Julia Paradise (11 page)

‘Does it go fast?' she asked silkily, caressing the duco.

‘Very fast,' the man assured her, taking off his hat again and scrutinizing her face. ‘But I myself am a slow and careful driver.' He smiled and gave a rather pretentious half bow forward, mocking the western image of the oriental manner, perhaps. ‘It was a present from my father. A wedding present,' he grimaced slightly, showing straight white teeth.

‘Your father must be very well off to shower such presents upon his children.'

‘One gift. Hardly a shower.' He looked to Ayres who was watching Julia. The colour had risen in her face and her little schoolmarm's mouth was shut tight. She was staring into Johnny Yang's face. No wonder he was embarrassed. He could not have returned such intense scrutiny politely. She was really inspecting him, as though he were a rarity, an oddity: his smooth dry sallow skin with the flattened-out nose, a face apparently without a seam or join in it anywhere, topped by the thick black neatly brilliantined hair.

Julia said, then, ‘He didn't do anything wrong, you know. He has no understanding of politics.'

The policeman now understood. He said as he got into the car, ‘You mustn't worry. We'll be in touch. Tomorrow maybe.'

‘Come to tea,' Julia said flatly as he started the motor. Then the car moved off followed at a distance by the lorry, with Willy Paradise, a willing martyr, in his blackened collar still sitting up in dignified silence.

As they rounded the bend in the drive, Ayres saw Gerthilde Platz in her trousers and man's broad-crowned hat straighten up. She watched the roadster and the lorry until they were out of sight, then turned back to pruning the roses.

 

Julia had put on the old cardigan again and she was smoking cigarettes one after the other. Ayres heard music coming from somewhere in the house, upstairs, he thought, the sound of a gramophone playing the same American jazz tune over and over again. He thought it extremely unlikely that Gerthilde Platz would be playing that kind of music.

Julia's face was screwed up as she spoke. She did not seem to have noticed the music. She was talking about her childhood with the old intensity. Her words, which had begun to slur, came out in venomous little bursts as she struggled for breath in the middle of sentences. Now and then she had to stop herself and make a loose sucking noise because of the saliva that had collected in her mouth. ‘The first night Willy came to the Hotel Continental he was just another man in a suit who had come to pay to get rid of his excess fluids.' She suddenly looked very much older than her thirty-one years of age. Her eyes looked raw.

After a silence she spoke on, her voice ugly.

‘Later that night I saw a man chasing the child along the balcony outside. She was terrified. I ran to the door but she was already at the end of the balcony, the man nearly with her. And then she turned and jumped. When I looked over the rail I could see her white nightdress spread out on the road below.'

Little claws of lines had crept around her mouth which she had rouged a shocking red since the afternoon.

‘Tina Terrina put her big arms around me and wouldn't let me go down to look. We cried together in her bed all night. I can still feel her big breasts shaking in her nightgown.'

Visions of her past continued to pour out of Julia. Everything stubbornly and perversely failed to flesh out the Freudian bones of the ‘case' assembled by Ayres in his clinical notes. As on their Tuesday afternoons she would brook no interruptions for question or clarification.

At one point, suddenly turning in her chair, she switched on the standard lamp and picked up from the floor a flat cardboard box and opened the lid. Still talking all the time, she began shuffling through the dozens of photographs inside. Ayres watched her with a foreboding that he was about to be shown her ‘night pictures'.

It was dark outside and Ayres was anxious to get going.

She was not capable of driving the motorcar and even if he could make it to the station there was no certainty that trains had not been delayed or even cancelled. He felt trapped. He wanted to stop the woman speaking because she was telling him things he did not want to hear, but there was a part of him sitting in that room, with Ayres but not of him, so it seemed, that cold cruel part of his mind which continued to listen behind the knocking of his heart. So excited was that scientific part of him that he said nothing, and sat and watched her hand shake as she lighted her next cigarette.

