The Kindness of Women

Other Japanese sentries, at the request of the American and Kuomintang authorities, guarded key government buildings around the city. My father told me that the Free French occupying Indo-China had recruited units of the Japanese army in their fight against the communist Viet Minh. For all this, whenever I saw the armed Japanese I thought of the isolated railway station in the countryside south of Shanghai. I almost believed that the Japanese soldiers guarding the city were preparing the bar-keepers, prostitutes and American servicemen for a longer journey that would soon set out from that rural platform.

The first of a long series of war crimes trials were held in October, and the senior Japanese generals who had ruled Shanghai during the war were charged with an endless catalogue of atrocities against the Chinese civilian population. Almost in passing, we heard that the Japanese had planned to close Lunghua and march us up-country, far from the eyes of the neutral community in Shanghai. But for the sudden end of the war, they would have been free to dispose of us, and only the atomic bombs had saved our lives. The pearly light that hung over Lunghua reminded me for ever of the saving miracle of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Once a week I visited the camp, where several hundred of the British internees were still housed. They survived on the rations parachuted by B-29 Superfortresses identical to those that had bombed Nagasaki. The dead and the living had begun to interbreed. As Yang drove south along the Lunghua road I searched the paddy fields for any sign of the railway station, expecting to see its platform crowded with new arrivals.

I tried to explain all this to Peggy, while she waited for her parents to sail from Tsingtao. I gave her the presents of clothes that I had bought at Sincere’s, the latest American lipsticks, nylon stockings and a box of Swiss chocolates. I was happy to be with her again in the children’s hut, watching her try on her new make-up. Through the rouge and lipstick a vivid woman’s face appeared, more beautiful than all the prostitutes at the Park Hotel. I wanted to embrace her and thank her for everything she had done for me, but we knew each other too well. Already I felt that she had begun to free herself from the camp, and that we would soon grow apart.

Casually, I described the death of the young Chinese. When I finished, hiding my feelings behind a liqueur chocolate, I realised that I had made him sound like myself.

‘Jamie, you should never have gone.’ Peggy settled a small child into its cot. ‘We did try to stop you.’

‘I had to go back to Shanghai. You know, I was really looking for Sergeant Nagata …’

‘Those soldiers might have killed you.’

‘They didn’t need to – I wasn’t ready for them.’

‘Jamie, they didn’t touch you! You walked away from them.’

‘I suppose I did – I keep thinking I should have stayed. Peggy, they wouldn’t have hurt me.’

Already she could see that I was disappointed.

At the end of October, as I left the Cathay Hotel after lunch with my mother, I shared a taxi with two American navy pilots who were trying to find the Del Monte Casino. I guided the Chinese driver to the Avenue Haig, only to find that the casino had been ransacked by the Japanese in the last days of the war. As we left the taxi, looking at the shattered windows and the broken glass on the steps, I noticed David Hunter hailing the driver from the lobby of Imperial Mansions, a run-down apartment building across the street in which several brothels operated.

David, like me, was dressed in a pale grey suit and tie, which he wore in the faintly shifty way shared by all the former Lunghua boys, as if we had been released after serving a sentence at a corrective institution. At times we would meet every day, but often I would do my best to avoid him. He had recovered from Sergeant Nagata’s slaps on the evening he tried to escape, but his swerves of dangerous humour exhausted me. Often I saw him on the steps of the Park Hotel, staring in a strained, smiling way at the Eurasian women waiting for the Americans. Once he lured a suspicious 14-year-old Chinese prostitute into his father’s Studebaker, which he borrowed to take us to the jai alai stadium. In the car park she squatted expertly across David’s lap, embroidered gown around her waist, shouting over her shoulder at the Chinese chauffeur. Dazed by her energy and nakedness, I let David order me into the night air, but twenty minutes later, when the chauffeur and I returned, she was kicking David in a fury of Chinese obscenities and trying to escape through the passenger window. David was laughing generously, his hands on her waist, but under his ruffled pale hair the flush of his cheeks resembled the bruises left by Sergeant Nagata’s hand.

I listened to my feet cracking the broken glass outside the Del Monte. Deciding to give David the slip, I left the American pilots with their taxi and stepped into the entrance of the casino. Gilt chairs lay heaped against the walls of the foyer, and the red plush curtains had been torn from the windows. Like chambers in an exposed dream, the gaming rooms were flooded with sunlight that turned the dance floor into the scene of a traffic accident. A roulette table lay on its side, gaming chips scattered around it, and the gilded statue of a naked woman with upraised arms that supported the canopy of the bar had fallen across a collapsed chandelier, a princess frozen in a jewelled bower.

