Mary grinned back, slid a hand into her bag. The hand emerged with a Shell Road Atlas. ‘I’ve got a map,’ she said, ‘and I know where New Egypt is.’
‘Shit.’ There was no way out of this. ‘Where is it then?’
But Mary wasn’t telling. She handed him his coat instead, led him downstairs to the car and opened the door. ‘Get in,’ she said.
He obeyed. Reluctantly.
Soon they were leaving the southern suburbs of the city. Frost glazed the rooftops of the last few houses; net curtains, like another kind of frost, hid the windows. Then open country, a dual carriageway through brittle woods. A new roundabout, fat yellow bulldozers, mud the colour of rust. The sky cleared. The grey turned blue. Sun struck through the windscreen, bounced off Mary’s diamanté brooch.
He turned to her with a puzzled look. ‘You know, I think I recognise this road. Should I recognise it?’
Mary shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
He studied the road in greater detail. Yes. There, for example. He remembered laughing at that signpost (PICNIC AREA I HARTFIELD 4) because it sounded like a football result.
‘Are you sure we haven’t driven down this road before?’ he asked.
‘I have, lots of times, but never with you. Oh,’ and she smiled across at him, ‘I almost forgot. Look behind your seat.’
He reached round and pulled out something he had no trouble recognising: a bottle of twelve-year-old malt whisky.
‘It’s for you,’ she said. ‘You can open it if you like.’
‘For me? Why?’
‘It’s not every day you go and meet parents you’ve never seen before, is it?’ she said.
*
It had been all right to begin with. The drive south. The sunshine. The whisky. But now he had the map on his knee and the village was less than an inch away and he was trembling. It was a feeling he hadn’t known for years, this trepidation, and it made a child of him. He wanted a hand to cling to, a bed to hide under. He wanted to turn round and run off in the opposite direction.
What was he going to say to them, these parents?
He tried out a couple of approaches in his head.
Polite: ‘Good afternoon. Mr and Mrs Highness?’ No, they’d probably take him for a Mormon and slam the door in his face.
Tantalising: ‘Mr and Mrs Highness? I’ve got some rather good news for you.’ Then they’d think that they’d won the pools or something. What a let-down when they discovered the truth.
Direct, but awkward: ‘Um, hello. My name’s Moses. I’m your son, I think.’ What would they do? Faint? Burst into tears? Pretend they didn’t understand (‘Moses?’ A blank look – affable, but blank. ‘Sorry, son. You must be confusing us with someone else.’)
He just couldn’t imagine it.
And now they were turning off the main road. A country lane took them up a steep hill in a series of tight curves. New Egypt appeared on a signpost for the first time (NEW EGYPT ) but it didn’t sound like a football result and he wasn’t laughing. They began to descend. A sign loomed on the right-hand side. Two grey metal stanchions buried in tall grass and ragged ferns.
NEW EGYPT
He reached for the bottle again, now almost empty. He smiled fleetingly. Mary thought of everything. She was an expert in a crisis. She ought to be. She had caused enough of them herself. Look at her now. So serene. Whisky always did that to her. He hoped they didn’t get stopped by the police. Unlikely, though. There wouldn’t be many –
Police.
Suddenly everything connected.
‘I have,’ he cried out. ‘I knew it.’
Mary stamped on the brakes. The car slewed into the hedge that lined the road. ‘Moses,’ she said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t shout like that.’
‘I have been here before,’ he said.
She switched the engine off and leaned back against her door. She lit a cigarette. ‘So tell me about it.’
He told her the whole story of the drive down to the south coast in July. The bizarre slobbering policeman. The motorbike disguised as a wheelchair. Old Dinwoodie in his flying-helmet.
‘How extraordinary,’ she said when he had finished. ‘Just think. That Dinwoodie might be a friend of your father’s.’
Moses looked dubious. ‘I don’t know. He looked like he’d just escaped from a mental home or something.’
Mary threw her cigarette out of the window. She started the engine, shifted into gear and pulled back on to the road.
‘I’m rather looking forward to this,’ she said.
