“You’re right.” I took the basket from Cleo’s hand. The warm scent of her body was more vivid than anything even LSD could contrive. “Dick can find someone else. We’ll bring a couple of bottles and see you at the splash in a few minutes…”

Hallucinations sang on the summer air, skipping towards the water meadows and the magic glade by the film studios.

The Exhibition

11

THE EXHIBITION

The idea of staging an exhibition of crashed cars came to me in 1969 after the road accident near Fair Oaks airfield in which Sally and David Hunter were involved. Luckily, neither of them was hurt in any way, but the strange circumstances of the accident, and the behaviour of the witnesses, seemed to spring straight from the special logic of the sixties. The exhibition at the Arts Laboratory, which intrigued some visitors and outraged a great many more, summed up so many of my obsessions at the time and clearly foretold the car crash that nearly killed me three months later. Right until its end, the decade continued to unravel its lurid mythologies.

*   *   *

Sally, still determined to prise me away from Shepperton, had bought tickets for the Fair Oaks air show, where David was taking part in a formation flight of vintage Tiger Moths. Alice and Lucy were too frightened by the exploding exhausts to come with us and were spending the day with Cleo Churchill and her daughter. Generous as ever, Sally insisted on a special treat for Henry. When she arrived he was assembling a model aircraft in the nursery, surrounded by his own air display of World War II fighters, exquisite replicas that seemed to contain more detail than their originals.

“Come on, Henry! I’ll ask David to give you a spin around Shepperton.”

“Well … David’s scary. Will Neil Armstrong be there?”

“He sent his apologies—he had to go back to the moon.” Sally squeezed Henry’s American football helmet, a gift from Dick Sutherland, over her white hair. “Henry, I’m going to be the first woman astronaut.”

“Wow…! A woman?”

“Hard to grasp, isn’t it? One giant step for womankind, that’s what we need.” When Henry went off to change, Sally soared around the model planes, blowing smoke from her Moroccan Gold through the silver propellers. “They’re so perfect, like hatched Fabergé eggs. The world’s filling up with broken plastic, and little Henry sits here by himself, putting it all together again. That’s the sort of thing you should write about.”

“I do, Sally. It’s practically my only theme.” Glad to see her, I held her restless hips. “Sally … you’re five miles high before the wheels leave the ground.”

“This is your captain speaking.” She placed her scarred forearms with their medley of sampler scents on my shoulders. “The plane now crashing on Shepperton is the Mumford Express…”