Julia Paradise Read online

  A few minutes later, she was back again, this time clutching the arm of a reverend gentleman. He wore a hat, a celluloid collar, a dark suit, and carried his own cardboard suitcase, even though a porter had followed him through the door and was unoccupied. The woman was still panicky and disoriented. When the desk clerk, a Chinese, spoke to them she shrieked, felt behind her for one of the comfortable lobby sofas, sat down and promptly fell asleep, much to the desk clerk’s puzzlement. The missionary gentleman shuffled shyly forward to the desk, still clutching his cardboard suitcase, to make his explanations.

  Ayres followed all this with his usual detached interest and was surprised to see the desk clerk pointing in his direction; then to see the clergyman shuffling forward with his same uncertain gait and removing his hat.

  He was a man of about fifty, Ayres judged, fair, balding with pale blue eyes. When he spoke up, Ayres discovered that his name was William Paradise, that he worked with the Methodist Missions in Shanghai and that, to judge from his harsh accent, he was an Australian.

  ‘My wife,’ he said slowly, ‘has come in for a bit of a shock lately.’

  Ayres did not appear to be very impressed. He threw the stub of the cigar he had been smoking into the brass spittoon, took out his bandana handkerchief, wiped a speck of phlegm from his mouth, inspected it, then put his handkerchief back in his pocket and began feeling for his pipe.

  ‘I’m afraid she’s become over-excited about things.’ The man paused and blinked at Ayres. ‘Things have been getting on top of her, rather. I’m afraid she has dropped her bundle altogether.’

  Ayres looked across the hotel lobby at the calmly sleeping woman. She was small, plain, nondescript, of indeterminate age, dressed in a black woollen suit. The Reverend Paradise was saying, ‘You will consent to examine her?’ Ayres found his pipe and examined the blackened tar on its bowl with apparent distaste.

  ‘You had better bring her upstairs. See if you can wake her. Or, if you like, I’ll get a couple of boys to load her into a barrow and take her up in the luggage lift.’

  The other man said apologetically, ‘My wife’s case has perplexed several physicians before yourself.’ He added as an afterthought, ‘I don’t expect you to perform any miracles.’

  Ayres’ rooms were on the third floor of the building, connected with the ground by a notoriously unreliable lift, an iron cage which groaned and shuddered on its cables and pulleys even when it did work. It was the bane of Ayres’ existence: as a heavy man he hated stairs. On this particular Saturday afternoon, already past the hour when Ayres customarily took his tea, the lift was working, although the lift porter was nowhere to be seen. He passed the little wooden alcove with its sliding window and saw the boy inside wrapped in a blanket, asleep in his chair. He climbed the three steps to the lift landing, opened the iron concertina door and ushered the missionary and his suitcase into the lift. The door closed and he turned the handle. The cables shuddered and whined and they began to ascend. As they did so, Ayres caught a glimpse of two porters loading the comatose little woman onto a wooden barrow.

  At first the Reverend Paradise seemed uncomfortable imparting the intimate details of his wife’s illness to a stranger but, once he had begun his story and got into his stride, he impressed Ayres as a kindly, intelligent man whose main concern was that his wife should get well again. As he spoke he nodded his head from time to time as if to reassure himself of the truth of his words. Ayres was able to piece together the following story.

  During her first year in this country the young woman had been troubled by cravings for sleep during the daytime. She had formerly been extremely energetic in carrying out her teaching duties. In the course of these attacks of drowsiness she had taken to talking in snatches of German. As a child she had heard her father speak German at home, although to all intents and purposes English was her native tongue. Her husband spoke no German. These cravings for rest were accompanied by sleeplike states at odd times throughout the day—‘waking daydreams’ the Reverend Paradise called them. Even during meals and conversations with visitors to the mission the missionary’s wife would literally fall asleep on her feet.

  On a long journey through the Interior on an evangelistic mission with a group of English teaching and medical missionaries his wife had begun to suffer from certain disturbances of her vision. The group had as one of their number an English doctor, who administered sedatives. But when this course of treatment was withdrawn, the disturbances of vision returned, and he called them by another name: hallucinations.

