The Kindness of Women (24 page)

Pushing past him, I opened the door. Sally was sitting on the quilted seat of the laundry basket, her skirt raised to her waist. Her bare legs were crossed around the hips of a young Spanish photographer whom we had met briefly at the Arts Laboratory. His unzipped trousers had slipped around his thighs, and his strong hands had pulled down the bodice of Sally's dress to expose her breasts. With their awkward and almost abstract movements, he and Sally seemed to be rehearsing a pornographic circus turn in which they somehow swapped their clothes during an intense sex act. As he sucked at her right breast Sally kissed his forehead, her strong legs drawing his penis into her. Seeing me, she held the Spaniard's shoulders and gave me a frank and happy smile.

While I drove back to Shepperton I thought of Sally's affection for me and her thousand kindnesses towards the children. Deep affection and the most casual disloyalty coexisted, separated by that tolerant smile. I remembered seeing the Vincents making love in their tired way on Sunday afternoons in Lunghua, and Mrs. Vincent's knowing eyes when she saw me watching her through my curtain. I could almost believe that Sally had deliberately exposed herself to me, urging me to take the next step in my unsentimental education. I had been drawn to Sally because she offered a key to this strange decade, but the only stable element in Sally's world was instability. By isolating my emotions, by separating feeling from action, I might perhaps even learn to enjoy Sally's infidelities.

I thought of her near-drowning at Brighton beach, when she had allowed me to bring a second wife back from the waves. I could still feel the sombre power of the dark rollers striking my thighs and chest as I waded into the deep water where death ran and the black foam through which I had dragged her onto the shingle.

Images of pain and anger floated free, like the billboards advertising the endless deaths of the murdered President, messages of violence and desire that alone could assuage the bereaved.

I sped on past the oncoming headlights, crossing the moonlit Thames to where Shepperton lay asleep in my children's dreams.

10

THE KINGDOM OF LIGHT

“Think of LSD as the kaleidoscope's view of the eye.”

While Dick spoke I sat in my study by the open French window, looking down at the glass of water in my hand and the sugar cube exposed beside the BBC tape recorder. A sinister glitter rose from the foil wrapper.

“Dick, are we ready?” I asked over my shoulder. “This is starting to feel like a suicide attempt.”

“Give me a moment—you
are
going to heaven…” Dick adjusted the tripod of his cine-camera, aiming its ferocious little lens at my face. Already I resented the camera, staring at me like a deformed robot. Summer light filled the garden, playing among the broken toys and the clothesline with its waving pyjamas—the usual cheerful mess that I had offered to clear away. But Dick had been adamant that I change nothing.

Sipping at the water, I noticed the collapsed wigwam which Alice and Henry had built from an old tartan blanket and the cucumber frame. Banished from its dark interior for some breach of childhood protocol, Lucy had demolished the wigwam with her pedal car. The others had threatened a terrible revenge, forgotten the moment that Cleo Churchill and her daughter Penny arrived at the front door. Friends of Dick, they would take the children down to the river while he and I embarked on a trip of our own, a short safari across the width of my skull.

“Dick, the garden's a mess—I ought to clear it up. Let's face it, your TV audience isn't going to be on acid.”

“Just what the ratings need. I'll suggest it to the BBC. They can put a gift pack in
Radio Times.
”

The four children were shouting in the hall, clamouring for ice cream, comics, and bubble-gum wrappers. Cleo Churchill put her head around the door and grimaced cheerfully.

“There's a riot brewing. I'll have to leave you to it.”

“That's fine, Cleo. Jim's eager to go. Give us a couple of hours.”

“Two hours? You ought to be filming me.” She frowned at the camera and microphone, the blood-pressure kit, and my straight-backed chair. “Jim, it looks genuinely weird—are you going to be all right?”

“Don't worry. Dick's monitored a lot of trips.”

“Even so. Never trust the ferryman.”

