The Kindness of Women (41 page)

“You have. Don't worry, you'll land in about three days, when it's all over.”

“I hope so. It's a long way to go to a movie.”

“But what a movie.” In fact, neither of us had seen the film. “It's a shame you're in fancy dress—no one will recognise you.”

“It's hardly a major role.”

“Rubbish—it's modest but crucial.”

“Cleo, I may have been edited out altogether.”

“Of course you haven't! How could they?” she huffed, indignant at the very idea. “You're the only one who was really there.”

“I'm not sure that's true—I think the actors felt that I was the odd man out, the only one who wasn't real. Most of them had been back to Shanghai.”

“You could have gone with them.”

“I know, but I hadn't the nerve. I wasn't ready to face everything again—I've spent my whole life trying to sort it out. This is the right way to go back to Shanghai, inside a film. In a sense they started shooting it fifty years ago…”

The world premiere would be held in three days' time, at a theatre in Westwood. Seat belt fastened, I waited as the plane turned over the sea and swept in across the idle waves. Despite the long flight from London, and what I had said to Cleo, I felt remarkably at ease. I looked down at the deserted beaches, with their isolated palms standing on the edge of the Pacific Ocean that I had last seen in 1946. I had never visited Los Angeles, but it seemed right that my childhood should meet its end in this desert city whose limitless imagination had remythologised the past and invented the future.

An hour later we were rolling along the San Diego freeway in the studio car, looking at the landscape of Los Angeles that neither of us had seen before but which was instantly familiar. Thousands of films and television series had installed an intact replica of the city in our minds, far more accurate than the preposterous Beefeater and pearly queen image conveyed by the British Tourist Board. Vaguely garish bungalows and storefronts stretched for miles under the tangle of overhead wires, a terrain of ticky-tack and painted glue fading in the sun, as if the entire city were a dusty film set waiting to be refurbished in some as yet to be financed production. I loved every inch of it and felt instantly at home.

Then, as we left the freeway and joined Santa Monica Boulevard, I saw the first anomaly, a jarring intrusion from another level of reality. A billboard the size of a tennis court stood beside the road, advertising the film we had come to see, my own name below those of the producers and director. For a moment the dream had woken and summoned its sleeper.

Identical signs reared over the rooftops of Los Angeles, and even over Sunset Boulevard, where another writer, Joe Gillis, had become entangled in the Hollywood dream. In our hotel I switched on the television set to find commercials for the film filling the screen with low-flying Mustangs, a real Shanghai burning again as Japanese soldiers marched down the Bund and my boyhood self was swept up in a panic of coolies and office clerks. Arm in arm, Cleo and I stared from our terrace at the billboard over Wilshire Boulevard. My past had escaped from my head and was clambering across the rooftops like some doomed creature in a forties monster movie.

Happily, the irony of all this was not lost on Cleo.

“How did Sinbad get the genie back in the bottle? Think.”

“God knows—some piece of low cunning, I suppose.”

“You've spent years writing about the media landscape, and now it's escaped and stood you in the palm of its hand.”

“I'll rent a car tomorrow. We'll find the real Los Angeles.”

“Dear, wake up. This
is
the real Los Angeles.”

The next morning we set out on a circuit of this mysterious city. Entire districts sat in the musty sunlight like intact fragments of television episodes, as strangely familiar as the revisited streets of one's childhood. Far from being the youngest, Los Angeles was the oldest city of the twentieth century, the Troy of its collective imagination. The ground courses of our deepest dreams were layered into its past among the filling stations and freeways.

*   *   *

On the day before the premiere, while Cleo was visiting English friends in Santa Barbara, the reception desk rang to say that a Mrs. Weinstock had called to see me. Assuming she was a local journalist, I asked the desk clerk to send her up to our suite. Moments later, I opened the door to find a handsome American woman in her middle sixties, strikingly dressed in a Persian-lamb coat and silk hat. Her commanding eyes rose instantly to the challenge when I failed to recognise her.

“James, you're too busy to remember me?” She stepped forward, in a heady aura of perfume and expensive fabrics. She seized my shoulders and pressed my face to her smooth cheeks. “Olga! Olga Ulianova from Shanghai!”

