The Kindness of Women (31 page)

“Don't hurry back—they're having the time of their lives. I hope you and Dick are thoroughly misbehaving yourselves.”

“I am, but Dick's been too busy giving TV interviews. Everyone agrees he's the sexiest psychologist in Rio.”

“And in London—bring him back in one piece.”

I remembered Dick romping in the women's workroom, and Fortunata with the medallions of Jane Fonda and Bardot clipped to her nipples, Robert Redford's face pressed to her pubis. Dick would look but not touch. Yet I was depressed and he was in ebullient form. A certain reserve now marked his attitude to me, as if I had failed an important test. I had always been reluctant to appear on television, a shyness that amused him and which he put down to an old-fashioned strain in my character. Clearly I was too bound to the mundane, to the contingent realities of a wife, children, and desire, to the fear of death and the anguish of space-time. Dick had side-stepped all these, accepting that the electronic image of himself was the real one, and that his off-screen self was an ambitious but modest actor who had successfully auditioned for a far more glamorous role. He might interview Carmen and Fortunata, but he would never break the spell by touching or needing them.

Watching as he enjoyed himself in the limousine, I guessed that he was the forerunner of an advanced kind of human being. If one day the world became a film festival, its inhabitants would all resemble Dick Sutherland. Television had made him impotent, but perhaps its real role, in evolutionary terms, was to depopulate an overcrowded planet. The camera lens was our way of disengaging from each other, distancing ourselves from each other's emotions. Looking out from the limousine at the veering, overexuberant streets, it occurred to me that everyone in Rio was having, not a good time, but the image of a good time.

Except, unmistakably, at Señor Pereira's party. The terrace and reception rooms of the duplex apartment seemed to rotate like a satellite nightclub in orbit over Rio, filled with lavish buffet tables, roulette wheels, and a light-show. Hundreds of guests danced to a maracas band, celebrating New Year's Eve in the year 2000. Elderly bankers who seemed to be impersonating distinguished film extras, sleek Rio gangsters more handsome than any film star, and fashionable property tycoons looking like expensive call boys mingled with a lower echelon of film agents, journalists, and television executives who formed the proletariat of the super-rich.

Above the cocaine voices and firework display on the terrace, I shouted to the Dutchman: “This party must have been going on since last year's festival. Rio film critics live in some style.”

“Pereira is much more than a film critic. He has a stake in a local TV station, all sorts of businesses, and even his own production company.”

Just what Pereira's film company produced I saw later that evening. Dick was dancing with the most glamorous woman at the party, somewhere between sixteen and sixty, whose costume had ransacked a Las Vegas casino. The Dutchman and I had fallen in with an American casting director and her husband, who were imagining the impossible task of casting the party's guests from the world's stock of supporting actors. After a buffet supper together we went in search of Dick.

Outside the disco in the dining room I caught sight of a familiar stocky blonde climbing the stairs to an upper floor.

“You know Fortunata?” the Dutchman asked. “She's trying to get into Pereira's films.”

“Can't she act? What's the problem?”

“No, she's stupid, but she can act—that's the problem. His films need obvious amateurs. They employ a new kind of realism.”

A glass verandah fronted the upper floor of the duplex. Guests thronged the rail, looking out over the sea towards the lights of Copacabana, the Sugar Loaf, and the great illuminated Christ of Corcovado. But Fortunata had turned into a small corridor that led past a kitchenette and bathroom into the rooms at the rear of the duplex. A uniformed security man stood by a locked door, talking to one of Pereira's gangster friends. He let Fortunata through, pointing out some defect in her makeup. When she smiled at me, snapping her compact, he assumed that we were with her and beckoned us forward.

We had entered a private suite within the duplex. An office equipped with desks and filing cabinets served as temporary storage space for the furniture moved from the rooms used for the party. Film equipment, lights, and silver umbrellas stood in the corner with a set of stage props—two plastic sofas, a roll of turquoise nylon carpet, and a tawdry bedspread, like the decor of a cheap motel.

