clergyman had pulled me on to the grass, and at this point in the confusion some lunatic had tried to revive me, some half-trained suburban first-aid enthusiast. Already I resolved that the sooner I left Shepperton the better, before any other blunder could occur.
However, before I could leave I needed a new set of clothes.
‘There’s a spare suit at the clinic, though your pupils at the flying school won’t recognize you in it.’ She added in a droll way: ‘I’m deliberately being cryptic – you might decide to jump out of this car.’
‘As long as the suit didn’t belong to someone who died. Tempting providence twice the same afternoon isn’t the kind of thing your priest would approve of.’
‘Blake, you didn’t tempt providence.’ Choosing her words, she went on matter-of-factly: ‘Actually, people don’t die at the clinic, it’s for out-patients only. Believe me, I’m glad you weren’t our first recruit. There’s a geriatric unit attached to it – the three children are temporarily there on referral, no one else would take them. I’m sorry they were being silly, but before they came here they’d been terribly abused.’
She pointed to a three-storey building beyond the clinic’s car-park. On the terrace a line of elderly patients sat in their wheelchairs, nodding at the sun. As soon as they saw my ragged flying suit they immediately revived, began to point at me and argue with each other. I assumed that they had seen the burning Cessna fly over and hit the trees along the river.
We waited in the car-park for the three children to run up to us. Unaware that I was watching her closely, Dr Miriam leaned against one of the cars and picked at a fleck of dirt under her thumbnail. For some reason, perhaps the heat reflected from the polished cellulose and my own half-naked body, I felt suddenly obsessed with this young woman, with the chipped varnish on her toe-nails, the grass-stains on her heels, the heady smell of her thighs and armpits, and even the cryptic residue of some patient’s bodily functions on her white coat. She flicked the dirt from her nail on to the grass, as if returning to the park part of that bountiful nature welling up ceaselessly through her pores. I felt that her grubby feet and air of untidiness stemmed not from any lack of hygiene but from her complete absorption in all the commonplaces of nature. I knew that she cured her patients with poultices of earth and spit, rolled together in her strong hands and warmed between her thighs. Infatuated with her smell, I wanted to mount her like a stallion taking a meadow-rich mare.
‘Blake …?’ She was watching me in a not unfriendly way, as if she knew that I was no ordinary pilot and was deliberately letting herself be attracted to me. When the children reached us she bent down and embraced them warmly in turn, smiling unflinchingly when the little girl’s sticky fingers searched her mouth.
The child was blind. I realized now why these three handicapped children stayed so close – in this way they pooled their abilities. The girl was the brightest of the trio, with an alert, pointed face and a lively, questing nose. The larger of the two boys, the stocky mongol with his massive forehead like an air-raid shelter, was her devoted guide-dog, always within hands’-reach and careful to steer her between the parked cars. He kept up a continuous murmured commentary on everything, presenting to his blind companion what must have been the picture of a dream-like and affable world.
The third child was a small, sandy-haired boy who squinted at the sky with tremendous excitement as if rediscovering each second the sheer joy of all that went on around him. As he gazed at the sun-filled park every leaf and flower seemed to hold the promise of a special treat. He used the leg-iron shackled to his right foot as a pivot, swinging around on it with some style.
I watched them scuttle around me, in and out of the cars. I liked this self-reliant threesome, and wished that I could help them. I remembered my Pied Piper complex. Somewhere in this park there might well be a miniature paradise, a secret domain where I could give the blind girl her sight, strong legs to the spastic, intelligence to the mongol.
‘What is it, Rachel …?’ Dr Miriam bent down to catch her whisper. ‘Rachel’s very keen to know what you look like. I haven’t quite convinced her that you’re not a personal messenger from the archangel Michael.’
The girl’s agile hands, with their acute flexion at the wrists, were already tracing out the contours of a face. Like the two boys, she seemed to cross reality at an angle. I lifted her and held her against my chest, partly to confirm that her small hands could not have bruised my ribs. Her thin breath panted into my face as her fingers raced like excited moths over my cheeks and forehead, poked into my mouth and nostrils. I almost enjoyed the sharp pain as she touched my lips. I held her tightly, squeezing her hips against my abdomen.
The mongol was tugging at my wrists, alarmed eyes under his overloaded forehead. The girl cried out, shaking her blind face away from my lips.
‘Blake! Put her down!’ Dr Miriam pulled the child from my arms. She stared at me in a shocked way, unsure whether this was how I ordin- arily behaved. Fifty yards away, Father Wingate was crossing the park. He had stopped under the trees, the canvas chair and wicker hamper in his strong hands, watching me as if I were some kind of escaped criminal. I knew that he had seen me seize the girl.
Dr Miriam lowered the child to the ground. ‘David, Jamie – take Rachel with you.’
The girl tottered away from me, safe within the mongol’s protective gaze. Clearly he was unable to decide whether Rachel had really been frightened by me. They ran off into the park together. Rachel’s hands were tracing out the profiles of some extraordinary face.
‘What did she see?’
‘By the looks of it, a kind of bizarre bird.’
Dr Miriam stood between me and the children, making sure that I did not take it into my head to run after them. My arms were still shaking from the effort of embracing the child. I knew that Dr Miriam was well aware of the brief sexual frenzy that had gripped me, and half-expected me to wrestle her into the back seat of the nearest car. How fiercely would she have fought me off? She stayed close to me when we entered the clinic, wary that I might assault one of the elderly patients shuffling into the waiting room.
But once we were in her office she deliberately turned her back to me, almost inviting me to hold her waist. She was still confused by the excitement of my crash-landing. For all her modesty, as she listened to my heart and lungs her hands never left me. I watched her in an almost dream-like way while she pressed my shoulders against the X-ray machine. The exquisite mole like a beautiful cancer below her left ear, the handsome black hair swept back out of harm’s way, the unsettled eyes ruled by her high forehead, the blue vein in her temple that pulsed with some kind of erratic emotion – I wanted to examine all these at my leisure, savour the scent of her armpits, save for ever in a phial hung around my neck the tag of loose skin on her lip. Far from being a stranger, I felt that I had known her for years.
She brought me the spare suit she had promised and watched me while I changed, staring frankly at my naked body and half-erect penis. I pulled on the black worsted trousers and jacket, the dry-cleaned suit of a priest or funeral mute, fitted with unusual pockets designed to conceal a secret rosary or the bereaved’s tips.
When she returned with the developed X-ray plates she handed me a pair of tennis shoes.
‘I’ll look like an undertaker out for a quiet run.’ I waited as she examined these photographs of my skull. ‘For a year I was a medical student. Who owns the copyright? They may be valuable.’
‘We do. They probably are. Thank God there’s nothing there. Will you come back for the aeroplane?’
I
