Rupert Thomson: Dreams of Leaving

Very few people had turned out for the funeral. A gaunt bearded man, an ungainly blonde woman and five police officers. Two men in shabby black suits took up the rear of the procession. One of them, Dinwoodie by name, wore a sling on his right arm. He had pale swivelling eyes and long hair that was prematurely grey. The other ran the village greengrocer’s shop. Their heads tilted sideways and inwards like two halves of a reflection so they could hear each other without raising their voices. They had allowed a small gap to open up between themselves and the five policemen. That they were linked, as if by an invisible cartilage, to the main body of the procession was obvious from their conversation.

‘So what do you think?’ Dinwoodie spoke in a hoarse whisper.

‘Think?’

‘About the baby. Do you think he really drowned in the river?’

The greengrocer squinted into the sun. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s the story that’s going round.’

‘That’s not what I’m asking.’

‘Is he really dead, do you mean?’

Dinwoodie nodded. His eyes lit like hot ashes.

‘Well, if he’s not,’ the greengrocer said, ‘where is he?’ A logical man, the greengrocer.

‘That’s what I’m getting at,’ Dinwoodie said. Sweat oiled the working parts of his face. It was sweltering outside, but it was not the heat that he felt.

The greengrocer waited for his friend to elaborate. They passed a marble cross that had been carved to look like wood. A heap of stone fruit and vegetables adorned the base. The greengrocer’s grandfather.

‘What I’m getting at is, could he have escaped?’ Dinwoodie said.

The greengrocer raised an eyebrow. ‘A thirteen-month-old baby?’

‘All right. Could his escape have been — ’ and here Dinwoodie paused, searching for the appropriate word — ‘have been,’ he continued, ‘ engineered? ’

‘Ah,’ the greengrocer said. A logical man, but not an excitable one.

‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

‘Well what do you think?’

‘It’s never been done before,’ the greengrocer said.

‘So far as we know,’ came Dinwoodie’s fierce whisper.

‘So far as we know,’ the greengrocer agreed.

One of the police officers walking in front of the two men twisted his head and glared in their direction. Dinwoodie lowered his eyes. He examined the flagstone path as it passed beneath his feet. The stones were uneven. Weeds pushed through the cracks like mysteries demanding solutions.

‘There seems to be some tension,’ the greengrocer observed, ‘among certain members of our local police force.’

Dinwoodie’s pale eyes glowed. His hand, trembling, clutched at the air. ‘Is it any wonder?’ he said. ‘They never found the baby’s body, did they? The mystery hasn’t been solved. It’s just being buried, that’s all.’ He drew a large yellow handkerchief out of his pocket and began to mop his forehead and his upper lip. ‘We’re burying an empty coffin here. An empty coffin. Don’t you see, Joel? They’re admitting they’ve failed. The police have failed — maybe for the first time. Do you know what that means? It means there’s hope for us, Joel. There really is.’

Joel sighed. As if the sun had slid behind a cloud, gloom moved over his face. ‘You’ll never know.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘I’m telling you,’ the greengrocer said. ‘You’ll never know. Who are you going to ask? The police?’ He snorted. ‘There’s no way you’ll ever find out.’

‘Ah, this fucking village,’ Dinwoodie snapped. ‘You too.’

Chief Inspector Peach (known behind his back as ‘The Fuzz’) swung round, his lower lip jutting, his face pink with indignation. ‘Gentlemen, please. This is a funeral.’

The two men covered the remaining distance to the open grave in silence.

*

George Highness stood, gaunt and bearded, beside his son’s grave. How he loathed New Egypt, he was thinking. How he loathed and detested the place. Hate massed in his fists, drew the blood out of his knuckles, tightened the stringy muscles in the back of his neck. He looked older than his twenty-nine years.

He was facing north. The cemetery fell away in front of him, sank to its knees, offering a view. Tombstones rough as dead skin. Yew trees almost black against a flawless sky of blue. Then, at the bottom of the hill, a wall which contained, if you looked closely enough (and as a child he had), every colour in existence. Beyond the wall, a row of brick cottages. Above their rooftops, the elm that told him where he lived; it stood in his front garden. Away to the left and anchored in a dip in the land, the church. Unusual stonework: green on grey days, grey on bright days like today. Timeless, ancient, solid. He didn’t believe in it. Further left, a lane dodged the pub and ran downhill past the village green. Behind him all the time, the police station. As it should be, he thought. A brief smile twisted one side of his mouth.

He turned back to the grave. He watched the empty coffin being lowered into the ground. What a farce this was. He glanced across at Alice, his wife. Tension bunched in her shoulderblades so that, in profile, she looked almost hunchbacked. Strands of green-blonde hair lay lank against the nape of her neck. Behind her veil her eyes were blank as stones. Her face like bread, spongy and pale. An echo of the girl he had married.

*

The first time he noticed her she was eight, a white floating girl, a twist of smoke against the grey trees on the western edge of the village. He began to run across the field. Twice he turned his ankle on a furrow. It didn’t matter. He ran on. He had to close the distance between them. Catch her before she vanishes, he had told himself. A curious thing to say. But so right, so instinctively right, he would realise later.

He must have been eleven. Even then he had felt the pull of her strangeness and how magnetic somehow her frailty was. Close up, among tree-trunks veined with ivy and bindweed, her feet lost in leaves the colour of rust, she had the awkward grace of a bird. A stork, perhaps, or a heron. She had the same elongated neck, the same brittle stumbling legs.

He stood in front of her getting his breath back. She wasn’t looking at him. He asked her name.

‘Alice,’ she said. Without moving her feet, she turned away so he could no longer see her face. Rooted to the ground she seemed. A bird that would never fly. He could have seen it then. In that first meeting.

‘What are you doing out here?’ he asked her.

‘I was alone.’

Her hands moved among the folds of her white dress. Three years younger than he was, she seemed wiser, more adult. Like blotting-paper she soaked up the messy ink of his questions.

Still something possessed him to say, ‘Not any more,’ and she turned towards him and looked at him as if he had just spoken for the first time.

They had met by chance and their friendship continued as a kind of planned coincidence. This understanding arose: he looked for her, she waited for him. He always knew where to find her — by the river, in the woods beyond the allotments, up on the hill behind the police station (from there, you could see the village as it really was, a group of houses huddled in a hollow in the land, bound on one side by the river’s thin grey cord and on the other two by trees which, from that distance, all too closely resembled fences) — and soon they were spending so much time together on the village boundaries that people began to think they were up to no good. The truth was simpler, though still ominous, perhaps. They wanted privacy, secrecy. They needed territory they could call their own. So they went to the edge of the village. Had to go to the edge. There were no halfway houses. They both understood this early on and recognised it in each other. Peach recognised it too. He wrote a short memo regarding the two children. The police were alerted. Gently.