A Chinese waiter and a young European woman were straightening the overturned chairs and brushing up the plaster that had fallen from the ceiling. As I walked past them the woman turned and followed me, pulling my arm.

‘James! They said you were back! You remember your Olga?’

Olga Ulianova, my pre-war nanny, pinched my cheeks with her sharp fingers. Unsure whether she had recognised me, she felt my shoulders, running her brightly varnished nails over the lapels of my suit.

‘Olga, you really scared me. You haven’t changed.’ I was glad to see her, though time seemed to be running in all directions. If I was three years older, Olga was both in her early twenties and late thirties. A procession of faces had been let into the bones of her face, layers of paint and experience through which gleamed a pair of pointed and hungry eyes. I guessed that she spent her days fighting off American sailors in the backs of the Nanking road pedicabs. Her silk suit was torn around the armpit, exposing a large bruise under her shoulder blade, and a smear of lipstick marked the strap of her brassiere. As she looked me up and down I knew that she had already dismissed my own experiences of the war.

‘So … such a smart suit. Mr Sangster said you had a good time in Lunghua. I guess you miss it.’

‘Well … a little. I’ll take you there, Olga.’

‘No, thanks. I heard enough about those camps. All those dances and concerts. Here it’s been real hell, I can tell you. The things my mother had to do, James. We didn’t have the Japanese looking after us.’ She sighed headily, swayed by the memory. She was sober, but I guessed that for the past three years she had been slightly drunk.

‘Do you work here, Olga? Are you the owner?’

‘One day. Bars, hotels, sing song parlours, everywhere. Believe me, James, these American boys have more money than Madame Chiang …’

‘I hope they give you plenty, Olga.’

‘What? Well, we won the war, didn’t we? Tell me, James, is your father still rich?’

‘He definitely isn’t.’ The thought of money had rekindled her waning interest in me. ‘He’s been in Soochow camp all through the war.’

‘He can still be rich. Take it from me, you can find money anywhere. Just look hard enough and give a big pull.’

She wiped the lipstick from her teeth, appraising me anew. Already I felt aroused by Olga, as confused as ever by her changes of temper. In every sense she was more wayward and exciting than the women in Lunghua. Before the war, when I undressed, she had glanced at my naked body with the off-hand curiosity of a zoo-keeper being shown a rare but uninteresting mammal. I took for granted now that no male body would rouse even a flicker of interest. Yet her eyes were sizing me up as if she were about to place a large physical burden on my shoulders.

‘I can see that you’re still a dreamer, James. I’m thinking about your father. He can make a good investment right now, while the Americans are here. There’s a small restaurant in the Avenue Joffre, only six tables …’

She stepped forward on her high heels, stumbling across the cut-glass pendants of the chandelier. She steadied herself, holding my arm in a strong grip. Her hip pressed against mine, trying to remind me of something I had forgotten. A potent scent of sweat and powder rose from her shabby dress, a quickening odour that I had noticed in the women’s huts at Lunghua.

I let her lean against me as we walked across the dance floor, our shoes breaking the glass. A rush of ideas filled my head as she worked her thigh into my leg. The war had accelerated everything, and I felt that I was surrounded by moving trains all beyond my reach. I wanted to have sex with Olga, but I had no idea how to approach her, and I knew that she would enjoy laughing at my gaucheness.

At the same time, something more than shyness held me away. Part of her attraction was the thought of going back to my childhood, but if I was certain of anything it was that I was no longer a child, and that the games of hide-and-seek through the streets of pre-war Shanghai were over for ever. Being brought up by servants, supposedly the gift of privilege, in fact exposed a child to the most ruthless manipulation, and I had no wish to be manipulated again, by sex or hunger or fear. When I made love for the first time it would be with Peggy Gardner.

I listened to the pendulum-like motion of the waiter’s broom. Olga’s free hand had slipped under my jacket and was pressed against my abdomen. She was hesitating, as if aware that she might find herself cast again as my governess, reminded of her parents’ penury in their pre-war tenement and the boring hours she had spent looking after this little English boy with his cycle and free-wheeling imagination.

From the hollows of Olga’s neck and the enlarged veins in the skin of her breasts I guessed that she had eaten as little as I had in the past three years. I put my arm around her shoulder, suddenly liking this tough young woman with her rackety ideas. Only the first-class private at the railway station had looked at me so intently. I wanted to tell Olga about the dead Chinese, but already the lost Japanese patrol was moving into the rear of my mind.

‘Are you going back to England, James?’

‘After Christmas – I’m sailing on the Arrawa with my mother.’ This troopship, a former refrigerated meat carrier, would repatriate the British nationals in Shanghai. ‘My father’s staying on here.’

