hung upside down above us.
Discreetly I ordered the searchlights switched off, and the audience’s attention turned to Nolan’s black- winged glider as it climbed towards the next cloud. Shards of dissolving tissue fell from the darkening air, the spray concealing whatever ambiguous creation Nolan was carving. To my surprise, the portrait that emerged was wholly lifelike. There was a burst of applause, a few bars of Tannhauser, and the searchlights lit up the elegant head. Standing among her guests, Leonora raised her glass to Nolan’s glider.
Puzzled by Nolan’s generosity, I looked more closely at the gleaming face, and then realized what he had done. The portrait, with cruel irony, was all too lifelike. The downward turn of Leonora’s mouth, the chin held up to smooth her neck, the fall of flesh below her right cheek – all these were carried on the face of the cloud as they had been in his painting in the studio.
Around Leonora the guests were congratulating her on the performance. She was looking up at her portrait as it began to break up over the lake, seeing it for the first time. The veins held the blood in her face.
Then a firework display on the beach blotted out these ambiguities in its pink and blue explosions.
Shortly before dawn Beatrice Lafferty and I walked along the beach among the shells of burnt-out rockets and Catherine wheels. On the deserted terrace a few lights shone through the darkness on to the scattered chairs. As we reached the steps a woman’s voice cried out somewhere above us. There was the sound of smashed glass. A french window was kicked back, and a dark-haired man in a white suit ran between the tables.
As Nolan disappeared along the drive Leonora Chanel walked out into the centre of the terrace. She looked at the dark clouds surging over the mesa, and with one hand tore the jewels from her eyes. They lay winking on the tiles at her feet. Then the hunched figure of Petit Manuel leapt from his hiding place in the bandstand. He scuttled past, racing on his deformed legs.
An engine started by the gates. Leonora began to walk back to the villa, staring at her broken reflections in the glass below the window. She stopped as a tall, blond-haired man with cold and eager eyes stepped from the sonic statues outside the library. Disturbed by the noise, the statues had begun to whine. As Van Eyck moved towards Leonora they took up the slow beat of his steps.
The next day’s performance was the last by the cloud-sculptors of Coral D. All afternoon, before the guests arrived, a dim light lay over the lake. Immense tiers of storm-nimbus were massing behind the mesa, and any performance at all seemed unlikely.
Van Eyck was with Leonora. As I arrived Beatrice Lafferty was watching their sand-yacht carry them unevenly across the lake, its sails whipped by the squalls.
‘There’s no sign of Nolan or little Manuel,’ she told me. ‘The party starts in three hours.’
I took her arm. ‘The party’s already over. When you’re finished here, Bea, come and live with me at Coral D. I’ll teach you to sculpt the clouds.’
Van Eyck and Leonora came ashore half an hour later. Van Eyck stared through my face as he brushed past. Leonora clung to his arm, the day-jewels around her eyes scattering their hard light across the terrace.
By eight, when the first guests began to appear, Nolan and Petit Manuel had still not arrived. On the terrace the evening was warm and lamplit, but overhead the storm-clouds sidled past each other like uneasy giants. I walked up the slope to where the gliders were tethered. Their wings shivered in the updraughts.
Barely half a minute after he rose into the darkening air, dwarfed by an immense tower of storm-nimbus, Charles Van Eyck was spinning towards the ground, his glider toppled by the crazed air. He recovered fifty feet from the villa and climbed on the updraughts from the lake, well away from the spreading chest of the cloud. He soared in again. As Leonora and her guests watched from their seats the glider was hurled back over their heads in an explosion of vapour, then fell towards the lake with a broken wing.
I walked towards Leonora. Standing by the balcony were Nolan and Petit Manuel, watching Van Eyck climb from the cockpit of his glider three hundred yards away.
To Nolan I said: ‘Why bother to come? Don’t tell me you’re going to fly?’
Nolan leaned against the rail, hands in the pockets of his suit. ‘I’m not – that’s exactly why I’m here, major.’
Leonora was wearing an evening dress of peacock feathers that lay around her legs in an immense train. The hundreds of eyes gleamed in the electric air before the storm, sheathing her body in their blue flames.
