The Kindness of Women (15 page)

The number of children always surprised me—this small Thames-side town was a life engine. When we reached the end of Charlton Road we had already collected a sandy-haired boy on a tricycle, two ten-year-old girls, and the infant daughter of the local builder. The splash meadow was filled with children playing on the grass and fishing for minnows along the reedy banks of the stream. I could almost believe that the bright summer frocks, fishing nets, and children's voices were a dream conjured from this placid stream asleep beneath the willows.

Alice and Henry ran towards the bank, where two mothers kept watch on a park bench. I took off my tennis shoes and walked in bare feet through the cool pelt of the meadow. Beyond the willows lay the calm surface of a gravel lake, its giant excavator rising like the gantries at Cape Canaveral.

Water surrounded Shepperton—the river, the gravel lakes, and the reservoirs of the metropolitan water board whose high embankments formed the horizon of our lives. Once I told Miriam that we were living on the floor of a marine world that had invaded our minds, and that the people of Shepperton were a new form of aquatic mammal, creatures of a new
Water Babies.

“You're Tom, the poor sweep,” she told me, as if placing me for the first time. “Poor Tom…”

“And who are you—Mrs. Do-as-you-would-be-done-by?”

“I don't think so, somehow. More like Mrs. Do-as-you-would-like-to-do-with…”

But we were all water babies. Alice was shrieking at the green slime that Henry flicked with a stick from the stream. I showed them a dead water beetle, but they were more interested in an aerosol paint can that floated between the reeds. It still held some of its propellent gas, and Henry fired a burst of spray at a dragonfly that veered too close.

Trying to repaint the air, we moved through the willows to the water splash that crossed the road. The water ran clear over the worn pebbles, but cars taking a shortcut to Shepperton often stalled there. The exasperated drivers would look up to find a beaming audience of mothers and their children curious to see what they would do next. It was here that the water-splash sequence from
Genevieve
had been filmed. Whenever Miriam and I watched the scene of the stranded antique car we could see ourselves, Henry, and Alice out of shot as we leaned on the polished rail of the footbridge.

Led by the retriever, we set off along the upper arm of the stream, collecting more children on our way. The rectangular stages of Shepperton film studios rose above the trees. Their presence dominated the town as much as the marine world of the reservoirs. Many of the programmes we watched on television were filmed in the streets of Shepperton, and its leafy avenues stood in for locations all over England. In Henry's intense four-year-old mind, Shepperton had begun to colonise the whole country.

These confusions of image and illusion gave Shepperton its special charge, as if true reality rested in the merging of the two. Next door to us lived a married couple whose daughter was a minor television actress. Twice a week the children watched her appear in one of their favourite series, and sometimes would turn from the screen to see her in Charlton Road, stepping from her car on a family visit. Henry and Alice would rush out to greet her, taking for granted that her real character lay somewhere between her fleeting street-self and the far more solid broadcast figure on the screen. Many of our neighbours worked as extras in feature films made at Shepperton studios, and I sometimes felt that Miriam and I were playing our parts in some happily chaotic sitcom whose script we extemporised as we went along.

The children squatted on the edge of the gravel lake and stared at a submerged motorcar resting on the sandy bed. The lake had been stocked by a local fishing club, and rainbow trout swam through the open windows. These drowned cars never failed to intrigue Alice and Henry.

“Henry, where's the car going?” Alice asked.

“Going a long way,” he told her. “Going to China.”

Miriam had explained that a hole dug deep enough in our garden would emerge somewhere in China. The gravel pit was the largest lake that Henry had ever seen, and he often tried to convince me that it was this hole that went all the way to Shanghai. Once when I dived into the lake he watched me as if I were about to set off forever to the world of my childhood.

“Daddy, are you going to swim to China now?”

“Well, it's too far to swim before tea. Let's go to Magic World instead.”

I waited for Polly to round up the children and led them towards a screen of fir trees. Mattresses and rusting bicycles lay among the pinecones, and we followed the dark path to an enclosed meadow behind the film studios. The sunlight played by itself on the knee-deep grass, and the children ran ahead of me, their faces bobbing like lanterns.