Open on the table beside his chair was the flat cardboard box of photographs. They had indeed proved to be her ‘night pictures' of the Chinese quarter in Shanghai: a legless beggar sitting on the footpath outside the entrance of a bank; coolies carrying huge bales on either end of bamboo poles bent over their backs; the girl-prostitutes, scarcely twelve or thirteen, lifting their skirts to expose themselves, hungry eyes grotesque above their mannequins' figures; a man wearing a gas mask, and behind him an open tray truck piled with corpses. There were photographs taken in the early-morning tea shops and around the markets, and none of them would have seemed out of place in a police coroner's report. But the subject of the photograph he was staring at was very much alive: one of the waif-prostitutes with her gleaming hair piled up on top of her head, her blouse open to reveal her unformed breasts, her face with its precocious make-up pouting forward at the camera as though she recognized some image in the lens, or behind it. It was the girl called Lucy, whom Morgan McCaffrey had hired as a model a couple of times and whom Ayres himself had used occasionally.

Now Julia spoke urgently, and it was apparent to Ayres that she was entrusting him with everything because she sensed she might be running out of time. She was full of stories that afternoon, specific and detailed as if they had actually occurred, a victim of her own fiction. ‘I didn't realize it was Lucy at first, with her face painted. I had only seen her in her blue school tunic. It had been six months. Even her family had given her up for dead. I had loved that girl. She had been my special girl, she was different from the others. I remember the first time she came to me and recited by heart,

 

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree...'

 

Suddenly Julia looked up at him. ‘You
killed her
, Ayres.'

The face of the child looked back at him from the photograph. The door opens and the painter, Morgan, remains at the easel. Behind his left shoulder Ayres can see the girl. At the sound of the door closing she turns and stares at him with such silent force that her head is thrust forward and her naked body seems out of balance. Morgan, bearded, with unkempt hair, hardly even European-looking in his padded blue coolie's jacket, does not move at Ayres' intrusion. He stands impassively, his brush classically almost pretentiously, poised in the air. His look is stern, his beard and moustache cover his mouth and any sign of emotion it might have given away. Only the eyes are clear, blue, open, almost transparent, giving him something of the piercing expression of the blind. When he finally speaks his voice is playful, amused, out of keeping with that gruff outcrop of beard. He says in his slow, amused voice, ‘Well, lookey me. If it isn't little Lucy's doctor friend here. Whatever can he want?'

‘I want you to show me the picture,' Ayres says.

Lucy's dark eyes look towards Ayres, then wander around the room, unwilling to meet his gaze. It is a large whitewashed room with a stone floor. The room is barbarically bare: no mats, no carpets, no stove for heat, and the model is shivering. Only the walls are covered with Morgan's paintings, some on paper, others on cardboard, plywood, the sides of a tea chest. In the middle of the room where he stands is the makeshift easel, the small work table, nothing more. Ayres looks around at the ten or twelve works pinned to the walls—teahouse scenes, lake scenes, boats drifting along a canal, strangely large brown-skinned native women with egg-like breasts sea bathing.

The painter watches him, his blue eyes still smiling. ‘Well, missee,' he says. ‘Well, little Lucy. We'd better find out what little Lucy's friend the doctor wants. You want to know what he wants, don't you, missee?'

She whimpers and stares hard at Morgan: intense, her fragile body twisting away, dark eyes shining, a tiny forest animal that might break its cover and run. He laughs sympathetically and takes Ayres by the shoulder, ‘Come on, little Lucy's friend. Come into the warm. We wouldn't want you to wear out your big bad bear's feet, now would we?'

