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.
‘I need them,’ he explained. ‘I need them to practise with. I’m still learning, you see.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Learning,’ she mocked, and waved a hand in the air, palm up, as if scattering seed. ‘Learning, he says. You’ve got a lot to learn if you ask me.’
‘I’m sorry, Alice. I just don’t follow you.’ His mind not cutting quite as cleanly as he had thought.
Her sudden fury released a blast of heat in the cold room. ‘Spending all your time with these,’ she screamed and grabbing a handful of rushes from a vase on the dresser hurled them, stiff and dripping, at his face. They landed on the floor with a slap. ‘And none of it with me,’ she went on. ‘Now do you follow?’
George wiped his face with the back of his hand.
‘If you want to learn something,’ Alice sneered, ‘why don’t you try learning something about marriage?’
Still George said nothing. He was staring at the rushes. They lay on the floor like a prophecy or an omen.
Then her voice sank back into listlessness as she told him, ‘They’re beginning to drive me mad.’
He decided that, from then on, he would only pick what he needed. He would hide the rushes out of sight at the top of the house. If the police came round and asked where all the ‘greenery’ was, he would have to dream up a new story.
As he watched Alice fly from the room, her arms angled back like wings, it struck him that this plan of his could be seen as nothing more than an attempt to set some vivid daring achievement against a marriage that had become lack-lustre, irredeemable. But he loved Alice. He still loved her. And her unhappiness hurt him all the more because he lacked the power to alter it. He had tried. God knows he had tried. He now knew that her only happiness lay in sleep, in unconsciousness, and finally, he supposed, in death. Moses, though. He could do something there. However risky, however far-fetched, however painful it might prove to be.
He locked himself in the attic at night and worked for hours at a stretch. He had never been practical so he took a certain pride in the acquisition of this new and utterly manual skill. He suffered untold setbacks and began to understand why he had heard so little about basket-weaving. Awkward, monotonous, maddening work.
Then, one night, he found himself watching in fascination as the rushes began to flow from between his clumsy hands, braiding, interlacing, reproducing in their twisting plaits, in their infinite and subtle shades of green, the currents of the river they had grown in. His confidence rose, bobbed on the surface of his darker thoughts. He knew he could build a basket that would float, he knew the river would carry his son. He became impish and for the first time in years looked as young as he really was, if not slightly younger. He danced a jig in the spotlight of his desk-lamp. He unleashed silent cries of jubilation. He saw a policeman turn into the street below, a truncheon swinging from his wrist. From his attic window, the chink in the curtains narrowed to an inch, George mocked the policeman as he passed.
‘You fool,’ he hissed. ‘Fool bobby. Look at you. Bobby fool.’
It was four in the morning before his excitement died down and he could sleep.
During the hours of daylight he hid the basket under a torn sheet in the corner of the room. It looked like a miniature ghost – the ghost Moses would become. It looked capable of uncanny things. It radiated power. The various materials he had used lay scattered on the floor – dried rush-stems cut to length, coils of thin blond rush-stems stringy as hair, pots of rush-glue that he had made by boiling the base of the stalks – and the reek of pitch hung in the air, so acrid that it was almost visible. How long before it crept downstairs, spread through the house, filtered out into the village? How long before the police started poking their noses in?
In ten days he had finished. He took Alice by the hand and led her up to the attic. A drab spring day. Wind nagging the wet trees. When he drew the cover off, she held her face in both hands as if it contained something that she was afraid she might spill. She examined the basket with nervous fingertips, her left eye twitching. He had been standing close to her, his arm touching hers, but now he stepped back, allowed her room to speak.
‘It’s beautiful. It’s – ’ and she hunted for more words with her hands as if they might be found on her person somewhere, in a pocket, perhaps, or up a sleeve. ‘It’s, it’s,’ and they came tumbling out, ‘it’s like an ark, isn’t it, George?’
George clapped his hands, then brought them to his lips. ‘That’s exactly what it is,’ he cried. ‘It’s an ark. Of course. Oh, Alice. You’re – ’
He couldn’t speak. In that moment he had seen his wife transformed again. She had forgotten herself so rarely during their nine years of marriage. He opened his arms, offered her an avenue. She closed her eyes and turned into it, blind. They clung to one another. Just there and then, the room darkening, rain closing in and shutting out the world, she was with him.
‘Alice,’ he murmured. ‘I love you.’
