I would never lead the Moscow run to the Third World War. The unborn child in the Iroquois Hotel had given me my new compass bearing. Miriam had written to say that she had taken a job on a Fleet Street newspaper, and I wanted to be with her again and be amazed by her American underwear. I was sorry to leave David, endlessly driving the long roads of Saskatchewan in his secondhand Oldsmobile, but he was happy now and had his own destinations. Flying had helped to free him from the past, and already he talked of leaving the RAF at the end of his initial engagement period and becoming a commercial pilot. For the time being he was right to stay in Moose Jaw and do his best to cheer up the Turks. The NATO boys would stage their mutinies and fill the bar of the Iroquois, while the VD films played in the meteorology theatre and Captain Artvin continued his long flight home.

Magic World

6

MAGIC WORLD

“Shall we go to Magic World?” I asked the children.

“Magic World! Yes!” Four-year-old Henry was already at the gate, rattling the iron catch. He shouted to the neighbours’ dozing retriever: “Polly, we’re going to Magic World!”

Three-year-old Alice skipped down the path, admiring her shiny shoes. “Magic World, Magic World…!”

Miriam leaned against the door while I hunted for sunglasses in the clutter of toys and unread bills on the hall stand. She waved to the children, smiling as if she would never see them again and wanted to remember this moment forever. When we returned from the walk Alice and Henry would have changed in a hundred small and marvellous ways, leaving their present selves somewhere in the woods. Parents were nostalgic for every second of these lost lives.

“Keep an eye on them.”

“They’ll keep an eye on me. We’ll be gone for an hour—you’re sure nothing’s going to happen before then?”

“I don’t know…”

In the last month of her pregnancy, time seemed to slow for Miriam, stretching her smallest gesture—a hand raised to ease her heavy breasts, the lipstick drawn absentmindedly across her mouth. She was moving into the timeless realm of the child in her womb; mother and child would begin life together. She pressed against me, knowing that I liked to feel the warm bulk beneath her smock, and lightly patted my penis.

“Just making sure you have everything you might need on the walk.”

“Sh … Midwife Bell will hear you. She disapproves enough of me already.”

“She adores you. Without you she’d be out of a job.”