sight of these immense explosions at Eniwetok stirred and enthralled me, and often I had to steady my trembling hands to avoid frightening Miriam. The mysterious mushroom clouds, rising above the Pacific atolls from which the B-29s had brought to Nagasaki the second day of apocalypse, were a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning everything. Fantasies of nuclear war fused forever with my memories of Shanghai, reminding me of the white dust in the Avenue Edward VII, down which I had walked like a child straying into a preview of the future.

Working as a copywriter for an advertising agency in London, I thought constantly of the pioneers of aviation—Lilienthal and the Wrights, Lindbergh, and even little Mignet, who ended his days in poverty, camping in disused hangars under the wing of his beloved Flying Flea. In my mind all the romance and ascensionist myths of flight were linked to weapons of destruction and the greater possibilities that lay beyond them.

At a reunion of Shanghai friends at the Regent Palace Hotel, I saw David Hunter for the first time since our arrival at Southampton in 1946. Despite the seven years he had scarcely changed, eyes under his pale fringe still watching the doors and windows as if he had just escaped from a penal institution. After a few years of working for his father, an import-export agent in the City, he had been a tennis instructor, a trainee actor, and even, briefly, a Jesuit novice. We began to see each other for lunch, drawn together by that sense of an unresolved past which we shared. He was nearly always drunk, but at the same time almost pedantically sober, unable to make sense of his own life but certain about the right course for mine. When his face was flushed with gin I could see the bruises rising through his skin.

“Psychiatry wasn't right for you, Jim,” he told me frankly, waving aside an entire career. “You'd have spent all your time analysing yourself.”

“Why? I didn't know there was anything to analyse.”

“You could have fooled me, dear sport. Your patients would never have left the waiting room.” David glanced at me in the same irritating and knowing way that Richard Sutherland had sometimes watched me in his office at the Psychology Department, as if waiting for some sudden insight into my character. “Tell me, do you still think about Shanghai?”

“Less than I used to. We might as well forget it—Shanghai's forgotten us.”

“Unsettling, that. Strange city, but it does have a kind of claim on us. All those poor bloody Chinese. What was Cambridge like?”

“I didn't see that much of the place. It's a glorified academic gift shop for American universities, where they can buy some quaint little professor for a few dollars. You need to be a tourist or an au pair girl to get the most out of it.”

“I took a course of lessons at the flying school. For some reason I wanted to go crop spraying in British Guiana. It's curious the delusions one has.” David shook his head at himself. “A girl and I went on the river in a punt. Cambridge seemed a good place to be.”

“The Americans have their nuclear bases there. Advanced jets sit on the runways loaded with hydrogen bombs, while huge quartermaster-sergeants cruise the country lanes in their Chryslers, looking for turkey farms.”

“Nuclear bases—I imagine you spent a lot of time hanging around them?”

“A little. Better than singing madrigals every hour of the day and night, or pretending to be Rupert Brooke.”

“Only in a way. You should have gone to Yale—though I wouldn't put it past them to be singing madrigals there as well.” David stared at his hands, holding them up as if he had just discovered a new weapon. “You know, we ought to join the American air force. You'd look great in a USAF uniform, Jim, driving around Cambridge in a Chrysler. It's really what you've always wanted to do. You could lay all the girls who haven't already been laid by the boys in USAF uniforms. Jim,
think
about it.”

“David, I am thinking about it. It's quite an idea—in fact, the first new one I've heard for years.”

“And not just for the girls…” David steadied his cutlery, glancing around the tables as if he wanted to straighten all the knives and forks in the restaurant. He was smiling at me with the excited but reassuring eyes I remembered from our afternoons in Shanghai, when he invited the wary Chinese bar girls to the apartment he rented from a Russian dentist in Imperial Mansions. As usual, he had soon provoked these young prostitutes into abusing him. Sex, for David, was as close as he could get to that terrifying evening in the guardhouse with Sergeant Nagata and Mr. Hyashi.

A career as a military pilot offered an even more direct entry to the realm of violence for which we hungered. For both of us the war years in Shanghai still set the hidden agendas of our lives. David dreamed of violence, in his concerned and thoughtful way, while I was looking for a means of re-creating the pearly light I had seen over the rice fields of Lunghua beside the railway station and which seemed to hover so promisingly over the American air bases near Cambridge.

During the next weeks we met again and talked around the possibilities of a flying career. I was bored by my job as a copywriter, and there were fewer weekend visits to Cambridge now that Miriam was working for her history of art degree. Still the mutinous sixth-former, she had become one of the star turns of undergraduate life, scandalising the first-year men with her powerful motorcycle, acting in a pornographic play by Apollinaire that the proctors had banned, smuggling boyfriends overnight into her room at Girton. She was always happy to see me, fiercely holding my shoulders as if ready to marry me that afternoon. But she was waiting for me to come to terms with the war and find my real compass bearing.

Flying in the American bomber force, now readying itself for a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, seemed to fulfil all those dreams, a make-or-break challenge that would force me to face myself. However, the U.S. Embassy, in a misguided fit, declined to recommend us for pilot training. David was stunned by the rejection, remonstrating with the polite but weary officials, who clearly regarded us as complete madmen and strongly urged us to join the RAF.