Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

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.