The Kindness of Women. J. G. Ballard
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