Mary poured the extraordinary tea. The old man cradled his mug in both hands. He sipped noisily, his moustache extending over the rim.
‘Christ, this is damn good,’ he said. ‘Uncommonly good. I’d almost forgotten what tea tasted like. Bloody good.’
‘Something I’ve noticed,’ Mary said. ‘All your escape stories are about men. Haven’t any women ever tried to get away?’
‘Women?’ The old man wedged his mug into a fold in the blanket. ‘There was one woman.’
He lit a cigarette and leaned back. Smoke filtered out of his nostrils. He was taking his time. He knew he had an audience.
‘Her real name was Miss Neville,’ he said, ‘but we all called her the mad lady. She lived behind the church. Strange house. Dark-red bricks and all the window-frames painted green. She had a withered leg so she couldn’t get about very much. She walked very slowly with two sticks, or sometimes she used crutches. You hardly ever saw her. She loved animals, especially birds. Storks used to land in her garden and, once, a flock of swallows hibernated in her kitchen instead of flying south for the winter. She had a special way with birds. She could talk to them and they understood her. Most people in the village thought she was some kind of witch. The children were frightened of her.
‘I was frightened of her too, but I was curious. One day – I suppose I must have been nine or ten – I went to visit her. I just walked up the drive and knocked on her front door. There was no answer, so I went round to the back and peeped in through her French windows. And there was old Miss Neville sitting in a high-backed chair. She was clapping her hands. Not rhythmically, the way you might clap to music, but a sort of double clap, as if she was summoning a servant. Her hair kept falling in her eyes, I remember, and her eyes were glowing yellow in the dark room, and her mouth was hanging open. She looked very strange, transported almost. For a moment I couldn’t work out what on earth she was doing. Then I saw the birds –
‘There were about eight of them, all the same size, dark grey, and when Miss Neville clapped her hands they rose into the air, all at the same time, straight up into the air like helicopters. And every time she clapped her hands they performed a new trick, a new manoeuvre. They flew round and round the room in perfect formation. They hovered in mid-air. They did all kinds of symmetrical things. I couldn’t believe my eyes, of course. I just stood at the window and stared. I completely forgot that I had no business to be there. And I suppose she must have seen me because the next thing I knew the door opened and she was standing in front of me.
‘“What do you want, young man?” she said. “I came to visit you,” I said. “Did you?” she said. “Did you indeed? Well, I suppose you’d better come in then, hadn’t you?” She had this queer way of stretching her neck out and looking down at you sideways. She was wearing a huge shapeless dress. As big as a tent, it was. And dark green, with little bits of velvet stuck all over it.
‘She hobbled back into the room on her crutches and I followed her. I have never been to a zoo, but her house smelt the way I imagine a zoo to smell. Sweet somehow. A curious mixture of musk and chicken-feed and manure. You know, I’ve never forgotten the smell of old Miss Neville’s house. And the mess. Feathers, balls of fur, bird-lime, mouse-droppings, cat-hair, frogspawn – you name it. I’d never seen anything like it. I suppose it was a zoo, really.
‘She gave me a tour of the place first. Animals everywhere. “Look where you’re going,” she told me. “I don’t want you treading on any of my family.” Some of the rooms had straw on the floor. Others had sawdust. She had covered the floor of one of the rooms about a foot deep in mud. It had grass and plants and flowers growing in it. It was just like being outside. Wasps buzzing around. Bees too. She had two bathrooms and both the bathrooms were like aquariums. Full of fish. On the third floor she had a snakehouse. A room that had been heated to a special temperature. Absolutely crawling with snakes. Ten she had, including a python. The whole room seemed to be alive and slithering about. And then there were the birds, of course. She let them fly all over the house. Wherever we went, they landed on her head, her hands, her shoulders, or talked to her from some perch up near the ceiling. Sometimes she waved them away, saying something like, “Not now, not now.”
