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The Homecoming

JOURNEYS SELDOM END when I think they do. Too often a piece of forgotten baggage goes on ahead and lies in wait for me when I least expect it, circling an empty carousel like evidence being assembled before a trial.

Airports, arrivals and the departure of one old pilot filled my mind as I entered Brooklands an hour later. Around me was a prosperous Thames Valley town, a pleasant terrain of comfortable houses, stylish office buildings and retail parks, every advertising man’s image of Britain in the twenty-first century. I passed a bright new sports stadium like an open-air nightclub, display screens showing a road-safety commercial that merged seamlessly into an elegant pitch for a platinum credit card. Brooklands basked. Prosperity glowed from every roof shingle and gravel drive, every golden Labrador and teenage girl riding her well-trained nag.

But I was still thinking of the frightened Muslim woman being escorted from the tiny mosque, the acid stench of her robe and the smell of terror that no perfume could mask. Something had gone seriously wrong in the Thames Valley, and already I identified her with my father, another victim of a malaise even deeper than shopping.

Three weeks earlier my father – Captain Stuart Pearson, formerly of British Airways and Middle East Airlines – set off on one of his regular Saturday afternoon outings to the Brooklands Metro-Centre. Still vigorous at seventy-five, he walked the eight hundred yards to the retail complex that was the west of London’s answer to the Bluewater mall near Dartford. Joining the crowd of shoppers, he crossed the central atrium on his way to the tobacconist that stocked his favourite Dunhill leaf.

Soon after two o’clock, a deranged gunman opened fire on the crowd, killing three shoppers and wounding fifteen more. The gunman escaped in the confusion that followed, but the police soon arrested a young man, Duncan Christie, a day-release patient with a criminal record and a long history of public disturbance. He had carried out an eccentric campaign against the huge mall, and a number of witnesses saw him flee the scene.

My father was hit in the head by a single bullet, and lost consciousness as fellow shoppers tried to revive him. With the other wounded he was taken to Brooklands Hospital, then transferred by helicopter to the specialist neurology unit at the Royal Free Hospital, where he died the next day.

I had not seen my father for several years, and in the hospital mortuary failed to recognize the tiny, aged face that clung to the bony points of his skull. Given the fifteen years he had spent in Dubai, I expected almost no one to attend the funeral service at the north London crematorium. A group of elderly BA pilots saw him off, grey but stalwart figures with a million miles in their ever-steady eyes. There were no local friends from Brooklands, but his solicitor’s deputy, a sympathetic woman in her forties named Susan Dearing, arrived as the service began and handed me the keys to my father’s flat.

Surprisingly, there was a representative from the Metro-Centre, a keen young manager from the public relations office who introduced himself to everyone as Tom Carradine, and seemed to see even this morbid event as a marketing opportunity. Masking his professional smile with an effort, he invited me to visit the mall on my next trip to Brooklands, as if something good might still come from the tragedy. I guessed that attendance at the funerals of shoppers who had died on the premises was part of the mall’s after-sales service, but I was too distracted to brush him off.

Two young women slipped into a rear pew as the recorded voluntary groaned from a concealed vent, a music that only the dead could appreciate, the sound of coffins straining like the timbers of storm-tossed galleons. One of the women laughed as the chaplain launched into his homily. Knowing nothing of my father, he was forced to recite the endless scheduled routes that Captain Pearson had flown. ‘The next year Stuart found himself flying to Sydney …’ Even I let out a giggle at this.

The women left as soon as the service ended, but I caught one of them watching me from the car park as the friend hunted for her keys. Dark-haired, with the kind of dishevelled prettiness that unsettles men, she was too young to be one of my father’s girlfriends, but I knew nothing about the old sky-dog’s last days. She waited irritably when her friend fumbled with the door lock, and tried to hide in the passenger seat. As their car passed she looked at me and nodded to herself, clearly wondering if I was too louche or too frivolous to match up to my father. For some reason I was sure that we would see each other again.

