We passed him an hour later, striding towards Windsor. I wanted to thank him, which no one had managed to do, but I found it difficult to come up with the right words. I steered the cruiser close to the bank and reduced speed so that we kept pace with him. He strode along in his heavy boots, checking some detail on his map. On his tartan shirt I could see the dry stain of the ice cream that he had expressed from the child’s stomach. I guessed that he was a schoolmaster or civil servant, but I knew that he might just as well be a ship’s purser or a day-release psychiatric patient. The heavy knapsack cut into his narrow shoulders, but he seemed unconcerned by the weight. Tied to the back of the knapsack was a pair of drying socks that I had not seen before and which I assumed he had washed in the river soon after saving the child.

Cleo waved to him, and he gave her a friendly but quick smile, lengthened his stride, and moved away from us. He was enjoying his holiday and preferred his own company. Cleo’s contingent world, the bare knees and the ice cream stain and the drying socks, moved past the cabin cruiser and the dozing swans. I had thought of asking him who he was, but I realised that, for all practical purposes, I already knew.

Dream’s Ransom

17

DREAM’S RANSOM

Guests were arriving in fancy dress, for a party of a very special kind. Hundreds of vehicles lined the quiet Buckinghamshire lane, and as I searched for a parking space I was overtaken by a studio van carrying two Marie Antoinettes, a pirate chief, and a trio of Roman senators. Their rouged cheeks and painted lips gave them the look of plague victims on their way to a fever hospital.

My dream of Shanghai had materialised, like all dreams, in the least expected place, among the imposing houses built around the golf course at Sunningdale, little more than a fifteen-minute drive from Shepperton. I had lived for thirty years within sight of the studios but had never stepped inside the huge sound stages and was unprepared for the scale of a major Hollywood production. A genie had sprung from the pages of my novel and was busily conjuring the past into life, working with an extravagance more than a match for the original Shanghai.

The city of memory whose streets I had redrawn within the limits of the printed page had materialised in a fusion of the real and the super-real. Memory had been superseded by a new technology of historical recovery, where past, present, and future could be dismantled and reshuffled at the producer’s whim.