The Kindness of Women (42 page)

I slipped my arm around Cleo's waist, happy to be with her and glad that we would be going together to New York. The premiere had been a great success, presented with effortless Hollywood professionalism, like a vast good-natured hallucination—the hundreds of limousines, revolving searchlights, and sealed-off streets lined with red carpet and security guards. The audience of film actors seemed to have absconded from reality for the evening, ambling down the aisles of the theatre with their sable coats and popcorn cartons.

As it happened, my small role had been edited out of the finished film, much to my relief, though I survived as a brief blur seen as the camera followed my younger self playing with his model aircraft. But this seemed just, like the faint blur which was all that any of us left across time and space. Besides, the film had served a deeper role for me—seeing its masterly recreation of Shanghai had been the last act in a profound catharsis that had taken decades to draw to a close. All the powers of modern film had come together for this therapeutic exercise. The puzzle had solved itself; the mirror, as I had promised, had been broken from within. In my mind the image had fused with its original, enfolding it within its protective wings. Looking at the great hotels along the Bund, unchanged after fifty years, I could almost believe that my memories of Shanghai had always been a film, endlessly played inside my head during my years in England after the war.

*   *   *

“They're launching some kind of ship.”

Cleo pointed to the crowd of people at the water's edge. A caterpillar tractor backed across the sand, pushing a trailer loaded with a bizarre sailing vessel. A single mast rose above a cabin that resembled a thatched hut. As we approached across the sand we could see that the hull was built entirely of papyrus reeds, bound together at stem and stern like the handle of a wicker shopping bag.

A square-rigged sail floated from the mast, bearing a half-familiar red emblem.

Cleo stopped and squinted through cupped hands. “It's Heyerdahl's papyrus ship—
Ra.
We published the book.”

“I thought it sank in the Atlantic…”

“He must be trying to cross the Pacific. Jim, you ought to volunteer. It's the original slow boat to China.”

“I don't think it's an original of anything…”

Crewmen knelt in the shallow waves, examining the underside of the craft. We stepped through the children and dogs playing in the water around the tractor. The mock-papyrus superstructure, assembled from moulded plastic and fibreglass, was bolted onto a sturdy steel hull.

“It's the replica of a replica.” Cleo laughed at herself for being taken in. “They must be using it in a film.”

“It looks like a real ship, though. If they're making a TV commercial they'll need something more seaworthy than Heyerdahl's original. This one's going somewhere.”

“Jim, now's your chance to get aboard.”

A black Labrador ambled through the waves, licking our hands and ready to shake its coat over us. I patted its head, admiring the easy expertise of the American crew. A man in swimming trunks and straw hat filmed the launch with a handheld video camera. At least this vessel would not sink, and a trial cruise among the weekend yachts of Marina Del Rey might uncover more truths about the performance of crew and vessel than its original's abortive mock-voyage across the Atlantic.

I thought of Olga sailing serenely through the lobby of the Beverly Hilton after we said goodbye. As she pressed her cheeks against my own I kissed for the last time the face of my childhood governess. That youthful and ageless mask was her true self, which time had stolen from her, the innocent and unlined face she had never been allowed to know as an adolescent.

The war had postponed my own childhood, to be rediscovered years later with Henry, Alice, and Lucy. The time of desperate stratagems was over, the car crashes and hallucinogens, the deviant sex ransacked like a library of extreme metaphors. Miriam and all the murdered dead of a world war had made their peace. The happiness I had found had been waiting for me within the modest reach of my own arms, in my children and the women I had loved, and in the friends who had made their own way through the craze years.

The waves struck sharply at our ankles. A strong wind was gusting across the beach, and the papyrus craft had broken free from its crew. With only the cameraman aboard, fumbling at the mast as he ducked the swinging boom, the craft confidently rode the waves. The launch crew leapt through the deeper water, pulling on the mooring lines but unable to restrain the boisterous vessel. The replica of a replica it may have been, but it was buoyant and well-founded, more than capable of taking on the sea and setting its own course across the Pacific, with only its shanghaied cameraman as crew, perhaps ending with a last triumphant heave on the beaches of Woosung.

“New York tomorrow. Then home to the children.” Cleo held my arm tightly as we walked back to our car, past the hippies and the fragrant beach fires, embers glaring in the freshening air. “Tell me—when they show the film in London, will they put back your little cameo?”

“I hope not.” I watched the papyrus craft cresting the breakers that rolled in from the Pacific, its bow set towards the China shore. “Cleo, think where that might lead…”

Also by J. G. Ballard

The Drowned World

The Voices of Time

The Terminal Beach

The Drought

The Crystal World

The Day of Forever

The Venus Hunters

The Disaster Area

The Atrocity Exhibition

Vermilion Sands

Crash

Concrete Island

High-Rise

Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories

The Unlimited Dream Company

Hello America

Myths of the Near Future

Empire of the Sun

Running Wild

The Day of Creation

War Fever

Rushing to Paradise

A User's Guide to the Millennium

Cocaine Nights

Super-Cannes

J. G. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 and for more than three decades has lived in Shepperton, England. He is the author of numerous books including
Empire of the Sun, Crash, The Day of Creation,
and
Super-Cannes.

THE KINDNESS OF WOMEN
. Copyright © 1991 by J. G. Ballard. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ballard, J. G., 1930–

The kindness of women / J. G. Ballard.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42284-4

ISBN-10: 0-312-42284-9

I. Title.

PR6052.A46 K5 1991

823'.914—dc20

91073730

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First Picador Edition: December 2007

eISBN 9781466856653

First eBook edition: October 2013