The traffic into Brooklands had slowed, filling the six-lane highway built to draw the population of south-east England towards the Metro-Centre. Dominating the landscape around it, the immense aluminium dome housed the largest shopping mall in Greater London, a cathedral of consumerism whose congregations far exceeded those of the Christian churches. Its silver roof rose above the surrounding office blocks and hotels like the hull of a vast airship. With its visual echoes of the Millennium Dome in Greenwich, it fully justified its name, lying at the heart of a new metropolis that encircled London, a perimeter city that followed the path of the great motorways. Consumerism dominated the lives of its people, who looked as if they were shopping whatever they were doing.

Yet there were signs that a few serpents had made their home in this retail paradise. Brooklands was an old county town, but in the poorer outskirts I passed Asian shops that had been vandalized, newsagents boarded up and plastered with St George’s stickers. There were too many slogans and graffiti for comfort, too many BNP and KKK signs scrawled on cracked windows, too many St George’s flags flying from suburban bungalows. Never far from the defensive walls of the motorways, there was more than a hint of paranoia, as if these people of the retail city were waiting for something violent to happen.

Unable to breathe inside the low-slung Jensen, I opened the window, preferring the roadside microclimate of petrol and diesel fumes. The traffic unpacked itself, and I turned left at the sign ‘Brooklands Motor Museum’, moving down an avenue of detached houses behind high walls. My father had made his last home in a residential complex of three-storey apartment buildings in a landscaped park, reached by a narrow lane off the main avenue. As I drove between the privet walls I was still trying to prepare a few pat answers for the ‘interview’ that would decide my fitness for the post of his son, an application that had been turned down nearly forty years earlier.

Unconsciously I reapplied for the post whenever I met him – he was always affectionate but distant, as if he had run into a junior member of an old cabin crew. My mother sent him details of my school reports, and later my LSE graduation photograph, but only to irritate him. Luckily, I lost interest in him during my teens, and last saw him at the funeral of my stepmother, when he was too distressed to speak.

I had always wanted him to like me, but I thought of the single piece of baggage on the deserted carousel. How would I react if I found a framed photograph of myself on his mantelpiece, and an album lovingly filled with cuttings from Campaign about my then successful career?

Holding the door keys in my hand, I stepped from the car and walked across the deep gravel to the entrance, half expecting the neighbours to emerge from their flats and greet me. Surprisingly, not a window or curtain stirred, and I climbed the stairs to the top-floor landing. After a count of five, I turned the key and let myself into the hallway.

The curtains were partly drawn, and the faint light seemed to illuminate what was unmistakably a stage set. This was an old man’s flat, with its leather armchair and reading lamp, pipe rack and humidor. I almost expected my father to appear on cue, walk to the rosewood drinks cabinet and pour himself a Scotch and soda, take a favourite volume from the bookshelf and peruse its pages. It needed only the telephone to ring, and the drama would begin.

Sadly, the play had ended, and the telephone would never ring, or not for my father. I tried to wave the scene away, annoyed with my own flippancy, a professional habit of trivializing the whole of life into the clichés of a TV commercial. The unopened mail on the hall table struck a more sombre note. Curiously, several envelopes carried black bands and were addressed to my father, as if he himself would read them.

I walked across the sitting room and drew the curtains. The bright garden light flooded through the scent of stale tobacco and staler memories. In front of me, looming across the houses and office buildings, was the silver dome of the Metro-Centre, dominating the landscape to the west of London. For the first time I realized that its presence was almost reassuring.

For the next hour I moved around the flat, opening desk drawers and kitchen cupboards, like a burglar trying to strike up a relationship with a householder whose home he was ransacking. I was introducing myself to my father, even though I was paying him a rather late visit. I shook my head a little sadly over his spartan bedroom with its narrow mattress, part of a widower’s self-denial. Here an old man had dreamed his last dreams of flight, a reverie of wings that overflew deserts and tropical estuaries. I opened the wardrobe and counted his six uniform suits, hanging together like an entire flight crew of senior captains. On the dressing table was a set of silver-backed hairbrushes that I assumed he had given to my stepmother, memories that would greet him each morning of this gaunt but still glamorous woman. Another memory of married years was an ancient bottle of Chanel, contents long evaporated. Pressing the cap, I picked out a faint scent, echoes of a much-loved skin.

