I HESITATED BEFOREopening the front door of the flat, unsure how Julia would respond to my father’s presence in every leather armchair and ashtray. At first she was stiff and awkward, as if expecting him to appear and challenge her. But she seemed at home when she emerged from the bathroom, a plaster over her eyebrow. She circled the living room, warming her hands around the tumbler of brandy, smiling at the pipe stands and the chorus line of framed photographs. Had she been the last of my father’s lovers? I could imagine her in the kitchen, reminding him about his next flu jab as he cooked an omelette for her.

Surprisingly, she was at ease with me, and sat on the arm of my chair, a hand on my shoulder.

‘Richard? Are you holding on?’

‘Just about. That was one very bizarre day. I’m glad you’re here.’

‘I wanted to see it.’ She winced at the tireless seesaw of a distant alarm. ‘Richard, I warned you strange things are going on.’

‘I’m not sure what is going on. After lunch I met the local wild man of the desert—your friend Duncan Christie. Completely mad and completely sane at the same time. Then Maxted locked me up in his loony bin. I got out thanks to his blonde stooge, Sergeant Falconer, and the next thing I knew I was leading a riot. For ten minutes this huge crowd was actually following me.’

‘We have to follow someone. Poor devils, there’s nothing else in our lives.’

‘Not much, anyway. That’s why I made a very good living—everything we believe comes from advertising. Tonight was different, though. The Metro-Centre bomb was supposed to light a fuse, but it didn’t work.’

‘Maybe it wasn’t advertising anything?’

‘You’re right. There needs to be a message. Next time I’ll remember.’

‘Another wild man from the desert. Dear Jesus . . .’ She took her drink and sat on the coffee table facing me. ‘Listen, Richard. You’re waking up into the nightmare you helped to script. Go back to London. The suburbs are far too weird for you. Why did you leave your job?’

‘It left me. To tell the truth, I was sacked. Pushed out by a rival who knew all my weaknesses.’

‘How come?’

‘She was my wife. In fact, I’d reached the end of the road.’

‘With her?’

‘And with the advertising business. The economy is rolling along an endless plateau, and consumers are bored with the view. Something strange is needed to get them to sit up.’

‘How strange?’

‘Strange, and more than a little mad. That was my big idea. We even had a slogan—“Mad is bad. Bad is good.” We tried it out once, with a new micro-car, but people got killed. No one liked it after that.’

‘Terribly dull of them.’

‘That’s what I thought. Another of the great advertising breakthroughs that got nowhere.’

‘Its time will come.’ She brushed her hair back from her face, as if exposing herself to me, the removal of yet another of the veils that hung between us. ‘How well did you know your father?’

‘Hardly at all. My mother never got over his leaving her. For years she told me he had died in an air crash. Cheques would arrive on my birthday and she’d claim they came from the other side. I always thought high-street banks were outposts of heaven. The curious thing is that I’ve got to know him better since he died.’

‘I’m sure he was a fine man.’

‘He was. With one or two odd ideas.’

‘Interesting . . .’ She moved around the living room, and peered into the corridor that led to the bedrooms. ‘Can I snoop around? These days, you don’t see where your patients live.’

I followed her into the kitchen, and watched as she glanced at the modest array of herbs and spices. She patted the basil plant I had bought, tore off a leaf and raised it to a nostril. She was tired but stylish, clearly moved by the memories of the old man she had tried to keep alive for a few last hours. I trailed after her, already roused by her scent, a perfume of her own distilled from beauty, bloody-mindedness and chronic fatigue.

‘So this is where he slept?’ She stood in the doorway of my father’s bedroom, nose quickening at the dark, picking up the spoor of an old man’s body. She stepped forward and switched on the bedside lamp, then sat on the bedspread, smoothing the stress lines from the silk fabric.

‘Julia . . . ?’

‘Here . . .’ She beckoned me to sit beside her. As if without thinking, she loosened the top button of her shirt. ‘So . . . his head lay on that pillow. An old pilot’s dreams. Think of them, Richard. All those endless runways . . .’

‘Julia . . .’ I sat beside her and held her shoulders. I realized that she was shaking, a faint trembling as if she had caught a sudden chill, a cold draught from a door onto the dark that had come ajar. A desperate woman was sitting on my father’s bed, about to make love to his son for reasons that had everything and nothing to do with sex, the kind of clutching and violent love that only the bereaved ever experience.

She took my hand and slipped it inside her shirt, then placed it over her breast. ‘You don’t have to like me.’

‘Julia . . .’ I tried to calm her. ‘Not here. Let’s go into my bedroom. Julia . . . ?’

‘No.’ She spoke flatly, in an almost coarse voice. ‘Here.’

‘Dear, try to—’

‘Here! It’s got to be here!’ She turned a fierce gaze on me. ‘Can’t you understand?’

20

THE RACING CIRCUIT

I LEFT HER SLEEPING in my father’s bed. It was still dark when I woke at four, uneasy with the odd contours of the mattress, the narrow hollows of an old man’s hips and shoulders, and the more unsettling imprint of his mind. Julia lay beside me when I sat up, then turned and nestled easily into the aged pilot’s mould. A strange night passage had exhausted her. Restless dreams followed a fierce act of love. She had seized me as if I were a demon to be pinioned, a delegate from my father’s grave. Sex with me was part atonement and part restitution, an act of penance.

I sat on the bed, stroking the cloud of dark hair, and gripped her free hand, hoping to force something of my affection into her. There was a faint answering pulse, like a thank-you note slipped under the emotional door, and she sank into a shallow morning sleep that would last for hours.

I needed to get out and run the streets before anyone else was up. As I pulled on my tracksuit I carried out a quick inventory of myself. A bleak list: I missed my car, my job, my friends in London. I missed my father, whom I had never known, and I missed the quirky but likeable young doctor I had met at the hospital, with whom I had shared a bed but scarcely knew any better. Some kind of guilt and unease separated us, despite all the warmth I clearly felt for her. Had she failed my father in some way during his last hours in the intensive care unit? Sitting astride me, she made love as if trying to resuscitate a corpse. I listened to her breathing, a child’s small burps and swallows, sounds shaped like bliss, and thought of the daughter that Julia and I might have one day.

But I needed to leave the flat and visit the Brooklands circuit, and hear the ghosts of engines rumbling in the dark.

A carton of orange juice in my hand, I jogged out of the estate and set off for the racetrack half a mile to the south. Around me the residential streets were still silent, the suburbs of nowhere, immaculate pavilions that reminded me of the stylish tombs on the mortuary island in the Venice lagoon.

A section of the Brooklands embankment rose through the darkness, thirty feet high at its peak, its ridge line cut by an access road. I ran through this narrow corridor, and then stopped at the beach of ancient concrete. I thought of my father visiting the track in the 1930s, a small boy stunned by the reek of fuel oil and expensive perfume, the scent of glamour and danger. Spectacular crashes filled the newsreels of the day, heroic deaths that were England’s answer to the dictators across the Channel, and expressed the kingdom’s unconscious need for war.