I gazed consolingly at his gentle face a large and flamboyantly dec- orated vehicle emerged from the gates of the film studios, set off rapidly down the road in a dusty clatter and swerved into the forecourt by the ticket kiosk. A hearse converted to carry surf-board and hang-gliding equipment, it was emblazoned with winged emblems and gilded fish. The blond-haired man who had been painting the gondolas stared at me in a self-conscious way from behind the steering wheel, then pulled off an antique flying helmet. He stepped from the vehicle and busied himself in the ticket kiosk, affecting not to notice me.
However, when I walked out to the end of the pier I heard his feet ringing on the metal slats.
‘Blake … be careful there!’ He waved me away from the flimsy rail, fearing that his rusting hulk might collapse under us. ‘Are you all right? This is where you came down.’
He looked at me with some sympathy, but at the same time he stood well back from me, as if at any moment I might do something bizarre. Had he watched my attempt to cross the motorway?
‘That was a spectacular landing …’ He stared at the strong current flowing below our feet. ‘I know you’re a stunt pilot, but you must have been rehearsing that for years.’
‘You’re a fool!’ I wanted to hit him. ‘I nearly killed myself!’
‘Blake, I know! I’m sorry – but I suppose we rehearse that too …’ He played with the antique goggles and helmet, suddenly embarrassed by this rival show of flying gear. ‘I’m working on a picture at the studios – the remake of Men with Wings. I play one of the test pilots.’ He gestured deprecatingly at the Ferris wheel. ‘All this is a long-term investment, or was meant to be. It needs something to give it a lift. In fact, I’m surprised more people aren’t here this afternoon. It’s rather funny, Blake, that you’re the only one who’s come …’
He reached up to one of the gondolas and swung himself into the air, showing off his muscular physique not so much to intimidate me – I could have knocked him down without any effort – as to win some kind of physical respect. His manner was aggressive but ingratiating, his mind already hard at work trying to think up some means of putting my crash to his advantage. As he gazed wistfully at the river, at the vanished traces of my accident swept away by the sunlit back of the Thames, I could see that he regretted being unable to exploit the derelict pier’s chance proximity to my crash-landing.
‘Stark, tell me – you saw me swim ashore?’
‘Of course.’ As if to forestall any criticism of his lack of action, he explained hurriedly: ‘I was going to dive in, Blake, but suddenly there you were, somehow you’d climbed out of the plane.’
‘Father Wingate helped me on to the beach. Did you see anyone try to revive me? Mouth to mouth respiration …?’
‘No – why do you ask?’ Stark was peering at me with a surprising look of intelligence in his actor’s face. ‘Don’t you remember, Blake?’
‘I’d like to thank him, whoever it was.’ Casually, I added: ‘How long was I in the aircraft?’
Stark was listening to the restive vultures in their cage. The huge birds were clambering around the bars, trying to seize a piece of the sky. I studied Stark’s unsettled eyes, the fine hairs that stood like needles around his lips. Had he revived me? I visualized his handsome mouth locked against my own, strong teeth cutting my gums. In many ways Stark resembled a muscular, blond-haired woman. I felt attracted to him, not by some deviant homosexual urge the crash had jerked loose from my psyche, but by an almost brotherly intimacy with his body, with his thighs and shoulders, arms and buttocks, as if we had shared a bedroom through our childhoods. I was the younger but stronger brother, the yardstick against which Stark would for ever measure himself. I could embrace him whenever I chose, force his hands against my bruised ribs to see if he had tried to attack me, test the bite of his mouth.
Confused by my stare, Stark turned his back on the river. ‘How long were you under? Three or four minutes. Perhaps more.’
‘Ten minutes?’
‘That’s a long time, Blake. You’d hardly be here.’ His composure returned, he watched me shrewdly, curious to see what I would do next. He played with the antique flying helmet, dangling this film prop in front of me as if toying with the suspicion that we were both actor-pilots. Yet I had flown a real plane against the sky, a powered aircraft, not one of his passive hang-gliders collaborating with the wind.
Along the perimeter road the police car approached, headlamps inflaming the afternoon sunlight. When it stopped by the kiosk I saw that Father Wingate was sitting in the rear seat behind the two policemen. He stared at me through the closed window with the pensive gaze of someone who had quietly turned himself in to the police.
As I waited for him to point me out to the officers Stark took my arm. ‘Blake, I’m driving to London – I’ll give you a lift across the river.’
I sat in the passenger seat of the hearse, wearing my funeral mute’s costume, hiding my face behind the folded canopy of the hang-glider. I listened to the chittering of the marmoset, the guttural screeching of the vultures. For some reason my arrival had frayed their nerves. In the rear-view mirror I could see Father Wingate watching me from the back seat of the police car, like a fellow conspirator keeping his own counsel, careful to give away nothing of his involvement with me.
Stark stood by the kiosk with the two policemen, warning them away from the rusty pier and shrugging as they pointed to the sky above the film studios.
So the police were still searching for a witness. As I watched the film actor shake his head I was convinced that despite all the uncertainties of the afternoon neither Stark nor Father Wingate, neither Miriam St Cloud nor any of the others who had seen my crash would betray me to the police.
At last I was about to escape from this suffocating town. I sat impatiently beside Stark as we queued to cross Walton Bridge. It was now late afternoon, and the bridge approaches were filled with traffic returning from London. Although Walton lay to the south of Shepperton, even further from the airport, at least it would spring me from this zone of danger. I was thinking of Stark’s decision not to betray me to the police – my apparent return from the dead had temporarily silenced the film actor as it had Dr Miriam, her mother and the fossil-hunting clergyman. Once I left, however, I was certain that Stark would leak the story to a newspaper or television company, particularly when he discovered that I had stolen the Cessna.
But for some reason of his own Stark was deeply impressed by my being a pilot. My spectacular arrival, a real crash as opposed to the contrived mishaps of his film, had tapped some barely formed but powerful dream. He pointed to the almost stationary traffic, the lines of cars stalled in clouds of sunlit exhaust.
‘By rights, Blake, you should be a thousand feet above all this. I took some flying lessons once, but I wasn’t ready for it. Have you tried hang-gliding?’
I was looking at the dead elms above the park. Around the bend of the river the Cessna’s tailplane flicked its message at me. The freshly painted gondolas of the Ferris wheel hung from the sky, toys waiting to be picked up by passing balloonists.