In the bathroom I opened the medicine cabinet, expecting to find a small warehouse of vitamin supplements. But the shelves were bare apart from a denture wash and a packet of senna pods. The old man had kept himself fit, using the rowing machine and exercise cycle in the spare bedroom. In the utility room beyond the kitchen was an ironing board and a table with the maid’s electric kettle and biscuit tin. Behind the piles of ironing and a row of heavily starched shirts was a workspace with a computer and printer, a few books stacked beside it.

I went back to the sitting room and scanned the shelves, with their rows of popular novels, cricket almanacs and restaurant guides to airline destinations: Hong Kong, Geneva, Miami. At some point I would go through his desk, hunting out share certificates, bank statements, tax returns, and assemble a financial picture of the estate he had left, money more than useful now that I was unemployed and likely to remain so.

But I left the drawers closed. I had learned enough to grasp that I scarcely knew this old man, and probably never would. I was looking for myself, but clearly I had played no part in his life.

In the centre of the mantelpiece was a framed photograph of a youthful airline captain standing with his crew beside a BOAC Comet, presumably my father’s first command. Gallant and confident, he looked ten years younger than his crew, and might have been my junior brother.

On either side of the photograph was a set of smaller frames, each containing a woman’s holiday snapshot. One showed a cheerful blonde legging her way out of a sports car. A second blonde posed in tennis whites beside a Cairo hotel, while a third grinned happily in front of the Taj Mahal. Others smiled across nightclub tables and lounged by swimming pools. All the women in this trophy corridor were happy and carefree; even the rather intense thirty-year-old in a fur coat whom I recognized as my mother seemed briefly to revive in front of my father’s camera lens. The display was oddly endearing, and already I liked the old pilot and decided I would get to know him better.

I drew the sitting-room curtains, ready to leave for my appointment with Sergeant Falconer at Brooklands police station, who would bring me up to date with the investigation into the tragic shooting. Trying not to think of the deranged youth who had fired into the crowd of shoppers, I looked out at the Brooklands racing track half a mile away. A section of the embankment had been preserved as a monument to the 1930s, the heroic age of speed, the era of the Schneider Trophy seaplane race and record-breaking flights, when glamorous women pilots in white overalls lit their Craven A cigarettes as they leaned against their aircraft. The public had been seized by a dream of speed no advertising agency could rival.

A faint smell had entered the room, the tang of an expensive but unpleasant cologne. Standing in the shadows beside the drawn curtains, I saw a thickset man in a black suit pause in the doorway, right hand feeling for the light switch on the wall. In his left hand he carried what seemed to be a stout metal truncheon, which he raised to test the darkness.

Willing myself to keep my nerve, I breathed steadily and edged away from the window, hidden from the intruder by the sitting-room door. In the light reflected from the framed photographs on the mantelpiece I could see the heavily built visitor still hovering in the hall, unsure whether to enter the room. Then I tripped over a pair of my father’s golf shoes, stumbled and knocked the shade from the standard lamp beside the desk. The intruder flinched back, the truncheon above his head, searching for a target. I threw myself at the door, shoulder-charging it like a rugby prop forward, and heard the man’s hand hit the wall, shattering the face of his wristwatch. He turned in a flurry of huge arms, sweat and hair oil, but I pinned the door against his hand, forcing his pudgy fingers to drop the truncheon.

I lost my balance and fell across the leather armchair. When I stood up and pulled back the door, gasping at the scented air, the man had gone. Feet sounded unevenly down the stairs, the limping gait of someone with a fractured kneecap. Another door slammed, but when I went to the sitting-room window the car park and gardens were silent.

I drew the curtains and opened the windows, then sat in the armchair and waited for the intruder’s scent to disperse. I assumed that I had been so awed by my father’s flat that I had forgotten to close the front door after me when I arrived. The visitor with the truncheon had behaved more like a housebreaker or a private detective than a neighbour calling to offer his sympathies.

When I left for my appointment with Sergeant Falconer, I found the ‘truncheon’ on the floor beside the door. I picked it up, unrolling a heavy magazine, a copy of the Journal of Paediatric Surgery.