*
They approached the village along a street of identical red-brick houses. They saw nobody. No movement in the windows, no smoke rising from the chimneys.
They reached a crossroads and turned left up the high street. They circled the village green. One peeling sightscreen. A duck-pond brimming with sky. No ducks, though. The clock on the church tower had stopped at ten past seven. Moses wondered how long ago.
‘I feel like the last person alive,’ Mary said.
Moses nodded. She was speaking for both of them.
There seemed to be no centre to the village. After passing the post office for the second time, she stopped the car outside a pub.
‘You might as well ask in there,’ she said.
‘Ask?’
‘Yes, ask. Where your parents live. That’s why we’re here, Moses. Remember?’
He leaned out of the window. The pub, he saw, was called The Legs and Arms. On the sign hanging above the doorway a pair of legs and arms, both disembodied, engaged one another in a sort of clumsy pink swastika.
‘Take a look at this place, Mary.’
‘Are you going in or not?’
‘The name, Mary. Did you see the name?’
She sighed. ‘I suppose I’m going to have to do this myself.’
‘No, it’s all right. I’m going.’ He opened his door and clambered out.
When he first pushed through the double-doors he thought the pub was empty. The silence. The gloom. The stale smells of peanuts, spilt beer, cheap cigars. Then he began to notice people. Half dozen or so. All sitting on their own in different corners. Not a word from any of them. Only, now and then, the rustle of a coat, the clink of a glass, a sigh. He walked up to the bar. A man slumped on a stool with a pint of bitter and a whisky chaser. He wore a green anorak and a pork-pie hat. He had a boxer’s face: dented in some places, swollen in others. Then Moses noticed the broken bloodvessels showing like red threads in the surface of the man’s skin. Not a boxer’s face. A drunk’s.
‘Excuse me,’ he said.
The drunk’s head rotated slowly, sideways and upwards. ‘Hundred yards,’ he said. A sluggish voice, blurred words. His eyes kept sliding away.
‘Excuse me,’ Moses said. ‘I need some directions.’
‘After all those years. Hundred yards then bam.’ The drunk’s elbow jerked. Beer slopped on to the bar, frothy as bile.
Moses nodded. He looked round casually for someone else.
‘Tell us about your stomach muscles, they said. Tell us what you do with your missus.’ The drunk’s face twisted with sudden frenzy. ‘Those filthy bastards.’ He aimed a soiled and trembling finger at Moses’s chest. ‘I could’ve done it, though. I could’ve bloody done it.’
Loop-tape in his head, Moses thought. That’s what happens in pubs. You get these weirdos. You come in halfway through and it sounds like gibberish. You wait an hour or two till they get round to the point where you first came in and you listen to the whole thing again. And sometimes it begins to make sense. Sometimes. But he didn’t have an hour or two today.
He noticed an old lady over by the window. Sun poured through the glass. She sat in its cold transparent glow, spotlit, brittle, both hands clasped on the head of her cane. Her chin moved rhythmically, as if she was chewing something. He approached.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for Mr and Mrs Highness. I wondered if you – ’
The old lady raised eyes of
the palest blue. They seemed to look beyond him to a scene of utter horror.
‘You had better ask my husband,’ she said.
‘Your husband?’ Moses glanced round.
‘Oh no. He isn’t here. He’s at home. On the manor, you see. Lord Batley never leaves the manor.’ She shuddered. ‘Never.’
‘You’re Lady Batley?’
The old lady lifted her chin an inch. Not pride exactly, but the memory of pride. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am.’
‘Lady Batley – ’ Moses was squatting beside her now – ‘I’m trying to find Mr and Mrs – ’
‘I sometimes come here for a glass of white wine. I don’t think there’s any harm in that.’ She smiled at him. Looking into her eyes was like looking down through fathoms of clear water to something lying on the ocean-bed. It gave him a kind of vertigo.
‘Of course, I don’t know what Oscar would say,’ she quavered. ‘Oscar doesn’t like to see women drinking alone. He disapproves.’ She lifted one dappled hand to her breastbone. ‘He tried to die once, you know. I told him, I told him it was no good. He promised me that he would never do it again.’