Fortunata opened the rear door and stepped into the corridor beyond, where powerful, ice-white lights flooded through an archway. Two men in tuxedos and a woman in a ball gown with a drink in her hand were staring into the lights. Fortunata joined them, frowning as a dog barked in pain and its handler shouted angrily.

When the dog calmed itself, whimpering plaintively, Fortunata stepped into the room. Over the Dutchman's shoulder I could see the dim faces of a film crew through the harsh lighting. Guests in evening dress leaned against the walls, watching as Pereira signalled to his cameraman. He gestured impatiently at the sound engineer, who crouched forward with a boom microphone, trying to pick up the dog's pathetic barks. The nervous German shepherd was being alternately comforted and abused by its handler, a small, shirt-sleeved man in his sixties with a pencil moustache. The glaring lights, the soundman's nervous thrusts, and the handler's fingers fondling its testicles had unsettled the large dog. It tugged at its leash, eager to go home, paws slithering on the tiled floor.

In front of the dog the crew had assembled a garish double bed with a quilted headboard, a cheap dressing table, and a red plastic lamp. Kneeling on the floor beside the bed was a naked woman, muttering to herself as she moved from one tired hand to the other. The fierce lights had bleached all the tones from her skin, which seemed like the latex on an inflated dummy. When she shook her long hair and glared angrily at Pereira I recognised Carmen's arrow-like profile. The dog struggled against its handler and she slapped her hand on the floor, shouting some obscenity in Portuguese. Pereira tried to calm her, but she stared at him with unconcealed distaste, as if regretting that she had been persuaded against her better judgement into an ill-considered career move with this incompetent producer.

The dog's ears pricked forward, its nose scenting Carmen's exposed buttocks. The handler warbled into its ears, one hand massaging its penis, the other pushing its bushy tail from his face. With a look of mock resignation, Carmen glanced at the spectators along the wall. There were nods of sympathy, heads shaken over the incompetence of the handler and his beast's lack of virility.

The sound engineer moved forward with his microphone, and the cameraman adjusted his eyepiece. The lights intensified, blanching out the faces of the spectators. The dog approached, paws slipping on the floor, the handler steering it by the testicles. Carmen raised one palm and brushed away an annoying piece of grit, then stared self-critically at the black pool of her shadow.

*   *   *

Three days later I stood on the steps of the conference centre, waiting to say goodbye to Dick Sutherland before catching the flight back to London. I had missed him when the audience dispersed after the televised panel discussion he had chaired. Giving up, I was about to walk to my taxi when I saw him emerge from the building with Señor Pereira. The film critic spoke effusively, thanking Dick for his presentation to camera and the few words of Portuguese he had memorised.

In the doorway behind Pereira, her silk dress lit by the TV monitors and their scientific films, Carmen was practising her English with one of the women simultaneous translators. Pereira saluted Dick, and she strode up and smilingly took the film critic's arm. Together they stepped into a waiting car.

“Dick, I'll see you in Shepperton. Carmen seems happy—I thought she loathed Pereira.”

“She did. But she feels her career is taking off—apparently she's made some film with a dog. Pereira wanted to show me the rough cut. It's been a big hit with the distribution people.”

“Lassie, come home, all is forgiven…”

“Is that the title? I'll give it a miss.”

“I would, Dick.”

Dick gazed at the statue of Christ on Corcovado. He squared his shoulders, not unhopefully, measuring himself against the TV ratings of the ultimate media personality. Along Copacabana Beach the salesmen were flying their festival kites above the heads of the footballers, hawking their movie-star lapel badges and belt buckles. The beggar woman from the favelas and her crippled child were hiding among the limousines outside the Copacabana Palace Hotel, ready to startle an unwary film executive. In the air-conditioned corridors of the conference centre the scientific films filled the monitor screens with their close-ups of nose-wheel housings, nasal septums, and pain registers, a vast dormant pornography waiting to be woken by the magic of fame.

