The Kindness of Women (25 page)

My arms and legs were dressed in light, sheaths of mother-of-pearl that formed a coronation armour. I looked down at the simple headstone that marked the grave of Henry's Dutch rabbit, waiting for the creature to reconstitute itself from its own bones and lollop through the glowing grass. In the waking dream of this illuminated garden, time and space no longer pressed their needs. The contingent world was rearranging itself, and serial time was giving way to simultaneity, as Dick had promised, where the living happily consorted with the dead, the animate with the inanimate.

I waited for Miriam to appear among the trees. She would walk in this garden again, while Alice and Lucy played with their younger selves and I met the youthful husband I once had been. I looked back at the house, but Dick had vanished and his camera stood on its tripod beside my empty chair. Charlton Road ran through a nave of light towards the river, and I assumed that Dick had gone to collect the children, telling them of their new playmates waiting for them at home.

I followed the pathway around the house. The silver envelope of my car floated in the drive like a tethered blimp. My neighbour approached with her elderly retriever, whose frayed coat and white muzzle glowed like a lion's. Shepperton lay before me, a town of matadors and their families dressed in their suits of light. The traffic moved down the high street, the cars exchanging their vivid auras. A helicopter crossed the river, its blades throwing silver spears at the great elms.

I crossed the road by the war memorial and entered the riverside park. In the distance, under the willow trees, my children were playing with balloons they had bought at the sweet shop. Globes of painted air hovered between their hands. Behind them a young woman walked through the forest. Her blond hair floated among the leaves, shedding haloes onto the ground at her feet. Breathless, I was struck by the grace of her walk, as she calmed the trees with a gesture and settled the starlings with a smile. With her unguarded beauty, she reminded me of a princess in the jewelled caverns of Gustave Moreau. I waved to her, hoping that she would touch me with the same calm grace, but she was following the children towards the river.

Losing my way in the overlit foliage, I sat down on a bench and stared at the unmoving hands of my watch. The world paused as time held its breath. The light was now so intense that it bleached all colour from the foliage of the elms. The grass around me was a carpet of milled glass, the trees hung with pendants of ice carved from the crystallised air. My eyes were exhausted by the whiteness of the world. Alice and Lucy ran towards me, figures in an overexposed film, all expression blanched from their faces as they played in their snow palace.

The river was a glacier of opal, moving past frosted banks. If time stood still, the water would fail to break under my feet. I walked towards it, ready to step onto its corrugated surface, aware of Cleo Churchill warning me away with her Moreau smile. She was pulling at my arm, but I knew that we could cross the river together and rest with the children in the meadow facing the park.

I called soundlessly to Alice and Lucy, who stared at me in a puzzled way, as if they had forgotten that I was their father. Then Dick Sutherland was running through the trees towards me, holding my shoulders and guiding me away from the water. I sat with him on the white grass, while the doors of the sun closed around me.

*   *   *

Three hours later I lay in my bedroom, a pillow under my back and my neck aching from the strain of staring at the sky. An interior dusk had settled over everything. The garden was sombre now, the muted colours locked away within the trees and flowers, as if depressed after their brief freedom. I tried to shield my inflamed eyes from the sunlight reflected off the passing cars. My entire nervous system was irritable and exhausted, and I could neither sleep nor rest. After rescuing me from the river, Dick had driven me back to the house and left me to recover while Cleo cooked an evening meal for the children.

Distracted by a call from a TV producer, Dick had allowed me to slip away to the park. Already I regretted taking part in the experiment. Dick's carelessness, whether deliberate or not, had nearly led me to drown myself. Annoyingly, he was far more interested in my messianic attempt to walk on water than in my vision of Shepperton as a solar garden, a sleeping paradise waiting to be woken from every stone and leaf.