‘Never do what?’ Moses asked.
Lady Batley stared at him. ‘Die,’ she said.
She sat there chewing in the cold light. He could see straight through her skin to the tangle of veins beneath. One coiled on her left temple as if squeezed from a tube of pale-blue oil-paint.
He stood up.
Walking back across the pub, he stopped to look at a picture on the wall. It was a drawing of a policeman. Cut from a magazine, by the look of it. Two darts pinned it to the flock wallpaper. One through each eye.
Moses frowned, looked around. A woman had just appeared behind the bar. She was washing glasses. A little routine, she had. Into the water, on to the brush, into the water and out. Nice rhythm. All right, he thought. One last attempt.
‘Do you know where I could find Mr and Mrs Highness?’ he asked her.
It was the drunk, surprisingly, who reacted. ‘What about Highness?’
Moses held up a picture of his parents standing outside their house. ‘Do Mr and Mrs Highness still live here?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘You mean they’ve moved?’
The drunk seemed to find this extremely funny. ‘Moved? Did you hear that, Brenda? “Have they moved?” he says.’
The woman behind the bar allowed herself a sour smile.
‘Where are they then?’ Moses asked.
‘Only one of them’s moved.’ The drunk released this information with a sly glance.
‘Which one?’
‘Mrs Highness.’
‘So she’s left her husband?’
The drunk cackled. ‘In a way, yes.’
Suddenly Moses understood. ‘She’s dead?’
‘Yeeaahh. Wa-hay.’ The drunk banged the bar with his red hand. ‘What a clever boy. Yeah, died in the home, she did.’
‘In the home?’
‘The loony-bin, the nuthouse, the funny-farm. Where anyone with any sense round here ends up.’ He sucked down the last of his beer. ‘Are you a detective?’
Moses smiled. ‘Not a detective, no.’
‘Not a policeman, are you? Not a bloody copper?’
‘No.’
‘Thank Christ for that.’ The drunk slung his glass across the bar. ‘Give us another, Brenda.’
‘You’ve had enough,’ Brenda said. ‘Time you went home, Joel.’
‘Ah, come off it, Brenda. Give us a pint.’
Turning her back on him, Brenda reached up and rang a bell. ‘Drink up, please. We’re closing now.’
‘Brenda, it’s not even two o’clock yet,’ Joel protested.
Brenda ignored him.
He rolled his eyes, shook his head. ‘All right then, give us a half.’
Still Brenda said nothing.
Joel cuffed his empty glass aside and lurched towards the door.
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ Moses said to Brenda, ‘but could you just tell me where this house is?’
She took one look at the picture and gave him a set of simple directions. The house, she told him, was no more than two hundred yards away.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’
Brenda’s hard face softened a touch. ‘You don’t come from around here, do you?’
He hesitated, then shook his head.
‘Count your blessings,’ she said. She rang the bell again. ‘Come on, you lot. Let’s have your glasses now.’
People began to rise from their chairs as if from the dead.
Outside the pub Moses bumped into the drunk, almost knocked him over.
‘You’re a bloody policeman, you are,’ the drunk shouted. He grabbed at Moses’s sleeve with a scaly hand. ‘I know a policeman when I see one. You’re a bloody policeman.’
Moses shook himself free. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.
He turned and walked back to the car.
‘Bloody policeman,’ the drunk jeered after him.
Moses opened the door of the Volvo and climbed in. Mary was smoking. Blue veils swirled around her face. She watched him through them.
‘Looks like you made a new friend,’ she said.
*
She started the engine. ‘You were ages. I thought you’d made a run for it.’
‘I almost did,’ he said.
They drove past the drunk. He was still standing on the pavement, waving his fist and shouting obscenities.
‘Why’s he calling you a policeman?’ she asked.
Moses shrugged. ‘Because I was asking questions, I suppose.’
‘So what did you find out?’ She slowed down, weaved in and out of the potholes in the road.