I could see that she disapproved, taking the view that there were more than enough adult excitements in the world; the experiment that Dick and I were about to make with my brain chemistry was a boy's game scarcely different from those that Henry played in the garden, when he lit a cigarette stub inside the wigwam or exploded a box of matches. Cleo, with her quick smile and shy glamour, was an editor of children's books whom I sometimes saw at Dick's parties. Aware, a little uneasily, of her concern, I guessed that she was worried about more than Dick's credentials. As she withdrew her hand reluctantly from my shoulder she glanced from the perspiration on my face to the untidy study and garden. Beyond any thoughts about the wisdom of experimenting with LSD was a thirty-second guess at my character and whatever flaws this potent hallucinogen might expose.

“Okay…” Dick set a dial on his aviator's watch and started the tape recorder. “It's 15:05 on June 17, 1967…”

Meeting Cleo's warning eyes, I placed the sugar cube on my tongue and let it rest there in a small show of defiance. As the children flung back the front door and rushed towards the gate I hesitated for a last moment. When Cleo had gone, slamming the door after her, I swallowed a mouthful of water.

“Right,” Dick told me. “You'll feel something in about half an hour, so sit back and relax. We can play chess.”

“I'll look at the garden.” I could usually beat Dick at chess, but this was one game he would enjoy losing, as the pieces turned into dragons. I listened to the children's shouts fading down the street, followed by Cleo's strong, cheerful voice. Herself a single parent, she had implied that I was stepping out of character, a responsible father taking this questionable drug, still legally available in England, though there had been frequent calls to have it scheduled.

I stared at the toy-cluttered garden, a moraine of happy memories that the past three years had deposited on this suburban plot. The glacier had moved on, Miriam sleeping calmly within its deeps. The children had almost forgotten their mother, something I had tried to prevent, mistakenly. If they remembered her it was on other levels, in their good humour, resilience, and confidence in unearned affection.

Strangely, Miriam had begun to recede even from me, while at the same time standing out more clearly in my memory. She seemed like the statue of a madonna suspended above the nave of a cathedral, rising into the air as I stepped away from her. The perspective lines of my life still led back to Miriam, but I owed a great deal to the women I had known since her death, above all to Sally Mumford, who had helped me to face head-on the pressures of pain and obsessive sexuality. Curiously, Sally's open infidelities had helped to ease my memories of Miriam, as if her death had been an infidelity of a special kind.

However, Dick had not been keen on having Sally present when he offered to supervise my LSD experiment. Her sudden swerves of mood, her muddled enthusiasms, might derail the hallucinatory locomotive. Eager to make the experiment and explore the locked doors of consciousness, I agreed that Cleo Churchill should look after the children. The amphetamines and drinamyls I had sometimes taken seemed less mind-altering than the average double Scotch, but Dick assured me that LSD was pushing against the limits of the brain.

I remembered his presentation to the head of the BBC's science programmes, as he outlined the projected series in which I would take part. Confident as always that he held his audience's attention, he had prowled around his display charts of brain sections and ECG readings like a pitchman selling the human brain to a party of intrigued visitors from another planet.

“The central nervous system is nature's Sistine Chapel, but we have to bear in mind that the world our senses present to us—this office, my lab, our awareness of time—is a ramshackle construct which our brains have devised to let us get on with the job of maintaining ourselves and reproducing our species. What we see is a highly conventionalised picture, a simple tourist guide to a very strange city. We need to dismantle this ramshackle construct in order to grasp what's really going on. The visual space we occupy doesn't actually coincide with the external world. Shadows are far deeper than they seem to us; the brain softens out the sharp contrasts so that we can analyse them more clearly—otherwise the world would be a mass of zebra stripes …

“Consciousness is the central nervous system's brave gamble that it exists, an artefact that allows it to make its way around the internal and external environments. In fact, we're beginning to think that time itself is a primitive psychological structure that we've inherited from the distant past, along with the appendix and the little toe. Yet we're totally trapped by this archaic structure with its minutes and hours trailing after each other like a procession of the blind. Once we get hold of a more advanced notion of time—let's say, time perceived as simultaneity—we reach the threshold of a far larger mental universe …

“Why do the dying think they're floating through tunnels? Under extreme pressure, the various centres in the brain which organise a coherent view of the world begin to break down. The brain scans its collapsing field of vision and constructs out of the last few rings of cells what it desperately hopes is an escape tunnel. Right to the end the brain is trying at all costs to rationalise reality—whether it's starved of input or flooded with sensory data, it builds artificial structures that try to make sense of the world. Out of this come not only near-death experiences but our visions of heaven and hell.”

