The Complete Short Stories

Low-Flying Aircraft

‘The man’s playing some sort of deranged game with himself.’

From their balcony on the tenth floor of the empty hotel, Forrester and his wife watched the light aircraft taking off from the runway at Ampuriabrava, half a mile down the beach. A converted crop-sprayer with a silver fuselage and open cockpits, the biplane was lining up at the end of the concrete airstrip. Its engine blared across the deserted resort like a demented fan.

‘One of these days he’s not going to make it — I’m certain that’s what he’s waiting for…’ Without thinking, Forrester climbed from his deck-chair and pushed past the drinks trolley to the balcony rail. The aircraft was now moving rapidly along the runway, tail-wheel still touching the tarmac marker line. Little more than two hundred feet of concrete lay in front of it. The runway had been built thirty years earlier for the well-to-do Swiss and Germans bringing their private aircraft to this vacation complex on the Costa Brava. By now, in the absence of any maintenance, the concrete pier jutting into the sea had been cut to a third of its original length by the strong offshore currents.

However, the pilot seemed unconcerned, his bony forehead exposed above his goggles, long hair tied in a brigand’s knot. Forrester waited, hands gripping the rail in a confusion of emotions — he wanted to see this reclusive and standoffish doctor plunge on to the rocks, but at the same time his complicated rivalry with Gould made him shout out a warning.

At the last moment, with a bare twenty feet of runway left, Gould sat back sharply in his seat, almost pulling the aircraft into the air. It rose steeply over the broken concrete causeway, banked and made a low circuit of the sea before setting off inland.

Forrester looked up as it crossed their heads. Sometimes he thought that Gould was deliberately trying to provoke him — or Judith, more likely. There was some kind of unstated bond that linked them.

‘Did you watch the take-off?’ he asked. ‘There won’t be many more of those.’

Judith lay back in her sun-seat, staring vaguely at the now silent airstrip. At one time Forrester had played up the element of danger in these take-offs, hoping to distract her during the last tedious months of the pregnancy. But the pantomime was no longer necessary, even today, when they were waiting for the practicante to bring the results of the amniotic scan from Figueras. After the next summer storm had done its worst to the crumbling runway, Gould was certain to crash. Curiously, he could have avoided all this by clearing a section of any one of a hundred abandoned roads.

‘It’s almost too quiet now,’ Judith said. ‘Have you seen the practicante?

He was supposed to come this morning.’

‘He’ll be here — the clinic is only open one day a week.’ Forrester took his wife’s small foot and held it between his hands, openly admiring her pale legs without any guile or calculation. ‘Don’t worry, this time it’s going to be good news.’

‘I know. It’s strange, but I’m absolutely certain of it too. I’ve never had any doubts, all these months.’

Forrester listened to the drone of the light aircraft as it disappeared above the hills behind the resort. In the street below him the sand blown up from the beach formed a series of encroaching dunes that had buried many of the cars to their windows. Fittingly, the few tyre-tracks that led to the hotel entrance all belonged to the practicante’s Honda. The clacking engine of this serious-faced male nurse sounded its melancholy tocsin across the town. He had tended Judith since their arrival two months earlier, with elaborate care but a total lack of emotional tone, as if he were certain already of the pregnancy’s ultimate outcome.

None the less, Forrester found himself still clinging to hope. Once he had feared these fruitless pregnancies, the enforced trips from Geneva, and the endless circuit of empty Mediterranean resorts as they waited for yet another seriously deformed foetus to make its appearance. But he had looked forward to this last pregnancy, seeing it almost as a challenge, a game played against enormous odds for the greatest possible prize. When Judith had first told him, six months earlier, that she had conceived again he had immediately made arrangements for their drive to Spain. Judith conceived so easily — the paradox was bitter, this vigorous and unquenched sexuality, this enormous fertility, even if of a questionable kind, at full flood in an almost depopulated world.