He opens the door into the next room. The girl hesitates, then scampers through under his arm. He closes the door of his icy studio gently behind them. They are in a smaller room, almost as bare, but the warmth from the squat porcelain stove in the corner and the furled bed mat make the room feel less stark. A small window high up lets the bleak northern light into the room and shows up the large picture resting against a wall. On canvas this one, and still on its stretchers: a nude of the twelve-year-old girl. Ayres is not prepared for this cold realism, the girl's flat breasts with the nipples scarcely formed, the childish paunch of her belly, no less than the surprise of her pubic hair. There is a message written clearly in the drooping languorous lines of her body, her lank blue-black hair which hangs as though sodden with sweat, the tousle of the bed mat in the background, this same bed mat now rolled up against the wall: Morgan has captured there the sadness of a man's receding desire, a desire not entirely satisfied, and on the girl's face, the despair of repeated rape. Ayres waits and watches for little Lucy's reaction, which does not come. Then the suddenness and force of his movement makes her cry out as he bends her forward against the wall. As he fumbles with his trouser buttons the sadness and the pity of it sticks in his throat.

 

In another country, and besides, the wench is dead; he thought. What difference between a ruptured uterus and a perforated rectum when a girl dies in the streets. The man from City Hall with the gas mask and the open truck wouldn't stop to find out. Or perhaps she had been picked up from the gutter by a woman who haunted the night streets in an old raincoat and scarf, with a camera, and taken to a missionary hospital to do her dying under a cross. Now, sitting in Julia's living room with the burden of the minutes ticking through his nerves, he could do nothing but wait for Julia to tell him.

 

He would relive for a long time everything she said in the room at the mission. He would recall the way her voice had grown thicker and thicker, and how her head had begun to hang to one side from the exhaustion of her telling, and how, the second time he had made himself face the photograph of the dead child, Julia had looked up and said, ‘That first Tuesday I came to your bed, I wanted to know what kind of man could do that.'

 

Willy Paradise was a small fish swimming in a dangerous stretch of ocean, as the First Secretary, Gerald Cole, pointed out to Ayres in the Long Bar. He would see what he could do, but really what was the point of a diplomatic Note, except to give some Chinaman a laugh, when it was taking every British and American marine available to keep the nationalist troops out of the Settlement? So Willy Paradise simply disappeared.

Several months later Ayres visited the actual building on the outskirts of Shanghai where the Nationalist secret police had kept their headquarters. It was a derelict grim-looking house with an overgrown garden behind a high stone wall. He peered through the empty doors and windows. There was simply nothing to see; certainly not Willy's ghost, even if Willy had been taken there. There were several small rooms in the cellar, but no blood, no human faeces, no hint as to what purposes they had served. He climbed the rickety stairs to an attic room whose window looked down onto the garden at the back, also full of weeds. He saw the brick wall with the three whitish patches where the bricks and cement had been chipped away. He went down the stairs and into the sunshine for a closer look.

The white patches had been chipped away by bullets. He could see where the prisoners would have stood, three at a time, facing the wall. Then the volley of bullets. The holes in the wall were deep: the process had been repeated hundreds of times. He worked his way back to where the executioners would have stood. Hundreds of bullet cases littered the ground under the weeds. The brass cases glittered in the sun.

Ayres looked around him. Behind the wall were telegraph poles, an ordinary thatched bamboo garden fence, roofs of houses. The noises of the morning drifted into the derelict garden, the everyday cheerful neighbourhood noises of voice and car and rooster. The perfect ordinariness of the morning the other side of that garden wall hurt him. He realized that he hated China almost as much as he hated life. Shanghai was, after all, a detour he had never intended. For years now, he had been holed up in this sordid stopping-off place. His home was still a hotel. He felt that he had lived for nearly thirty-five years in this world and he had understood nothing. And something else: he felt that he had failed to understand the import of Julia Paradise's gift to him.

She was like a brilliantly-coloured jigsaw puzzle dismantled and spread across the floor of his mind. His thoughts continued to inhabit small sections of her life—or what he increasingly thought of as her ‘lives'. He talked aloud to her, pleading with her to clarify this point, to explain the apparent contradiction between this and that to make sense of the brutal pantomime he played over and over. In short, he became obsessed.

Even in the Master he found only discouragement. Freud himself had written, ‘It still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories...' And from his own lecture notes of 1919: ‘Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.' Ayres thought of his own inability to love. Could he aspire to being no more than a helpless voyeur into the lush interiors of women? He felt that his training, his scientific method, had failed him.