  Put simply, she began to see animals which weren’t really there. This zoöpsia took many forms: a tribute to the imagination, had they been deliberate invention. She saw mice, rats, insects, snakes—her imagination seemed to select the classically loathsome creatures. One of her most persistent hallucinations was a small brightly patterned snake moving across the floor in the periphery of her vision. Her zoöpsia was accompanied by a terror of real animals. The mere touch of fur, even in a coat, caused her nausea. Her pet miniature dog, which formerly she had fawned over, now revolted her and she had killed it with a walking stick in a fit of terror.

  A serious problem, in the light of their Christian mission in this country, was that the patient developed a virulent sinophobia, referring to the local people, even the Christian Chinese with whom they worked, as dogs. She also began to suffer from serious hallucinations of fire. She felt that she actually was, or was about to be, trapped inside a burning building. These hallucinations consumed her, threw her into paroxysms of terror to the point where she could smell the smoke, hear the crackle of the flames and the screams of the other victims, and feel the heat of the fire on her hands and face.

  She had returned with her husband to the little mission school twenty miles outside Shanghai where they presently lived and worked. She had become abusive even towards their European colleagues. She was an embarrassment to her husband, but a cross he had to bear. She was deliberately rude to visitors to the mission and flew into terrible rages with her husband. She threw tantrums in which she banged her head against the wall, ripped the buttons off her clothing and exposed herself.

  Her dementia worsened to such an extent that she began to live more and more in her room. She lived in a kind of twilight world pretty much divorced from the daily life of the mission school. She lived the sheltered life of an invalid and became increasingly dependent on medication. She alternated between periods of torpor and flashes of brilliant hallucination during which she would sometimes write late into the night in her penny notebooks, the common paper-covered books into which the pupils used to copy their exercises.

  During these ‘creative’ periods she would sometimes leave her room and roam the mission grounds and the countryside around the mission in an agitated condition. At other times she would catch the train to Shanghai and wander night and day through the dangerous and unsanitary Chinese quarters with her camera—one of her delusions was that she considered herself to be a ‘serious’ photographer. It was during these periods that her behaviour was more likely to be violent and anti-social, and she became a regular visitor to the cells of the police precincts of the International Settlement. She had embarked upon one of these escapades the previous evening and the Reverend Paradise had walked the streets all that morning looking for her. He had finally found her, in her present pitiful and exhausted condition, in a workingman’s tea-house; whence he had brought her here.

  The Reverend William Paradise finished his story with a kind of pitiful exhaustion of his own. He wiped his handkerchief across his flushed pink forehead. Ayres looked back at him from his armchair with a mixture of mild enquiry and contempt. ‘I might point out,’ he said quietly, ‘that cases such as these are common to the point of banality here.’

  A whimper of disbelief escaped from the clergyman. ‘Like my wife’s, you say?’

  ‘I’ve seen hospital wards full of neurotic Englishwomen, many of them victims of their husbands’ ambitions in the colonial
services. Some of them are just gin-soaked biddies in there to dry out and to have a bit of a rest.’

  The other man said in his quiet, pleading voice, ‘We are Methodists.’

  Ayres looked back at him, a hint of amusement in the shape of his mouth through his beard. He said, ‘We put it down to the East. Sooner or later the women are shipped home and I daresay that in many cases simple homesickness is as good an explanation as any.’

  ‘And this is the category into which you are putting my wife?’

  ‘Not at all. I simply wished to point out that I have seen quite severe cases of dementia among European women here in China and in the end the cure was as simple as a steamship ticket home.’

  ‘Our home is here, Ayres. These are now our people. We have our mission.’

  Ayres looked at him and made no attempt to disguise his contempt. The other man saw this and went on quickly, ‘You will consent to examine her, though?’

  ‘I’ll examine her.’ Ayres tried to smile, but the effect only added to his visitor’s disquiet. ‘As you said, no miracles. You go downstairs and have some tea and I’ll see what I can do for her. Try a piece of the strudel cake. They do serve excellent teas here.’