‘Richard — come on. You look dead. Let’s drink a toast to me.’ Judith pulled the trolley over to her chair. She sat up, animating herself like a toy. Seeing their reflections in the bedroom mirror, Forrester thought of their resemblance to a pair of latter-day Scott Fitzgeralds, two handsome and glamorous bodies harbouring their guilty secret.

‘Do you realize that we’ll know the results of the scan by this evening? Richard, we’ll have to celebrate! Perhaps we should have gone to Benidorm.’

‘It’s a huge place,’ Forrester pointed out. ‘There might be fifteen or twenty people there for the summer.’

‘That’s what I mean. We ought to meet other people, share the good news with them.’

‘Well…’ They had come to this quiet resort at the northern end of the Costa Brava specifically to get away from everyone — in fact, Forrester had resented finding Gould here, this hippified doctor who lived in one of the abandoned hotels on the playa and unexpectedly turned up in his aircraft after a weekend’s absence.

Forrester surveyed the lines of deserted hotels and apartment houses, the long-shuttered rotisseries and supermarkets. There was something reassuring about the emptiness. He felt more at ease here, almost alone in this forgotten town.

As they stood together by the rail, sipping their drinks and gazing at the silent bay, Forrester held his wife around her full waist. For weeks now he had barely been able to take his hands off her. Once Gould had gone it would be pleasant here. They would lie around for the rest of the summer, making love all the time and playing with the baby — a rare arrival now, the average for normal births was less than one in a thousand. Already he could visualize a few elderly peasants coming down from the hills and holding some sort of primitive earth festival on the beach.

Behind them the aircraft had reappeared over the town. For a moment he caught sight of the doctor’s silver helmet — one of Gould’s irritating affectations was to paint stripes on his helmet and flying-jacket, and on the fenders of his old Mercedes, a sophomore conceit rather out of character. Forrester had come across traces of the paint at various points around the town on the footbridge over the canal dividing the marina and airstrip at Ampuriabrava from the beach hotels in Rosas, at the corners of the streets leading to Gould’s hotel. These marks, apparently made at random, were elements of a cryptic private language. For some time now Forrester had been certain that Gould was up to some nefarious game in the mountains. He was probably pillaging the abandoned monasteries, looting their icons and gold plate. Forrester had a potent vision of this solitary doctor, piloting his light aircraft in a ceaseless search of the Mediterranean littoral, building up a stockpile of art treasures in case the world opened up for business again.

Forrester’s last meeting with Gould, in the Dali museum at Figueras, seemed to confirm these suspicions. He had dropped Judith off at the ante-natal clinic, where the amniotic scanning would, they hoped, confirm the absence of any abnormalities in the foetus, and by an error of judgement strolled into this museum dedicated by the town to its most illustrious native artist. As he walked quickly through the empty galleries he noticed Gould lounging back on the central divan, surveying with amiable composure the surrealist’s flaccid embryos and anatomical monstrosities. With his silverflecked jacket and long hair in a knot, Gould looked less like a doctor than a middle-aged Hell’s Angel. Beside him on the divan were three canvases he had selected from the walls, and which he later took back to decorate his hotel rooms.

‘They’re a little too close to the knuckle for me,’ Forrester commented. ‘A collection of newsreels from Hell.’

‘A sharp guess at the future, all right,’ Gould agreed. ‘The ultimate dystopia is the inside of one’s own head.’

As they left the museum Forrester said, ‘Judith’s baby is due in about three weeks. We wondered if you’d care to attend her?’

Gould made no reply. Shifting the canvases from one arm to the other, he scowled at the trees in the deserted rambla. His eyes seemed to be waiting for something. Not for the first time, Forrester realized how tired the man was, the nervousness underlying his bony features.

‘What about the practicante? He’s probably better qualified than I am.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of the birth, so much, as the…’

‘As the death?’

‘Well…’ Unsettled by Gould’s combative tone, Forrester searched through his stock of euphemisms. ‘We’re full of hope, of course, but we’ve had to learn to be realistic.’

‘That’s admirable of you both.’

