The Unlimited Dream Company. John Gray
off his almost naked body to me. His casual paddling had a serious purpose, re-establishing his rights over this water I had temporarily made my own.
He waved to Dr Miriam, the small conspiratorial gesture of a past lover, waiting for her to invite him on to the lawn. When she ignored him he pointed in an off-hand but sly way to the dead elms above our heads.
Looking up, I saw a section of the Cessna’s tail suspended from the upper branches. Pinned against the sky, it flicked from side to side, a flag already semaphoring my presence to the searching police.
‘Stark … he’s always had sharp eyes.’ As if protecting me, Dr Miriam took my arm. ‘Blake, come on. We ought to leave. I’ll find you something to wear at the clinic.’
At that time, as I followed her across the lawn, I was aware only of the silent crowd watching me from both banks of the river, the tennis players sitting with their rackets on the grass. Their faces seemed almost hostile. Seen through this strange light, the placid town into which I had fallen had a distinctly sinister atmosphere, as if all these apparently unhurried suburbanites were in fact actors recruited from the film studios to play their roles in an elaborate conspiracy.
We reached Dr Miriam’s sports car in the drive behind the house. Hovering in the porch, Mrs St Cloud handed the medical bag to her daughter.
‘Miriam—?’
‘Mother, for heaven’s sake. I’ll be quite safe.’ With a tolerant shake of her head, Dr Miriam opened the car door for me.
As I stood there barefoot in the oil-stained rags of my flying suit I was suddenly certain that Mrs St Cloud would not run to the telephone the moment I left. This middle-aged widow had never seen anyone return from the dead. With a hand to her throat, she stared at me as if I were a son whose existence she had absent-mindedly misplaced.
At the same time, I had no intention of outstaying my welcome. For whatever motives, one of these people had tried to kill me.
Should I have been more wary of Miriam St Cloud? Even then, as we approached the clinic, it seemed strange that I was so ready to trust this young doctor. Little more than a student, with her white coat and grass-stained feet, she sat seriously over the wheel. She was still unsettled, putting herself to unnecessary trouble to look after me, and I suspected that she might try to drive me to the local police station. We stopped several times under the trees, giving the three children time to catch up with us. They raced across the park, whooping and hooting, as if hoping to shock the solemn beeches out of their silence. I kept a careful watch for the arrival of the police, my arm behind Dr Miriam’s seat. If a patrol car appeared I was ready to wrest the controls from her and bundle her out on to the grass.
The sunlight shivered through the trees. The birds and leaves were restive, as if the elements of the disrupted afternoon were trying to reconstitute themselves.
‘Do you want to go back to your mother?’ I asked. ‘I’d say she needs you more than I do.’
‘You upset her – she wasn’t expecting you to recover so dramatic- ally. Since father’s death two years ago she’s spent all her time by the window, almost as if he were out here somewhere. Next time you come back from the dead do it in easy stages.’
‘I didn’t come back from the dead.’
‘Blake, I know …’ Annoyed with herself, she pressed my hand. I liked this young doctor, but her light-hearted reference to my death irritated me, a touch of dissecting-room humour I could do without. In fact, apart from my bruised mouth and ribs, I felt remarkably well. I remembered swimming strongly for the shore as the Cessna sank beneath me, and then fainting in the shallows, more from relief than real exhaustion. The clergyman had pulled me on to the grass, and at this point in the confusion some lunatic had tried to revive me, some half-trained suburban first-aid enthusiast. Already I resolved that the sooner I left Shepperton the better, before any other blunder could occur.
However, before I could leave I needed a new set of clothes.
‘There’s a spare suit at the clinic, though your pupils at the flying school won’t recognize you in it.’ She added in a droll way: ‘I’m deliberately being cryptic – you might decide to jump out of this car.’
‘As long as the suit didn’t belong to someone who died. Tempting providence twice the same afternoon isn’t the kind of thing your priest would approve of.’
‘Blake, you didn’t tempt providence.’ Choosing her words, she went on matter-of-factly: ‘Actually, people don’t die at the clinic, it’s for out-patients only. Believe me, I’m glad you weren’t our first recruit. There’s a geriatric unit attached to it – the three children are temporarily there on referral, no one else would take them. I’m sorry they were being silly, but before they came here they’d been terribly abused.’
She pointed to a three-storey building beyond the clinic’s car-park. On the terrace a line of elderly patients sat in their wheelchairs, nodding at the sun. As soon as they saw my ragged flying suit they immediately revived, began to point at me and argue with each other. I assumed that they had seen the burning Cessna fly over and hit the trees along the river.
We waited in the car-park for the three children to run up to us. Unaware that I was watching her closely, Dr Miriam leaned against one of the cars and picked at a fleck of dirt under her thumbnail. For some reason, perhaps the heat reflected from the polished cellulose and my own half-naked body, I felt suddenly obsessed with this young woman, with the chipped varnish on her toe-nails, the grass-stains on her heels, the heady smell of her thighs and armpits, and even the cryptic residue of some patient’s bodily functions on her white coat. She flicked the dirt from her nail on to the grass, as if returning to the park part of that bountiful nature welling up ceaselessly through her pores. I felt that her grubby feet and air of untidiness stemmed not from any lack of hygiene but from her complete absorption in all the commonplaces of nature. I knew that she cured her patients with poultices of earth and spit, rolled together in her strong hands and warmed between her thighs. Infatuated with her smell, I wanted to mount her like a stallion taking a meadow-rich mare.
‘Blake …?’ She was watching me in a not unfriendly way, as if she knew that I was no ordinary pilot and was deliberately letting herself be attracted to me. When the children reached us she bent down and embraced them warmly in turn, smiling unflinchingly when the little girl’s sticky fingers searched her mouth.
The child was blind. I realized now why these three handicapped children stayed so close – in this way they pooled their abilities. The girl was the brightest of the trio, with an alert, pointed face and a lively, questing nose. The larger of the two boys, the stocky mongol with his massive forehead like an air-raid shelter, was her devoted guide-dog, always within hands’-reach and careful to steer her between the parked cars. He kept up a continuous murmured commentary on everything, presenting to his blind companion what must have been the picture of a dream-like and affable world.
The third child was a small, sandy-haired boy who squinted at the sky with tremendous excitement as if rediscovering each second the sheer joy of all that went on around him. As he gazed at the sun-filled park every leaf and flower seemed to hold the promise of a special treat. He used the leg-iron shackled to his right foot as a pivot, swinging around on it with some style.
I watched them scuttle around me, in and out of the cars. I liked this self-reliant threesome, and wished that I could help them. I remembered my Pied Piper complex. Somewhere in this park there might well be a miniature paradise, a secret domain where I could give the blind girl her sight, strong legs to the spastic, intelligence to the mongol.
‘What is it, Rachel …?’ Dr Miriam bent down to catch her whisper. ‘Rachel’s very keen to know what you