  Julia Paradise was awake. She lay on his leather ottoman and looked around the strange room in which she found herself. A range of expressions formed on her face: a scowl, a frown, a brief relaxation into her former languor, then a look of utterly pathetic dejection. When she spoke—a word here and there in answer to Ayres’ questions—her voice slurred as she salivated, and now and then the saliva dribbled uncontrollably from the corner of her mouth.

  She was not a pretty woman. Her dark hair was at once short and untidy and her eyes were made unnaturally large by the thinness of her face. Her skin was pale, anaemic and unhealthy-looking. Her nervous little figure was emaciated, as though it had never filled out from girlhood, and she was apparently breastless.

  It was immediately obvious to Ayres from the jerky agitation of her movements and from her habitual relapse into a mask-like apathetic expression that she was indeed suffering from a serious nervous condition. The mask contorted from time to time without warning into spasms of tics douloureux. Her hands were particularly thin; the skin stretched tightly over the bones of her knuckles and her fingers were reddened and scaly with what looked like dermatitis. Her face was so emaciated with its dark eyes, stark cheekbones and cropped hair, that Ayres asked himself whether there might not be something organically wrong with her, whether or not she might after all be the victim of a wasting disease. He had formed the conclusion from her husband’s account that she was an hysteric; an hypothesis in which the physician who had previously examined her apparently concurred.

  Then Ayres smiled in grim recognition. He went over to his desk and slowly, methodically unpacked his surgical bag. He was not so much of a specialist that he did not have to cope with the common run of complaints among the guests staying at the hotel, the gastric upsets and diarrhoea, the sore throats and influenza that were a lesser man’s bread and butter—as well as his occasional forages into the exotic gardens of the mind. He sorted through the contents of his bag—the stethoscope, the blood pressure apparatus, the large chrome-plated syringe and the box of needles, and the other box containing the ampoules of morphine.

  The little woman watched him, bright-eyed now, perched on the edge of the Ottoman, wiping her chin from time to time with the back of her hand. He walked over and helped her remove the shabby black woollen jacket of her suit, then rolled up the sleeve of her blouse.

  He had guessed right. The inside of her right arm was covered with puncture marks. He watched her, but she was looking down at her arm and her face showed no emotion. Then, as he walked over to his desk to get the syringe and ampoule, he heard the noise she was making, a kind of deep grizzling growl in her throat—exactly the noise of a sick animal whimpering. A sob, a sniffle, the sound of her sucking in her saliva. He took up the spirit bottle and a piece of cotton waste. She stretched her arm out, waiting.

  ‘Not today,’ he said. ‘We’ll give that arm of yours a bit of a rest, I think.’ He lifted the hem of her skirt over her knees, and above the plump stocking rolls on each thigh. He rubbed the flesh with the alcohol, then, holding up the syringe, pricked the tip of the needle through the taut rubber skin stretched over the ampoule and drew back the plunger. She winced as he inserted the needle into her clean white thigh.

  It seemed that Ayres was finally to be left alone that afternoon. His rooms had a dark, still, empty feeling. He was at a loose end, vaguely annoyed: he usually allowed himself the Englishman’s Saturday half-holiday. Ayres walked back into his study, a large room at the front of his apartment overlooking the street. In one corner was an ornate amber and rose stained-glass window—an oddity in an hotel room, he had always thought. The little fireplace was surrounded with tiles to match the amber in the glass. A lonely Saturday afternoon smell pervaded his rooms. There was the smell of stale furniture polish, and the faint tang of oranges which made him think, for some reason, of the Reverend William Paradise.

  Ayres drew the blinds, then the curtains, then switched on the two standard lamps whose glow surged and faded unsteadily with the unreliable current of Shanghai’s electricity supply. Then he lowered his bulk into his winter fireside chair, an oversized armchair with a carved wooden back, which was upholstered in burgundy velvet and striped quilted damask. He had also turned on his green-shaded desk lamp, although he had no intention of sitting at his desk where substantial bundles of mail and English-language newspapers and periodicals were awaiting him in piles.