‘Given one possible outcome, I think Judith would prefer someone like you to deal with it…’

Gould was nodding sagely at this. He looked sharply at Forrester. ‘Why not keep the child? Whatever the outcome.’

Forrester had been genuinely shocked by this. Surprised by the doctor’s aggression, he watched him swing away with an unpleasant gesture, the lurid paintings under his arm, and stride back to his Mercedes.

Judith was asleep in the bedroom. From her loose palm Forrester removed the Valiums she had been too tired to take. He replaced them in the capsule, and then sat unsteadily on the bed. For the last hour he had been drinking alone in the sun on the balcony, partly out of boredom the time-scale of the human pregnancy was a major evolutionary blunder, he decided — and partly out of confused fear and hope.

Where the hell was the practicante? Forrester walked on to the balcony again and scanned the road to Figueras, past the abandoned nightclubs and motorboat rental offices. The aircraft had gone, disappearing into the mountains. As he searched the airstrip Forrester noticed the dark-robed figure of a young woman in the doorway of Gould’s hangar. He had seen her mooning around there several times before, and openly admitted to himself that he felt a slight pang of envy at the assumed sexual liaison between her and Gould. There was something secretive about the relationship that intrigued him. Careful not to move, he waited for the young woman to step into the sun. Already, thanks to the alcohol and an over-scrupulous monogamy, he could feel his loins thickening. For all his need to be alone, the thought that there was another young woman within half a mile of him almost derailed Forrester’s mind.

Five minutes later he saw the girl again, standing on the observation roof of the Club Náutico, gazing inland as if waiting for Gould’s silver aircraft to return.

As Forrester let himself out of the suite his wife was still asleep. Only two of the suites on the tenth floor were now maintained. The other rooms had been locked and shuttered, time capsules that contained their melancholy cargo, the aerosols, douche-bags, hairpins and sun-oil tubes left behind by the thousands of vanished tourists.

The waiters’ service elevator, powered by a small gasolene engine in the basement, carried him down to the lobby. There was no electric current now to run the air-conditioning system, but the hotel was cool. In the two basketwork chairs by the steps, below the postcard rack with its peeling holiday views of Rosas in its tourist heyday, sat the elderly manager and his wife. Señor Cervera had been a linotype operator for a Barcelona newspaper during the years when the population slide had first revealed itself, and even now was a mine of information about the worldwide decline.

‘Mrs Forrester is asleep — if the practicante comes send him up to her.’

‘I hope it’s good news. You’ve waited a long time.’

‘If it is we’ll certainly celebrate tonight. Judith wants to open up all the nightclubs.’

Forrester walked into the sunlight, climbing over the first of the dunes that filled the street. He stood on the roof of a submerged car and looked at the line of empty hotels. He had come here once as a child, when the resort was still half-filled with tourists. Already, though, many of the hotels were closing, but his parents had told him that thirty years earlier the town had been so crowded that they could barely see the sand on the beach. Forrester could remember the Club Náutico, presiding like an aircraft-carrier over the bars and nightclubs of Ampuriabrava, packed with people enjoying themselves with a frantic fin de sicle gaiety. Already the first of the so-called ‘Venus hotels’ were being built, and coachloads of deranged young couples were coming in from the airport at Gerona.

Forrester jumped from the roof of the car and set off along the beach road towards Ampuriabrava. The immaculate sand ran down to the water, free at last of cigarette-ends and bottle-tops, as clean and soft as milled bone. As he moved past the empty hotels it struck Forrester as strange that he felt no sense of panic at the thought of these vanished people. Like Judith and everyone else he knew, like the old linotype operator and his wife sitting alone in the lobby of their hotel, he calmly accepted the terrifying logic of this reductive nightmare as if it were a wholly natural and peaceful event.

Forty years earlier, by contrast, there had been an uncontrolled epidemic of fear as everyone became aware of the marked fall in the world’s population, the huge apparent drop in the birth-rate and, even more disquieting, the immense increase in the number of deformed foetuses. Whatever had set off this process, which now left Forrester standing alone on this once-crowded Costa Brava beach, the results were dramatic and irreversible. At its present rate of decline Europe’s population of 200,000 people, and the United States’ population of 150,000, were headed for oblivion within a generation.

