Dreams of Leaving (20 page)

And here the manuscript ended. George had lost his momentum, lost interest. In that moment, the moment when he pushed his pen aside, he had realised that he was no different from any other New Egyptian. The apathy had taken hold. What better comment on the nature of the village than that its self-appointed historian had failed to complete his history of the place! How typical, how
archetypal
that was!

It had been ten years since he had touched the manuscript, and he now knew that he would never go back to it again. What was the point? Who could he give it to? When he died, it would fall into the hands of the police and end up in that fucking museum.

Not on your life.

He would destroy it first.

*

The following day, at three in the afternoon, a man with tangled grey hair stopped outside George's house. It was Dinwoodie, come to pay his respects.

Dinwoodie unlatched the gate. A screech of metal disturbed a silence of dripping leaves. The gate, it seemed, was rarely opened.

He paused again, and stared up at the front of the house. Another death in the family.
Another,
though? He wished he knew. Even after all these years.
Especially
after all these years.

The front door opened before he could pretend to be moving, and George Highness emerged, wrapped in a brown overcoat and a yellow scarf. In his hand, a bunch of flowers. Dinwoodie jumped backwards, as if he had been caught red-handed at something. Which, in a way, he had been. Trespassing not so much on property as on grief. He gulped a hello.

‘Good afternoon, Dinwoodie,' George said. To Dinwoodie, his composure seemed unnatural, suspect.

‘I – ' he began.

‘You wanted to see me?'

‘Yes,' Dinwoodie said. ‘I was on my way to visit you.'

‘And very nearly there, by the look of it.' With his free hand, George indicated Dinwoodie's feet which were planted on, if not rooted in, the garden path. ‘I was on my way out,' he continued. ‘As you see.'

Cool customer, Dinwoodie thought. He tried again.

‘I wanted to offer you my condolences,' he said. And then, by way of explanation, ‘The death of your wife. I'm very sorry.'

At last George looked surprised. He blinked and angled an embarrassed glance into the shrubbery that divided the path from the small front lawn. ‘Thank you,' he said, ‘but it seems a little like the death of someone who was already dead.' A smile leaked from his face. ‘If you follow me.'

‘Yes,' Dinwoodie said. ‘Yes, I think I do.'

The two men were both shuffling on the path now. Their eyes darted here and there as if following minnows in a pond.

‘If you're going out,' Dinwoodie ventured finally, ‘perhaps I could join you?'

‘All right,' George said, but it was not too grudging. ‘I'm going to the cemetery to put these – ' he held the flowers up as if they were slightly ridiculous – 'on my son's grave.'

Dinwoodie murmured, bowed; he might have been giving permission.

Side by side, they walked up Caution Lane. When they reached Church Street they turned right and began to climb the hill. Spring was late this year. Rain hung in the trees like pieces of broken glass. The branches, grey, spindly, arthritic, seemed to be resisting growth. Dinwoodie could hear George's knees cracking in the silence.

‘A lot of tragedies recently.' Dinwoodie threw out the remark, then turned eagerly to George as if he had lit a fuse that might cause George to explode with some kind of revelation.

But George had withdrawn into himself. ‘Yes,' he said. He fitted the word between gasps for breath. It was a steep hill.

A dark horse, Dinwoodie thought. Really a very dark horse.

He increased the pressure marginally. ‘Your wife, of course. And then
Joel – ' He scanned George's face, but George still seemed more interested in the surface of the road, so he added, a little unnecessarily, perhaps, ‘The greengrocer.'

‘I heard,' George said. And just as Dinwoodie was about to prompt him again, George added, ‘An extravagant plan, but doomed. Doomed from the very beginning.'

Dinwoodie, the fire that he was, kindled. Fingers spread in a primitive comb, he dragged a hand through his tangle of hair.

‘Too extravagant, you think?'

George settled for the conventional response. ‘Nobody's ever escaped. Why should an extravagant idea be more likely to succeed than a simple one?'

‘You may be right,' Dinwoodie said. George's gloom didn't dismay him too much; at least they were talking now. ‘But a simple plan,' he went on, ‘might stand a better chance, you think?'

