The Kindness of Women (14 page)

For reasons clear only to David, we always had sex in the same room—he needed to watch and to be watched. Brigid sat across me, wearing her little slip like a masonic apron, steering my penis inside her with one hand as she squeezed my testicles with the other. Yvette at last made me come while she lay on her back, breast held to my mouth as she forced her finger into my anus. In turn, David liked me to watch him on the adjacent bed. His eyes would be fixed on mine in a curiously innocent and trusting way. Shoe marks flushed his thighs, and Yvette sat across him, smearing my semen from her vulva onto the pillow. His hands thoughtfully massaged the stretch marks of her heavy abdomen. One evening he had taken photographs which no one in Moose Jaw would develop. The flash lights irritated the women's eyes, but in the sudden glare their faces, so empty of expression when they had sex, at last came alive, and I saw two blue-collar housewives who had ditched their husbands and aspired to the most bourgeois of lives.

“You NATO boys sure need your liquor,” Yvette opined. She grimaced as David carried my trousers into the bathroom. “How come they ever let him into the air force?”

“It's all part of the Communist conspiracy,” David explained. He began to wash out the trousers in the handbasin, picking at the shreds of turkey. “Don't you listen to Senator McCarthy? NATO is a plot to overthrow the U.S. of A. We're so busy fighting each other we'll have no time to take on the Russkies.”

“I can believe that. It beats me you're ever fit to climb inside those airplanes.”

“Yvette, let me tell you. A few drinks make those old tubs really sit up. Jimmy boy's planning to start World War III on his own.”

“Looks like he's already finished.” Brigid, the dark-haired girl in the black petticoat, sat on the bed beside me. Her small, detergent-chafed hands, with their smell of lipstick, semen, and rectal mucus, ran across my forehead, trying to find a surviving personality. A flicker of concern crossed her eyes and then faded into the vast indifference that separated her from all men. Her small, bony face had the seriousness of a determined child's. She helped me into the bathroom and watched without comment as I sat on the edge of the bath, washing my face in the basin. David had rinsed out my trousers and hung them over the radiator. When I finished she stood in front of the mirror and began to bathe her breasts, trying to soap away the marks left by David's teeth.

I led her into the spare bedroom and sat beside her on one of the beds. Music drummed through the wall, shaking the Victorian dresser. Looking at Brigid's reflection in the full-length mirror, I realised that she was pregnant. I lifted her petticoat and stared down at the plump curve of her abdomen. I held her breast, almost expecting to feel the milk gathering inside its heavy globe, then gently touched her stomach.

“Hey, you're too young for that stuff.” She pushed me away. “It's okay to fuck me but anything else is off limits.”

“Don't worry.” It had not occurred to me that sexual games could be played with an unborn child. “How many months are you, Brigid?”

“The doctor thinks four, but I say five.”

“That's good. What about the father? Does he know?”

“What father?” She glanced at me as if I had not yet learned the facts of life. “She doesn't have a father.”

“It could be a boy.”

“It's a girl.” She spoke with complete certainty, then lay on the bed and raised her knees to expose her vulva. I knelt in front of her, drawing her buttocks onto my thighs, and eased my penis into her vagina, moved by the thought of sharing this private space with her unborn infant. For the child's sake, I hoped it was not a son.

“Just take your time. You won't hurt her.”

Who was the father—one of the Danes or Norwegians, or some Canadian railroad worker waiting for her in the trailer town behind the grain elevators?

“Did Captain Artvin ever come here?”

“Who's that again?”

“Artvin—the Turkish pilot who disappeared.”

“They all disappear, believe me. I went with some of the Turks. Yvette likes them, but I couldn't get to them. What did this one look like?”

“I never met him. He took off one day and flew away.”

“Sounds like a great idea. Next time he can ask me to go with him.” She held my scrotum, drawing on my testicles. “Come on, baby, more now … that's it, push for Momma…”

Later I lay beside her, gazing at the curve of her abdomen. One day soon, a midwife would be using similar words to her. Accepting that I had no prurient interest, she let me raise the petticoat and put my hand on her skin. I was surprised by the size of the child. Now and then a small tremor moved the surface, as if it recognised my hand.