“Olga…?” I was pinned against the television screen by my childhood governess, who had materialised from the Hollywood sky like the billboards and TV commercials. “Olga … I can't believe it…”

“So you'd better start now.” She glanced around the suite, taking in every detail of the books on the table, Cleo's clothes hanging in the bedroom, the open suitcases and presentation photographs. As she sized me up, deciding that no more than a few seconds' inspection was needed, I tried to remember the edgy young woman I had last seen in the Del Monte nightclub. Despite the years, her features were almost unchanged, the lips as cutting as ever, the hectic eyes carrying out an inventory of my clothes, self-confidence, integration into the real world. But her face wore a curious mask, as if a child's cheeks, nose, and chin had been slung from her temples, through which glared the penetrating eyes and sharp teeth of an old woman.

“You haven't changed, James. Not even a little. You're still riding your pedal bike.” She smiled shrewdly, slipping her coat across a chair. “But now you remember me?”

“Olga, yes … I'm still amazed to see you. Did the studio arrange this?”

“The studio? Everything isn't a film, James. My daughter and I are staying with our friends in Van Nuys, so I thought, Let's see how my James is.”

“I'm glad you did. But you got out of Shanghai?”

“Of course! Once the Americans left. Believe me, James, I'm not designed for Communism. I'm living in San Francisco for many years now…”

“And you're married…?”

“Mrs. Edward R. Weinstock—my husband is a nose and throat surgeon, very influential.” She nodded darkly, scrutinising with only marginal approval a photograph of Cleo and myself. “But you were nearly a doctor yourself? I read an interview—I couldn't understand…”

“I gave it up after a couple of years—I wanted to be a writer.”

“A writer?” Her nostrils twitched doubtfully, as if only the plushness of this Beverly Hills hotel suite prevented her from criticising a disastrous career move. She was wearing an expensive gown with a gleaming lamé thread that she might have worn to the opening of a Las Vegas casino, but as she turned to and fro on her rapier heels I found myself glancing under the arms for the telltale tear. I remembered the brief glimpse of her breast that had so dazed my adolescent mind. Despite her expensive hair and jewellery, there was still something slatternly about Olga, as if her body were a disposable tool to be used as necessity dictated. I thought of her in postwar Shanghai, a tank trap full of vodka, lying in wait for the young American servicemen.

“So this film, James. Is it good?”

“I'm sure it is. They say it's his best. I haven't seen it yet.”

“You haven't?” This was clearly a serious omission, one I should have rectified before signing the film contract or, more sensibly still, before writing a line of the book. She shook her head, as if I were still the odd little boy who had cycled all over Shanghai in search of a war. “Anyway, it's a big help for your career. You were always telling stories. Your poor mother didn't know what was coming next…”

“This is the only book I've written about Shanghai—for some reason, it took a long time.”

“Too much to forget, people don't realise … the things I could tell about Shanghai. You and I should write a book, James, a real bestseller. My ideas and your—”

“One is enough, Olga. I might write a sequel about my life in England.”

“England?” Doubtfully, Olga sniffed her Scotch. “Is it so interesting? I read about your wife—that's sad for you.”

“That was a long time ago. I'll treat you to lunch, Olga, and you can bring me up to date.”

“Listen, it's never long enough. When my mother passed away…” As an afterthought, she added: “My second husband died. An English dentist in Hong Kong, so I understand.”

On our way to the rooftop restaurant she held my arm in a genuine show of sympathy, evoked almost entirely by her feelings of pity for herself. Responding to the attentions of the restaurant, she was soon as animated as a teenager, showing off her smooth cheeks and trimmed nose. The young Olga I remembered, whose body I had tried to glimpse as she undressed in the bathroom, seemed to beckon across the years from this ageing but still glamorous woman. She spoke with scarcely a pause for breath about her years in Hong Kong and Manila, battling her way to the top of the social hill as husbands died under her like horses under a cavalryman at Austerlitz.