George gave Dinwoodie a look that Dinwoodie couldn't decipher: he saw a gloating first, then condescension, then sadness – then all three merged until he couldn't be sure what he had seen. He decided to risk it anyway. ‘I have a plan,' he said.

‘Really? You surprise me. What is it this time, Dinwoodie?'

‘There's no need to be sarcastic.'

George sighed. ‘I'm sorry. I'm not myself at the moment.'

Crap, Dinwoodie thought. You're yourself all right. He gave the churchyard gate a shove. It banged against the wall. Two crows, scared, broke away from the top of a yew tree. Black shrapnel against a lowering grey sky. George followed Dinwoodie up the path. He held his flowers upright in his hand and level with his face, the way you might hold an umbrella. As they climbed up through the cemetery, Dinwoodie's head rang with unvoiced arguments. He wanted to believe that it was only a matter of time before George heard. But they reached the grave in silence, with Dinwoodie still uncertain how to reopen the subject. He read the inscription on the stone.

Lines of scepticism showed on either side of Dinwoodie's mouth. It was a charade. He knew, he just
knew
that George had pulled it off somehow. Patience failing, he struck out.

‘Your wife's dead,' he said, and then, with a sly weakening of emphasis that George, he felt, would detect and understand, ‘and so is your son. There's nothing to keep you here now, George. Why don't we join forces, collaborate, and get out of this place? What do you say?'

George squatted on his haunches, arranged the flowers in a small rusty urn. ‘On the contrary,' he said. ‘Now they're,' and he didn't hesitate, ‘both dead, there's everything to keep me here.'

‘I don't understand.
What
is there to keep you here?' Dinwoodie's hand ransacked his hair for a reason.

‘Memories, I suppose,' George said. ‘These graves. The graves of the people I love.' It must have sounded sententious to him because he added, almost defiantly, ‘Besides, what's out there, anyway?'

‘Freedom,' escaped from Dinwoodie's lips before he knew it.

Still meddling with the flowers, George shook his head. ‘Freedom isn't out there any more than it's in here.' He glanced round at the rows of damp tombstones.

‘How do you know,' Dinwoodie cried, his hands clutching at the air, ‘until you've tried?'

In a quiet voice George said, ‘Dinwoodie, when are you going to grow up?'

Dinwoodie's face reddened as if he had been slapped on both cheeks. ‘You know,' he said, trying to keep his voice under control, ‘I used to think you had something, George. Guts, maybe. A bit of initiative. I don't know. That's what I thought. But you haven't. You haven't got anything. You're just a shell. I – I pity you.'

George rose to his feet. He stood at an angle to Dinwoodie. A remote smile on his face, he watched smoke drift from a chimney, fade into the sky. He had nothing to say, it seemed. Or if he had, he wasn't going to say it.

‘Well, I'm going to try, anyway,' Dinwoodie said. ‘And I'll do it alone if I have to.'

George looked Dinwoodie square in the face for the first time that afternoon. ‘You haven't got a chance, Dinwoodie. You'll fail. You'll end up in that police museum.'

‘Fuck you,' Dinwoodie said.

And he whirled away down the slope, trampling on the graves of his forefathers. His mouth, thin-lipped, chapped, set in a grim smile. It felt good to be walking on the dead.

Fuck him, he thought. Fuck them all. I'm not dying here.

He didn't look back at George Highness. They had parted in anger. He doubted they would ever speak to each other again.

*

At home that evening George couldn't settle. He kept seeing Dinwoodie's white impassioned face. He kept seeing Dinwoodie stride away across the graveyard, grey hair, grey raincoat flapping. With his gaunt frame and his square shoulders lifted, he had made George think of a cross. He knew in his heart, in his bones (wherever it is that you truly know), that Dinwoodie was dead.

As dusk fell, he left his house for the second time that day. Unprecedented, this. But perhaps he had some dim foreknowledge of the consequences and courted them as expiation for the way he had treated Dinwoodie. In any case, he could no longer stay indoors.