At the same time, by an unhappy paradox, there had been no fall in fertility, either in man or in the few animal species also affected. In fact, birth-rates had soared, but almost all the offspring were seriously deformed. Forrester remembered the first of Judith’s children, with their defective eyes, in which the optic nerves were exposed, and even more disturbing, their deformed sexual organs — these grim parodies of human genitalia tapped all kinds of nervousness and loathing.

Forrester stopped at the end of the beach, where the line of hotels turned at right angles along the entrance channel of the marina. Looking back at the town, he realized that he was almost certainly its last visitor. The continued breakdown of the European road-systems would soon rule out any future journeys to Spain. For the past five years he and Judith had lived in Geneva. Working for a United Nations agency, he moved from city to city across Europe, in charge of a team making inventories of the huge stockpiles of foodstuffs, pharmaceuticals, consumer durables and industrial raw materials that lay about in warehouses and rail terminals, in empty supermarkets and stalled production-lines — enough merchandise to keep the dwindling population going for a thousand years. Although the population of Geneva was some two thousand, most of Europe’s urban areas were deserted altogether, including, surprisingly, some of its great cathedral cities — Chartres, Cologne and Canterbury were empty shells. For some reason the consolations of religion meant nothing to anyone. On the other hand, despite the initial panic, there had never been any real despair. For thirty years they had been matter-of-factly slaughtering their children and closing down the western hemisphere like a group of circus workers dismantling their tents and killing their animals at the season’s end.

From the bank of the canal Forrester peered up at the white hull of the Club Náutico. There were no signs of the young woman. Behind him, facing the airstrip, was a roadside restaurant abandoned years before. Through the saltstained windows he could see the rows of bottles against the mirror behind the bar, chairs stacked on tables.

Forrester pushed back the door. The interior of the restaurant was like a museum tableau. Nothing had been moved for years. Despite the unlocked door there had been no vandalism. From the footprints visible in the fine sand blown across the floor it was clear that over the years a few passing travellers had refreshed themselves at the bar and left without doing any damage. This was true of everywhere Forrester had visited. They had vacated a hundred cities and airports as if leaving them in serviceable condition for their successors.

The air in the restaurant was stale but cool. Seated behind the bar, Forrester helped himself to a bottle of Fundador, drinking quietly as he waited for the young woman to reappear. As he gazed across the canal he noticed that Gould had painted two continuous marker lines in fluorescent silver across the metal slats and wire railing of the footbridge. From the door he could see the same marker lines crossing the road and climbing the steps to Gould’s hotel, where they disappeared into the lobby.

Standing unsteadily in the road, Forrester frowned up at the garish faade of the hotel, which had been designed in a crudely erotic Graecian style. Naked caryatids three storeys high supported a sham portico emblazoned with satyrs and nymphs. Why had Gould chosen to live in this hotel, out of all those standing empty in Rosas? Here in what amounted to the red-light quarter of the town, it was one of a group known euphemistically all over the world as the ‘Venus hotels’, but which Judith more accurately referred to as ‘the sex-hotels’. From Waikiki to Glyfada Beach, Rio to Recife, these hotel complexes had sprung up in the first years of the depopulation crisis. A flood of governmentsubsidised tourists had poured in, urged on into a last frantic festival of erotomania. In a misguided attempt to rekindle their fertility, every conceivable kind of deviant sexual activity had been encouraged. Pornographic hotel decor, lobbies crammed with aids and appliances, ceaseless sex-films shown on closed-circuit television, all these reflected an unhappy awareness by everyone that their sex no longer mattered. The sense of obligation, however residual, to a future generation was no longer present. If anything, the ‘normal’ had become the real obscenity. In the foyer of one of these hotels Forrester and Judith had come across the most sinister pornographic image of all — the photograph of a healthy baby obscenely retouched.

