36

In the middle of the afternoon, as I was dozing in the armchair by my french windows, with the sun warm upon my legs, Dr. Belasco came to my room accompanied by an orderly pushing a wheelchair. I assumed, for this has happened on occasion in the past, that I was to be taken to be examined, perhaps to be X-rayed. Neither of them spoke, which surprised me. Dr. Belasco is usually voluble.

Once in the wheelchair, however, I was steered along a series of corridors down which I could not remember having ever gone, arriving eventually in the front lobby of St. Justin’s. On the right was a window of sliding glass panels behind which a receptionist sat. Opposite this was a settle and several chairs arranged around a low table scattered with colourful magazines of a variety I had never before seen. A notice board mounted on the wall carried a series of sheets of paper, some of them coloured and all of them pinned up neatly. A very large colour photograph in a black wooden frame on the wall depicted a high volcanic mountain with snow fringing its summit, a flat tree in the foreground beneath which was standing an elephant, its trunk upraised to pluck at the foliage overhead.

The doctor held the main door open and the orderly pushed me through, turning left down a ramp onto an expanse of tarmacadam marked out with oblongs in white paint. A number of quite extraordinary vehicles were parked about the place. Their bodywork gleamed, some of them with a metallic sheen, as if microscopic flecks of silver had been added to the paint. All were streamlined, their headlights incorporated into their shape, their spokeless wheels made of solid silvered metal or protected by circular silver discs.

‘You are wondering, aren’t you, Alec?’ Dr. Belasco said at last. ‘I doubt you have ever seen the likes of such—how would you have called them—automobiles?’

I did not respond, did not even move my head. I had no need to: the orderly was slowing spinning the wheelchair round so that I could not help but take in my surroundings.

‘The world has changed a great deal since you last visited it,’ Dr. Belasco continued, at the same time nodding to the orderly, who directed the wheelchair towards a small dark blue vehicle of a sort well beyond even my imagination. It contained only two seats and was open, lacking a roof; every other vehicle I could see was enclosed.

‘This is not my car,’ Dr. Belasco admitted. ‘It belongs to one of the consultants, but he has agreed to lend it to me—to us—for an hour.’ He opened the door. The base of the vehicle’s chassis cleared the road by only a few inches.

The orderly helped me out of the wheelchair and into the passenger seat. Once I was settled, he placed a blanket over me up to my neck, tucking it in behind my back. A restraining strap was then put over my shoulder and midriff and attached to a buckle, presumably to ensure that I did not attempt to abscond. These preparations complete, Dr. Belasco joined me in the driver’s seat.

‘We shall not go far,’ he said, ‘just around the town and maybe a short way into the countryside.’

He turned a key and the engine burst into immediate life with a soft thrumming sound. Releasing what I took to be the brake and pushing a short stick forwards, which I realised was a means of altering the gearing, he increased the engine speed and we moved gracefully away, without so much as a judder, down the drive to a pillared gate, out of St. Justin’s and onto a tree-lined residential road of substantial houses set back behind privet, box and beech hedges.

After several hundred yards, we reached a junction. A large number of vehicles was passing in either direction and it was several minutes before Dr. Belasco could edge out into the main stream.

‘There are now over thirty-five million vehicles in Britain,’ he declared. ‘This equates not quite to one vehicle of some sort or another for every two people. The figure does not include bicycles and the like, only powered vehicles. Quite a number more, I would imagine, than when you last travelled in such a fashion.’

We came to a small area of shops and were obliged to drive slowly behind a double-decker omnibus painted in blue and cream. Upon its rear end was pasted a poster advertising holidays with Thomas Cook. So, I thought, recalling my battered suitcases, some tiny things were still the same.

‘I’m sure you recognise the greengrocer’s shop, Alec,’ Dr. Belasco said.

I allowed my head to move just sufficiently to see a shop, a red-and-white-striped canvas awning projecting out over the pavement to keep the weather off a variety of fruits and vegetables.