‘Anyway, after she had showed me round, she insisted that I stayed for tea. “I expect you’d like some lemonade, wouldn’t you,” she said. “Little boys like lemonade.” I told her that I liked lemonade very much. So she led me along a gloomy passageway and down a flight of steep stone steps. We went through a door and she switched on a dim light. We were in the cellar. I looked round and saw rows and rows of bottles. They were all lying in racks like wine, but they weren’t wine, they were lemonade. She had stuck labels on all the bottles and every label had a year on it, the year that she had bought that particular bottle. Some of those bottles of lemonade were thirty years old. “I like to have lemonade in the house,” she said, “just in case the vicar drops in.” In her book, you see, vicars always drank lemonade. Vicars and little boys. She selected a bottle for me and held it up to the light. “1919,” she said. “A rather good year, don’t you think?” I thought it best to agree with her. So, for tea, I drank lemonade that was nearly twenty years old, ate a few stale wafer-biscuits, and talked to Miss Neville, who sat there with a dove perched on her head the whole time. She was bats, of course, but really very kind. Afterwards I thanked her and went home.’ The old man paused and scratched his beard, the part that nestled under his left ear. ‘Now remind me. Why was I talking about Miss Neville?’
Moses grinned. ‘You were going to tell us about how she tried to escape.’
‘Of course I was. That’s right. Christ, I’m getting old. Completely forgot.’ The old man tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail, stuck it in the corner of his mouth and lit it. The empty packet joined dozens of identical empty packets on the shelf above his bed. ‘It must have been a year or two later. 1938, 1939, something like that. A policeman, I don’t remember which one, found Miss Neville lying in a field on the outskirts of the village. It was dawn. She had broken her hip. She was wearing some sort of leather harness round the top half of her body. No sign of any sticks or crutches anywhere. After being taken to the doctor, she was interrogated by Peach. She didn’t deny having tried to escape. In fact, apparently she told him that the only reason she had left it until so late in her life was because she couldn’t bear to be parted from her animals. Then he asked her the obvious question, “How did you get as far as that without your crutches?” “I flew,” she said. “flewo?” Peach said. “My birds,” she said. “They carried me.”
‘And you know something?’ The old man leaned forwards, his speech accelerating. ‘I believe it. After what I saw in her sitting-room that afternoon I definitely believe it. There was a magic about that woman. Not strong enough to break the spell of the village, perhaps,’ and his hand twirled in the air again, ‘but what could be that strong? Can you imagine, though? Miss Neville being carried through the sky at dawn by a flock of birds. Like a parachute. A parachute of birds. What a sight that must’ve been! What a magnificent sight!’
Moses gazed through the window. He was trying to imagine a woman in a huge green dress flying through the sky. It was difficult. In this village he found himself approaching the limits of his imagination.
‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘I mean, how did it happen, d’you think?’
The old man shrugged. ‘Nobody really knows. She must have fallen, that much is obvious. Perhaps the birds lost their grip. Perhaps something frightened them. I don’t know. In any case, she was dead in two years. Complications with the broken hip.’
‘Sad story,’ Mary said.
‘Sad, but not so very strange. Everybody fails, you see.’
Moses smiled. ‘Not everybody,’ he said, ‘surely.’
‘Well, no,’ the old man admitted. ‘Not everybody, I suppose.’ He shook his head as if he still found the whole thing pretty hard to believe. ‘You see,’ he went on,
‘most people fail because they think that escape’s impossible and the police are infallible. When you’re faced with those two beliefs, it paralyses you. Escape is a dream, a song you sing, a story you tell, but not something you ever seriously think of doing. Not if you’ve any common sense. Anybody actually attempting to escape steps beyond the bounds of reality. They become unreal, even to themselves. They dress up as Tarzan, they build toy bombs, they pretend to die. No wonder they fail. In the end, all they succeed in doing is making the police museum the most interesting place in the village. The secret is to accept all that conditioning, be realistic about it.’
Moses looked puzzled. ‘Realistic? I don’t follow.’
