I noticed that more mementoes had left the walls, the ticket stubs of the Rio premiere of 2001 and photographs of himself with the American astronauts at the Houston Space Center. I guessed that he was clearing away these remnants of the past twenty years so that he could return to his youth. Steadied by the camera, he reflected on his Scottish childhood and his wartime schooldays in Australia, where he and his sister had been evacuated.
“… Thinking about the Japanese during the first years of the war was rather like thinking about death. Everyone in Australia was vaguely frightened of the Japanese soldiers and knew they were approaching, but no one had ever seen one. Of course, our idea of the Japanese was a complete caricature—very different from your case, Jim, as a boy in wartime Shanghai. You knew exactly what the Japanese were like, and you’d also seen a great deal of death. Looking back, how do you think that affected you?”
I watched the sound engineer’s tape turning and looked up to find Dick watching me with surprisingly clear eyes, his long jaw raised to reveal his ravaged neck.
I replied clumsily: “I did see a lot of dead people—as you’d expect during a war. In some ways I think it was very corrupting…”
“Go on—you say corrupting, but how exactly?”
“Well … it wasn’t the dead who were devalued but the living. Our expectations of life were lowered.”
“Is that because they were too high in the first place?” Before I could reply, Dick continued in a last surge of breath: “Perhaps we have exaggerated ideas about life, expectations that we see are unrealistic only as it draws to an end? It may be that we’ve allowed life and death to become polarised, when they’re really much closer to each other than we realise. As I get nearer to my own death the distance seems to shrink…”
After the recording Dick held my hand in a friendly but absentminded way. He walked stiffly into the dining room, which overlooked his high-walled garden. Had he begun to forget me, along with the beer mats and the American licence plates? Yet his apparently impromptu question had made a telling point, addressed more to me than to the television audience, a brief but acute inquiry into my own motives and character.
The days between our recordings seemed to lengthen, as if I were applying some unconscious brake to time in an attempt to hold back the approaching end. A different man was emerging through Dick’s wasted features, far more self-reliant than the television performer he had seduced himself into becoming. At our third and fourth interviews he spoke to camera in a short-breathed and almost impatient tone, describing his pleasure in the everyday world around him, in the garden and fish pond, his sense of triumph at winning the affection of his neighbours’ cat. But these pleasures seemed as abstract as the moves in a chess game. I guessed that he was entering a realm where, seeing everything with absolute clarity, he no longer cared to be distracted by pleasures of any kind.
Our fifth recording was cancelled, and I assumed that Dick had decided to end the series. But his sister told me that he had briefly returned to the Marsden, to be introduced to a new regimen of drugs that would stabilise a secondary tumour in his knee. By now, two months after discharging himself, he breathed with continuous effort, his diaphragm forced into his ribcage by the enlarging lobes of his liver. On the day of our interview his sister and I knocked on his bedroom door, unable to get a reply. We entered to find the French windows open to the cool November air. Dick was sitting in his woollen dressing gown at the bottom of the garden, staring at the house without noticing us. I had seen the same fixed eyes in my neighbours’ golden retriever when it had crept into the garden to die. Only when Dick rose from his deck chair and stepped slowly towards us did time begin again.
Without any greeting, he led me to his computer room, where a small editing suite had been installed. Before the arrival of the BBC crew Dick began to run through the film of our earlier conversations. Shifting the clips of film with his impatient fingers, he stared at himself as he addressed the camera. Until then I had been glad that the TV screen was helping to ease his last days. The medium that had trivialised his scientific career had appeared to come to his rescue, but now its magic had dimmed.
The BBC crew arrived, and we could hear their lowered voices in the hall. Usually their appearance provided Dick with a slight lift, and the expression would return to his face like a bucket drawn from a dark well. But he ignored them, staring at the empty screen of the editing machine. I touched his arm, thinking that he had lost consciousness, but his eyes were alert.