“You come from England?” Brigid asked. “I always wanted to visit there. Maybe I'd see the king and queen.”

“The king died. But I've seen them—they came to my college.”

“On the level?”

“Sure. A big limousine pulled up and four little people stepped out, the king and queen and the princesses. They looked as if they were landing on the Earth for the first time.”

“That's something. Did you really get to meet them?”

“Almost…” As an undergraduate prank I had taken off my academic gown and laid it in a pool of water under the wheels of the approaching Daimler. Describing the incident, I realised that I had impressed Brigid at long last. When I entered her body she saw me as working for her, doing my bit to help the unborn child, but now I was more than twenty Canadian dollars.

In the next room David and Yvette were asleep. I was glad that David had calmed himself and was able to embrace Yvette without needing some elaborate ruse. Flying, and these matter-of-fact women with their direct view of the world, had settled him.

Brigid lay on her side and pressed my hand to her abdomen. “It doesn't bother you?”

“I used to be a medical student.”

“Then you know about it. Yvette says it's going to be hard in the last months. You can attract the wrong kind of guy.”

I was massaging the small of her back, in a way that I imagined young husbands caring for their pregnant wives. I felt the child stir, as if woken by the music. The likelihood of Captain Artvin being the child's father was remote, but something bound them together in my mind. Assuming that Artvin was dead, and that I alone knew his resting place, as a fellow pilot I had some notional responsibility for this infant. I tried to think of Miriam, but her letters had become more and more infrequent.

“Tell me, Brigid, would you like to go to England?”

“Sure. I could meet the queen—you can introduce us.”

“I mean it. I have enough money.”

“So?”

“So we go together. You can stay with me there.”

“Together?” She turned from me and lay on her back, moving my hand from her abdomen. She pulled down the black slip.

“Why not?” I waited for her to reply. “You think I'm too young?”

“Just a little. You NATO boys … you're going to be flying around with your atom bombs, making the world a safer place. Let's get to sleep while there's still time left…”

*   *   *

Her coolness hurt, however naïve my drunken scheme seemed in the uneasy light of the next day's hangover. A week later, flying over Deer Lake, I tried to remember the position of the drowned Harvard. Somewhere to the northwest I had seen the turtle-shaped lake, but it had vanished into the featureless landscape. Warmed by the late February sunlight, the surface ice was beginning to melt, and the lakes were changing shape as the snow retreated to the original shorelines. Abandoning my navigation exercise, I flew back and forth across the white land, past the isolated water towers and grain elevators.

An hour later, when I found the Harvard, I had almost run out of fuel. The turtle lake had become a long ellipse, one of a cluster of small lakes separated by yellowing meanders. Algae covered the fuselage, but I could see the blurred numerals on its wing. Circling the lake at five hundred feet, I fixed its map position—once the lake warmed in the early spring, a month before we moved to the jet school at Winnipeg, I would rent an inflatable dinghy and show the Turks where their comrade was buried. I hoped that they would decide to leave him in the lake, sealed away from the world in his cocoon of algae, still embarked on his solitary flight.

Twenty miles from Moose Jaw the fuel tanks were empty. By luck I found an empty stretch of road between two deserted wheatfields. At the last moment, as I came in to land, I saw the fencing posts beneath their upholstery of snow. The Harvard touched down in a storm of icy mud that sluiced across the silent fields. It lost its starboard wing tip, then ground-looped and careened to a halt in the ditch beside the road.

Fifteen minutes later a mink farmer in a slush-covered Cadillac drove up as I sat stunned in the cockpit. He stared calmly at the blood leaking from my helmet and drew on his cigarette with his hard lips. At last he raised his window and rolled away. I learned later that he had never contacted the airfield, perhaps hoping that I would freeze to death behind my cracked windshield.

*   *   *

The senior Canadian officers hearing my case openly admitted their bafflement. I had been seen over Deer Lake, but they were puzzled that I had managed to consume the Harvard's ample reserves of fuel. They had already decided that I should cease training and be returned to England, but they examined and reexamined my flight plan, suspecting that I had been navigating a secret course of my own.