‘He’ll stay? That’s good. I’ll talk to him about my restaurant. Will you study in England?’

‘If I have to.’ On an impulse, I said: ‘I’m going to be a doctor.’

‘A doctor? That’s very good. When I’m sick you can look after me. It’s your turn now.’

As I left, promising to introduce her to my father, Olga said: ‘Now you can play hide-and-seek in the whole world.’

A week after Christmas I left Shanghai for ever. Some six hundred former internees, mostly women and children, sailed for England in the converted meat carrier. My father and the other Britons staying behind in Shanghai stood on the pier at Hongkew, waving to us as the Arrawa drew away from them across the slow brown tide. When we reached the middle of the channel, working our way through scores of American destroyers and landing craft, I left my mother and walked to the stern of the ship. The relatives on the pier were still waving to us, and my father saw me and raised his arm, but I found it impossible to wave back to him, something I regretted for many years. Perhaps I blamed him for sending me away from this mysterious and exhilarating city.

When the last of the banks and hotels faded into the clouds above the Bund I carried my suitcase to one of the men’s mess rooms. At night we slung our hammocks across the open decks where the refrigerated carcases of New Zealand meat had hung. In the darkness the hundreds of sleeping bodies swayed together like sides of lamb packed in canvas.

After our evening meal I returned to the stern rail, almost alone on the deck as the Arrawa neared the entrance to the Yangtse. Shanghai had vanished, a dream city that had decided to close itself to the world. The rice fields and villages of the estuary stretched to the horizon, with only the sea to separate them from the nearest landfall at Nagasaki.

The Arrawa paused at Woosung, readying itself to join the great tide of the Yangtse as it flowed into the China Sea. As we waited on the swell, edging closer to the eastern bank of the Whangpoo, we drifted past a large American landing craft beached on the shore. A tank-landing vessel scarcely smaller than the Arrawa, its flat prow lay high on the streaming mud-flat, as if it had been deliberately beached on this isolated coast. The Arrawa was in no danger of striking the craft, but a signal lamp flashed from its bridge. American military police patrolled its decks, their weapons levelled as they waved us away.

A fetid stench floated on the air, as if vented from an exposed sewer filled with blood. Leaning from the stern rail, I saw that the hold of the landing craft was filled with hundreds of Japanese soldiers. They sat packed together in rows, knees pressed against each other’s backs. All were in a bad way, and many lay down, crushed by the mass of bodies. They ignored the Arrawa, and only a group of handcuffed NCOs turned their eyes towards the ship.

A loudspeaker barked from the bridge of the landing craft, and the American guards shouted at the British officers in the wheel-house. Clearly the Arrawa had appeared at an inconvenient moment. The Japanese armies in China were being repatriated, but I wondered how this large body of men, almost a brigade in strength, would ever survive the three-day voyage to the Japanese mainland.

Then, on a cliff above the mud-flats, another group of armed soldiers caught my eye. Hundreds of Kuomintang infantry, in their peaked caps and leggings, bayonets fixed to their rifles, stood on the grass-covered slopes, waiting for the Arrawa to move away.

A siren thundered over my head, almost splitting the funnel. Its echoes hunted the vast brown swells of the Yangtse. We steered ahead, the single propeller churning the water and sending its spray into my face. The forward ramp of the landing craft was being lowered from the prow, and the first Japanese soldiers were stumbling on to the mud-flat.

PART II The Craze Years

4

The Queen of the Night

Women dominated my years at Cambridge – fellow medical students, the cheerful Addenbrookes nurses I took drinking on the Cam and the moody demonstrators in the Physiology Department, forever polishing their cracked nails behind the jars of embryos – but none more than Dr Elizabeth Grant. During my first term at the university I saw her naked every day, and I knew her more intimately than any other woman in my life. But I never embraced her.

I remember the October morning in the Anatomy Department when I first met Dr Grant. With the hundred freshmen joining the medical school, I took my seat in the amphitheatre for the welcoming address by Professor Harris, the head of anatomy. I sat alone in the topmost row, marking my distance from the other undergraduates. Exempt from military service, and rugby fanatics to a man, they were mostly the sons of provincial doctors who in due course would take over their fathers’ practices. Already I was depressed by the thought that in forty years’ time, when I needed their help, it would be these amiable but uninspired men who held my life in their hands. But in 1950 I knew nothing about medicine, and had yet to learn that inspiration and amiability played next to no part in it.

Professor Harris entered the theatre and stood at the podium. A small, puckish Welshman, he gazed at the tiers of beefy young men like an auctioneer at a cattle market. He spotted me sitting alone under the roof, asked for my name and told me to put out my cigarette.