Standing in the grass was a collection of stage props abandoned by the companies shooting television commercials. A candy bar the size of a small car lay in the sun, its papier-mâché wrapper peeling from the wooden frame. Beside it were a detergent pack my own height, its plywood sheeting warped by the rain and sun, and a fibreglass ketchup bottle painted in red enamel. Canvas peeled from the shampoo sachets and toothpaste tubes, but this never dismayed Alice and Henry. They ran squealing through the grass, fascinated as ever by the magnified versions of the objects that made up their domestic world.

Pride of place in their affections was taken by a ten-foot-high replica of a pink toilet roll. On earlier visits Henry had pulled back a flap of the rotting canvas, and through this small door the children crawled one by one. I could hear them shrieking with delight at this notion of a toilet roll large enough to live in. They waved their arms through the canvas, shouting to Polly, who was frantically trying to nose his way into the dim interior.

“Let's have a party!” someone shouted.

“Party, party…” Alice was skipping inside the giant roll, eyes on her shiny shoes in case they vanished from her feet.

I lay back in the grass, thinking contentedly that there would soon be another child to dance in this enchanted meadow. I was glad that our third child would be born here, as much from the stream and the splash meadow as from Miriam's womb. Her first labour, at the nearby maternity hospital, had been over before I returned home, expecting to be called the next day. Our huge son, solemn as any alderman, was asleep in his mother's arms when I reached the ward. But the infants were separated from their mothers for long periods of the day, bellowing together in their cribs behind a heavy door, and Miriam vowed to have her future children delivered at home, in our own bed.

So we conceived and slept beside the growing Alice as she came to term, and made love an hour before the labour began. Miriam lay back on her own pillows, hands grasping the headboard with its erratic reading light, surrounded by the wardrobe and her familiar clothes, her mother's photograph and her friends' flowers and greeting cards on the dressing table. In this warm midden with its utter lack of hygiene she had swiftly given birth to Alice as I stood weeping behind the capable shoulders of Midwife Bell. That night we slept together with Alice in her cot beside us, as Polly the retriever nosed the dustbin, snuffling for the placenta in its parcel of newspaper. The next day Miriam was up to welcome her friends and see me off to work.

Not only was I glad that our child would be born in Shepperton, but I almost believed that I, too, had been born there. The past had slipped away, taking with it my memories of Cambridge and Canada, of the dissecting room and the snow deserts of Saskatchewan, and even of Shanghai. The warm light over Shepperton reminded me of the illuminated air that I had seen over the empty paddy fields of Lunghua as I walked along the railway line, but the light that filled the splash meadow came from a kinder and more gentle sun. The children Miriam had borne and the others who played by the stream had taken the place of the dead Chinese lying in the Lunghua creeks and canals.

For the first time I was living in an endless present that owed nothing to the past. The skies over Shepperton were crossed by airliners taking package tourists to the holiday beaches of Corfu and the Costa Brava. Soon the whole planet would be on vacation. At Cape Canaveral, the Americans were readying themselves to fly into space. On television we watched Richard Sutherland reporting from the space centre, the Florida sun gleaming through his blow-dried hair. He was now a presenter of popular-science programmes, one of the new breed of media academics who taught the world to feel at ease with itself. His upbeat commentaries dovetailed perfectly with the commercials for candy bars and fabric conditioners. Past and future had been annexed into a present as depthless and cheerful as a child's colouring book.

I woke in the sleepy heat of the meadow grass, aware that the children were fighting inside the toilet roll. A light aircraft soared overhead, its propeller catching the sun. A single-engined Piper, it had flown from the west, where Fair Oaks airfield lay in the woodland beyond Chertsey. It turned in a wide circle above the studios, flaps lowered as if the pilot were trying to land in this secret meadow.

The children broke off their quarrel. Alice ran to me as I knelt in the grass and hid in my shoulder.

“Is that a bad plane, Daddy?”