Judith and her husband had been too young to take part in these despairing orgies, and by the time of their marriage there had been a general revulsion against perverse sex of every kind. Chastity and romantic love, pre-marital celibacy and all the restraints of monogamy came back in force. As the world’s populations continued to fall, the last married couples sat dutifully together like characters from a Vermeer interior.

And all the while the sexual drive continued unabated. Feeling the alcohol surge through him, Forrester swayed through the hot sunlight. Somewhere around the hangar beside the airstrip the young woman was waiting for him, perhaps watching him at this moment from its dark interior. Obviously she knew what he was thinking, and almost seemed to be encouraging him with her flirtatious dartings to and fro.

Forrester stepped on to the bridge. Behind him the line of garish hotels was silent, a stage-set designed for just this adventure. The metal rungs of the bridge rang softly under his feet. Tapping them like the keys of a xylophone, Forrester stumbled against the rail, smearing his hands against the still-wet stripe of silver paint.

Without thinking, he wiped his hands on his shirt. The lines of fluorescent paint continued across the bridge, winding in and out of the abandoned cars in the parking lot beside the airstrip. Following Gould’s illuminated pathway, Forrester crossed the canal. When he reached the fuel store he saw that the young woman had emerged from the hangar. She stood in the open doorway, her feet well within the rectangle of sunlight. Her intelligent but somehow mongoloid face was hidden as usual behind heavy sunglasses — a squat chin and high forehead fronted by a carapace of black glass. For all this concealment, Forrester was certain that she had been expecting him, and even more that she had been hoping for him to appear. Inside her black shawl she was moving her hands about like a schoolgirl — no doubt she was aware that he was the only man in the resort, apart from Gould, away on his endless solo flying, and the old linotype operator.

The sweat rose from Forrester’s skin, a hot pelt across his forehead. Standing beside the fuel hydrant, he wiped away the sweat with his hands. The young woman seemed to respond to these gestures. Her own hands emerged from the shawl, moving about in a complex code, a semaphore signalling Forrester to her. Responding in turn, he touched his face again, ignoring the silver paint on his hands. As if to ingratiate himself, he smeared the last of the paint over his cheeks and nose, wiping the tacky metal stains across his mouth.

When he reached the young woman and touched her shoulder she looked with sudden alarm at these luminous contours, as if aware that she had been forming the elements of the wrong man from these painted fragments — his hands, chest and features.

Too late, she let herself be bundled backwards into the darkness of the hangar. The sunglasses fell from her hands to the floor. Forrester’s luminous face shone back at him like a chromiumed mask from the flight-office windows. He looked down at the sightless young woman scrabbling at his feet for her sunglasses, one hand trying to hide her eyes from him. Then he heard the drone of a light aircraft flying over the town.

Gould’s aircraft circled the Club Náutico, the panels of its silver fuselage reflecting the sun like a faceted mirror. Forrester turned from the young woman lying against the rear wall of the hangar, the glasses with their fractured lenses once more over her face. He stepped into the afternoon light and ran across the runway as the aircraft came in to land.

Two hours later, when he had crossed the deserted streets to his hotel, he found Señor Cervera standing on the dune below the steps, hands cupped to his eyes. He waved Forrester towards him, greeting him with relief. Forrester had spent the interval in one of the hotels in the centre of Rosas, moving restlessly from one bathroom to the next as he tried to clean the paint off his face and hands. He had slept for half an hour in a bedroom.

‘Mrs Forrester—’ The old man gestured helplessly.

‘Where is she?’ Forrester followed Cervera to the hotel steps. His wife was hovering in an embarrassed way behind her mahogany desk. ‘What’s happened?’

‘The practicante arrived — just after you left.’ The old man paused to examine the traces of silver paint that still covered Forrester’s face. With a wave of the hand, as if dismissing them as another minor detail of this aberrant day, he said, ‘He brought the result to Mrs Forrester…’

‘Is she all right? What’s going on?’