When we returned to the suite she said: “James, your book made a lot of interest in San Francisco—many people from Shanghai are living there. Perhaps you could give a talk to us. You could say I was your family's friend. Maybe in the diplomatic service…”

“Olga, I'd like to, but even writing about Shanghai was difficult enough.”

“Of course. I know your feelings. We were always close, James. You never told your mother about those things I took—the silver and the jade horses … I always wanted to thank you for that.”

“Olga, I never knew.”

“Maybe you forgot. They had so much, and my parents were hungry every day. My father lost all his hope, sitting in that little room. It's lucky he died before the war came. My mother forgave me—women understand—but a father? Never…”

Olga held my arm, the scent of her hair, throat, and breasts overrunning my senses. She stood beside me, staring at the mansions of Beverly Hills as if seeing the vanished façades of Amherst Avenue. I remembered how, forty years earlier, I had felt her strong hip pressed against mine as we stood in the glass-strewn ballroom of the Del Monte nightclub. During the dark days at school in England I had often thought of Olga. We would have made love on one of the roulette tables if I had been less intimidated by her, and particularly if I had offered a shortcut to my father's office.

I embraced this exotic female chimera, with her dream's ransom of a face lift. Her body was even older than mine, but her face was that of the White Russian teenager who had first looked after me.

She smiled to herself, perhaps amused by the memory of some childish exploit in the garden at Amherst Avenue.

“And your friend, James?” Her fingers loosened my tie and shirt. She ran her nails across my chest, making sure that my nipples were still there. “Is she back soon?”

“Not till tomorrow—she's gone to see publishing people she knows in Santa Barbara. Olga, this has nothing to do with her.”

“Publishing? Then it's okay…” She raised her face in front of me, a small screen on which was projected the image of a young woman.

I wondered why she had bothered to see me—perhaps out of pride, and to remind me that she could still dominate my life. Certainly, she would have felt no debt of honour for stealing from my parents before the war. But she knew that we were both victims in our different ways of Western rule in Shanghai, which my parents represented for her. We had once been wounded and corrupted by Shanghai, insofar as children could be corrupted, and by making love in this California hotel we would prove to each other that the wounds had healed.

“Good … you know, James, I never waited long for a man. This could be a bad example for me…”

She held my wrists in the same firm grip she had used half a century earlier to steer me towards the bathroom. Standing beside the bed, she closed the wardrobe mirrors so that no reflection of her back would reach my eyes. She began to undress me as if preparing me for a party, her fingers never leaving my skin as they moved around my body.

Delaying herself deliberately, she stood against me, playing the moody governess unsure whether to accord some trivial privilege to her charge. I kissed her affectionately, glad that she had come through and was happily married to her influential surgeon.

The film of our life rushed backwards through the projector, devouring itself as it hunted for some discarded moment that held the key to our earliest selves.

*   *   *

On our final day in Los Angeles, a week after the film premiere, Cleo and I decided on a last visit to the ocean. Waiting for our car, we stood in the entrance of the hotel, looking up at the black skyscrapers of Century City a few hundred yards away. This cluster of sightless towers emerged through the low-rise sprawl of the city like a harsh, obsidian Manhattan.

Cleo stared at the razor cornices and gave a shiver. “Is it all going to look like this when we come back? Please, God … what sort of heaven circles those spires?”

“None I want to wake into. But face it, Cleo—modernism is the gothic of the information age. Dreams sharp enough to bleed, and no doubts about man's lowly place in the scheme of things. Let's head for the beach…”

Venice, by contrast, was ramshackle and comforting. An intact fragment of the sixties survived along its promenades. The wide sands stretched past roller-skaters and muscle-builders, break dancers and beggars posing as Vietnam psychos. Its modest stands were hung with flower-power T-shirts and mystic jewellery. Driftwood fires were burning on the sand beside the shelters which the groups of hippies had erected. The sea seemed far away, a glimmer of waves along the horizon, as if the Pacific had decided to withdraw for the day. I could almost believe that we were walking on the bed of a fossil sea, with ancient cigarette ends, ballpoint pens, and beer cans embedded in its scarred surface, all that remained of some earlier race.