“We’ll have lunch at Runnymede. We can visit the Kennedy Memorial.”

“Do I approve of that? I’ll think about it…”

These talismanic zones disturbed Cleo. She distrusted their hold on me, for the soundest reasons. My decision not to watch Dick’s documentary struck her as a promising first step in my rehabilitation, a return to the contingent world. I looked back at Shepperton, at the great elms in the park by the war memorial, at the film studios and the riverside hotels, receding from me like the Bund at Shanghai.

“Jim!” I felt Cleo gripping my arm. “Relax, the place will still be there when you get back.”

“I know. I’ll get a drink for us.”

“We don’t need a drink. You always behave as if Shepperton only exists thanks to an act of will on your part.”

Laughing, I embraced her, almost sending the cruiser into the bank. “Cleo, I dream the place…”

“And a wonderful dream, too. Alice and Henry and Lucy. Now and then, though, wake up.”

“I will…”

*   *   *

Two hours later we moored at Runnymede and walked across the meadow towards the hills that rose through the woods. In a sentimental gesture, a British Prime Minister had bequeathed an acre of soil to the American nation, and the limestone monolith of the memorial to John F. Kennedy overlooked the site of Magna Carta. During the Vietnam War the memorial had been continually defaced and vandalised, and on one occasion cracked by a bomb.

Arm in arm, we climbed the pathway towards the memorial. The crack that divided the limestone was freshly cemented. Ancient graffiti had left their blurred traces in the face, overlaid by slogans and swastikas aerosolled in Day-Glo paints. Litter and beer cans were strewn about the site, and the remains of a takeaway meal in silver foil had been pushed under the memorial stone. Fifty feet away, partly concealed by a magnolia shrub, a middle-aged man with a shock of pale grey hair was copulating with a twenty-year-old woman. Trousers loosened around his waist, he lay between her raised legs, moving in hurried spasms as if urged on by the presence of this morbid stone.

Cleo lowered her gaze and frowned at the litter. “Doesn’t anyone ever clean the place? You’d think Kennedy was completely forgotten.”

“I suppose he is—in a way, that’s a good thing.”

I thought of the role that Kennedy and his assassination had played in my own life, and how his televised images had shaped the imagination of the 1960s. Stills from the Zapruder film had seemed more poignant than a Grünewald crucifixion. Now only the graffiti endured, like the bird droppings on the statues of Victorian generals and statesmen in the squares of London.