So we conceived and slept beside the growing Alice as she came to term, and made love an hour before the labour began. Miriam lay back on her own pillows, hands grasping the headboard with its erratic reading light, surrounded by the wardrobe and her familiar clothes, her mother’s photograph and her friends’ flowers and greeting cards on the dressing table. In this warm midden with its utter lack of hygiene she had swiftly given birth to Alice as I stood weeping behind the capable shoulders of Midwife Bell. That night we slept together with Alice in her cot beside us, as Polly the retriever nosed the dustbin, snuffling for the placenta in its parcel of newspaper. The next day Miriam was up to welcome her friends and see me off to work.

Not only was I glad that our child would be born in Shepperton, but I almost believed that I, too, had been born there. The past had slipped away, taking with it my memories of Cambridge and Canada, of the dissecting room and the snow deserts of Saskatchewan, and even of Shanghai. The warm light over Shepperton reminded me of the illuminated air that I had seen over the empty paddy fields of Lunghua as I walked along the railway line, but the light that filled the splash meadow came from a kinder and more gentle sun. The children Miriam had borne and the others who played by the stream had taken the place of the dead Chinese lying in the Lunghua creeks and canals.

For the first time I was living in an endless present that owed nothing to the past. The skies over Shepperton were crossed by airliners taking package tourists to the holiday beaches of Corfu and the Costa Brava. Soon the whole planet would be on vacation. At Cape Canaveral, the Americans were readying themselves to fly into space. On television we watched Richard Sutherland reporting from the space centre, the Florida sun gleaming through his blow-dried hair. He was now a presenter of popular-science programmes, one of the new breed of media academics who taught the world to feel at ease with itself. His upbeat commentaries dovetailed perfectly with the commercials for candy bars and fabric conditioners. Past and future had been annexed into a present as depthless and cheerful as a child’s colouring book.

I woke in the sleepy heat of the meadow grass, aware that the children were fighting inside the toilet roll. A light aircraft soared overhead, its propeller catching the sun. A single-engined Piper, it had flown from the west, where Fair Oaks airfield lay in the woodland beyond Chertsey. It turned in a wide circle above the studios, flaps lowered as if the pilot were trying to land in this secret meadow.

The children broke off their quarrel. Alice ran to me as I knelt in the grass and hid in my shoulder.

“Is that a bad plane, Daddy?”