Dreams of Leaving

by Rupert Thomson

  And George Highness, of course.

  George Highness. Would he talk?

  Somehow Peach doubted it. The man was private to the point of arrogance, and stubborn with it. Those characteristics would prevent him broadcasting what he had done, would nip any revolutionary instincts in the bud. It would be enough for George Highness to know that he had outsmarted the entire police department of New Egypt. Peach imagined that he must derive enormous satisfaction from that knowledge.

  Once again he saw Highness during the closing moments of that funeral in 1956. When he walked over to offer his condolences, Highness had actually smiled. No more than a slight puckering at the corners of his mouth, but a smile none the less. The sheer brazen impertinence of it. Since then Peach had developed a theory about smiling. Why, only the other day he had delivered a lecture on the subject to a group of new recruits.

  ‘Now if you see somebody smiling,’ he had told them, ‘it can mean one of two things. One, that the person in question is perfectly adjusted to life in the village. Anybody who is that well adjusted should be viewed as a potential threat. Can any of you tell me why?’

  Peach’s glance had swept along the row of recruits. Not one of the four had anything to offer. A pretty dull bunch. He sighed.

  ‘The reason is this. The person who is that well adjusted to life in the village is an exception. That person has occupied an extreme position. They are, in that sense, unbalanced, volatile. They are capable, at any moment, of veering to the other extreme, one of despising life in the village, one of plotting to escape from the life they despise – ’

  Peach had seen the faces of his recruits light up in turn as the point became clear. One or two nodded seriously as if they had known all along and had simply been waiting to have their knowledge confirmed.

  ‘Now,’ Peach went on, ‘who can tell me what the second meaning of a smile might be?’

  Again his gaze had moved along a row of blank faces. For God’s sake.

  Then one of the recruits, Wragge by name, a poor specimen of a youth with a nose that dangled from his face and a pair of close-set colourless eyes, stuck his hand up in the air.

  ‘Yes, Wragge?’

  ‘Could it be because they’re harbouring a plan to escape, sir?’

  Well, well. There was hope yet. Perhaps he was even looking at a future Chief Inspector. Harbouring, too. The perfect word to use in that context. Peach had studied Wragge for a moment and tried to widen the gap between those eyes, tried to invest that drooping nose with a bit of dignity, a bit of gristle. If only Wragge looked as intelligent as he obviously was.

  ‘Excellent, Wragge. That’s perfectly correct.’

  He saw Wragge’s mouth expand a fraction. A smirk of complacency. Peach had decided there and then that he didn’t care for Wragge. But he might be useful, of course.

  ‘When you see somebody smiling they might be dreaming of, or planning, an escape. A smile is a danger sign, a warning, a lead. I cannot impress upon you too strongly that you should treat a smile with the utmost suspicion,’ he had concluded. Or almost concluded, because he had then experienced a moment of inspiration – wild, vivid, lateral – the kind of inspiration that made him the kind of Chief Inspector he was. ‘Think of it like this,’ he had lowered his voice for effect, ‘somebody smiling is like somebody pointing a gun. They need to be disarmed or they will cause injury, damage, loss of morale. Even, perhaps, loss of life. There are times when I think smiling should be made illegal, but obviously – ’ and he had raised a hand in the air, fingertips uppermost like a waiter with an invisible tray, to demonstrate that he was exaggerating to make a point, that he was, in fact, joking. Then he had himself smiled. There had been laughter among the recruits, but it had been serious laughter. The message had hit home.

  He leaned back, pushed knuckles into his eyes. He returned to his scrutiny of the file. He turned up a sheaf of loose letters. These were answers to the barrage of enquiries he had unleashed following his encounter with that policeman in October 1969. There was one, for instance, from the policeman’s immediate superior:

  Dear Chief Inspector Peach,

  Thank you for your letter of October 20th. I regret to say that I do not personally recall the case to which you refer since I was only transferred to this constabulary three years ago. However, I have had recourse to our records and I can inform you that a baby was indeed admitted to this police station during June 1956. On June 16th, in fact. The baby was registered under the name Moses George Highness.

  It would seem that the Detective Sergeant in charge of the case attempted to locate the baby’s parents, but without success. The only lead he had to go on was the name Highness, a name so unusual that he assumed it was an alias, a bogus name, devised to throw whoever found the child off the scent. Following the failure of these investigations, the baby in question was remitted to an orphanage in Kent, the address of which you will find attached to this letter.

  I hope this has been of some help to you, and I trust your research into this most tragic of human problems continues to go well.

  Yours sincerely,

  Detective Sergeant Hackshaw

  This most tragic of human problems. Peach’s own words, lifted from his own letter. He had written as a police officer with a social conscience, a police officer who was working on a book about missing children. Upon receiving this letter from Hackshaw, he had immediately written to the orphanage. He had received the following reply:

  Dear Chief Inspector Peach,

  It is not our custom to supply information regarding the children in our charge; however, in this case, given your official position and your serious interest, I have taken it upon myself to waive the regulations. Moses was admitted to the Rose Hill Orphanage on June 29th 1956. I myself personally supervised the admission. He spent nine years with us – nine very happy years, I believe – and on June 1st 1965 was adopted by a couple with whom he had formed an extremely satisfactory relationship during the year previous.

