the perimeter fence. The Harvard slid across an empty dual carriageway into the garden of a bungalow owned by a retired air-traffic controller. He had watched my botched take-off from his bedroom window, and his testimony sealed my fate. By the time the ambulance and fire trucks arrived my flying career was over.
But at least the crash had brought me to Jane, one of the teenage doctors, as I called them, who wandered around the surgical ward at Guy’s. She was twenty-seven years old, but could have passed for seventeen, slumming through the ward in worn sandals with dirty toes and lank hair, lunching off a chocolate bar as she studied my temperature chart. Looking up from my pillow into her sceptical gaze, I wondered why a beautiful young woman was disguising herself as a hippie.
She was gentle enough when she examined my knee. Her small hands with their chipped nails deftly removed the drainage tubes. She finished her chocolate, screwed up the wrapper and dropped it into my half-empty teacup.
‘This knee needs to be flexed more – I’ll get on to physio.’ She studied my admission notes, tapping a pencil between her strong teeth. ‘So you’re the pilot here? You crash-landed your plane?’
‘Not exactly. The plane never left the ground.’
‘That must be quite an achievement. I like pilots – Beryl Markham is my hero.’
‘A great flyer,’ I agreed. ‘Totally promiscuous.’
‘Aren’t all women, if they want to be? Men have such a hang-up about that.’ She stuffed my file into its rack at the foot of the bed. ‘They say flying and sex go together. I don’t know about that side of your life, but it’s going to be a while before you fly.’
‘I’m set to lose my licence.’
‘How sad.’ She took a syringe from the kidney dish and eyed the meniscus. ‘I’m sorry. Flying must be important to you.’
‘It is. By the way, is that needle clean?’
‘Clean? What an idea…’ She eased the antibiotic into my arm. ‘No one cleans hospitals these days – this isn’t the 1930s. We spend the money on important things. Fancy wallpaper for the managers’ dining room, new carpets for the senior consultants …’
Already I was staring at the high forehead she disguised behind a dark fringe, and the quick but oddly evasive eyes. I liked the bolshie cast of her mouth, and the lips forever searching for the choicest four-letter word. Her unlined face was pale from too many cigarettes, too many late nights with boring lovers who failed to appreciate her. Despite the name tag – ‘Dr Jane Gomersall’ – I almost believed that she was one of those impostors who masquerade so effortlessly as members of the medical profession, some renegade sixth-form schoolgirl who had borrowed a white coat and decided to try her hand at a little doctoring.
Keen to meet her again, I was soon out of bed, and spent hours in my wheelchair hunting the corridors. Sometimes I would see her loafing on a fire escape with the younger surgeons, laughing as they smoked their cigarettes together. Later, when we talked near the soft-drinks machine outside the lifts, I learned that she was not a hippie, but adopted her scruffy style to irritate the hospital administrators. She had specialized in paediatrics, but ward closures had reassigned her to general duties. Her clergyman father was the headmaster of a Church of England school in Cheltenham, and the role of rebel and classroom agitator had come early to her.
On my last day, a few minutes before Charles collected me, I heard the familiar flip-flop of worn sandals, and limped to the door as she sauntered past. She waited amiably for me to speak, but I could think of nothing to say. Then she raised her fringe, as if cooling her forehead, and suggested that I show her around Elstree Flying Club.
The next weekend she drove me from my house in Maida Vale to the airfield in north London. She was surprised by the aircraft in the hangars, by their rough, riveted skins and the harsh reek of engine coolant and lubricating oil. My Harvard, still stained by the traffic controller’s rhododendrons, especially intrigued her. One of the watching mechanics helped her into the cockpit. Without a parachute to sit on, she was barely visible through the windscreen. She pushed back the canopy, stood on the metal seat-base and flung out an arm, in the posture of the winged woman screaming to her followers on the Arc de Triomphe. The sculpture had deeply impressed her during a school visit to Paris, and I only wished I could have supplied her with a sword.
Later she dressed in my white overalls and put on an old leather flying helmet, lounging around the Harvard like the women pilots in aviation’s heroic days, smoking their Craven A’s while they leaned against their biplanes and gazed at the stars.
We were married within three months. I was still on my crutches, but Jane wore an extravagantly ruched silk dress that seemed to inflate during the ceremony, filling the register office like the trumpet of a vast amaryllis. She smoked pot at the reception held at the Royal College of Surgeons in Regent’s Park, sniffed a line of cocaine in front of her mother, a likeable suburban solicitor, and gave an impassioned speech describing how we had made love in the rear seat of the Harvard, a complete fiction that even her father cheered.
During our Maldives honeymoon she snorkelled on the outer, and dangerous, side of the reef, and befriended a female conger eel. More out of curiosity than lechery, she set my camcorder to film us having sex in our bamboo hut, watching me like a lab technician who had grown attached to an experimental animal. Sometimes I sensed that she might walk off into the sea and vanish for ever. At Maida Vale, a week after our return, a policeman called to question her, and she admitted to me that she supplied tincture of cannabis to psoriasis sufferers and had tried to grow hemp plants in a disused laboratory at the hospital. Already I guessed that the urge to work abroad was part of the same restlessness that had led her to marry me, a random throw of the dice.
‘Paul, be honest,’ she said when she learned of the Eden-Olympia vacancy. ‘How do you feel? Dissatisfied?’
‘No. Are you?’
‘We all are. And we do nothing about it. You’ve stopped flying, and keep getting these knee infections. I’m a trained paediatrician and I practically carry bedpans. Think of something really perverse I could do.’
‘Have a baby?’
‘Yes! That’s rather clever, Paul. But I can’t. At least not now. There are problems.’
‘Medical ones?’
‘In a way …’
But I had seen Jane inserting her coil and could feel the drawstring emerging from her cervix.
Now, following David Greenwood, we had arrived in Eden-Olympia, among the most civilized places on the planet and one that promised to stifle the last vestiges of her hunger for freedom. The heroine of ‘La Marseillaise’ was about to sheathe her sword.
THE POOL LAY beside me, so calm that a film of dust lay on the surface. Through the cool depths I could see a small coin on the sloping floor, perhaps a one-franc piece that had slipped from the pocket of Greenwood’s swimsuit. Burnished by the pool detergent, it gleamed like a node of silver distilled from the Riviera light, a class of pearl unique to the swimming pools of the rich.
I listened to the vacuum cleaners working in the bedroom, a relentless blare that had driven the echoes of the Harvard’s engine from my mind. The two Italian maids arrived each morning at ten o’clock, part of the uniformed task force that moved from villa to villa. A gardener, Monsieur Anvers, appeared on alternate days, watered the grass and shrubs, and cleaned the pool. He was unobtrusive, an elderly Cannois whose daughter worked in the Eden-Olympia shopping mall.
One of the maids stared cheekily at me from a bathroom window, as if puzzled by my life of ease. Already the concept of leisure was dying in the business park, replaced by a grudging puritanism. Freedom was the right to paid work, while leisure was the mark of the shiftless and untalented.
Deciding