‘Come and join us – there’s no need to be standoffish. You’ll find we need each other.’

He waited as I crept red-faced to the seats below. Despite the humiliation, I admired Harris. He and his brother, both now eminent phys- icians, had been born to a poor Swansea family, and each had worked for six years to support the other until he qualified. Despite the late start, Harris had rapidly propelled himself to the professorship of anatomy at Cambridge. His idealism and lack of privilege struck me as unique in the university, and I identified myself closely with him. Needless to say, the privileges of my own childhood escaped me altogether.

Welcoming us to his profession, Harris took us through a brief history of medicine from the days of Vesalius and Galen, stressing its craft origins and low social standing – only in the present century, in response to the emotional needs of his patients, had the physician’s status risen to that of the older professions, and Harris warned us that in our own lifetimes its status might fall. In China, I remembered, physicians were paid only while their patients enjoyed good health. The payments were suspended during illness and only resumed when the treatment succeeded.

Lastly, Harris stressed the importance of anatomy as the foundation stone of medicine, and warned that a small number of us would be unable to face the long hours of dissection. Those repelled by the sight of a cadaver should call on him privately, and would be assigned to other degree courses.

How many did? None in my own year. I can remember the sudden silence, and uneasy jokes, as we entered the dissecting room, part nightclub and part abattoir, with an illuminated ceiling of frosted glass. Waiting for us, lying face up on the dissection tables, were some twenty cadavers. Steeped in formaldehyde, they were the colour of yellow ivory. More than anything else, the richness of their skins marked out the dead, as if their personalities had migrated hopefully to the surface of their bodies. Every kind of blemish stood out in the harsh light, moles and operation scars, warts and faded tattoos, an amputated big toe and a pair of supernumerary nipples on the barrel chest of a cadaver with a prize-fighter’s physique. Each body was an atlas recording the journeys of an entire life.

I took my place at the glass-topped table assigned to me, and set out my dissection manual and instruments. Already I noticed a few curious stares. Alone among the cadavers, mine was that of a woman. For purposes of dissection, the human body was divided into four sections: thorax and abdomen; head and neck; arm; and leg. Each would occupy a term, and be dissected by a team of two students. I knew no one at the medical school whom I could partner, apart from Peggy Gardner, now in her final year at Cambridge, and decided to select a cadaver at random. Then, scanning the list of numbers I noticed that one was identified as ‘17F’. Without hesitating, I wrote my name alongside.

Sure enough, I found myself sitting beside the bald head of a strong-shouldered woman who had died in her late middle age. Fine blonde hairs rose from her shaved eyebrows, lips and pubis, and her face had the firm set of a headmistress or hospital matron. In most respects she was indistinguishable from the male cadavers – her breasts had subsided into the fatty tissue of her chest wall, while the genitalia of the males had shrivelled into their groins – but she was already an object of attention. Most of the students had spent the war in their boarding schools relocated far from the bombed cities, and had probably never seen a naked body, let alone that of a mature woman.

Only Peggy Gardner was unimpressed, when she entered the dissecting room and found me working with my partner, a Nigerian dentist in his thirties, who was taking an anatomy degree.

‘There’s a lot more work there,’ she said reprovingly. ‘You’ll have to cut away all the fat before you reach the fascia.’

‘It was the luck of the draw.’ Embarrassed, I added: ‘For some reason I got the Queen of the Night.’

‘Rubbish. And that’s awfully flippant, Jamie. You’re still trying hard to be different. You haven’t changed since Lunghua.’

‘Peggy, that sounds like a death sentence.’

I might not have changed, but Peggy had transformed herself from the thin-shouldered 16-year-old who had sailed to England with me on the Arrawa. I remembered how she had started to mimic the fine-stitched mannerisms of the widowed Mrs Dwight. Peggy had spent her first years in England in a world without men. Behind her handsome stride I could see the self-confident spinsters who had taught Peggy at her boarding school near Brighton. Stylish but well-buttoned, she sailed through the young demonstrators who tried to flirt with her.

But Peggy, at least, seemed at home in England, which for me was a zone of transit between my past life in China and a future that, annoyingly, showed no signs of arriving. I was marooned in a small, grey country where the sun rarely rose above the rooftops, a labyrinth of class and caste forever enlarging itself from within. The English talked as if they had won the war, but behaved as if they had lost it. My years at school had made me realise how much I was an outsider – the other boys were friendly, but left me alone, as if they found me threatening in some undefined way. I thought all the time of going back to Shanghai, but that escape route had closed in 1949 with Mao Tse-tung’s takeover of China.

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.’