Where they had turned left out of the garden gate, he turned right and walked towards Peach Street. He could have given Dinwoodie some encouragement, he was thinking. He could have explained his theories about escape. He could even have told him about Moses. But George had kept the secret for so long that secrecy had become a habit. He saw secrecy as his plan's foundation, its strength, a guarantee, if you like, of its success. Superstitious of him, true, but impossible now to shake off. So he had been harsh with Dinwoodie, as you might be harsh with a pestering child. And in many ways Dinwoodie
was
a child. His tantrums, his enthusiasms, marked him out – even from a Tommy Dane or a Joel Mustoe. Tommy Dane's escape-attempt had been an act of violence, thoroughly in character, an integral part of his fight against authority. Joel's, on the other hand, had been a sly private affair; the greengrocer had turned to escape, George felt, because he sought tangible proof of his superiority – out of arrogance, in other words. Only Dinwoodie had pure motives. He had said it himself. He wanted freedom. Simple as that. It would have been noble if it hadn't been so naïve.

As George waited to cross Peach Street, a truck swept past trailing yards of blue smoke. Stacked upright behind the tailboard and lashed into position with ropes stood an entire platoon of dummy policemen. These were not the dummies he was used to (blue uniforms stuffed with old rags, foam rubber or straw). These were professional dummies, the kind you see in shop windows. They had eyes, noses, hands, hair. They were uncannily lifelike. Even at a distance he recognised a Peach, two Hazards and a
Dolphin. He shuddered. Alice's words came back to him like a prophecy.
Look at their faces!

He stumbled across the road and climbed over a stile into the allotments. He sank on to a bench, breathed in the bitter fleshy smell of cabbages. Ranks of bean-canes sharp as lances. A guarded peace. Over by the tin shed where the gardening tools were housed he could make out the squat figure of Mrs Latter, the woman who ran the post office and a keen grower of marrows. He raised a hand to her, a salute rather than a wave, but she didn't respond. Perhaps she hadn't noticed him. He slid his hand back into his coat pocket like a useless weapon.

After picking his way through the rows of vegetables, he crossed the road again and set out across the village green. Passing the pond on his right (a squabbling of ducks, the plop of a frog), he turned left into Magnolia Close. The church rose at the end of the street, an obstacle, solid, adamant. George suddenly realised that the route he had chosen would lead him past the Chief Inspector's house. Normally he steered clear of Magnolia Close, but, then again, normally he didn't go out twice in a single day. He considered turning round, but his feet ached, and if he carried on past the church he would be home in five minutes.

Peach's house stood at right-angles to the church on the corner of the village green. It had once been the vicarage. Peach had evicted the priest shortly after the war claiming that, as Chief Inspector, he needed the house because it had such a commanding view of the village. (It also had an eighteenth-century wood-panelled staircase and an unusual parterre with triangular flower-beds enclosed by low box hedges, not to mention a topiary in yew dating, supposedly, from 1841. Enthusiasts would sometimes stop outside the house and enquire if they might look over the gardens. Mrs Peach was always most gracious.) But he hadn't won the house without a fight.

‘What about the spiritual welfare of the village?' the then priest had argued. ‘Is not my rightful place at the heart of the community?'

‘It'll take you precisely three minutes to walk from the church to your new house,' Peach told him. ‘I've timed it myself.'

‘But
symbolically?
' the priest persisted.

No mean philosopher himself and as brutally secular as any medieval emperor, Peach had quashed the priest's arguments. Truth to tell, with his army of policemen behind him, his victory had never been in doubt. What did the hapless priest have to call upon but the assistance of his sexton (a widower with cataracts) and the wrath of God?

‘But I
need
a big house – my
family
– ' he had pleaded, honest at last, and grovelling too.

Peach had quoted Colossians. ‘Set your affection on things above, not on things of the earth.'

Touché,
priest.

‘My children,' the priest whimpered, ‘I have to provide for my children.'

‘And what makes you think that I'm not going to have children?' Peach had countered. ‘I'm only thirty-six.'

The priest could hardly tell Peach that he had it on very good authority (from the doctor himself, in fact) that the Chief Inspector's wife was incapable of having children. He gave way, and was moved (the police transported his furniture) to a pleasant if characterless house on the far side of the village green. The roles of church and state were set for Peach's reign.