Dreams of Leaving (3 page)

Afterwards he never asked her why she had accepted him. He could only suppose that he had got closer to her than anybody else, so close that she had been able to show him how far away she was from most people. A curious basis for a marriage, perhaps, but not untypical of the village where they lived. In those days, of course, he had still believed that her darkness would lift, that some kind of wind would spring up inside her and blow it all away like so many clouds. He had never imagined that it would thicken until the air of their marriage became impossible to breathe, until it was suffocation for her to live in the same house with him.

In bed she froze before he even touched her. Her body locked, keys turned in all her muscles. He could find no way to open her. He talked to her, but there were no magic words.

One night, months after the wedding, she called out. ‘Help me.'

He thought she was talking in her sleep and lay still.

‘Help me,' came her voice again. ‘Please.'

He climbed out of his bed and into hers. He put his arms around her, but he could no more bend her than he could have bent a plank of wood. She would snap first. He held her, tried to still the trembling beneath her rigid surfaces. He held her until dawn came, watched the grey light wash into the shallow trough of her forehead, felt her nearest leg twitch under her nightgown, twitch again, then slowly begin to thaw, to stretch and flex until, curled into a foetal ball, she slept.

Aching and exhausted, he dropped away into a deep well of sleep, daylight a silver hole the size of a coin somewhere far above. He woke three hours later. Rose up through many layers of sleep in one breathless second. This sudden consciousness felt like vertigo. The bed was empty on Alice's side, moulded but cold. Brushing the covers aside, he stood up, stumbled on to the landing.

‘Alice?' His voice came to him as if through undergrowth.

He tried again. ‘Alice?
Alice?
'

Her face floated, bland and round, into the darkness at the bottom of the stairs. ‘What is it, George? What's wrong?'

‘Nothing. I just thought – '

‘I was in the kitchen. Making breakfast. I wanted to surprise you.' She smiled up at him.

Sometimes he wondered which one of them would go mad first.

*

After eight years of marriage Alice became pregnant. They couldn't believe it. They had long since resigned themselves to a life barren of children. And given the village they lived in, perhaps it wasn't such a bad idea. It was no place for children, they told themselves. In fact, it could be seen as selfish, cruel even, if not actually criminal, to want to bring a child into their bleak doomed world.

But when Alice's tests proved positive those layers of justification fell away like scaffolding no longer needed. Their marriage rose into the air, sheets of glass and gleaming steel, founded in rock, challenging the sky. They were giddy for days.

And Alice changed. It was like the simple tilt of a Venetian blind: she suddenly afforded views into herself that he had never known (or even guessed) existed. She sang in the mornings, she came down to breakfast naked, she altered her hairstyle. A new woman. Was it because there was now somebody inside her beside herself to think about? He didn't know – and, superstitious where Alice was concerned, didn't ask either. He remained astonished and grateful. They both felt rewarded. They made all kinds of plans.

‘We'll plant roses in the garden,' George said. He hated gardening.

‘We'll paint the house,' Alice said. She hated decorating.

‘We'll shoot Peach,' George said. They both hated Peach.

They began to laugh.

‘We'll shoot the whole bloody lot of them,' George said.

‘We'll go away,' Alice said.

Neither of them noticed the transition.

‘We'll buy a caravan,' George said.

‘A gypsy caravan.'

‘We'll travel all over the country. Like gypsies.'

‘We'll go everywhere. We'll see things.'

‘We'll get married again.'

‘A gypsy wedding.'

‘Jump over a fire hand in hand.'

‘You playing a Spanish guitar.'

George laughed. ‘You in one of those big whirly skirts.'

‘We'll live happily ever after,' Alice said. ‘Like in fairy stories.'

Roses were planted and the house was painted, but they skilfully ignored the point at which their fantasies failed to face reality. Happiness had turned them into children. The mood of innocence lasted, swept them into 1955.

