‘Terribly dull of them.’
‘That’s what I thought. Another of the great advertising breakthroughs that got nowhere.’
‘Its time will come.’ She brushed her hair back from her face, as if exposing herself to me, the removal of yet another of the veils that hung between us. ‘How well did you know your father?’
‘Hardly at all. My mother never got over his leaving her. For years she told me he had died in an air crash. Cheques would arrive on my birthday and she’d claim they came from the other side. I always thought high-street banks were outposts of heaven. The curious thing is that I’ve got to know him better since he died.’
‘I’m sure he was a fine man.’
‘He was. With one or two odd ideas.’
‘Interesting . . .’ She moved around the living room, and peered into the corridor that led to the bedrooms. ‘Can I snoop around? These days, you don’t see where your patients live.’
I followed her into the kitchen, and watched as she glanced at the modest array of herbs and spices. She patted the basil plant I had bought, tore off a leaf and raised it to a nostril. She was tired but stylish, clearly moved by the memories of the old man she had tried to keep alive for a few last hours. I trailed after her, already roused by her scent, a perfume of her own distilled from beauty, bloody-mindedness and chronic fatigue.
‘So this is where he slept?’ She stood in the doorway of my father’s bedroom, nose quickening at the dark, picking up the spoor of an old man’s body. She stepped forward and switched on the bedside lamp, then sat on the bedspread, smoothing the stress lines from the silk fabric.
‘Julia . . . ?’
‘Here . . .’ She beckoned me to sit beside her. As if without thinking, she loosened the top button of her shirt. ‘So . . . his head lay on that pillow. An old pilot’s dreams. Think of them, Richard. All those endless runways . . .’
‘Julia . . .’ I sat beside her and held her shoulders. I realized that she was shaking, a faint trembling as if she had caught a sudden chill, a cold draught from a door onto the dark that had come ajar. A desperate woman was sitting on my father’s bed, about to make love to his son for reasons that had everything and nothing to do with sex, the kind of clutching and violent love that only the bereaved ever experience.
She took my hand and slipped it inside her shirt, then placed it over her breast. ‘You don’t have to like me.’
‘Julia . . .’ I tried to calm her. ‘Not here. Let’s go into my bedroom. Julia . . . ?’
‘No.’ She spoke flatly, in an almost coarse voice. ‘Here.’
‘Dear, try to—’
‘Here! It’s got to be here!’ She turned a fierce gaze on me. ‘Can’t you understand?’
20
THE RACING CIRCUIT
I LEFT HER SLEEPING in my father’s bed. It was still dark when I woke at four, uneasy with the odd contours of the mattress, the narrow hollows of an old man’s hips and shoulders, and the more unsettling imprint of his mind. Julia lay beside me when I sat up, then turned and nestled easily into the aged pilot’s mould. A strange night passage had exhausted her. Restless dreams followed a fierce act of love. She had seized me as if I were a demon to be pinioned, a delegate from my father’s grave. Sex with me was part atonement and part restitution, an act of penance.
I sat on the bed, stroking the cloud of dark hair, and gripped her free hand, hoping to force something of my affection into her. There was a faint answering pulse, like a thank-you note slipped under the emotional door, and she sank into a shallow morning sleep that would last for hours.
I needed to get out and run the streets before anyone else was up. As I pulled on my tracksuit I carried out a quick inventory of myself. A bleak list: I missed my car, my job, my friends in London. I missed my father, whom I had never known, and I missed the quirky but likeable young doctor I had met at the hospital, with whom I had shared a bed but scarcely knew any better. Some kind of guilt and unease separated us, despite all the warmth I clearly felt for her. Had she failed my father in some way during his last hours in the intensive care unit? Sitting astride me, she made love as if trying to resuscitate a corpse. I listened to her breathing, a child’s small burps and swallows, sounds shaped like bliss, and thought of the daughter that Julia and I might have one day.
But I needed to leave the flat and visit the Brooklands circuit, and hear the ghosts of engines rumbling in the dark.
A carton of orange juice in my hand, I jogged out of the estate and set off for the racetrack half a mile to the south. Around me the residential streets were still silent, the suburbs of nowhere, immaculate pavilions that reminded me of the stylish tombs on the mortuary island in the Venice lagoon.
A section of the Brooklands embankment rose through the darkness, thirty feet high at its peak, its ridge line cut by an access road. I ran through this narrow corridor, and then stopped at the beach of ancient concrete. I thought of my father visiting the track in the 1930s, a small boy stunned by the reek of fuel oil and expensive perfume, the scent of glamour and danger. Spectacular crashes filled the newsreels of the day, heroic deaths that were England’s answer to the dictators across the Channel, and expressed the kingdom’s unconscious need for war.
‘Hello . . . ? You down there . . . come up and join me. You get a better view of the race . . .’
Above me, on the upper slope of the embankment, a man was strolling through the darkness. He wore a white tuxedo, as if he had strayed from an all-night party. He beckoned to me with an actorish gesture, but moved cautiously along the pitted concrete, as if a lifetime of treacherous floors had taught him to be wary of any surface. Seeing that I was too out of breath to climb up to him, he made his way down the slope.
I waited for him to reach me, and noticed an American car parked on the road below. A chauffeur in a peaked cap leaned against a door, smoking a cigarette and drawing small sketches on the dark air with its red tip.
‘Right . . .’ David Cruise took my hand, smilingly easy and avuncular, as if greeting a new contestant onto his cable show. ‘It’s worth going up there, you can still feel the slipstream. Listen—did you hear that?’
‘Hold on. A Bugatti, I think. Four carburettors, or maybe a Napier-Railton.’
‘That’s it!’ Pleased that I had played my role in his little routine, Cruise shook my hand. ‘Mr—?’
I introduced myself, but Cruise waved my name into the misty dawn air, taking for granted that he was too famous to identify himself. Without being aware of it, he was playing to the camera, which I sensed was somewhere beyond his favourite left profile.
‘Good, good . . .’ He savoured the air, as if relishing the tang of burnt rubber. ‘Wonderful . . . unlimited horsepower, twenty-litre engines. Nothing like it today. We have the technology, but we can’t build a dream.’
‘Formula One? No?’
‘Come on . . . millionaires in asbestos suits plastered with logos. This was the real thing.’
‘More than the Metro-Centre?’
Cruise stopped to glance at me as we made our way down to the Lincoln. ‘The Metro-Centre? I wish I could see it lasting seven years, let alone seventy.’
He gazed over the dark rooftops of the town, where the last haze of smoke from a few smouldering cars merged into the morning mist. At the football stadium the giant screens were still lit, showing an intermission commercial to the deserted stands. His screen self spoke to an elderly team supporter about her new bedroom suite, his hand bouncing the mattress as if inviting her for a romp.
Cruise silenced me with a raised fist, and stopped to watch himself. His mouth mimed in response to his signature repertory of engaging smiles, the shy grimaces that expressed a deep interest in his studio guests.
Despite the dim light, I could see him clearly in the pale aura of suburban fame that surrounded him. The dark was his medium, the deep blackness disguised as the interior of a TV studio. I was struck by how small he seemed, though he was almost six feet tall, with the kind of muscled physique found among gym users. He was bantering and easy-listening, but never ironic about himself. A minor deity should never express doubt over his own existence. In every way he was a creature of afternoon television, with a head of silver hair sculpted to show off the
