All goes well as far as Pago Pago but when they take off on Christmas morning the partner crashes and although he’s unhurt his plane is destroyed. He goes home and now our young pilot, who has no long-distance experience, flies on alone. Norfolk Island is a tiny speck on his map and he’s navigating by compass and dead reckoning, hoping that he’s compensating correctly for crosswinds.
Fourteen hours out of Pago Pago he’s a half-hour overdue at Norfolk Island and there’s no land in sight. He’s lost over the ocean and running out of fuel with night coming on. He calls Auckland but he’s not within range of their radar so he’s not on their screens; his automatic direction finder is broken and he can’t tell them where he is. No search-and-rescue team can find him before he has to ditch; the best Auckland can do is patch him through to a veteran pilot on a New Zealand Air flight from Fiji to Auckland with a planeload of passengers.
Before he can be helped the exhausted young man must be located. Determined to save him from death in the sea, the older man, with unflagging ingenuity, finds him after many tries and leads him to Auckland. By this time our pilot has been flying for more than twenty-three hours. The rescuer lands first; he watches the little Cessna glide in and out of the darkness and the rain with an empty tank; then he half carries the young man out of the plane. I cry every time I see that little plane glide in empty.
Tomorrow when the wood arrived I’d cut pieces to size, glue them as necessary, wait for the glue to dry, and then get started on my first uncommissioned woodcarving.
Tomorrow came, and the wood. I sawed, I glued with Evo-Stik, and I waited until the next day. I was very nervous; the block of lime was screwed to the bench and my tools lay beside it, all of them razor-sharp and just as ready to bite into my flesh as the wood. Something needed to be said or done before I put my hand to the work. Prayer? Would it be right for an atheist to pray? I recalled various times when I’d said ‘Please’ in matters large and small. ‘Please let me get there on time.’ ‘Please let me not drop this.’ ‘Please let there be hot water.’ Was I talking to the train, the light bulb and ladder, the boiler? To what, then? The wood was waiting with my guide lines pencilled in.
I poured myself a large Jack Daniel’s; after all, this was the launch of something. Then I put on Peggy Lee, ‘Is That All There Is?’. That didn’t do it for me, so I went to Boney M and ‘Rivers of Babylon’, listened to that track once, then tried Mahalia Jackson singing America’s Favourite Hymns, starting with Track 5, ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’. I imagined her singing with her eyes closed, her hands clasped, joyous and secure in her connection with Jesus. Carried along by her fervour, I let the CD run to its end, then I put on Patsy Cline singing ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’. A different style but there was nothing lost in the change from one singer to the other: they were both hooked up to something that wasn’t there for me. And yet …
One more large Jack Daniel’s and I took up the mallet and the straight-edge adze. ‘Please,’ I said to the wood. I struck a tentative blow, the adze slipped and bit me in the leg. It didn’t find the femoral artery but there was a lot of blood so I bandaged it as well as I could, pressed down hard on it with my hand, and called a minicab to take me to Chelsea & Westminster Accident and Emergency.
‘You’ve got blood all over your trousers,’ said the driver. ‘I don’t want it all over my car.’ I’ve seen faces like his in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch but better done.
‘Give me five minutes,’ I said. I went back into the house, wrapped a towel and several plastic carrier bags around the offending leg, took a couple of turns with ducting tape to hold them in place, grabbed a book for the waiting room, and tried the minicab again. ‘OK?’ I said. ‘No blood.’
‘If there is, you’ll pay for the upholstery,’ said my Samaritan, and off we went.
This being a Tuesday morning traffic was fairly light at Accident and Emergency. I gave one of the receptionists my details and joined the other accidents and emergencies among rumpled newspapers and magazines and Styrofoam cups of coffee and soft drinks. There were two Muslim women accompanied by men and small children, a large man with a MOTHER tattoo on his arm, a youth with his arm in a sling, and a young woman who was reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Nobody was bloody but me. Outside the Fulham Road provided its usual soundtrack while in the waiting room an atmosphere of truancy and withdrawal from the world prevailed.
The book I’d brought with me was Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense. I was at the point where chess had overflowed its boundaries to pervade everything and the grandmaster Luzhin saw the shadows on the floor grouping to attack him when my name was called by the triage nurse in her little cubicle.
‘You’re quite a package,’ she said. She had a Scots accent and looked like short shrift but with a friendly grin. She spread some paper towels on the floor, unwrapped me, and told me to pop off my trousers. ‘What happened?’ she said.
‘I was working on a woodcarving when the adze slipped.’
‘Accident-prone, are you?’
‘I didn’t use to be but maybe I am now.’
She cleaned the wound, which was only oozing now, put on a temporary dressing, and solved the bloody-trousers problem by giving me a hospital dressing-gown and steering me into a cubicle for express stitching by Dr Kohn, a young man who looked as if he knew too much. ‘You should get an anatomy book if you want to do the job right,’ he said with a straight face. ‘You missed the artery by about an inch.’
‘Very funny. Do I look suicidal?’
‘No more than others I’ve seen but you never know — a lot of accidents aren’t strictly accidental.’ He raised his eyebrows and looked at me knowingly.
‘Thank you for your input. If I had my notebook with me I’d write that down.’
‘Maybe you can remember it.’
‘I’ll try. Thanks for the stitches.’
A pair of hospital pyjamas was found for me and a plastic bag for my trousers. I phoned for a minicab and went home.
I didn’t feel quite ready to pick up adze and mallet again, and although my leg hurt I could walk normally, so after lunch I took myself to the Royal Academy of Art to see The Genius of Rome exhibition. This exhibition, drawing on so many museum and private collections, was as remarkable logistically as artistically and was unlikely ever to happen again. Painters from all over Europe who had worked in Rome between 1592 and 1623 such as Rubens, Bril, and van Honthorst were represented along with Caravaggio, Caracci, Saraceni, Gentileschi, and the other native Italians.
A slowly moving procession of eyes met, again and again across the centuries, the eyes of lute players, courtesans and low life, Christ and the Virgin, the penitent Magdalene, and a variety of saints and Old Testament figures. The modernity of the faces was startling — I’ve seen Caravaggio’s gypsy fortune-teller at the cashier’s window in Lloyds, d’ Arpino’s Virgin reading the Sun on the District Line, Gentileschi’s St Francis selling vegetables in the North End Road, and everybody’s Christs everywhere. These many faces of Christ spoke to me and asked questions but for the time being I avoided this dialogue and gave my attention to the landscapes of Paul Bril.
I was much intrigued by a small one, only thirty-two centimetres wide, oil on copper, The Campo Vaccino with a Gypsy Woman Reading a Palm. There were some good-looking Roman ruins in the foreground, middle distance, and far distance. The near ones were in shade, making as it were a proscenium through which to view the far sunlit ones. There were many people and cattle. The figures nearest the viewer were deeply shadowed; the eye moved beyond them to the gypsy, her client, and the others grouped with them, and from them to the further sunlit figures. The campo, the ruins, the trees and sky and the divisions of space, light, and shadow were the main action; the gypsy and her group gave scale and emphasis to the visual planes of near, middle, and far. The colour, although austere and restrained, had a richness about it. If I had been able to stand in the real Campo Vaccino with the ruins and figures arranged as in the picture it would not have had the peculiar charm of the painting because the visual planes would not have been so ordered, so beguilingly presented. Everything in the picture was real but Paul Bril had restaged it so that the eye and the mind of the viewer could better contain it. Yes! I thought, if I could only see my life with the light and shadow and colours of near, middle, and far, I could … What?