*
A misty dawn in the June of t
hat year. Trees’ branches blurred, hands gloved in white lace. The fields beyond the trees invisible.
The sun, the world, invisible.
Ideal conditions.
Since his birth, Moses had been growing at a startling rate and now, at thirteen months, he already measured over two and a half feet. George knew he had to act fast. If he left it any longer the whole thing would be impossible.
He turned away from the bedroom window. Alice was still asleep, her many anxieties holding her down, weights on her body, weights on her eyelids. She slept late these days. After that morning in the attic she had curled in on herself like a snail, all her life inside, withheld. When he tried to speak to her, she flinched, backed away, hands muffling her ears. She didn’t want to listen any more.
He crossed the landing to his son’s room. Moses lay on his back. He was gazing at his fish mobile. The window stood open a notch and cool air flowed in. Finned shapes swam in the gloom. When he noticed his father standing above him, one of his hands began to strike the air. Sounds that had the feeling of words and the complexity of sentences bubbled from his mouth. He would be talking in no time.
George reached down and lifted him out of his cot. The baby’s feet pumped the air like someone treading water. A trickle of silvery drool spilled from the corner of his mouth and ran down George’s sleeve. Moses grinned.
‘Thank you, Moses,’ George said. ‘Thank you very much.’
He carried Moses downstairs. He opened the kitchen door and groped one-handed for the light. The window jumped back, turned blue. The mist a bandage on the sky. The sun would soon bleed through.
He changed Moses on the kitchen table then set him in the high-chair while he made breakfast. Baked beans, toast and tea for him. Porridge with brown sugar, blended banana and a bottle of milk for Moses.
‘All your favourites, Moses,’ he said. ‘A real feast.’
Where would his next meal come from? What would it be? Who would be holding him? George squeezed his eyes closed for a moment, tilted his head back. His mind bustled with questions, a thousand voices babbling at once. He looked down at Moses, ran his hand through the widow’s peak. The hair stood up in a dark crest then fell forwards in wisps on to the baby’s forehead.
Remember these final moments.
The night ebbing. Trees rising out of the sky – dark islands, jagged coastlines.
Daylight beginning to heat the crimson roses in the kitchen window.
The taut click of the electric clock. The knocking of a waterpipe. The shudder of the fridge.
His nerves tightened and Moses, sensing tension, pushed the teat away from his mouth.
‘It’s all right, Moses. Everything’s all right. Here.’ His soothing voice as he touched the bottle to Moses’s lower lip. Moses began to suck again, his eyes drifting out of focus.
Later there would be no way to bring this close again or make it seem real. Memory is a museum. Events mounted on pedestals, faces in Perspex boxes, emotions behind looped red ropes. Everything temperature-controlled, sealed off, out of reach. Looking only. No touching. That alone is distancing enough but sometimes, after a difficult journey, you arrive at the bottom of the steps, those grand stone steps with lions sprawled on either side, and you look up and the museum is closed. New hours, renovation work, an obscure public holiday. There is nothing for it. You turn away. Later in George’s life there would be times when he doubted whether he had actually ever had a son.
The church clock struck six. George eased the back door shut, winced as the loose glass rattled. He moved across the damp grass, a suitcase in one hand, the basket in the other and Moses, snug in a one-piece suit, lying peacefully in the crook of his right arm. Nervousness turned his belly on a spit but he no longer feared anything. Now he was outside and under way, now he felt his plan begin to stir, to breathe, to come alive, he passed through fear into excitement. His eyes flicked from side to side, missing nothing. The row of marigolds, mist frosting their warm orange glow. The top of the fence a giant saw-blade. The hinges on the garden gate coiled like springs and burgundy with rust. The way he was looking around he might have been leaving the village himself. Seeing it for the last time. The one thought that had sustained him for the past six months now lifted him again. Moses was leaving New Egypt. Leaving the place where apathy lay like a fine dust over everything. Where people gave up, broke down, turned their faces to the wall. Where lips had forgotten how to smile and danger wore a blue uniform with silver buttons. Absurd. Pathetic. Criminal.
He glanced down. Moses lay still, but his eyes seemed lit from the inside. That’s because he knows something good is happening, George thought. Babies always know.
Mist clung to the world like a new dense air, like sweat on skin. The gate didn’t creak for once. No lights in any of their neighbours’ houses. The inanimate was on their side. They had accomplices everywhere. It was going to work.
