The woman walking away from the man, her mouth a straight line, eyes tiny black dots. The girl in the red dress holding her hand, compliant as before, but struggling slightly to keep up, perhaps? The skirt of her dress — and the dress of the woman — caught in the wind that tugs at the windsock. The girl in the yellow hat looking back. The man’s outstretched hand. The man’s slight paunch. His jeans belted beneath his little round stomach. The knees bagging out. One shoulder dipping slightly. The shoulder that carries the arm that connects to the hand that is outstretched. Maybe it’s lowered by the action of stretching out the hand? Maybe the stretched-out hand is too aggressive, the dipped shoulder the man’s way of compensating? He wants them all to come back but doesn’t want to coerce a small child. Doesn’t want to be seen to coerce a small child. The woman walking away. The child will join her. The three of them will walk away. He will be left standing there by the plane.
The plane, the four-seater plane moving down the runway, the grass runway. The wheels turning and turning. The plane moving down the runway. The wheels turning. The plane lifting, suddenly suspended, the wheels ceasing to turn. The plane moving forward, away from the camera, all of its seats apparently occupied. Is it the same plane the man had been standing beside? Is there an obvious gap in the field where his plane had been? Is this definitely the man’s plane? The four-seater plane moving down the runway. The wheels turning on the flattened grass. The sudden lift, the rise into the air, as if on a string. The careful steadying of the wings. The gradual ascent.
The phone rings. I pick it up.
‘Hello?’
Even to me, on my end of the phone, my voice sounds disembodied, alienated, suspicious.
‘Ksssh-huh-huh.’
I don’t have anything to say, so I remain silent.
‘So listen,’ Lewis says, ‘do you want to go on a walk or what?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Let’s go out walking. We’ve got stuff to talk about.’
‘Have we?’
‘Yeah. Free tomorrow morning?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ll pick you up at nine.’
‘Make it ten.’
‘Whatever.’
The moment I put the phone down it rings again. I pick it up.
‘What the fuck is it now?’
‘Paul Kinder?’
I don’t recognise the voice.
‘Yes?’
‘Delivery. I’m outside your house.’
I apologise and hang up. I run downstairs and open the door.
There’s a man on the doorstep wearing a blue driver’s uniform jacket over a Manchester United shirt. He has dark hair going grey cropped to the length of his stubble. A gap between his two front teeth and a bigger gap in the bottom set where he’s lost a tooth and not replaced it. A tattooed spider’s web crawls up the side of his neck from under the United shirt. He’s holding a bulky electronic device with a keypad, a little screen and a stylus attached by a curly plastic flex.
‘Sorry about that,’ I say.
‘No worries, mate. Expecting a chair?’
‘Er, yeah.’
‘Sign here.’
I sign and he steps aside to reveal the chair standing on the path behind him.
‘All yours, mate,’ he says.
‘Thanks.’
I carry the chair into the house and stand it in the hall for a moment. I get a knife from the kitchen and cut through the strong plastic wrapping. It is a black office chair with a wide curved back and sturdy armrests. Connected to the shaft under the seat are a number of controlling levers. It’s quite heavy and an awkward shape, but I manage to carry it upstairs without crashing into the wall or having to take a break. I wheel it into my study. I pull my old chair away from my desk and slide the new one into place. Finally, slowly and with a certain amount of ceremony, I lower myself on to the chair and feel it gently sigh at it takes my weight.
It offers my back lots of support and is extremely comfortable. As it should be, given how much I’ve paid for it.
It is a Herman Miller Aeron chair.
It is the chair that Geoff Dyer, Alain de Botton, Francesca Simon and Siri Hustvedt all use.
Since coming back from Zanzibar and then shortly afterwards visiting Russell Flynn’s family in Whitley Bay, Ray had spent most of his time living in a small flat in Whalley Range, Manchester, trying to decide what to do with his life. He visited his parents in Hyde. With Ray’s blessing they adopted Nicholas. The boy called them his Nana and Grandad; Ray was Daddy, and Mummy, if Nicholas ever asked, was in heaven. Ray felt a little uneasy about this, but he accepted that it had to be his parents’ choice what they told the boy since they were giving his son a home and an upbringing, and in any case, Ray couldn’t think of a better alternative.
Ray read a lot — poetry, mainly — and applied to university with a view to perhaps taking teacher-training qualifications in due course. He was aware of England winning the World Cup at Wembley — it was hard not to be — but football had never been among his interests and the way the RAF had handled the death of Flynn had dealt a blow to his sense of national pride.
William Dunstan’s trial was set for September at the Old Bailey. It meant missing the start of university, but Ray had no choice. He would be called as a witness. Even if he hadn’t been required to attend, he would have done so. He owed it to Flynn and he was curious about Dunstan.
Over the summer he listened to a lot of jazz at home and went to concerts in Southport, Stockport and Manchester. He was living on a small pension from the RAF, which he thought of as blood money; he supplemented it with a few shillings earned collecting glasses at pubs around Ardwick.
The RAF offered to find him accommodation in London, but he preferred not to have to rely on their help and sorted himself out with a bedsit in Earls Court. He visited some of the local pubs, which appeared to be favoured by either Australians or homosexuals. Either way, the company was overwhelmingly male.
On the opening day of the trial, having been told that he might be called on the first day but equally might not be, Ray was led to the witnesses’ room. There were two other people present. One, a stocky man wearing a blue suit with his red hair shaved up the back of the neck, was sitting with his back to the door. Ray had only ever seen Henshaw in his engineer’s overalls, but he was easily recognisable from behind. The other man, a court usher, exchanged a few quiet remarks with the woman who had escorted Ray, before she left again.
Ray found his thoughts escaping from the room like smoke and drifting into another part of the building. He pictured Billy Dunstan, sat in profile in the dock. Composed, erect and alert, impeccably turned out in his squadron leader’s uniform, he would cut quite a different figure from the dashing individual in his leather flying jacket and white silk scarf. His dark reddish-brown hair, glistening with Brylcreem, would be combed straight back from his forehead, with a severe side parting. Ray tried to imagine Dunstan’s barrister, and his opposite number, but found that he couldn’t.
Which of them, Ray wondered, would he end up doing battle with? It depended which version of the truth he told. How important was it to mention, for example, the sexual attraction between Dunstan and the nurses he was trying to impress? It only had to be mentioned and it would stick. It would help to convict. All Ray had to do was stay away from that angle. The nurses were on the plane because they had been invited by Flight Lieutenant Campbell. With Campbell having been drawn away to Pemba Island, Dunstan had merely sought to avoid the nurses’ disappointment by still allowing them on board. He was a kind man, a gentleman. What happened to Flynn was a terrible accident, a tragedy.