  The door of his study opened and his Chinese boy appeared, carrying a tray with coffee. When the boy went out Ayres reached across to pour from the pot, then settled back in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat. He sipped the coffee, preoccupied by something. Perhaps he had a headache, but his face bore the marks of a man trying to think of something he had forgotten more than of any sudden pain. A vein beat in his temple, a gentle persistent throb, as though reminding him of something.

  Presently the boy came in again, this time with Ayres’ smoking things. There was a small spirit lamp, two pipes and an intricately carved jade box. Without a word the pipes were prepared. The boy took a small ball of the sticky opium and rolled it between his finger and thumb, then speared it on the needle and baked it in the flame of the spirit lamp until it crackled. As Ayres bent forward with the pipe held to his mouth, the boy set the needle into the pipe. The pipe crackled, and Ayres drew the smoke down into his lungs.

  The boy made up the other pipe in the same way as the first, then left. Ayres smoked it and settled back in his chair. A long time passed. His thoughts did not want to break his trance by speaking to him. He felt a thought rise up in him then fade before he could recognize it. He felt that he was on the point of making a crucial confession to himself, but that he was holding himself back from such an irrevocable step as an admission of guilt: like a murderer might feel, for instance.

  Twice or three times a week it was Ayres’ habit to venture out into the city to visit his painter friends. The latest of these artists was named Morgan, a young graduate of the Slade School in London, and a fellow Scot. When Ayres had first met him he was living like an animal, hungry, in a bare unheated room in the Chinese quarter, where he slept on a mat on the stone floor and did his paintings—when he could afford to buy paints—on the sides of old packing cases. Ayres, playing the patron, had installed the man in more suitable accommodation in the old American Concession, paid him a small weekly allowance and the fees for his models.

  These models were invariably Chinese girls barely out of childhood. Indeed both men might have been shocked had they known their actual ages. They were prostitutes whom Ayres himself procured from a house in the Bubbling Well Road. After the painter had made use of her all day, sometimes Ayres went to make use of her at night. As these girls were always thin and small, the sexual contrast with his own gross size was a painful
one to contemplate, and what he preferred. In the artist’s rooms at night he always took them in the same position: from behind. All such girls were in his mental notation, ‘Wendies’, with their wispy boy-like figures, unformed breasts, bony hips and slender arms.

  Ayres recognized this in himself indulgently. He knew well Freud’s remark that ‘some perverse trait or other is seldom absent from the sexual life of normal people’.

  Afterwards he sometimes bought both artist and model a drink and something to eat in one of the nightclubs of the quarter. It had been there, outside the building where Morgan lived in Szechuan Road, just down from the post office, that he saw Willy Paradise’s little wife, late that night after her strange Saturday afternoon consultation.

  He had just put on his hat and coat and had come down the stairs. It was as though she had been standing at the door, trying to decide whether to go in, when Ayres had appeared. She turned quickly away and started walking, wrapped in her thick overcoat, clutching her basket, bundling her way along the street.

  It was nearly midnight and the street was deserted. In the doorways of the post office families of beggars huddled together out of the wind. Now the little woman was running with such a sense of urgency that, although the beggars followed her with their eyes, none bothered to approach her.

  Ayres walked after her twenty, then fifty, then a hundred yards behind. She did not turn. She passed eventually into the French Concession and still Ayres followed her. The French policemen did not emerge from their patrol post. Ayres saw the shadows of their heads moving in the light against the frosted glass.

  Julia Paradise had entered a region of tenements, rat-infested boarding houses where the sewage ran open into the streets. Between these buildings even more temporary accommodations had been constructed out of flattened kerosene tins, packing cases and any other materials that could be scrounged. Every few months a detachment of French soldiers moved through the Concession pulling down these shanties and turning the wretches who inhabited them out onto the streets. But that night the only noise which disturbed the residents of the slum from their sleep was the sound of a woman’s running footsteps, and even further behind her, the heavy tread and straining breath of Dr Ayres.