George slipped across the lane that wound behind their house. He cleared the stile. Ahead of him now stretched the bridleway where girls sometimes rode horses. Blackberry bushes banked high on either side. A ditch offered a hiding-place, should they need one. One hundred yards on, the hedgerow subsided, merged with the undergrowth. The track narrowed, ran into a copse, lost its identity. Trees meshed overhead, weeds sprang up. Now he was walking through a dim green tunnel. Birds sang in harsh sporadic bursts. Otherwise only the creak of the basket and the soft thudding of his shoes on the packed mud.
Five minutes later, as they were leaving the cover of the wood, some instinct made George look over his shoulder. And there, wrapped in shadow, casual and terrifying, stood a policeman. The policeman stared at George and George, transfixed, stared back. Neither of them moved or spoke.
It was several long seconds before George realised that it was only a dummy. It hadn’t been there two days ago. They must have moved it. They were always doing that, the bastards. Even when he had turned his back on the dummy, he could feel its supernatural presence, the pressure of those blank white eyes.
He stood at the edge of an open field. Cows often grazed there in the daytime. Now it seemed empty, an arena of dull grass, occasional highlights of dew. Beyond this field, another field. Beyond that, the river. This was the most dangerous part. He could imagine the colour blue appearing, on the very border of visibility, but spreading like ink until it surrounded him.
He began to walk.
He had to stop every so often to alter his grip on the basket, to switch Moses from one arm to the other, to wipe the lenses of his glasses, but he never stopped for long and when he started again he always walked faster than before. His eyes probed the mist and it broke up into marbles, weightless, grey and white, jostling, colliding. After that he kept his eyes on the path. At last the ground began to slope down and he heard the trickling of the river.
When he reached the place where the rushes grew he squatted down. He opened the lid of the basket and laid Moses inside. He left the lid open while he fitted the suitcase into the brackets he had built on to one side of the basket. He used the leather strap that bound the suitcase to lash it into position. There were two makeshift pockets on the other side of the basket. These he filled with stones to act as ballast. He sat back on his heels and pushed at the suitcase with spread fingers. It seemed secure enough. His only lapse into sentimentality, this suitcase. He had packed it the previous night. It contained a few mementoes of their all too brief family life together. Also inside the suitcase was a carefully worded (and unsigned) letter instructing that the contents were to be ‘held in trust for Moses George Highness until he attains the age of twenty-five’. No reasons were given for the abandonment of the baby. The fewer clues, the better.
The sky had expanded above their heads. The mist was beginning to lift. A tractor snarled two or three fields away. He had to get back.
He bent down and kissed Moses. Moses tugged at his hair.
‘Moses,’ he whispered. ‘That hurts.’
Moses gurgled.
George tried to imagine his son’s future face, the face this face was a blueprint for, but nothing came. He fastened the lid and waited. He couldn’t form the word goodbye – not even silently. It stuck like a fishbone in his throat and would choke him. He lifted the basket in both hands and set it down in the shallows. The rushes, stiff, abundant, held it fast. He rolled it from side to side to test for buoyancy and removed two or three stones from the right-hand side. It was as stable as it would ever be. He gave it a firm push. The rushes parted. The basket floated out into the current, stern swinging anti-clockwise, and began to slide downstream. He watched it dissolve into the mist.
He stood up. Wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Brushed some mud off his coat. A greyness invading him, gloom in his blood. He turned away and, walking fast, reached home in ten minutes. So far as he could tell nobody saw him return.
Alice was sitting at the kitchen table. She had been staring at the door. When he opened the door and appeared in the gap, she stared at him with equal blankness. Sleep had swollen her eyelids, creased one side of her face.
‘Is it done?’ she asked. Her voice flat and neutral. An automatic pilot through the storms in her head.
He nodded. ‘It’s done.’
*
At midday George called the police and reported his son missing. The Chief Inspector would be there in fifteen minutes, he was told. He replaced the receiver and looked across at Alice. He had talked to her earlier that morning.
‘Alice,’ he had said, sitting down at the kitchen table, ‘I’ve got to talk to you.’
Her face, sullen, lifted an inch. ‘Talk then.’
‘Now we’ve got this far, I don’t want to risk ruining the whole thing.’
Her resentment crystallised. ‘We’ve?’
‘We did this together, Alice. We thought it would be the best thing for Moses, remember?’
Dreams of Leaving Page 3