By now the burning oil that filled the cabin was scorching my face and hands. I decided to put the aircraft down into the river – rather than be burned alive I would drown. Half a mile ahead, beyond tennis courts and a park ringed by dead elms, a large Tudor mansion stood above a sloping lawn that ran down to the water.
As the aircraft crossed the park my shoes were on fire. Vaporizing glycol raced up the funnels of my trousers, scalding my legs and about to boil my testicles. The treetops rushed by on either side. The undercarriage splintered the brittle upper branches of the dead elms, and a cloud of starlings erupted from the trees like shrapnel from a shell. The control column struck itself from my hands. At the last moment I shouted at the river as it rose towards me. Falling apart in the air, its tail impaled by the branches, the aircraft plunged into the water. Spray and steam exploded through the fuselage, the hot pellets striking my face. Hurled forwards against the harness, I felt my head strike the cabin door, but without any sense of pain, as if my body belonged to a passenger.
However, I was certain that I never lost consciousness. Immediately the aircraft began to sink. As I tried to release the harness, struggling with the unfamiliar buckle, a seething black water filled the cabin and swirled in a greedy way around my waist. I knew that within a few seconds I would be drowned.
At this point I saw a vision.
Supported by its wings, the aircraft lay passively in the water. A huge cloud of steam rose from the submerged engine and drifted towards the bank. The nose tilted forwards, and the river lapped in an off-hand way at the fractured windshield in front of my face. I slipped the release catch of my harness, and was trying to force open the cabin door when my attention was held by the scene in front of me.
I seemed to be looking at an enormous illuminated painting, lit both by the unsettled water and by a deep light transmitted through the body of the canvas. What surprised me, as I pushed the cabin door against the current, was the intense clarity of every detail. In front of me, above its sloping lawn, was the half-timbered Tudor mansion. A number of people were watching me, like figures posed by the artist in a formal landscape. None of them moved, as if frozen by the burning aircraft that had burst out of the afternoon sky and fallen into the water at their feet.
Although I had never been to this town before – Shepperton, I assumed, from the presence of the film studios – I was convinced that I recognized their faces, and that they were a party of film actors resting between takes. Nearest to me was a dark-haired young woman wearing a white laboratory coat. She stood on the foam-flecked lawn below the mansion, playing in a distracted way with three small children. Two boys and a girl, they sat side by side on a swing like monkeys huddled together on a perch, smiling hopefully at whatever game the young woman was trying to arrange for them. Out of the sides of their eyes they watched me in a knowing way, as if they had been waiting all day for me to land my plane in the water for them. The smaller of the boys wore leg-irons, and whistled now and then at his heavy feet, encouraging them to kick the air. The other boy, a stocky, large-skulled mongol, whispered something to the girl, a pretty child with pale cheeks and secretive eyes.
Above them, in an upstairs window of the mansion, was a handsome, middle-aged woman with a widow’s empty face, the mother, I guessed, of the girl in the white coat. She held the brocade curtain in one hand, a forgotten cigarette in the other, unsure whether the violence of my arrival might drag her down with me. She was calling to a bearded man in his late fifties who sat on the narrow beach that separated me from the bank. An archaeologist of some kind, he was surrounded by easel, wicker hamper and specimen trays, his strong but over-weight body squeezed into a small canvas chair. Although his shirt was soaked with water splashed across him by the aircraft, he was staring intently at something on the beach that had caught his attention.
The last of these seven witnesses was a man of about thirty, naked but for his swimming trunks, who stood at the end of a wrought-iron pier jutting into the river from the group of riverside hotels beyond the mansion. He was painting the gondola of a miniature Ferris wheel, part of a children’s funfair built on to this crumbling Edwardian pier. He paused paint-brush in hand, and with complete presence of mind glanced casually over his shoulder at me, displaying his blond hair and the showy, muscular physique of a film company athlete.
The water rose around my chest, surging through the submerged dials of the instrument panel. I waited for one of the witnesses to come to my help, but they stood like actors waiting for a director’s cue, their figures lit by the vibrant light that suffused the air. A deep, premonitory glow lay over the mansion, the amusement pier and the hotels by the marina, as if in the last micro-seconds before an immense disaster. I was almost convinced that a huge airliner had crashed on to this suburban town or that it was about to be overwhelmed by a nuclear catastrophe.
The river swirled across the windshield. A murky foam thrashed against the fractured glass. At the last moment I saw the archaeologist rise from his chair, strong arms outstretched across the water, trying to will me from the aircraft as if he had suddenly realized his responsibility for me.
The starboard wing sank below the surface. Dragged by the current, the Cessna rolled on to its side. Breaking free from my harness, I forced back the door and clambered from the flooded cabin on to the port wing strut. I climbed on to the roof and stood there in my ragged flying suit as the aircraft sank below me into the water, taking my dreams and hopes into its deep.
I was lying on the wet grass below the mansion. People jostled around me in what seemed to be a drunken brawl, ordered back by the young woman in the white coat.
‘Dr Miriam—!’
‘I can see he isn’t dead! Now get away!’ She brushed her untidy hair out of her eyes and knelt beside me, a nervous but strong hand on my breast-bone, ready to pump my heart back to life. ‘Good God … you seem to be all right.’
For all the authority in this young woman’s voice, she was totally confused by something, still not altogether sure that I was alive. Behind her was the middle-aged woman I had seen in the window of the mansion. She stared at me in an appalled way, as if she, and not I, had escaped from the accident. Engine grease marked her silk blouse and the pearls hanging from her neck. She held the forgotten cigarette in her left hand, about to brand this drenched aviator who had wrestled himself on to the grass.
She reached down and angrily shook my shoulder.
‘Who are you!’
‘Mrs St Cloud! You’ll hurt him, madam …!’
A man in chauffeur’s uniform tried to calm her, but she clung to me in a disorientated way, as if I had stolen something valuable from her.
‘Mother!’ The young doctor struck her hand from my shoulder. ‘He can’t cope with you as well! Bring my case from the house!’
The people around me stepped back reluctantly, revealing a placid sky. The intense light had gone, and the Ferris wheel rotated against the clouds like an amiable mandala. I felt strong but strangely old, as if I had completed an immense voyage. I touched the doctor’s arm in an effort to calm her, wondering how to warn her