As always, I was surprised by her shrewdness. She had seen me frowning at the aircraft and its camera pylon mounted behind the passenger door.

“No, it's a good plane—it might bring you a present.”

Henry sat against my knee, pushing Alice's hand from my chin. “Daddy, has it got a bomb?”

“A bomb? Who would want to bomb Shepperton?”

“Uncle David might. He has a bomb, Daddy. He told me.”

“Not anymore. Besides, he's much too fond of you and Mummy. Home, everybody…”

*   *   *

David Hunter came to see us that afternoon. He had left the RAF at the end of his short-service commission, after active service against the terrorists in Kenya and a last tour flying the Vulcan nuclear bomber. “Think, Miriam,” he liked to remind her, “if that Turk hadn't defected to the Russians, your husband and I could have dropped the first hydrogen bomb on Moscow. How does it feel to be married to a man who might have started World War III?”

His scatty charm still protected him, but he had the edginess of a man who expected the past to come up behind him and tap him on the shoulder with some absurd but nagging inquiry. For a year he had drifted along the fringes of private aviation, and then bought a small company specialising in aerial photography. He would be away for months, photographing industrial complexes in Brazil or hotel developments in the Seychelles. For the past week he had been based at Fair Oaks, making a cine-film of the prewar Brooklands motor-racing circuit.

As rootless as ever, he never ceased to be amazed by my quiet domesticity, suspecting that I had repressed a large part of my true nature. Aware that Miriam felt uneasy at any talk of Shanghai, he rarely referred to our war years together.

He arrived with presents for the children, a bottle of whisky for me which he promptly opened and began to drink, flowers for Miriam and lavish compliments she was too delighted to resist.

“Why are pregnant women so erotic? Tell me, Miriam. In my bones I know we'll get married one of these days.”

“There's a queue forming,” Miriam warned him. “Richard Sutherland, Henry, Jim … You'll have to fight your way down the aisle.”

“God, woman, I'm kneeling by the altar.” He placed his hands on Miriam's smock. “It must be due any moment—if it comes this afternoon, can I watch?”

“Only if you can prove that you're the father.” Miriam loved his attentions, as she loved those of other men, revived by their compliments far more than by mine. She had always been a flirt, but five years of marriage and children made the lightest flirtation seem a serious business. To a mother of two children, sex was all or nothing. I knew that sometimes she longed to get away, to live on her desert island with three strange men—though with husband and children tucked into a decent pension in the next bay—and that she encouraged my writing as a way of being adventurous by proxy. I dimly guessed that one day she would have affairs and this second childhood would be over. I had learned that a woman could love her husband and children but still feel restless enough to want to leave them.

*   *   *

As we stumbled around the broken toys in the garden, David came to the point.

“I'm off to Hong Kong at the end of the month. All expenses paid. We're filming a housing project in Kowloon for a Chinese developer.”

“What a plum. There are lots of old Shanghai hands you can look up.”

“I'll avoid them. I want to go up to Shanghai itself.”

“Think of me as you stroll down the Bund.”

“As it happens, I wondered if you'd like to come?”

“To Hong Kong?”

“Shanghai, mostly. You could take a month's leave. We need to go back and see the place for ourselves.”

“David, I can't. Even if I wanted to, there are Miriam and the baby. You'll find someone in Hong Kong.”

“No, thanks. Those old Shanghai hands, and all that talk of tiffin and mah-jongg and how many servants they had—nothing to do with what really happened. That's why you and I should go.”

“Nothing did happen.”

“For a start, Jim, we happened. That railway station you were always talking about in Moose Jaw. We ought to find it for you.”

“That was a killing. Sad for the Chinese, but it meant nothing.”

“You used to say he was trying to tell you something. You need to get away from this—it's potty botty doo-doo all the day…”

“David, it's the only time I've been happy.”

“But you shouldn't be too happy, Jim.”

After David had gone I mentioned his offer to Miriam.

“David's a fool!” She thumped her saucepan onto the kitchen table, where the children had set up a miniature replica of their Magic World. “You haven't flown for years. He'd have you killed the first time you tried to take off.”