‘I gave up the idea of trying to escape myself,’ the old man explained. ‘I knew I couldn’t do it. It was beyond me, quite literally. I decided to help somebody else escape instead. My son. You. And the whole time I was planning to get you out I was realistic about it. Because it wasn’t my freedom that was at stake. Because I had nothing to lose. As for you, well, you were too young to know what was happening, too young to have been weighed down, disabled by all those stories about the outside world, too young to be able to experience that sense of becoming unreal to yourself. If I failed to get you out, you wouldn’t go to pieces or turn into an alcoholic or end up in the mental home. You simply wouldn’t know any better. So you made it. The plan succeeded. And that’s what’s sustained me all these years as I’ve watched others fail around me. That and the idea that I might finally have got one over on old Peach – ’ The old man began to chuckle to himself. His cigarette shook in his curved brown fingers.
Moses now asked the question he had been dying to ask. ‘But how did you do it? How did you get me out?’
‘Oldest story in the world,’ the old man told him. ‘There’s a river that runs past the village. You may have noticed it. It’s about a mile away, across the fields. There’s one particular bend in the river where the current suddenly moves from the riverbank out into midstream. I tested it with twigs and cans. I waited for the right weather conditions, a misty morning, then I left you there, floating on the river in a basket made of pitch and rushes.’ He smiled. ‘Moses, you see?’
Moses shook his head in wonder. Then he looked across at Mary and knew that she knew what he was thinking. That pattern of light and shade. That sound of running water. Real memories.
‘So David was right all along,’ he said.
‘Who’s David?’ the old man asked.
‘David was one of the boys at the orphanage. I had a fight with him because he went round telling everyone that I’d been found by a river.’
The old man laughed, and, once again, the laughter triggered a fit of coughing. It shook him harder this time. His chest rattled like a bag of dice.
Mary held the glass out to Moses. ‘More water,’ she said.
When he returned, she had propped the old man up on his pillows. The old man’s arms lay outside the blanket, limp, stringy, palms up.
‘Are you all right?’ Moses asked him.
The old man nodded, but didn’t trust himself to speak.
Nobody had turned the light on in the room. The air had thickened, a haze of greys and blues, partly darkness, partly smoke. Hands and faces showed up pale, almost phosphorescent. A radiator began to tick in the corner.
‘Those bloody sardines,’ the old man muttered when he had recovered his breath.
He lit another cigarette. His face looked gaunt and dented in the stark orange flare of the match. His perversity resembled Mary’s, Moses thought.
‘I think we ought to leave you now,’ she was saying. ‘You should rest.’
The old man nodded.
‘Are you sure you’re going to be all right?’ Moses asked.
‘I’m fine.’ The old man spoke in a whisper now. ‘I’ve talked too much, that’s all. I’m not used to talking, you see.’
‘And you sang.’ Looking down at the old man, Moses suddenly had an idea. ‘Why don’t you come with us?’
‘I thought you might say that.’
‘Well, why not?’
The old man sighed. ‘It’s not quite as simple as that.’
‘All you have to do is get in the car.’
The old man shook his head. ‘Listen, I’ve told you about the people who live in this village. I’ve told you what they’re like. Well, I live here too. I’m one of them. I’m the same as they are.’
‘But you’re different. You – ’
The old man cut in. ‘I’m the same. Look at me. Lying in bed for years on end. I’m the same.’
Moses lowered his eyes.
‘Don’t push him, Moses,’ Mary said. ‘He has his own life here. And you have yours somewhere else. That was his gift to you.’
Moses looked up at the old man. ‘I wanted to help you, that’s all.’
‘You have helped me. By coming here. By letting me know that you’re alive. You’ve no idea how much that means.’
Moses said nothing.
‘Perhaps you’ll visit me again,’ the old man whispered, ‘sometime.’
‘Of course I will.’ Moses paused. ‘There’s one more thing I wanted to ask you. That pink dress. The one in the suitcase. Did it belong to my mother?’
‘Yes, I gave it to her, but she never wore it.’ The old man smiled sadly. ‘It was a dream of mine to take her dancing in that dress.’ He lifted a hand, let it fall again.
‘A dream of yours? Like that caravan?’