Forrester started towards the elevator but the old woman waved him back. ‘She went out — I tried to stop her. She was all dressed up.’

‘Dressed? How?’

‘In… in a very extravagant way. She was upset.’

‘Oh, my God…’ Forrester caught his breath. ‘Poor Judith — where did she go?’

‘To the hotels.’ Cervera raised a hand and pointed reluctantly towards the Venus hotels.

Forrester found her within half an hour, in the bridal suite on the third floor of one of the hotels. As he ran along the canal road, shouting out Judith’s name, Gould was walking slowly across the footbridge, flying helmet in hand. The dark figure of the young woman, the lenses of her fractured sunglasses like black suns, followed him sightlessly from the door of the hangar as Gould moved along the painted corridor.

When at last he heard Judith’s cry Forrester entered the hotel. In the principal suite on the third floor he discovered her stretched out on the bridal bed, surrounded by the obscene murals and bas-reliefs. She lay back on the dusty lam bedspread, dressed in a whore’s finery she had put together from her own wardrobe. Like a drunken courtesan in the last hours of pregnancy, she stared glassily at Forrester as if not wanting to recognize him. As he approached she picked up the harness beside her on the bed and tried to strike him with it. Forrester pulled it from her hands. He held her shoulders, hoping to calm her, but his feet slipped in the vibrators and film cassettes strewn about the bed. When he regained his balance Judith was at the door. He ran after her down the corridor, kicking aside the display stands of pornographic magazines outside each bedroom. Judith was fleeing down the staircase, stripping off pieces of her costume. Then, thankfully, he saw Gould waiting for her on the landing below, arms raised to catch her.

At dusk, when Gould and Forrester had taken the distraught woman back to the hotel, the two men stood by the entrance in the dusk.

¥ In an unexpected gesture of concern, Gould touched Forrester’s shoulder. Apart from this, his face remained without expression. ‘She’ll sleep till morning. Ask the practicante to give you some thalidomide for her. You’ll need to sedate her through the next three weeks.’

He pointed to the silver stains on Forrester’s face. ‘These days we’re all wearing our war-paint. You were over at the hangar, just before I landed. Carmen told me that you’d accidentally stepped on her glasses.’

Relieved that the young woman, for whatever reasons, had not betrayed him, Forrester said, ‘I was trying to reassure her — she seemed to be worried that you were overdue.’

‘I’m having to fly further inland now. She’s nervous when I’m not around.’

‘I hadn’t realized that she was… blind,’ Forrester said as they walked down the street towards the canal. ‘It’s good of you to look after her. The Spaniards would kill her out of hand if they found her here. What happens when you leave?’

‘She’ll be all right, by then.’ Gould stopped and gazed through the fading light at the causeway of the airstrip. A section of the porous concrete seemed to have collapsed into the sea. Gould nodded to himself, as if working out the time left to him by this fragmenting pier. ‘Now, what about this baby?’

‘It’s another one — the same defects. I’ll get the practicante to deal with it.’

‘Why?’ Before Forrester could reply, Gould took his arm. ‘Forrester, it’s a fair question. Which of us can really decide who has the defects?’

‘The mothers seem to know.’

‘But are they right? I’m beginning to think that a massacre of the innocents has taken place that literally out-Herods Herod. Look, come up with me tomorrow — the Cerveras can look after your wife, she’ll sleep all day. You’ll find it an interesting flight.’

They took off at ten o’clock the following morning. Sitting in the front cockpit, with the draught from the propeller full in his face, Forrester was convinced that they would crash. At full throttle they moved swiftly along the runway, the freshly broken concrete slabs already visible. Forrester looked over his shoulder, hoping that Gould would somehow manage to stop the aircraft before they were killed, but the doctor’s face was hidden behind his goggles, as if he was unaware of the danger. At the last moment, when the cataract of concrete blocks was almost below the wheels, Gould pulled back on the stick. The small aircraft rose steeply, as if jerked into the air by a huge hand. Thirty seconds later Forrester began to breathe.