  Mr and Mrs Pole, formerly of 14 Chester Row, Maidstone, Kent, have now moved to Leicester. I regret to say that I do not have their new address. However, with all the resources at your disposal, I am sure that you will be able to trace them without too much trouble.

  Yours sincerely,

  Beatrice Hood

  A third far briefer letter from a sergeant in Leicester confirmed the information supplied by Mrs Hood. The Poles had moved to the outskirts of the city, a green suburb. The sergeant had been kind enough to provide Peach with the address. And there Peach had let the matter rest.

  He lay back in his chair and listened to the rain. Three years had passed since then. Three passive years.

  His eyes were drawn to the corner of his office. There, propped up on a shelf, stood the toy dog, visible only as a ghostly patch of white in the shadows. Some remote ray of light had caught the black and orange glass of its left eye, so it seemed to be winking at him, mocking him. Balancing on three legs, it lifted its fourth and urinated on his career. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to throw it out. It was the only piece of evidence he had. It was a symbol of progress – what little he had made.

  At least he was one up on George Highness, though. There was some solace in that. At least he knew Moses was alive. Highness could only hope he was. Perhaps he would be able to torture Highness with that knowledge. Yes, he might just be able to make the bastard squirm a little. To think that the fate of the village should have rested in that man’s hands. It was monstrous. Monstrous. Highness would pay for that. Unquestionably he would pay.

  Hands folded on his desk, Peach schemed for a while.

  Then the phone rang.

  He lifted the receiver. ‘Peach.’

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, dear – ’

  It was Peach’s wife.

  ‘Hilda. What is it?’

  ‘It’s just that it’s getting very late. I was worried about you.’

  Peach glanced at his watch. Good Christ, it was alm
ost one o’clock. He hadn’t realised.

  ‘I’m sorry, Hilda. I had no idea it was so late. I’ll be home in a few minutes.’

  ‘I’ll have some supper ready for you.’

  His dear wife. ‘Thank you, Hilda. I’ll be there very soon.’

  He replaced the receiver. Locking up his office, he walked out into the rain.

  *

  At the age of forty-five, George Highness already slept as old men do. He went to bed early, usually at around ten. He took a glass of water with him for the night and a Thermos of weak tea for the morning.

  By five he was always awake again. Then he would doze with the radio on, floating halfway between consciousness and dreams. The voices of the news announcers, turned to the lowest volume, muttered distantly, drowsily, like traffic or waves. At seven he poured himself a cup of tea, and sipped it noisily, as privacy allows you to, his head propped on a heap of pillows. Sometimes he reached for his electric razor and, holding a circular mirror in his left hand, trimmed his beard.

  Then he could delay no longer, even though the day offered him nothing. He levered his thin legs out of the bed and on to the floor. The opening moments of this routine never varied. On with his dressing-gown and slippers, across the landing, and into the lavatory.

  On this particular morning, perhaps because of the storm that had kept him awake for half the night, he was still asleep when the phone rang in his bedroom at eight-thirty. The sound reached down into his dream like an excavator’s mechanical arm and scooped him out of the rubble of his subconscious. He rolled over groaning, pulled the phone towards his ear.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Could I speak to Mr Highness, please?’

  George thought he could place the voice. A man’s voice – alert, efficient, nasal. If he had been asked to put a smell to it, he would have said toothpaste. The name eluded him, however.

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘This is Doctor Frost from the Belmont Home. I’m sorry to be calling you so early – ’

  Frost. Of course. ‘That’s all right, doctor. I – ’

  ‘I’m afraid I have some rather bad news for you, Mr Highness. It’s about your wife – ’ The doctor paused.

  Like one of those puzzles, George thought. Fill in the missing words. He had already guessed the answer, but he said nothing. He closed his eyes and saw blue crosses in the darkness. He listened to the doctor’s hygienic silence. He had always suspected Frost of being a coward.

  Eventually: ‘She died at seven o’clock this morning.’

  George opened his eyes again. The room a watercolour in grey. A coating of dust on the lampshade above his head. Through the window, the elm tree and a triangle of glassy sky. He turned on to his side and drew his knees towards his chest.

  ‘Mr Highness?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Somebody will be contacting you later today. About the forms. I’m sorry, Mr Highness.’

  Doctor Frost hung up.

  George could see him now, a pink man in a white coat. Those sparse white hairs, how obscene they looked against his raw pink skull. His quick prim steps as he strutted down the hospital corridor. Congratulating himself, no doubt. An unpleasant task, successfully accomplished. On with the day.

  And Alice –

  And Alice, worth five or ten of him, lying in a drawer somewhere, her mouth ajar, her eyes transfixed –

  George pushed his face into the pillow. His love, dormant these twelve years, rose in his throat, acidic, scalding. He tried to swallow, couldn’t. He closed his eyes again, curled up. His last thought before falling into a deep sleep concerned the telephone. He would disconnect it. He had only had it installed in the first place so he could speak to her, or be there if she needed him. Now there was nobody to speak to any more. Cut it off. Complete the isolation.