‘Miss Chanel, the clouds are like madmen,’ I apologized. ‘There’s a storm on its way.’
She looked up at me with unsettled eyes. ‘Don’t you people expect to take risks?’ She gestured at the storm-nimbus that swirled over our heads. ‘For clouds like these I need a Michelangelo of the sky … What about Nolan? Is he too frightened as well?’
As she shouted his name Nolan stared at her, then turned his back to us. The light over Lagoon West had changed. Half the lake was covered by a dim pall.
There was a tug on my sleeve. Petit Manuel looked up at me with his crafty child’s eyes. ‘Major, I can go. Let me take the glider.’
‘Manuel, for God’s sake. You’ll kill –’
He darted between the gilt chairs. Leonora frowned as he plucked her wrist.
‘Miss Chanel …’ His loose mouth formed an encouraging smile. ‘I’ll sculpt for you. Right now, a big storm- cloud, eh?’
She stared down at him, half-repelled by this eager hunchback ogling her beside the hundred eyes of her peacock train. Van Eyck was limping back to the beach from his wrecked glider. I guessed that in some strange way Manuel was pitting himself against Van Eyck.
Leonora grimaced, as if swallowing some poisonous phlegm. ‘Major Parker, tell him to –’ She glanced at the dark cloud boiling over the mesa like the effluvium of some black-hearted volcano. ‘Wait! Let’s see what the little cripple can do!’ She turned on Manuel with an over-bright smile. ‘Go on, then. Let’s see you sculpt a whirlwind!’
In her face the diagram of bones formed a geometry of murder.
Nolan ran past across the terrace, his feet crushing the peacock feathers as Leonora laughed. We tried to stop Manuel, but he raced ahead up the slope. Stung by Leonora’s taunt, he skipped among the rocks, disappearing from sight in the darkening air. On the terrace a small crowd gathered to watch.
The yellow and tangerine glider rose into the sky and climbed across the face of the storm-cloud. Fifty yards from the dark billows it was buffeted by the shifting air, but Manuel soared in and began to cut away at the dark face. Drops of black rain fell across the terrace at our feet.
The first outline of a woman’s head appeared, satanic eyes lit by the open vents in the cloud, a sliding mouth like a dark smear as the huge billows boiled forwards. Nolan shouted in warning from the lake as he climbed into his glider. A moment later little Manuel’s craft was lifted by a powerful updraught and tossed over the roof of the cloud. Fighting the insane air, Manuel plunged the glider downwards and drove into the cloud again. Then its immense face opened, and in a sudden spasm the cloud surged forward and swallowed the glider.
There was silence on the terrace as the crushed body of the craft revolved in the centre of the cloud. It moved over our heads, dismembered pieces of the wings and fuselage churned about in the dissolving face. As it reached the lake the cloud began its violent end. Pieces of the face slewed sideways, the mouth was torn off, an eye exploded. It vanished in a last brief squall.
The pieces of Petit Manuel’s glider fell from the bright air.
Beatrice Lafferty and I drove across the lake to collect Manuel’s body. After the spectacle of his death within the exploding replica of their hostess’s face, the guests began to leave. Within minutes the drive was full of cars. Leonora watched them go, standing with Van Eyck among the deserted tables.
Beatrice said nothing as we drove out. The pieces of the shattered glider lay over the fused sand, tags of canvas and broken struts, control lines tied into knots. Ten yards from the cockpit I found Petit Manuel’s body, lying in a wet ball like a drowned monkey.
I carried him back to the sand-yacht.
‘Raymond!’ Beatrice pointed to the shore. Storm-clouds were massed along the entire length of the lake, and the first flashes of lightning were striking in the hills behind the mesa. In the electric air the villa had lost its glitter. Half a mile away a tornado was moving along the valley floor, its trunk swaying towards the lake.
The first gust of air struck the yacht. Beatrice shouted again: ‘Raymond! Nolan’s there – he’s flying inside it!’
Then I saw the black-winged glider circling under the umbrella of the tornado, Nolan himself riding in the