13

THE CASUALTY STATION

Mental asylums, like the prisons they resemble, are so often burdened with the least appropriate names. As I drove through the gates of Summerfield Hospital I wondered who had christened this sombre Victorian pile. Immense red-brick walls like a perpetual headache rose to the shabby eaves, broken by barred windows that had never been cleaned, as if to protect the patients from the gloomy microclimate that hovered over this forgotten corner of south London. Faded lawns struggled in the shadows of the tall fir trees, but on my visits to David Hunter I had never seen even one of the two thousand patients taking the air.

Anyone, I found, could drive through the gatehouse without being stopped, and the endless internal roads that wound past the great buildings gave the impression that Summerfield was open to the world. In fact, the gatehouse, like the dead lawns and the visitors' car parks, was part of a decoy. The central enclave of the asylum, the citadel of the insane, remained securely sealed within itself. From the windows of David's ward, through one clear pane that had replaced the original frosted glass, I could see the internal courtyards attached to the high-security wings. Into these bleak stone pits, walls topped by steel claws, the deeply insane were occasionally released to stare in their haunted way at the mystery of the open air. Puzzlingly, the exercise yards were all of different shape, some triangular, others rectangles or gnomons, with small recesses that served no conceivable purpose, as if they together formed a jigsaw of a fractured mind, to be completed before a patient's release.

Two vehicles occupied opposite corners of the car park, breaking that companionable rule by which drivers arriving at an empty car park place themselves alongside each other. Most of the patients, I noticed, were visited only by the poorer of their friends and relatives, who had to make the long walk from the gatehouse and were too tired to do more than sit and listen. A signpost pointed to the short-term wards—
NARCISSUS, ROSEMARY
, and
HYACINTH
. Carrying my chessboard and a bag filled with fruit, aviation magazines, and newspapers, I set off towards the entrance lodge. As always, however hard I tried to repress the sensation, I felt that I was arriving with my luggage to begin my own stay at Summerfield. These impassive buildings possessed a moral authority far more intimidating than the tired psychiatrists who worked within their wards.

While the superintendent checked my name against the roster I rattled the chessboard and guessed that it would soon be lighter by a piece. The battered chess sets at Summerfield had lost half their men. In his matter-of-fact way, David explained that these destitute patients, often abandoned by their families, possessed nothing and would treasure a stolen piece like a precious doll. Usually, as I sat in the dayroom with David, one of the old men he had befriended would be staring at his private pawn on an open board. A former accountant at the Church Commissioners, he had tried to suffocate his invalid wife. After an hour of thought he would at last embark on a cautious move.

Closing the board at the end of my visits, David always palmed one of the pieces, usually the black bishop, which he had identified with me. This was partly to irritate me, and partly to ensure that I played with no one else. While I searched for him I could hear his gentle voice outside the women's ward, as he gallantly steered one of the old women towards the lavatories. He greeted me cheerily, closing the lavatory door.

“I hope she knows what to do,” he confided. “Most of the time she just stands there, trying to remember her daughter. She calls it her memory box…”

Affable and good-humoured as ever, he surveyed the day-room, looking for something new to tell me. Patients in dressing gowns sat on the leather chairs, talking to their subdued relatives. On the sofa beside us a young woman lay with her knees pulled up to her chin, lost in her deep sleep of largactil. Her open eyes were tilted into their upper lids, as if she were trying to see something inside her skull. At the dispensary hatch a line of patients queued for their thimbles of tranquilliser.

“They'll bring some tea in a moment.” David leafed through the aviation magazines, and held my arm, glad to see me. His confinement had brought us together. “It's good of you to come—how are the kids?”

“They're blooming, passing all their exams. Henry's built an aircraft for you—the Wright Flyer. Alice and Lucy wanted to come with me.”

“Not a good idea, actually.” David tore at an orange and treated me to a knowing smile. “They can visit you, Jim, when it's your turn.”

I let this pass and watched another of the older women, wearing nothing but a faded nightdress, carry a vase of daffodils to the window ledge. She held the flowers to the light, introducing them to the sun.

“It's restful here,” I commented. “All the sunlight, and these sleeping women. You could be in a private hotel on the south coast.”