“Dick, they’re here…”
“You can tell them to wait.” He gestured dismissively at the screen. “The producer’s lost his nerve—he wants to change the ‘direction’ of the series. Can you believe that? A little late in the day. Bring in other topics, what do I now think of abortion? Abortion—do-it-yourself genocide … He didn’t like that.”
He laughed thinly, massaging his knee through his pyjamas.
“Dick, can you walk? I’ll bring the wheelchair.”
“No—it’s just down the hall. The surgeon at the Marsden talked about a prosthetic limb. The wonders of modern prosthetics, dear God—the castration complex raised to the level of an art form. He explained that they’re close to ‘understanding’ disease—they don’t realise that they’re soon going to be overwhelmed by an epidemic of imaginary diseases. The one thing we treasure most is a corrupt version of ourselves.” He held my wrist, aware that I was trembling. “Now, this experiment … Someone else will have to take over. Perhaps one day, who knows…”
These were the last words that Dick spoke to me. He stood up and stepped quietly into his bedroom with a backward wave of the hand. He closed the door, leaving me to apologise to the film crew. He had spoken matter-of-factly of our “experiment,” and I realised that he had taken part in the documentary with one end in mind. The series had been a desperate stratagem that alone might have saved him. He had literally put his faith in my ironic prophecy that he would make the first great scientific discovery on television, and had gambled against all logic that the scientific discovery would be his recovery from inoperable cancer.
What was to have been our last interview never occurred. When I arrived at the house a fortnight later, an ambulance was parked outside. In the hall were Dick’s local doctor and the district nurse, his sister and her husband, all lit by the glare of the television lights through the door of Dick’s bedroom. He was to have taped his last reflections on his life before being taken to hospital, but it was clear that he was now too exhausted to speak. The producer had persuaded the reluctant doctor to allow a last shot of Dick lying on his bed in the dining room, beside the dark mahogany table and its straight-backed chairs, a scene set for a tribunal.
Standing in the doorway behind the cameraman, I waved to Dick as he lay with the oxygen mask over his face, a glucose drip in his arm, a catheter draining into a glass flagon under the bed. He no longer wore his wig, and his face seemed to have been sucked into the mask, as if his wasted body were about to drain away down these encircling tubes, their coils like the telephone wire looped around the chest of the young Chinese on the railway platform.
16
THE IMPOSSIBLE PALACE
A funfair was visiting Shepperton. As I walked along the river I could see the chromium-panelled caravans through the trees, driving into the park beside the war memorial. There were trucks loaded with Dodg’em cars and sections of merry-go-rounds, a dismantled dream that these taciturn circus folk reassembled each weekend in one of the small towns of the Thames Valley, reminding the inhabitants of a forgotten corner of their imaginations. Already the children playing by the riverbank had left the water. Whooping to their mothers, they ran towards the park, where the dozen vehicles were drawn up in a circle, a magic fortress that only children could storm.
I remembered how Alice and Lucy would ride their unicorns side by side, sixpenny treats that bought a fortune of excitement as they moved up and down, ribbons flying, arms clasped around the unicorns’ n
ecks, wide eyes cutting the air. Henry would sit stiffly in his silver aeroplane, embarrassed at being too large for the cockpit, then stand up like a stuntman and grip the leading edge of the wing, a lordly, three-year-old Lindbergh.
I strolled through the trees, almost expecting to see them waiting for me by the entrance. They had left for the start of the university summer term, but in my mind they were always playing in the park. Alice’s bright eyes, a swirl of Lucy’s white frock, Henry’s excited shout at some new idea conjured themselves from the eddies of air and light. Generously, the park released its hoarded treasures. Stirred by the summer wind, the great elms were shedding their memories. I shielded my eyes from the sun and looked up at the shifting hampers of foliage, searching for a troupe of children perched on the branches, younger selves of the housewives and office workers of Shepperton. Perhaps I would see my own youthful self, bony cheeks under a strange haircut, whom I scarcely recognised in our snapshot albums.