They levelled out and made a left-hand circuit of the empty resort. Already Gould was pointing with a gloved hand at the patches of phosphorescent paint in the hills above Rosas. Before the take-off, while Forrester sat uncomfortably in the cockpit, wondering why he had accepted this challenge, the young woman had wheeled a drum of liquid over to the aircraft. Gould pumped the contents into the tank which Forrester could see below his feet. As he waited, the young woman walked round to the cockpit and stared up at Forrester, clearly hoping to see something in his face. There was something grotesque, almost comic, about this mongoloid girl surveying the world with her defunct vision through these cracked sunglasses. Perhaps she was disappointed that he was no longer interested in her. Forrester turned away from her sightless stare, thinking of Judith asleep in the darkened hotel room, and the small and unwelcome tenant of her body.

Eight hundred feet below them was a wide valley that led inland towards the foothills of the Pyrenees. The line of low mountains marked the northern wall of the plain of Ampurdan, a rich farming area where even now there were small areas of cultivation. But all the cattle had gone, slaughtered years beforehand.

As they followed the course of the valley, Forrester could see that sections of the pathways and farm tracks which climbed the hills had been sprayed with phosphorescent paint. Panels of silver criss-crossed the sides of the valley.

So this was what Gould had been doing on his flights, painting sections of the mountainside in a huge pop-art display. The doctor was waving down at the valley floor, where a small, shaggy-haired bullock, like a miniature bison, stood in an apparent daze on an isolated promontory. Cutting back the engine, Gould banked the aircraft and flew low over the valley floor, not more than twenty feet above the creature. Forrester was speculating on how this sightless creature, clearly a mutant, had managed to survive, when there was a sudden jolt below his feet. The ventral spraying head had been lowered, and a moment later a huge gust of silver paint was vented into the air and fanned out behind them. It hung there in a luminescent cloud, and then settled to form a narrow brush-stroke down the side of the mountain. Retracting the spraying head, Gould made a steep circuit of the valley. He throttled up his engine and dived over the head of the bullock, driving it down the mountainside from its promontory. As it stumbled left and right, unable to get its bearings, it crossed the silver pathway. Immediately it gathered its legs together and set off at a brisk trot along this private roadway.

For the next hour they flew up the valley, and Forrester saw that these lines of paint sprayed from the air were part of an elaborate series of trails leading into the safety of the mountains. When they finally turned back, circling a remote gorge above a small lake, Forrester was not surprised to see that a herd of several hundred of the creatures had made their home here. Lifting their heads, they seemed to follow Gould as he flew past them. Tirelessly, he laid down more marker lines wherever they were needed, driving any errant cattle back on to the illuminated pathways.

When they landed at Ampuriabrava he waited on the runway as Gould shut down the aircraft. The young woman came out from the darkness inside the hangar, and stood with her arms folded inside her shawl. Forrester noticed that the sides of the aircraft fuselage and tailplane were a brilliant silver, bathed in the metallic spray through which they had endlessly circled. Gould’s helmet and flying-suit, and his own face and shoulders, shone like mirrors, as if they had just alighted from the sun. Curiously, only their eyes, protected by their goggles, were free from the paint, dark orbits into which the young woman gazed as if hoping to find someone of her own kind.

Gould greeted her, handing her his helmet. He stripped off his flyingjacket and ushered her into the hangar.

He pointed across the canal. ‘We’ll have a drink in your bar.’ He led the way diagonally across the car park, ignoring the painted pathways. ‘I think there’s enough on us for Carmen to know where we are. It gives her a sense of security.’

‘How long have you been herding the cattle?’ Forrester asked when they were seated behind the bar.

‘Since the winter. Somehow one herd escaped the farmers’ machetes. Flying down from Perpignan through the Col du Perthus, I noticed them following the aircraft. In some way they could see me, using a different section of the electromagnetic spectrum. Then I realized that I’d sprayed some old landing-light reflector paint on the plane — highly phosphorescent stuff.’

