hubcaps splashed with the best of Surrey mud. Out of curiosity, I made a sharp U-turn, and drove back past the courthouse.
Geoffrey Fairfax sat behind his steering wheel, head partly hidden inside a copy of
7
SNAKES AND LADDERS
THE SNAKES ON THE Brooklands board were only pretending to be asleep, and the ladders led anywhere.
I unlocked the front door and stepped into the darkened flat, lowering my suitcase to the floor. Around me were the few rooms, the now silent spaces of my father’s life, even more unfamiliar than they had been four days earlier. I felt like a student returning after a year at a foreign university, unsettled by the strange shapes of the rooms in the family home.
No one was here to greet me, uncork a bottle of champagne or hand me the keys of my first sports car. But there was a welcome of another kind. I recognized my father’s scent on the air, an old man’s soft breath, the sweet tang of tobacco steeped into the curtains and carpets.
A presence I scarcely knew was already arraying itself around me. Should I sleep in my father’s bed? I hesitated before entering his bedroom. Sleeping on his mattress, my head on his pillow as I dreamed of him, was too close for comfort. I left my suitcase in the hall and drew the curtains, aware that too much daylight would unnerve the ghosts.
In the bookcase beside the bed was a shelf of logbooks tracking his transits of the globe. There were biographies of test pilots of the 1960s, privately published by long-ago aircraft companies—Fairey, De Havilland, Avro—signed and dedicated to my father: ‘For Stuart, who always kept flying speed . . .’
Amazingly, there was a copy of Saint-Exupery’s
I poured myself a small whisky before exploring his chest of drawers. Everyone had a sex life, and their own little habits, not all endearing. But there was nothing on the shelf of the bedside table, apart from a bottle of eye drops and a sachet of beta-blockers, with its line of foil punctures ending on the morning of his death. There were no sleeping pills or tranquillizers. The old pilot slept easily, and sleep was something to be dealt with quickly. My father had been a man who wanted to stay awake.
I carried my suitcase into the second bedroom, and opened the windows with their view of the Metro- Centre. Its presence was curiously inviting, filled with those treasures I had spent my childhood coveting. Despite our large house and Mercedes, the home my mother made for us was bleak. Very rarely did anything new enter our lives. We made do with an elderly TV set, an electric clock that tried bravely to guess the time, and a central heating system that whined ceaselessly to itself. Shops and department stores were places of magic. I was forever showing my mother advertisements for new toasters and washing machines, hoping that they would ease the strain of existence for her. Even my presents were rationed. A proportion of birthday gifts sent to me by her sister and friends was carefully set aside, locked away for future use, so that I was always outgrowing my gifts.
Surprisingly, I turned out to be rather spartan as an adult, living in large apartments that I kept almost unfurnished. I worked all day devising ways of selling people a host of consumer goods, but rarely bought anything unless I needed to. Childhood had inoculated me against the consumer world I longed for so eagerly.
SEARCHING FOR SHEETS and pillowcases in the utility room, I noticed the workstation in the corner with its computer. My father’s emails were still stacking up, messages and fixture lists from local sports clubs that he supported. I scrolled through the details of ice-hockey matches, archery and basketball contests. My father supported a huge number of teams, and must have exhausted himself trailing around from ice rink to football stadium to athletics ground.
But the books on the nearby shelf were even more of a surprise. Next to the yearbook of a small-arms manufacturer were biographies of Peron, Goering and Mussolini, and a history of Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. I pulled down an illustrated guide to Nazi regalia and the ceremonial uniforms of the Third Reich. The heavy, laminated paper was soft from frequent handling, and I could almost feel my father sitting at this desk and turning the pages as he scanned the illustrations of Reichsmarschalls’ batons and leather SS overcoats.
A darker scent had crept into the flat. I sat back from the desk and pulled open the metal drawer. There was a clutter of Metro-Centre knick-knacks, loyalty gold cards and season passes, invitations to consumer clubs and sports events. A bulldog clip held a dozen issues of a Metro-Centre newsletter, filled with photographs of sporting club dinners, everyone in their St George’s shirts. The teams looked as smart and disciplined as paramilitary units.
Present in several of the group portraits was David Cruise, the Metro-Centre cable-channel presenter, with his actor’s handsome but empty face, a suntan like an advertising campaign and a smile that owed nothing to humour. His fleshy jaw made me think of Wernher von Braun posing beside a Redstone rocket in Arizona, Nazi past behind him and the future on hold.
Was my father a National Front supporter? Sleep would be less easy in the flat than I hoped. I opened the window, trying to let out the unpleasant aura, and noticed a banner hanging from the wall behind the door. This bore the emblem of a local football club, the Brookland Eagles. Embroidered in gold thread, two raptors with grotesquely hooked talons grimaced from the scarlet field.
My father’s interests had taken him into some threatening arenas. The modest workstation was almost a neo-fascist altar. I paused by the neatly pressed laundry on the ironing board. Lifting one of the shirts, I unfolded the familiar St George’s Cross, armorial eagles stitched to its left shoulder. I held the shirt to my chest, and imagined my elderly father wearing this threatening costume with its screaming eagles, the oldest football hooligan in Brooklands.
I stared at myself in the half-length mirror above the maid’s kettle and biscuit tin. The tasselled banner hung behind me, as if I were on a podium that faced a chanting crowd. I seemed more aggressive, not in the bully-boy way of the street thugs who had driven the imam from his suburban mosque, but in the more cerebral style of the lawyers, doctors and architects who had enlisted in Hitler’s elite corps. For them, the black uniforms and death’s- head emblems represented a violence of the mind, where aggression and cruelty were part of a radical code that denied good and evil in favour of an embraced pathology. Morality gave way to will, and will deferred to madness.
I tried to smile, but a different self stood behind the shirt. My cautious take on the world, imposed on me by my neurotic mother, had given way to something far less introverted. The focus of my face moved from my eyes and high forehead to my mouth and jaw. The muscles in my face were more visible, the strings of a harder appetite, a more knowing hunger . . .
I threw the shirt into the empty laundry basket.
WHAT DANGEROUS GAME had my father been playing? Years of mismanaged third world airports brought out a nasty strain of racism in senior pilots. Or was there something fascist about flight itself? Death, far from closing his life, had opened the door to a dozen possible futures. Already he was a different man from the wise and sympathetic figure I had imagined. What sort of father would he have made? I sensed my free and easy childhood, scarcely controlled by my distracted mother, giving way to a more disciplined regime. Discipline as a means of instilling love . . . ?
The flat was airless, and I needed to pace a car park somewhere to clear my head. I closed the door behind me and left the apartment house, listening to my feet on the gravel, a horizontal slide area where nothing was firmly bedded.
I was sitting in the driving seat of the Jensen, waiting for my mental compass to reset itself, when a grey Audi turned into the car park beside me. A tall, middle-aged Asian in a creased business suit stepped out. As his