Everyone had been intrigued, but the BBC declined to buy the series.

“Dr. Sutherland,” the head of science programmes had commented, “your description of the dying brain rather resembles the BBC…”

*   *   *

“Dick, my watch has stopped.”

“Let me see. No, it's 3:45.”

“It must be later than that…”

I stared at the motionless second hand and tried to work the winder. My fingers felt as cool and sensitive as a jeweller's, but I had the sudden notion they belonged to someone else. The second hand moved again, then halted for a further indefinite movement. A deep ruby light filled the garden, as if the sun had begun to overheat. I leaned forward, almost falling from the chair, and peered at the vivid cyanide blue of the sky.

“Sit back and relax.” Dick stood behind me, reassuringly patting my shoulder. “There'll be a little retinal irritation to start with.”

“Dick, I'm moving in and out of time.”

“That began some while ago. Look at the garden and see what you make of the colours—they're probably drifting down the spectrum.”

I pushed Dick's hands away and wondered if he was playing another of his devious games. He had always been strongly competitive and envied me both Miriam and my China background. There was a sly look on his face which I remembered seeing in his office at Cambridge, like that of a fisherman who had hooked an unexpected catch and was just out of reach of his gaff.

The spools of the tape recorder were turning, but I noticed that they were spinning towards each other. Assuming that this was another piece of antiquated BBC equipment, I waited for the unravelling tape to loop into the air. The black plastic case had separated from the frame, but before I could warn Dick he had stepped away from me to his camera.

Colours were floating free from the surfaces around me. The summer air had become a translucent prism and the blades of uncut grass were touched by a layer of emerald light. The giant Russian sunflowers that I had grown for Alice and Lucy wore crowns of gold that drew them towards the sky. A haze of dense ruby air suffused the foliage of the cherry trees. The scarlet paintwork of Lucy's pedal car was separating from the battered metal, a glowing carapace that some skilful technician had painted on the air and which I wanted to press down onto the rusty shell.

The untidy garden glowed with chemical light. The apple tree and its treehouse formed a chalet-sized cathedral, its branches a stained-glass window in which the broken toys were set within their own haloes. The dragon patterns of the Chinese carpet under my feet, the shaggy bark of the pear tree scored with Henry's initials, the creosoted panels of the fence were releasing the light trapped within themselves. The green veil of every leaf and stem, the scarlet of Lucy's car, were detachable skins below which the real leaf and car were waiting to be discovered. The sunlight and its generous spectrum were gaudy pennants celebrating the unique identity of the smallest stone and twig. Refracted through the prism of their true selves, the leaves and flowers were glowing windows in the advent calendar of nature.

“Jim, look towards the camera…”

Dick sat in the armchair beside me, the tape recorder on his lap. Its spools still turned in opposite directions, but none of the tape had become entangled. As the light in the garden grew more intense I was struck by the remarkable lustre of Dick's hair—some overeager makeup girl at the studios had fitted him with a shoulder-length toupee of copper fleece. Light coursed through its filaments, and I wanted to warn Dick that his viewers would see every fevered mole and freckle in his cheeks. The blood raced through the enlarged capillaries, turning his hands and face into a set of inflamed maps.

Stifled by the seething room, I stood up and stepped through the French window. I walked across the garden, my feet sinking through the electric haze that lay over the grass. The stones in the rockery shone like gems set in jeweller's velvet, and the soil in the flower beds was warm with the glow of compost giving life to itself.