Just slightly less brilliant than it had been outside, the weather suddenly became ordinary again: the heavens giving the correct salute to everything returning to routine. It had been a perfect long weekend. I can’t remember a nicer one. All thoughts of destination, deadline and doubt disappearing in the long and certain kiss of summertime, all present utterly content to do little beyond nothing whatsoever. Water pistols, cookery, dawdling and finally learning how to play C# diminished seventh on the guitar was about the size of it.
But now the bouncy castle had been packed away — a bit like putting a genie back in a bottle, that: both a struggle and a shame; the blow-up mattresses and sleeping bags from the night in the tent rolled into neat sausages. There was still a gigantic train track going all round the lounge but my wife had begun to pack her case for the early train to London and that was the end of that. A wonderful timeless pause it had been, but gradually our lives clunked back towards first gear.
It was as if everyone was smoking big, invisible cigars at teatime, uncharacteristically calm, especially all the children. ‘Is it ever worth making lamb stock?’ I wondered out loud. I rarely get a word in at the table, so hearing myself for once, I continued: ‘I mean it’s very lamby, isn’t it? I seem to have created essence of lamb all right, but is that what we want? Eating this is like standing in the barn when they are giving birth.’ No one was really listening, all dog tired, content and reflective. Well, these were rhetorical questions anyway. I watched my wife take a thoughtful mouthful and she was about to say something, when Tony arrived.
I guess we’d all been half-listening out for him and his aeroplane all weekend. When Tony arrives it takes about three seconds for the engine noise to build to a deafening roar. The odd powered glider switching on its engine to make the last couple of miles back to the strip on the top of the hill on the southerly horizon had caused hearts to leap a few times, but until teatime on Monday all skyward glances were followed by sinking feelings: just something floating way above. They remind me of jellyfish, gliders: nothing like the sudden rush of zooming noise, the absolute exhilaration of a light aircraft in its glory. This time it was Tony all right. Everyone was out in the garden before I’d finished saying, ‘Quick, out in the garden!’ He never tells me when he’s coming. He just makes a low pass over the house. The sheep have nibbled a runway-shaped patch of grass in the top field, and if we all come out to wave, sometimes he lands up there and takes us for a spin. It’s tantalising.
A few weeks back I was in a particularly dull meeting about building regulations’ compliance when he zoomed over the office, shaking the foundations and sending my pulse from minims to semiquavers in a beat. I longed to run out the door waving and shouting. ‘What was that?’ the architect had said. It’s Tony, I murmured, gazing out of the window, watching him line up for a final approach over the campsite. He went around at the last minute and climbed back into the sky in the direction of Oxford. I couldn’t concentrate for the rest of the meeting. I was convinced at the time that I had done the right thing, but ever since I’ve been thinking that I should have just run out of the door without saying a word and gone up there to meet him.
This time, the quad bike was parked outside the back door and I was tearing up the farm track at 60 in no time, overtaking the whippet at the top of the hill. The dog would have beaten me to the strip, but a group of rabbits scattered and he disappeared in a hedge. Low over the campsite the aircraft came, a taildragger in landing configuration, flaps down, flying alongside me at head height then climbing away, suddenly very quiet again as I drew to a standstill. I could hear the whippet panting. In the middle distance the aircraft described half a figure of eight and came rushing back towards me at full speed. For a moment I thought he would hit me. Then he was gone, waggling his wings, the signal for ‘cheerio’.
Then I was alone in a sea of a million buttercups and countless perfect dandelion clocks with startled rooks circling over the woods. What had looked like an unremarkable grey sky five minutes earlier was a hundred shades of silver. The movement and glamour of a flying machine, the freedom and possibilities it suggested had cast a huge spell for miles around. It was quiet again, and overcast, but nothing like before.
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