‘I have to leave. I’m an instructor at a flying school – they’ll need to know the aircraft came down here.’
‘I thought you were a stunt pilot.’
‘I am, in a way. I am a stunt pilot.’ To avoid her interested gaze, I asked: ‘What’s the matter with your mother? She’s mad …’
‘You startled her, to put it mildly. Now, wait a minute.’ She stood in front of me and felt my bruised ribs and abdomen, like a teacher inspecting a child injured in a playground. The blood from my grazed knuckles spotted her hands. Once again I felt a strong sexual attraction to her, part of my nervous relief at being alive. There was a slight swelling under her upper lip, as if she had bruised it kissing her lover.
‘Before you leave I want to take an X-ray of that head. Five minutes ago we thought you’d …’
She left the sentence unfinished, less out of deference to me than to the clergyman. He had moved a few steps closer but had still not joined us. His level stare made me sure that he already suspected I was not a qualified pilot. Dr Miriam squeezed the water from my suit. ‘Father Wingate, who’s the patron saint of stunt pilots and flying instructors? There must be one.’
‘Clearly there must be. Miriam, leave the poor fellow alone.’ To me, he added: ‘It isn’t every day that young men fall from the sky.’
‘More’s the pity.’ She turned from me and silenced the three children, who were running around the swing. The boy with leg-irons was uttering a series of whooping cries that sounded like a parody of my voice. ‘Jamie – why are you being cruel?’
I thought of clouting the boy but the priest touched my shoulder. He had at last approached me, and was staring into my face as if reading the seams in one of his bone-beds. ‘Before you go. You’re all right, are you? You must have a powerful will – you literally came to life in our hands.’
For all his pious tone, I knew that he was not about to ask me to join him in a prayer of thanks. My apparent return from the dead had clearly shaken the orders and proprieties of his universe. Perhaps he had tried to revive me on the beach, and after all these years of wearing the cloth was embarrassed to find that he had apparently performed a miracle.
Seeing his strong physique at close quarters, the shoulders still trembling with some strange repressed emotion, I could easily imagine him deciding to crush the life out of me and send me back to the other side before everything got out of hand. He was deliberately exposing the suspicions that crossed his face, trying to provoke me. I was tempted to grapple with him, force my bruised body against his and hurl him on to the oil-stained grass.
I touched my lips, wondering if the priest had revived me by this act of oral rape. Someone with powerful arms had crushed the air from my lungs – a man of my own size, judging from the imprint of his mouth and hands. The priest was old enough to be my father, but despite his dog-collar he had the aggressive physique of a rugby player.
I looked at the circle of faces, at the people lining the opposite bank of the river. If not the priest, then which of the seven witnesses? Perhaps Dr Miriam, or her dotty mother. Mrs St Cloud had emerged from the mansion, the oil-stained pearls hanging in a greasy chain around her neck. She still hesitated to approach me, as if she expected me to ignite spontaneously and destroy her already disfigured lawn.
The last of the witnesses, the blond-haired man painting the Ferris wheel, had stepped down from the rusting pier and was now walking along the beach towards us. He strolled through the shallow water in his bare feet, showing off his almost naked body to me. His casual paddling had a serious purpose, re-establishing his rights over this water I had temporarily made my own.
He waved to Dr Miriam, the small conspiratorial gesture of a past lover, waiting for her to invite him on to the lawn. When she ignored him he pointed in an off-hand but sly way to the dead elms above our heads.
Looking up, I saw a section of the Cessna’s tail suspended from the upper branches. Pinned against the sky, it flicked from side to side, a flag already semaphoring my presence to the searching police.
‘Stark … he’s always had sharp eyes.’ As if protecting me, Dr Miriam took my arm. ‘Blake, come on. We ought to leave. I’ll find you something to wear at the clinic.’
At that time, as I followed her across the lawn, I was aware only of the silent crowd watching me from both banks of the river, the tennis players sitting with their rackets on the grass. Their faces seemed almost hostile. Seen through this strange light, the placid town into which I had fallen had a distinctly sinister atmosphere, as if all these apparently unhurried suburbanites were in fact actors recruited from the film studios to play their roles in an elaborate conspiracy.
We reached Dr Miriam’s sports car in the drive behind the house. Hovering in the porch, Mrs St Cloud handed the medical bag to her daughter.
‘Miriam—?’
‘Mother, for heaven’s sake. I’ll be quite safe.’ With a tolerant shake of her head, Dr Miriam opened the car door for me.
As I stood there barefoot in the oil-stained rags of my flying suit I was suddenly certain that Mrs St Cloud would not run to the telephone the moment I left. This middle-aged widow had never seen anyone return from the dead. With a hand to her throat, she stared at me as if I were a son whose existence she had absent-mindedly misplaced.
At the same time, I had no intention of outstaying my welcome. For whatever motives, one of these people had tried to kill me.
Should I have been more wary of Miriam St Cloud? Even then, as we approached the clinic, it seemed strange that I was so ready to trust this young doctor. Little more than a student, with her white coat and grass-stained feet, she sat seriously over the wheel. She was still unsettled, putting herself to unnecessary trouble to look after me, and I suspected that she might try to drive me to the local police station. We stopped several times under the trees, giving the three children time to catch up with us. They raced across the park, whooping and hooting, as if hoping to shock the solemn beeches out of their silence. I kept a careful watch for the arrival of the police, my arm behind Dr Miriam’s seat. If a patrol car appeared I was ready to wrest the controls from her and bundle her out on to the grass.
The sunlight shivered through the trees. The birds and leaves were restive, as if the elements of the disrupted afternoon were trying to reconstitute themselves.
‘Do you want to go back to your mother?’ I asked. ‘I’d say she needs you more than I do.’
‘You upset her – she wasn’t expecting you to recover so dramatic- ally. Since father’s death two years ago she’s spent all her time by the window, almost as if he were out here somewhere. Next time you come back from the dead do it in easy stages.’
‘I didn’t come back from the dead.’
‘Blake, I know …’ Annoyed with herself, she pressed my hand. I liked this young doctor, but her light-hearted reference to my death irritated me, a touch of dissecting-room humour I could do without. In fact, apart from my bruised mouth and ribs, I felt remarkably well. I remembered swimming strongly