Fans opened at the corners of the old man’s eyes. ‘Like the caravan,’ he said. ‘We had a lot of dreams, Alice and I. But you were the only one that came true.’
Moses bent down and kissed his father on the forehead.
‘Something you should do,’ the old man said, mischief now in his dark eyes, ‘is to go and see your gravestone.’
‘Gravestone?’
‘Yes, gravestone. How else do you think we explained your sudden disappearance? You died, remember? You drowned in the river.’
‘I see.’ Moses had taken in so much during the past few hours that he felt as if he was about to overflow.
‘If you run into a policeman, it might be best to pretend that you’re just passing through. And don’t, for God’s sake, mention your name. As I said, you’re supposed to be dead. If they find out you’re not, well, it could be dangerous.’
‘I’ll be careful,’ Moses promised. ‘Are you sure you’re going to be all right?’
‘I’ve lived here alone for twenty years. I’ll be fine. Oh, and Moses – ’ the old man held his cigarette away from his lips and a slightly embarrassed smile appeared there – ‘next time you can talk.’
*
‘Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it?’ Mary shifted into second. The car began to scale the hill that led to the graveyard.
‘I don’t know,’ Moses said. ‘I feel a bit dazed.’
She nodded as if that made sense to her.
‘You were very quiet,’ he said.
‘It was your scene. I didn’t have a part.’
He watched her driving. You had a part, he thought.
A silence followed. The sun, setting behind an oak, punched fierce orange holes in its black, almost metallic foliage. By the time they passed through the cemetery gate the colours in the sky were vanishing. Still, they found the grave easily enough. Moses knelt down in the grass and tried to decipher the inscription. Mary wandered off to look at the church.
It was true what he had told her. He was having trouble finding room to store everything he had heard that afternoon. The places where it should have gone were already crammed with all kinds of junk from his own life. And yet so much of what he had heard, it seemed, was his own life too. He would have to squeeze it in somehow. It was a strange idea. Like trying to put foundations in a building that had already been completed. Unsettling. He heard footsteps behind him. He turned round, expecting to see Mary. Instead he saw a policeman.
‘Good evening, sir,’ the policeman said.<
br />
Moses thought it wise to match the policeman’s politeness. ‘Good evening, officer.’
‘A pleasant cemetery.’
‘Very pleasant.’
‘Even at night.’
There was just the suggestion of an interrogative in the policeman’s amiable remarks, as if he didn’t really understand why somebody should be visiting a cemetery at night and would quite like to know.
Moses hesitated.
Suddenly the policeman’s forefinger flew up to his chin and stuck there. ‘Forgive me if I’m mistaken, sir,’ he said, ‘but aren’t you the gentleman who assisted PC Marlpit in the Dinwoodie case?’ His eyes glittered against the brooding sky.
Moses was too surprised to lie. ‘How did you know that?’
The policeman’s forefinger edged from his chin to the side of his nose where it slid rhythmically against the fleshy curve of his nostril. ‘PC Marlpit described you in great detail. He was, I believe, quite struck by your appearance. PC Marlpit is one of my oldest friends. We shoot together.’
‘Shoot?’
‘Pheasant,’ the policeman said, ‘and grouse, when they’re in season. Otherwise bottles in my back yard.’ The way he lowered his eyes and smiled, he might just have given away a slightly embarrassing secret.
‘Interesting,’ Moses said.
‘Something occurs to me. If you were to accompany me to the police station, I’m sure the Chief Inspector would be delighted to meet you and thank you personally for your part in the unfortunate affair.’
‘I don’t know. We really ought to be getting back.’
‘We?’ The policeman scoured the air for evidence of a second person.
‘She’s looking at the church,’ Moses explained.
The policeman nodded to himself. His eyes returned to Moses’s face. ‘It would take up very little of your time, sir. The station is just behind us. A minute’s walk away. If the lady wouldn’t mind, that is.’
‘If the lady wouldn’t mind what?’ Mary said, appearing out of the darkness.
‘Going to the police station,’ Moses said. ‘The Chief Inspector would like to thank me for what I did in July.’
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