On May 22nd, almost two weeks late, Alice went into labour. After thirteen hours she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. He weighed 11 Ibs 3ozs (a local record) and he had a widow's peak which, according to George, signified a life of great good fortune. Otherwise there was nothing particularly unusual about him. Because both George and Alice had always liked the story about the Israelites crossing the Red Sea – in their eyes, of course, the pharaoh was a policeman – they decided to call their son Moses. There was hope in a name like that.

Alice returned home.

Two weeks later George found her in the scullery cupboard. She was vomiting. On the floor beside her stood an empty tin of baking yeast.

‘I wanted to rise,' she whispered, when she could speak again. ‘I wanted to rise out of this place.'

He could almost have laughed, but a weight descended, crushing all humour, however bitter, crushing all thought. In the squalid darkness, squatting among hoes and rakes, smells of compost and turpentine, jamjars of nails, his wife's face gave off the palest light. He knelt beside her, took her awkwardly in his arms. It wasn't resistance that he encountered then, it was fear, stealing like a numbness through her flesh, stiffening her limbs. He heard the distant jangle of keys.

After that he would often hear her sobbing behind locked doors or see her crouching by the hedge at the end of the garden, the sun pouring its harsh light on her like scorn. She was sliding backwards and he couldn't get a grip on her. She had lost interest in everything, Moses included. His size frightened her. His demands made her feel powerless: he was so
strong.
She wished, she told George once (her face caged in her hands, tears trickling through the bars of her fingers), that she had never had him. George could only gaze at her. It was such a brutal transformation.

When Moses was six weeks old, Alice drew the curtains and went to bed. In desperation George consulted the village doctor, a fussy bald man with a moustache like Stalin's. The doctor used reassuring phrases – nothing to worry about, it's only post-natal depression, perfectly normal – and prescribed a course of iron pills. ‘Time,' he said to George. ‘Give her time.' But time had always been difficult for Alice, and George wasn't reassured. Meanwhile Moses was growing, changing, almost oblivious, as if his life had an uninterruptable momentum of its own. He slept the whole
night through without waking and, for the first two months, slept in the mornings too. Once he had mastered the art of sitting up, he seemed content to spend the day on the floor, one hand on his stomach, thumb in his mouth, smiling. He had one solemn expression which he put on rather deliberately, like a cap. He seldom cried and seldom moved. In retrospect, then, a most unusual baby.

George had to learn motherhood. He sterilised bottles, changed nappies, wheeled Moses around in his new maroon pram. He even knitted Moses a simple romper-suit. He told Moses stories about New Egypt, and Moses often looked as if he was listening. Piece by piece, an extraordinary idea occurred to George. The picture, when he had assembled it, shocked him, shook him with its implications, but as the months went by it tightened its hold. First it became possible, then logical, and finally the only alternative. He realised that regardless of,
because
of Alice's condition, he would have to share it with her.

‘Alice,' he said one evening after a dinner that he had cooked and she hadn't touched, ‘there's something I've got to say.'

‘What.'

‘We have to let Moses go.'

Her eyes flickered, widened, but she said, ‘Yes.'

George's patience had been fraying for days. Now it tore. ‘Jesus Christ, Alice,' he shouted. ‘Don't just say yes. Say what you mean.'

She sat motionless. Then she began to shiver. The wave of his anger subsided. Shame flowed into the spaces it had left.

‘Listen to me,' gently now. ‘We have to get Moses out of this village. I've been thinking about it. I've got a plan.'

Alice said nothing.

‘I know there's only an outside chance, but it's the only chance he's got. It's worth it, for him. For us too, in a way.'

‘In what way?' Her voice was so soft that the silence bullied it.

‘We'd be thinking about something other than ourselves. Maybe that would bring us together again. Maybe it would – ' but he broke off, aware that he was walking into fantastic territory. ‘We
have
to do it. We have to try and give him what we never had. We owe it to him.'

‘I don't know – '

‘We
owe
it to him. What have we got to lose? Fuck all.'

His language had coarsened recently. The frustration, he told himself. The sheer bloody frustration of it all. He looked across at Alice. Her unwashed hair hung in limp greenish strands. Her centre-parting had the pinkness of a scar. She avoided his eyes.

‘You hate me,' she said.

He sighed. ‘Alice, you know that's not true.'

