J. Ballard - The Kindness of Women

Soon after arriving at Cambridge I invited Peggy to my rooms at King’s, with their windows on to the noisy, organ-weary chapel. Happy to see her again, I watched her stalk around my sitting-room, shaking her head over the Magritte and Dali reproductions on the mantelpiece, and the novels by Camus and Boris Vian. I remembered our days together in the children’s hut at Lunghua when she had carefully explained, in at least twelve stages, the right way to sew a button on to my shirt. Sensible housewifery could hold any demons at bay, any hunger.

‘Why do you read all this stuff? You aren’t going to the Sorbonne. Nobody’s heard of them here.’

‘Peggy, they haven’t heard of anything in Cambridge. The dons are only interested in their damned madrigals and getting on to the Brain’s Trust. The whole place is fake gothic pageant with a cast of thousands of bicycles.’

‘It isn’t gothic and it isn’t a fake.’ Peggy turned the novels face down on to the mantelpiece, clearly worried for me. ‘When they built King’s Chapel it was more modern than Corbusier, and stood for something weird enough even for you to believe in. Go to the Cavendish – Rutherford split the atom there.’

‘You make it sound like Anne Hathaway’s cottage. I have met E. M. Forster – he tottered into the Provost’s sherry party yesterday. Whiskery old gent with sad eyes, like a disappointed child-molester.’

‘Good.’ Peggy nodded approvingly. ‘At last you’re meeting the real King’s. Did he put his hand on your knee?’

‘I waited, but no luck. The real King’s, all right. If you listen carefully you can hear the choir-boys sobbing. That’s why they play the organ all day long.’

‘You’re too old for him, that’s all. Those Addenbrookes nurses are more your line. They’ll completely corrupt you … all this brave talk about psychoanalysis.’

‘Psychoanalysis? If I talk about it ever, it must be to myself. Here they see it as a rather strained kind of mittel-European joke.’ I stared through the window at the American tourists outside the chapel. ‘Yesterday I saw a Chevrolet in the Psychology Department car park – it must be the only Chevvy in Europe. God, it made me think of Shanghai and all those Americans.’

‘Why? Stop thinking about Shanghai and Lunghua. It’s all over.’

‘I don’t think about it, actually. But it isn’t over.’

Peggy took my shoulders, as if we were back in the children’s hut and she was warning me not to provoke Sergeant Nagata. ‘Jamie, try to remember – you’re here, in England.’

‘Yes … in a weird way Lunghua was a small version of England. I used to wonder why no one tried to escape.’

‘Where would they have escaped to?’

‘That wasn’t it. Lunghua reminded them of home. Remember all those signs? “Waterloo Station”, “Piccadilly Circus”, “The Serpentine”? That was a stagnant pond that gave everyone malaria.’

‘It kept people’s spirits up. Besides, you’ve forgotten that some people did escape. You were the one who wanted the war to go on for ever. While David and the Ralstons were trying to break out, you were trying to break in. People thought it was very funny.’

‘The food store? So everyone knew? I wanted us to live there for ever. Hansel and Gretel, I suppose. God, I loved you so much …’

But when I placed my hands on her waist, trying to thank her for all she had done in Lunghua, she slipped away from me. I sat down in my armchair, as the organ blared insanely from the chapel, thinking of the elderly lechers who had made Peggy’s last year in the camp such a trial. Something about my books and reproductions disoriented her; perhaps she feared that Cambridge might be dismantled like the Tsingtao of her childhood. The French novels and my feigned world-weariness were not merely frivolous and adolescent, but dangerous, like my decision to dissect a female cadaver. Peggy had been my first love, but sadly not my first lover. She had known me too closely in Lunghua, washing and feeding me when I was ill, and sharing too much emotional stress, to want us to come together again.

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