As if cued by these memories, a young man in a pin-striped business suit and tie was standing in the car park beside his Triumph sportscar, watching me as he folded back the canvas hood. I followed the children towards the caravans in the centre of the park, not quite able to make out his expression, though he seemed to recognise me. From its licence plate I realised that his Triumph was twenty years old, the same age and model as the car that Dick Sutherland had once let me drive.
Chattering to herself, a neighbour’s daughter overtook me. When she held my hand, urging me towards the funfair, the young man left his Triumph and began to walk in a deliberate way towards me. Was he a friend of Alice and Lucy? There was an edge to his jaw that reminded me again of the photograph of myself before my marriage. As the elms stirred over our heads, dappling the hair of the child pulling at my hand, I had the absurd notion that this young man was myself. He was calling to me, a hand raised in warning.
“I say—are you the parent…?”
I turned to greet him and bumped into the girl’s older sister, who had followed us from the river. I helped to pick up her bucket and spade that I had knocked onto the grass, but by the time we had exchanged apologies the young man had returned to his car. He locked the canvas hood, avoiding my eyes as he stepped into the driver’s seat. I guessed that he had seen me following the children, too old to be a parent and too young to be a grandfather, and suspected that I might have some illicit interest in them.
I watched him drive away, exhaust roaring as he swerved past the war memorial and the crowded lunch-hour pubs. When he had gone I felt that I had narrowly missed meeting myself.
* * *
This sense of an imminent rendezvous somewhere in Shepperton had been growing within me during the six months since Dick Sutherland’s death. I woke each morning, looking forward to the day’s work, buoyed by the warm spring light and by a mysterious elation that had overtaken me. I had expected to be depressed by Dick’s death, an ordeal made all the more harrowing by the uncompleted documentary, but I felt an immense sense of release. The air outside the crematorium was so bright and pungent that I scandalised Cleo Churchill by searching the chimneys for any signs of burnt flesh.
The non-denominational service, with its recorded organ voluntary and mock-solemn trappings, had resembled the rites of a new religion still in its development stages, an effect only stressed by the large contingent of television producers who were present. Behind their heavy shades, forever dreaming of twelve-part series, they perhaps saw Dick as a mana-personality for the age of global TV. We were attending the funeral of someone who, with the shrewdest foresight, had already interred himself within the film archives of the BBC.
I had taken care to grieve for Dick while he was still alive, aware that repeats of his old programmes would soon be returning to our screens. Much as I disliked the documentary film in which we had taken part, I was grateful to Dick for choosing me as his interviewer. By demystifying his own death he had freed me from any fears of my own. For the first time since the birth of my children I felt that I was wholly done with the past and free to construct a new world from the materials of the present and future.
Time itself, bundling us headlong towards destinations of its own choice, had begun to loosen its grip. A day would last as long as I chose. Leaving my typewriter, I could spend an hour watching a spider build its web. On my walks by the river I stood among the elms and waited for time to calm itself, listening to its measured breath as it settled itself over the forest. I recognised the mystery and beauty of a leaf, the kindness of trees, the wisdom of light. My small house, the domestic streets and gardens glowed with the same vivid air I had seen during my experiment with LSD, and in that unending summer when Henry, Alice, and Lucy had been born.
* * *
At the entrance to the funfair, while their mothers gossiped and searched their handbags, the children waited impatiently by the ticket booth. They rushed squealing towards the merry-go-round, leaving behind the solitary, copper-eyed son of the Pakistani news agent. He watched me shyly as I bought our tickets, then darted away to join the others.
The carousel was turning, and the children shrieked as the ancient calliope chuntered out its brassy tune. Horses and unicorns rose and fell. Small hands tugged at the horses’ manes, pigtails streamed in the air, and cries of alarm gave way to frowns of deep seriousness.