‘But why save them? They couldn’t survive on their own.’

‘Not true — in fact, they’re extremely hardy. By next winter they’ll be able to out-run and out-think everything else around here. Like Carmen — she’s a very bright girl. She’s managed to keep herself going here for years, without being able to see a thing. When I started getting all this paint over me I think I was the first person she’d ever seen.’

Thinking again of Judith’s baby, Forrester shook his head. ‘She looks like a mongol to me — that swollen forehead.’

‘You’re wrong. I’ve found out a lot about her. She has a huge collection of watches with luminous dials, hundreds of them, that she’s been filching for years from the shops. She’s got them all working together but to different times, it’s some sort of gigantic computer. God only knows what overlit world nature is preparing her for, but I suppose we won’t be around to see it.’

Forrester gazed disagreeably into his glass of brandy. For once the Fundador made him feel ill. ‘Gould, are you saying in effect that the child Judith is carrying at this moment is not deformed?’

Gould nodded encouragingly. ‘It’s not deformed at all — any more than Carmen. It’s like the so-called population decline that we’ve all accepted as an obvious truth. In fact, there hasn’t been a decline — except in the sense that we’ve been slaughtering our offspring. Over the past fifty years the birth-rate has gone up, not down.’ Before Forrester could protest, he went on, ‘Try for a moment to retain an open mind — we have this vastly increased sexuality, and an unprecedented fertility. Even your wife has had — what — seven children. Yet why? Isn’t it obvious that we were intended to embark on a huge replacement programme, though sadly the people we’re replacing turn out to be ourselves. Our job is simply to repopulate the world with our successors. As for our need to be alone, this intense enjoyment of our own company, and the absence of any sense of despair, I suppose they’re all nature’s way of saying goodbye.’

‘And the runway?’ Forrester asked. ‘Is that your way of saying goodbye?’

A month later, as soon as Judith had recovered from the birth of her son, she and Forrester left Rosas to return to Geneva, After they had made their farewells to Se–or Cervera and his wife, Forrester drove the car along the beach road. It was 11 a.m., but Gould’s aircraft still stood on the airstrip. For some reason the doctor was late.

‘It’s a long drive — are you going to be well enough?’ he asked Judith.

‘Of course — I’ve never felt better.’ She settled herself in the seat. It seemed to Forrester that a kind of shutter had been lowered across her mind, hiding away all memories of the past months. She looked composed and relaxed again, but with the amiable and fixed expression of a display-window mannequin.

‘Did you pay off the practicante?’ she asked. ‘They expect something extra for..

Forrester was gazing up at the faades of the Venus hotels. He remembered the evening of the birth, and the practicante carrying his son away from Se–ora Cervera. The district nurse had taken it for granted that he would be given the task of destroying the child. As Forrester stopped the Spaniard by the elevator he found himself wondering where the man would have killed it — in some alley behind the cheaper hotels at the rear of the town, or in any one of a thousand vacant bathrooms. But when Forrester had taken the child, careful not to look at its eyes, the practicante had not objected, only offering Forrester his surgical bag.

Forrester had declined. After the practicante had left, and before Se–ora Cervera returned to the lobby, he set off through the dark streets to the canal. He had put on again the silver jacket he had worn on the day when Gould had flown him into the mountains. As he crossed the bridge the young woman emerged from the hangar, almost invisible in her dark shawl. Forrester walked towards her, listening to the faint clicking and murmurs of the strong child. He pressed the infant into her hands and turned back to the canal, throwing away his jacket as he ran.

While they drove along the line of hotels to the Figueras road Forrester heard the sounds of the aircraft. Gould was climbing into the cockpit, about to warm up the engine before take-off.

‘I never really understood him,’ Judith commented. ‘What was he up to in the mountains?’

‘I don’t know — some obsession of his.’

During a brief storm two nights earlier another section of the runway had collapsed. But Forrester knew that Gould would go on flying to the end, driving his herd higher into the mountains, until they no longer needed him and the day had come to take off for the last time.