‘However, some of the produce may be new to you,’ he said. ‘Avocado pears, passion fruit, lemongrass.’

We moved slowly on.

‘There’s a chemist’s shop. Nothing much changed there, I’d say. Still a purveyor of potions and poisons. Yet what of next door? The dry cleaner’s. Are you not curious how one can launder clothing without getting any of it wet? And look, at the end of the precinct—a Chinese restaurant. It does good business. Cantonese-style sweet-and-sour pork, cashew nuts and king prawns, beef in oyster sauce. Does that not make you wonder, Alec? Does it not make you want to know? Perhaps even try the cuisine?’

We left the shops, passing a church and a police station, which I noticed had a blue lamp hanging from an iron bracket to one side of the entrance, as it would have had when I was a small boy. In a short distance, we were in a rural landscape of low, rolling hills. The fields were mostly pasture in which sheep and cattle were grazing. Here and there, copses of deciduous trees broke the line of the hedges. One hillside was thickly covered with ranks of dark pine planted in rows, the ground beneath devoid of undergrowth. For a while, the road followed a river, the water slow or, in places, tumbling quickly across stones or smoothly over a weir. Finally, Dr. Belasco drove up a hill and pulled in to one side, switching off the engine.

Before us lay the river valley, a small village in the centre of which was an ancient and narrow stone bridge, some scattered farms with white farmhouses and green-painted corrugated iron barns. The scattered fields interspersed with trees were a collage of green and, where a bright yellow tractor was ploughing, ochre.

‘So much has changed,’ Dr. Belasco remarked, ‘and yet so much is just the same.’ He turned to look at me, his hand upon the steering wheel, the sun bright upon his face. ‘“What man that sees the ever-whirling wheel / Of Change, the which all mortal things doth sway, / But that thereby doth find, and plainly feel / How Mutability in them doth play / Her cruel sports, to many men’s decay?”’

I did not shift my gaze from the panorama before the car, yet I thought, the doctor knows his Spenser. I remembered, on the turn of a second, The Fairie Queen and how the girl on Eileen Tosdach had so reminded me of Duessa the changeling.

He looked at his watch and started the engine once more.

Reaching the outskirts of the town, we came upon a garage. In a workshop, I could make out men in stained working clothes repairing vehicles raised above their heads on ramps. At the roadside was a tall sign bearing a golden scallop shell upon a red background, and I realised it was the same insignia as I had seen on the overalls of the mechanic in the village in which Rupert had halted to buy petrol, shortly before we hit the cart horse.

For just a fleeting moment, I was back in that spring Saturday a lifetime away, feeling the wind on my face and smelling, once more, the sour scent of the hawthorn blossoms in the hedgerows of a world long since lost. I could not quite hear Rupert’s voice calling me from my seat on the milestone and tried to remember the names of the towns and the distances carved upon it. If, I thought, I could recall these details and then get hold of a map and a pair of protractors, I might be able to triangulate our position and discover the identity of the village. There was a book of road maps of Great Britain in a compartment in the door panel of the car, and I was almost tempted to try to sneak it out under the blanket at the end of my ride. Yet no sooner had the idea occurred to me than I dismissed it. For me there is only the now and the next.

Although driving, the doctor must have been simultaneously studying me, for he suddenly said, ‘The Shell petrol sign means something to you, doesn’t it?’

Yes, I thought, it does, but you will never know what.

It was then I understood the motive behind this excursion. He wanted to shock me, to jar my memory, to force me into a need to communicate with him. If, he anticipated, he showed me the wonders of the world from which I had withdrawn myself, aroused my curiosity or was somehow able to bring to me a cue that might trigger off some memory, he might be able to get me to start to talk.

How mistaken he was. He thought I had excluded myself from the world but did not realise that those pieces of the world I wish to retain have stayed with me, as vivid as the day I lived them. What he also could not comprehend is that whilst there are some things I have striven never to forget, there are others I have tried to disregard yet cannot.