Trying to steady my mind, I stared at the bedroom ceiling. Whenever my gaze lingered for more than a few seconds a festering sore appeared in the old plaster, as if my eyes were transmitting a virulent disease, a Gorgon-stare that turned a minute insect stain into a throbbing infection. Soon the suppurating plaster was covered with a plague of boils. Trying to recapture their paradise vision, the optical centres of my brain were misreading the smallest cues in the play of light across the quiet room.

I covered my eyes and listened to the children enjoying an impromptu party with Cleo and her daughter. Their voices calmed me, but when I moved my hand I saw that flies covered every inch of the room. Their trembling wings seethed on the sheets and pillows, cloaking my hands in black mittens. Trying to drive them away, I touched my scalp and found that a piece of my skull was missing. The tips of my fingers dipped into the soft tissues of my brain …

Hearing my cry, Cleo left the children and ran up the staircase. She sat on the bed and placed my hands in her lap, shaking her head over the afternoon's folly. Looking up at her concerned face, I could still see the nimbus of light that had followed her through the riverside trees. I remembered the benediction she had bestowed on every starling and blade of grass.

“Jim … shall I telephone Richard? I ought to ring your local doctor.”

“No—but call Peggy Gardner. I'll come out of it soon.” The last person I wanted around was Miriam's sometime physician, still under the thumb of Midwife Bell and ready to cast doubt on my fitness as a parent. Shortcuts to paradise and shamanistic visions belonged to the dubious realm of backstreet abortions and nutmeg addiction. I moved my hands gingerly to my scalp, relieved that my skull was intact. “My fingers are so sensitive—I thought I'd pushed them into my brain. Are the children all right?”

“They're fine—I've invented a new game for them. They think you've got sunstroke.”

“I have! That intense light—for a few seconds this afternoon I saw … heaven and hell.”

“That
must
be one of Richard's overdoses.” There was a hint of criticism, as if she were well aware of Dick's ambiguous experiments. “I hope it was worth it.”

“Yes … yes, it was.” I held her hand, waiting as the termites faded into the walls. Somewhere inside my head Cleo was still walking through the riverside forest, waiting for me to join her in the palace of light. Its doors stood ajar among the homely elms. In that paradise vision all her shyness had gone, she no longer hid her eyes behind her long hair and ever-ready smile. “It went to pieces at the end, but I saw something I'd never seen before, a dream of…”

“The real world?”

“All the real worlds. Everything was its original self…” Trying to explain myself, I reached out and touched her hair. “I told Dick that you looked like an archangel.”

She moved my hand from her cheek, frowning at my foolhardiness. “That should do wonders for my career. I hope you repeat that on the programme.”

“I will.” I raised myself and sat uncomfortably on the bed beside her. I wanted to embrace Cleo's broad hips. One day she and I would make that river crossing together. “Cleo, tell me—was there any film in the camera?”

“I assume so—why?”

“People are easier to control when they think they're going on television. It's just Dick…”

“Perhaps you've been too trusting—but I imagine he understands you.”

She paused at the door, looking at me as if aware for the first time of my real motives for embarking on this risky expedition across my head.

*   *   *

If Cleo was prepared to put aside her doubts, Peggy Gardner was resolutely disapproving. During the next days I prowled the garden, staring at the sunflowers and the broken toys, as I tried to understand why the light had left them. The whole of Shepperton was drab and inert, exhausted by the effort of briefly becoming its real self. While the children were at school I walked down to the river, searching the trees for any sign of Cleo's presence. As the sunlight pierced the foliage I caught hints of that magic glade where she had walked with the birds, dressed in light.

“You've let a Trojan horse into your mind,” Peggy told me, mustering a show of sympathy. “What were you really trying to do?”

I conducted the air, thinking of a reply. “‘Place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible…' It was stranger than I expected—I was actually looking inside my own head.”

“But, Jamie dear—we already know what's there. It's obvious to anyone who's read a few pages.”

“Shadows on the wall. Dick was right—I was watching the brain at work, seeing it assemble pieces of time and space into a workable dream of life.” I pointed to the walls of my study and the sunlit garden. “All this is just as much a stage set as anything in Shepperton Studios.”