  Its brash nagging woke him again just after ten. The medical secretary from the Belmont. Wanting to know whether Mr Highness would collect the death certificates in person or whether she should post them.

  ‘Post them,’ George snapped, and hung up.

  As he reached for his tartan dressing-gown, his body began to shake.

  *

  Alice, Alice, Alice.

  He tried to use the sound of her name to bring her back. It had been so long. He was in danger of losing his sense of her. It would be as if she had never been.

  He tried to gather solid details. To give her death, in distance, substance.

  That green-blonde hair, scraped back in a denial of its beauty. Her shoes scattered, often singly, throughout the house, the insteps cracked, the heels trodden down. The time when, pregnant, she walked naked down the stairs to breakfast. And later, in the winter, the tip of her tongue on her top lip as she trickled peanuts into the miniature wire cage in the garden so the birds wouldn’t starve. And that blurred smile, almost tearful, flung his way like a handful of grain, breaking up as it arrived.

  Her smiles always blurred, as if seen from a moving train.

  Her eyes always creased at the edges by dreams of leaving.

  And how he would come back sometimes to find the doors locked and the curtains drawn. How he had to break into his own house. And all the breakfast things still standing on the table. Immovable from hours of being there. Petrified.

  The butter decomposing on a china dish.

  Wasps suffocating in the marmalade.

  Such padded silence.

  It was summer, the hot summer of 1959, but she wouldn’t have the windows open. When he asked her why – a stupid question, but he could think of no others – she turned her smudged and punished eyes on him and said, ‘Go away.’

  Him, the world, everything.

  For hours, for days, she lay upstairs. Once he walked into her bedroom, sat down on the quilt. In the darkness he mistook her shoulder for her forehead. The bed shook with her crying.

  ‘Why are you crying, Alice?’ he asked her. ‘Tell me why you’re crying.’

  ‘I don’t know, I can’t help it, it just happens, I don’t know why, I’m happy really – ’ It all came flooding out until she was crying so hard her words lost their shape, became unintelligible.

  She was committed in 1960. She committed herself, really. She wanted it. That was one day he didn’t have to search his memory for. Maroon ambulance, black mudguards. Big silver headlights. And Alice shuffling down the garden path, taller than the two nurses who supported her. Eyes rolling upwards in their sockets. Frightening white slits. Regal somehow. But mad. Or not mad, perhaps, but painfully, unbearably unhappy. Mauve smears on her white exhausted face. Channels worn by the passage of tears. He remembered thinking, Alice is escaping. For the Belmont Mental Home, ironically, stood some three miles beyond the village boundary.

  She only came back to the house once. And talked about prisons constantly. And the prisons kept shrinking. First it was the village. Then it was their house on Caution Lane. In the end, of course, it was her own body.

  Alice is escaping. Well, now she had.

  Perhaps he shouldn’t cry for her. He had read somewhere that tears are like ropes: they tie a person’s soul to the earth. Now the prisons no longer existed for her she was free. And he should let her go.

  He sat in the kitchen and reviewed the twelve years he had spent alone. He had sung in the choir, and his voice – a bass baritone – had performed respectably enough. He had given lectures in the church hall under the watchful eye of the Chief Inspector, lectures on the history of the region, the traditions and the crafts. He had never really socialised, but nor had he been rude when approached.

  And then there had been his book.

  He rose to his feet and walked into the front room. Selecting the smallest key from the bunch he kept in his pocket, he unlocked the lid of his writing-desk. He reached in and pulled out a bundle of paper. About a hundred typed pages. His secret manuscript. The title scrawled in spindly black capitals:

  NEW EGYPT – AN UNFINISHED HISTORY.

  He weighed the book in his
hands. Not much to show for almost a year’s work, but then he had scrapped a good deal. Besides, it had served its purpose. It had got him through those first few months of living without Alice. Plunging into a personal history of the village, he had found that he lost track of time, that he could put his loneliness to good use, that he could exorcise the ghost that Alice had become. He remembered those hours, days, weeks at the writing-desk with a kind of grateful nostalgia.

  Shifting a pile of old newspapers, George sank down on to the sofa. He loosened the red string that bound the manuscript and turned the title-page. He skimmed across the opening sentence with a wry smile (I was born in the most boring village in England). With Alice still in mind, he moved forwards to his chapter on escape and began to read.

  Stories of escape-attempts, songs of resignation and disillusion, fantasies about the outside world abound in the village and form a unique body of local folklore. They divide into two distinct categories. On the one hand there are ballads, nursery rhymes and moral tales, all of which serve to remind people of their allegiance to the village and to persuade them, often insidiously, that the world outside is a hostile and lonely place. Great emphasis is laid on roots, the idea of a birthplace, the feeling of being among people you have grown up with. An example of this first category (which is, by the way, the official folklore of the village and is written, more often than not, by members of the police force) would be the story of the man who leaves the village in search of a better life. At the beginning he can scarcely contain his joy. The open road, the new earth beneath his feet – why, the very air smells of freedom!