Watching them sail by, I stepped closer to the rotating canopy. The lights swirled past, borne on the jangling music that drew memories from the wind, a dream of my own children when they had ridden these shabby unicorns. A two-year-old boy solemnly piloted the miniature aircraft, too frightened to cry, eyes charged by the steaming hoots of the calliope.
As I gazed at this enchanted scene, the carousel seemed almost stationary, preserved forever in a single moment. For the first time I could see beyond the little riders, through the silver forest of spiral pinions and the rotating mirrors above the calliope. Everyone I had known was riding the unicorns, Miriam and Dick Sutherland, a teenage Sally Mumford, boyish David Hunter. I stepped forward, waiting for an empty mount …
“Jim! Look out! What are you doing?”
A wooden pillar struck my hand. The carousel whirled past in a rush of noise and light, a raucous tumbril of chipped paint and peeling gilt. I fell backwards, steadied by two men watching their sons. A woman’s firm arms held me as I stumbled across the veering air.
“Jim—you nearly fainted!” Cleo Churchill pressed my cheeks, concerned eyes peering into my face. “I thought I’d find you here. You looked as if you were trying to climb on board…”
* * *
Sunlight filled the garden below the windows of my study, cheering the brambles and elders that crowded the edges of the lawn.
“I’m glad you don’t drive like that…” Cleo brought two tumblers of gin and ice from the kitchen. “Jim, tell me—were you trying to join the children?”
“Not really…” I managed to laugh at myself and massaged my bruised hand. The rosy glow of angostura suffused the gin like a bloodstream glimpsed through a butterfly’s wing. The carousel owner and his muscular sons had ordered me away, suspecting that I was up to no good. “I’d forgotten the thing was moving—a trick of the sun. It turned the carousel into a kind of stroboscope…”
“Well, I believe you … try not to stop any speeding cars—I’d hate having to explain that to Lucy and Alice.”
The fan on the mantelpiece was turning, and the reflected sunlight through her blond hair reproduced this curious effect. The same aura hovered over Cleo’s bare shoulders as over every leaf in the garden. I was sorry to have worried her—for months she had been telling me that I was marooned in Shepperton, and the accident at the funfair must have seemed to her like another of my attempts at internal escape.
Old friends by now, we had never become lovers—in a boozy and reflective mood I had once described this to her as a technical omission, to which she had replied with a raised eyebrow, a shrewd smile, and silence. But we had been separated by our shar
ed friendship with Dick. Our different perspectives on this remarkable but ambiguous man had kept us apart, along with a certain wariness that Cleo felt towards me. Now that Dick had gone we had only ourselves, that shock of recognition sensed at so many funerals and the cue to so many realignments.
I wanted to embrace her, but I found it difficult to get to grips with anything around me, the realm of desire and even the world of everyday objects. Cleo’s sensitive hands and shy lips, the leaves in the drive, the rainbows on the windshield of my car had all become idealised versions of themselves. The housewives shopping in Shepperton High Street, the extras leaving the film studios, the children on the carousel had been transformed by Dick’s death. Distanced from their everyday selves, they seemed to hover beyond the contingent world of time and space, exiled from the paradise of the ordinary.
* * *
I stood by my desk, where Cleo had placed two heavy manila envelopes. They contained those mementoes of Dick which his sister had offered to us. While Cleo watched from the safety of her glass of gin, I drew out the California licence plate, the fading photographs of Dick in the cockpit of his weekend Cessna, posing alongside astronauts and space scientists at the 1960s Cape Kennedy. There were coasters from the Tropicana Motel in Hollywood, chips from a Las Vegas casino, and name tags from forgotten psychological conferences.
I arranged them in chronological order, as far as I could remember. The photographs and mementoes were clips from the film of his life, in which he had been both star and director. The artless vanity of the young Richard Sutherland only prompted my affection for him. I was glad that he had died quietly and without pain, in the deep peace of the hepatic coma.
Cleo wiped her eye, taking my arm. “It’s like a shrine. The bones of a saint. Are you going to keep everything?”