“And what happens when you move the stage sets out of the way?”

“To be honest, I don't know yet.”

“You're going to try again?”

“In a month or two. Dick is keen to film me.”

“Mad … all this for a television programme?”

“I'm humouring him there. It's hard to describe the intense light, the sense that one's about to witness some huge revelation.”

“But what?”

“I'll find out. The same light lay over Lunghua on the day the war ended.”

“It never ended—for you.”

Peggy stood in the open doorway with her back to the garden, looking at me in the same kindly and tolerant way I remembered from the children's hut, when I had outlined some madcap method of finding food for us. The light touched her strong shoulders and the handsome hips I had never held. In a real sense we knew each other too well. Sex was for strangers, and as soon as one ceased to be a stranger desire died. Miriam had always been careful to keep part of herself veiled from me. Perhaps one day Peggy and I would become strangers to each other, as we grew older and apart …

The light shifted, a retinal veer. For a moment I saw Peggy suspended in the air above the pear tree, angel of our suburb. I imagined this spinsterish doctor in her sensible woollen suit and court shoes, positioned at various points above the rooftops of Shepperton.

“Are you all right?” Peggy was staring at my eyes. “You were miles away. What about the children—is Sally going to look after them?”

“Dick's asked a friend of his, Cleo Churchill. She brought her daughter and slept on the sofa. She's more level-headed—I think he's frightened that Sally might—”

“Poor Sally. You people use each other like deviant children.”

*   *   *

I kissed Peggy fondly, watched her drive away, and then helped the children with their homework and prepared our lunch. Deviant adults? The reproof stung, however much I reminded myself that Peggy's stance of responsibility and good sense was more at odds with the world than she realised. She might care for her deprived and abused infants, but she had never loved a child of her own, with all that love entailed. Spectres stalked the little garden of her house in Chelsea. It was not only in my mind that the four Japanese soldiers still waited at their wayside railway station for a train that would never come, as trapped by time as we were. War was the means by which nations escaped from time. Peggy and I and those Japanese soldiers had been marooned on that island platform, waiting for another war to set us free. They had tormented the Chinese to death in the hope that cruelty alone would release the mainspring of war.

*   *   *

Three weeks later, on another warm summer afternoon, I sat in my chair by the open French window. Dick's camera, with or without its film, sat on its tripod. While Cleo readied the children for a picnic, Dick was talking to his agent on the telephone, still in high hopes of selling his brain series to a regional channel.

At Dick's suggestion we had transformed the overgrown garden into a model of bourgeois family life. The children's toys sat on the grass like exhibits at a church fête. Rescued from the darkest cupboards, an older generation of bears and koalas sat in a circle like geriatric patients allowed to take the sun. The girls' brightest frocks, washed and ironed, hung from the clothesline, and Henry's bullfight poster, listing his name with those of Cordobés and Paco Camino, was pinned to the pear tree.

Hearing the children shouting by the gate, I left my seat and walked around the side path. Cleo was lifting a picnic basket through the kitchen door.

“Are you coming with us? Good.” She greeted me with a smile of surprise. She remained doubtful of Dick's experiments and clearly thought I was being manipulated by him.

“No.” I helped her with the basket. “I wish I was. We're starting in a moment.”

She brushed her hair from her cheeks, deliberately showing me her strong face. “I hope you're all right. Last time…”

“There was something wrong with the dose. Don't worry. I'll see you as an archangel again.”

“See me as I am.” She stopped by the car and rested the picnic basket on the hood. Earlier she had helped Dick to set out the children's toys on the grass, striding uneasily around the garden like the reluctant member of a demolition squad. “Why don't you come with us? You're the last person who needs to experiment with himself.”

“Cleo, I promised Dick…”

Lucy skipped up to me, showing off her shiny belt. “Daddy, are you coming?”

“Come on, Daddy,” Henry chimed in. “We're going to Magic World.”