‘My mother’s dead. She died in a mental home or something. I couldn’t really understand everything. Turn right here.’
They passed a row of terraced houses. Paint had dropped from the façades, lay on the ground like old leaves. Scrap metal sprawled on unmown lawns. A car with no wheels stood in a driveway. They saw no people. Not even any children.
‘My father’s still alive though,’ he added. ‘Apparently.’
He lit a cigarette, inhaled. The smoke came out with a sigh. ‘It should be down here somewhere on the left. On the corner. That’s what the woman said.’
‘Are you all right?’ Mary asked him.
He nodded. ‘I think so.’
They both recognised the house at the same time.
It had aged since the photographs. The front lawn had lost grass as old men lose hair. Bleached grey wood showed through the paintwork round the windows. A section of guttering lay on the garden path. A shattered roof-tile too. No parasol, of course. When Moses peered through a downstairs window he saw a sofa with no cushions and a fireplace stuffed with crumpled newspaper, no real signs of life.
They stood on the porch. The doorbell didn’t seem to work (Mary had listened through the letter-box), so they tried the brass knocker instead. Solid thuds echoed through the house like hammerblows. Nobody came.
‘Doesn’t look like there’s anybody there.’ Moses couldn’t keep the relief out of his voice. Now they could drive back to London with clear consciences, he was thinking. At least they had tried.
‘Let’s go round the back,’ Mary said.
He followed her, dread rising suddenly in him like floodwater.
Mildew grew on the side wall of the house. A drainpipe had come away; it stretched across the concrete path, a spindly fallen tree. The back door was green. Somebody had nailed a piece of hardboard over one of the glass panels.
‘After you,’ Mary said.
Moses turned the handle. The door grated open. He glanced over his shoulder at Mary, saw encouragement in her smile.
He found himself in a corridor. He picked his way over the scattered bones of a bicycle. Several massive cardboard boxes had been stacked against the wall. There was scarcely enough room to squeeze by. He ti
lted his head sideways to read one of the labels. THREE-PIECE SUITE, it said. ARMCHAIR He moved on, passed an open doorway. The kitchen. A fridge gaped at him, nothing in its mouth. The house smelt unused, unlived-in. But a queer sourness hung around the edge of that smell, a sourness he couldn’t quite identify: something like fish, something like sweat, something like margarine.
At the bottom of the stairs, he hesitated.
‘Hello?’ he called out.
But too softly. He cleared his throat.
‘Is anybody there?’
Something shifted overhead. Something creaked.
‘Bugger off,’ came a hoarse voice. ‘Bugger off and leave me alone.’
Moses stepped backwards.
Mary touched him lightly on the wrist. ‘Go on,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’
He began to tiptoe up the stairs. The higher he went, the sourer the smell became. More like rotten fish now, old sweat, rancid margarine. And tinged with the reek of stale cigarettes. The fifth step from the top groaned under his weight.
‘Bugger off I said,’ came the voice again, still hoarse, but angrier. ‘Get out of my house.’
Moses had reached the landing. He passed one closed door, then a second. A third, to his right, stood ajar. He pushed on the varnished wood and it gave. In the widening gap, he saw an old man on a double-bed.
The old man wore a pair of glasses, a pale collarless shirt and a green cardigan (whose smooth brown buttons looked like chocolates). Nicotine had stained the lenses of his glasses yellow and one of the arms had been mended with black insulating-tape. He had the most enormous beard. Three feet long and almost as wide. If you had walked down the street behind him, you would have been able to see it protruding from either side of his head. Once black, now threaded with minute white hairs, it spread down over his chest and tucked into the V of his cardigan. With his glasses and his beard he looked, Moses thought, like a man in disguise; it would have been difficult to describe his eyes, for instance, or his mouth.
A beige horse-blanket concealed the lower half of the old man’s body. His hands rested on the outside. They were beautiful hands. Stained, like the glasses, but ascetic, tapering and permanently curved, as if made to bless the small round heads of children. One lay flat, palm down, beside his thigh. The other held a cigarette.
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