Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

‘Your wife’s dead,’ he said, and then, with a sly weakening of emphasis that George, he felt, would detect and understand, ‘and so is your son. There’s nothing to keep you here now, George. Why don’t we join forces, collaborate, and get out of this place? What do you say?’

George squatted on his haunches, arranged the flowers in a small rusty urn. ‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘Now they’re,’ and he didn’t hesitate, ‘both dead, there’s everything to keep me here.’

‘I don’t understand. What is there to keep you here?’ Dinwoodie’s hand ransacked his hair for a reason.

‘Memories, I suppose,’ George said. ‘These graves. The graves of the people I love.’ It must have sounded sententious to him because he added, almost defiantly, ‘Besides, what’s out there, anyway?’

‘Freedom,’ escaped from Dinwoodie’s lips before he knew it.

Still meddling with the flowers, George shook his head. ‘Freedom isn’t out there any more than it’s in here.’ He glanced round at the rows of damp tombstones.

‘How do you know,’ Dinwoodie cried, his hands clutching at the air, ‘until you’ve tried?’

In a quiet voice George said, ‘Dinwoodie, when are you going to grow up?’

Dinwoodie’s face reddened as if he had been slapped on both cheeks. ‘You know,’ he said, trying to keep his voice under control, ‘I used to think you had something, George. Guts, maybe. A bit of initiative. I don’t know. That’s what I thought. But you haven’t. You haven’t got anything. You’re just a shell. I–I pity you.’

George rose to his feet. He stood at an angle to Dinwoodie. A remote smile on his face, he watched smoke drift from a chimney, fade into the sky. He had nothing to say, it seemed. Or if he had, he wasn’t going to say it.

‘Well, I’m going to try, anyway,’ Dinwoodie said. ‘And I’ll do it alone if I have to.’

George looked Dinwoodie square in the face for the first time that afternoon. ‘You haven’t got a chance, Dinwoodie. You’ll fail. You’ll end up in that police museum.’

‘Fuck you,’ Dinwoodie said.

And he whirled away down the slope, trampling on the graves of his forefathers. His mouth, thin-lipped, chapped, set in a grim smile. It felt good to be walking on the dead.

Fuck him, he thought. Fuck them all. I’m not dying here.

He didn’t look back at George Highness. They had parted in anger. He doubted they would ever speak to each other again.

*

At home that evening George couldn’t settle. He kept seeing Dinwoodie’s white impassioned face. He kept seeing Dinwoodie stride away across the graveyard, grey hair, grey raincoat flapping. With his gaunt frame and his square shoulders lifted, he had made George think of a cross. He knew in his heart, in his bones (wherever it is that you truly know), that Dinwoodie was dead.

As dusk fell, he left his house for the second time that day. Unprecedented, this. But perhaps he had some dim foreknowledge of the consequences and courted them as expiation for the way he had treated Dinwoodie. In any case, he could no longer stay indoors.

Where they had turned left out of the garden gate, he turned right and walked towards Peach Street. He could have given Dinwoodie some encouragement, he was thinking. He could have explained his theories about escape. He could even have told him about Moses. But George had kept the secret for so long that secrecy had become a habit. He saw secrecy as his plan’s foundation, its strength, a guarantee, if you like, of its success. Superstitious of him, true, but impossible now to shake off. So he had been harsh with Dinwoodie, as you might be harsh with a pestering child. And in many ways Dinwoodie was a child. His tantrums, his enthusiasms, marked him out — even from a Tommy Dane or a Joel Mustoe. Tommy Dane’s escape-attempt had been an act of violence, thoroughly in character, an integral part of his fight against authority. Joel’s, on the other hand, had been a sly private affair; the greengrocer had turned to escape, George felt, because he sought tangible proof of his superiority — out of arrogance, in other words. Only Dinwoodie had pure motives. He had said it himself. He wanted freedom. Simple as that. It would have been noble if it hadn’t been so naïve.

As George waited to cross Peach Street, a truck swept past trailing yards of blue smoke. Stacked upright behind the tailboard and lashed into position with ropes stood an entire platoon of dummy policemen. These were not the dummies he was used to (blue uniforms stuffed with old rags, foam rubber or straw). These were professional dummies, the kind you see in shop windows. They had eyes, noses, hands, hair. They were uncannily lifelike. Even at a distance he recognised a Peach, two Hazards and a Dolphin. He shuddered. Alice’s words came back to him like a prophecy. Look at their faces!

He stumbled across the road and climbed over a stile into the allotments. He sank on to a bench, breathed in the bitter fleshy smell of cabbages. Ranks of bean-canes sharp as lances. A guarded peace. Over by the tin shed where the gardening tools were housed he could make out the squat figure of Mrs Latter, the woman who ran the post office and a keen grower of marrows. He raised a hand to her, a salute rather than a wave, but she didn’t respond. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed him. He slid his hand back into his coat pocket like a useless weapon.

After picking his way through the rows of vegetables, he crossed the road again and set out across the village green. Passing the pond on his right (a squabbling of ducks, the plop of a frog), he turned left into Magnolia Close. The church rose at the end of the street, an obstacle, solid, adamant. George suddenly realised that the route he had chosen would lead him past the Chief Inspector’s house. Normally he steered clear of Magnolia Close, but, then again, normally he didn’t go out twice in a single day. He considered turning round, but his feet ached, and if he carried on past the church he would be home in five minutes.

Peach’s house stood at right-angles to the church on the corner of the village green. It had once been the vicarage. Peach had evicted the priest shortly after the war claiming that, as Chief Inspector, he needed the house because it had such a commanding view of the village. (It also had an eighteenth-century wood-panelled staircase and an unusual parterre with triangular flower-beds enclosed by low box hedges, not to mention a topiary in yew dating, supposedly, from 1841. Enthusiasts would sometimes stop outside the house and enquire if they might look over the gardens. Mrs Peach was always most gracious.) But he hadn’t won the house without a fight.

‘What about the spiritual welfare of the village?’ the then priest had argued. ‘Is not my rightful place at the heart of the community?’

‘It’ll take you precisely three minutes to walk from the church to your new house,’ Peach told him. ‘I’ve timed it myself.’

‘But symbolically? ’ the priest persisted.

No mean philosopher himself and as brutally secular as any medieval emperor, Peach had quashed the priest’s arguments. Truth to tell, with his army of policemen behind him, his victory had never been in doubt. What did the hapless priest have to call upon but the assistance of his sexton (a widower with cataracts) and the wrath of God?

‘But I need a big house — my family — ’ he had pleaded, honest at last, and grovelling too.

Peach had quoted Colossians. ‘Set your affection on things above, not on things of the earth.’

Touché, priest.

‘My children,’ the priest whimpered, ‘I have to provide for my children.’

‘And what makes you think that I’m not going to have children?’ Peach had countered. ‘I’m only thirty-six.’