Did they think that I might be planning to defect and was rehearsing the same escape flight made by Captain Artvin? In a sense they were right, as David was well aware. He made no attempt to intervene on my behalf, knowing that it was time for me to leave the air force. Whatever mythology I constructed for myself would have to be made from the commonplaces of my life, from the smallest affections and kindnesses, not from the nuclear bombers of the world and their dreams of planetary death. By revealing the location of the lost Harvard I might have persuaded them to alter their decision, but I had seen enough of the RAF. I wanted to forget Shanghai and the Avenue Edward VII and the flash of the Nagasaki bomb, and there was a simple way of doing so.

I would never lead the Moscow run to the Third World War. The unborn child in the Iroquois Hotel had given me my new compass bearing. Miriam had written to say that she had taken a job on a Fleet Street newspaper, and I wanted to be with her again and be amazed by her American underwear. I was sorry to leave David, endlessly driving the long roads of Saskatchewan in his secondhand Oldsmobile, but he was happy now and had his own destinations. Flying had helped to free him from the past, and already he talked of leaving the RAF at the end of his initial engagement period and becoming a commercial pilot. For the time being he was right to stay in Moose Jaw and do his best to cheer up the Turks. The NATO boys would stage their mutinies and fill the bar of the Iroquois, while the VD films played in the meteorology theatre and Captain Artvin continued his long flight home.

6

MAGIC WORLD

“Shall we go to Magic World?” I asked the children.

“Magic World! Yes!” Four-year-old Henry was already at the gate, rattling the iron catch. He shouted to the neighbours' dozing retriever: “Polly, we're going to Magic World!”

Three-year-old Alice skipped down the path, admiring her shiny shoes. “Magic World, Magic World…!”

Miriam leaned against the door while I hunted for sunglasses in the clutter of toys and unread bills on the hall stand. She waved to the children, smiling as if she would never see them again and wanted to remember this moment forever. When we returned from the walk Alice and Henry would have changed in a hundred small and marvellous ways, leaving their present selves somewhere in the woods. Parents were nostalgic for every second of these lost lives.

“Keep an eye on them.”

“They'll keep an eye on me. We'll be gone for an hour—you're sure nothing's going to happen before then?”

“I don't know…”

In the last month of her pregnancy, time seemed to slow for Miriam, stretching her smallest gesture—a hand raised to ease her heavy breasts, the lipstick drawn absentmindedly across her mouth. She was moving into the timeless realm of the child in her womb; mother and child would begin life together. She pressed against me, knowing that I liked to feel the warm bulk beneath her smock, and lightly patted my penis.

“Just making sure you have everything you might need on the walk.”

“Sh … Midwife Bell will hear you. She disapproves enough of me already.”

“She adores you. Without you she'd be out of a job.”

I embraced Miriam, breathing the familiar heady scents of baby talc, basil, gloss paint, and washing powder that clung to her smock. On its hem was a brown potty stain left by one of the children, taking its place among the countless stains and smells of our little house, a realm of soft armpits and swollen nipples in which I had spent an entire life.

“Rest now. Don't start rebuilding the bedroom.”

“Bring me back some magic.”

*   *   *

With a last wave, I latched the gate and set off with Henry and Alice down the sun-filled street. Polly the retriever had decided to join us. He trotted beside Alice, now and then detouring to quiz and spray a lamppost. The modest houses in Charlton Road sat in their quiet suburban gardens, but seeing them through the dog's and the children's eyes transformed the rosebushes and rockeries, the freshly painted front doors and forgotten roller skates. They became more vivid, as if aware that Polly and the children would soon forget them, and were urging themselves more brightly into existence. Our own house was as modest as the others—my salary as assistant editor of a scientific journal barely matched the small mortgage—but Miriam, Henry, and Alice turned it into an endless funfair of noise and cheer. Behind other doors in Charlton Road were other Miriams. Young wives and their children strolled the streets of Shepperton and played in their gardens like agents of an exuberant foreign power.