‘You're bored with me. You hate me.' Her voice had grown hard, serrated, but when she lifted her eyes to his the water in them warped and trembled like the air above a fire.

‘No.' He reached across the table and took one of her hands. ‘I love you, Alice. I always have. You know that.'

She looked down again. Tears began to splash on to her skirt. Because he couldn't see them falling from her eyes, they seemed to have nothing to do with her. This tyrant sadness had invaded her, was running her. She lacked the strength to fight it.

‘I love you,' he repeated. ‘We only have each other. What else do we have?'

Her mouth tightened, shrank. ‘You want to take my child.'

George climbed to his feet. He paced round the kitchen. He let his eyes travel over things: the chipped spout on the teapot; the cobwebs slung between the cooker and the fridge; the lino floor curling at the corners as if stale; cracks, like black hairs, on the cups and plates; the window a tiny dribbling pane of glass. He felt as if he was walking on the ocean bed. If he opened his mouth to scream, he would drown.

‘Look at us,' and he was still circling the room, ‘just look at us. We're pitiful. Absolutely bloody pitiful. What can we do? Nothing. Not a damn bloody thing, Alice.' He rested one hand on the back of a chair, pinched his eyes with the other. ‘But Moses – ' and, using the boy's name, his voice lifted as if in prayer. He sensed a change in the quality of his wife's silence. He took it as approval. Or, if not approval, acquiescence at least.

The next day he dressed warmly in his old sheepskin coat and walked down to the river. It was a raw sunless afternoon in January. His breath streamed out behind him, a white scarf in the wind. It had been raining for days and the mud track sucked at his boots. He passed the tree-house that he and Alice had built fifteen years before. A few lengths of wood, blond and curiously straight, among the sinuous green branches. Dismantled by the wind, by other children. Almost unrecognisable now. When he reached the river, he squatted down and began to pick the bulrushes, snapping them off at the waterline so he would have a good length to work with. He kept going until he could no longer feel his hands. He held his hands out in front of him, red up to the wrists, and smiled. Something was happening. Something was actually happening. He gathered up his bundle of rushes and walked home across the fields.

He visited the river almost every day for five or six weeks. Sometimes lithe, sometimes sluggish, it was always there, alive, developing, like the drift of his thoughts. It gave him lessons in momentum, it taught him
persistence. Some days he would sit on the bank and watch it go by, watch an endless array of objects twist and roll and jink their way downstream – sticks, cans, leaves and once, improbably, a wardrobe, its slim mirror bright as a knife in a drawer. Downstream. That was where Moses was going. In a basket made of rushes and sealed with pitch. That was the plan.

Alone on the bank, he would run through the mechanics of the plan, weigh up the coincidences it depended on, wonder, above all, at the cheek of it, and slowly it would begin to flow in his head, washing obstacles away, and he would know then that it was right, that it could work, that if he didn't at least give it a try then the rest of his life would be a cowering, a ritual of flagellation, a bottomless pit of remorse. He knew the dangers too. They showed themselves often enough. Policemen appeared from nowhere, propelled by curiosity. They scrutinised his armfuls of rushes. They asked innocent loaded questions.

‘Rushes, Mr Highness?'

‘Yes, officer.' And then, ‘My wife, you know. She loves having greenery around the place.' Absolute crap, of course. In her present state, she couldn't have cared less. And how he longed to sound defiant. To say, for example, ‘That's right, officer. They're rushes.' Or even, ‘Yes. So what?' He resisted. These would have been cheap victories. He forced himself to think in campaign terms.

But it wasn't only the police he had to contend with. Once he came back from the river to find Alice waiting, hands on hips, in the kitchen. It was Valentine's Day.

‘Hello, Alice,' he said, kicking off his Wellington boots. ‘God, it's beautiful out there.' He felt good after his walk, his mind honed by the wind and cutting cleanly.

‘Don't tell me,' she snapped. ‘More bloody rushes.'

He looked up at her in surprise. She so rarely swore. And the air in the kitchen suddenly seemed compressed, squeezed into a space too small for it.