Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

‘— but one of the reasons I asked you in here was to say how sorry I was to hear the news. About your wife, I mean. Alice, wasn’t it?’

George nodded. ‘I suppose I’d been expecting it for years, really.’ He touched his cheek again.

‘You’re bleeding,’ Peach exclaimed. He offered George a clean handkerchief. George accepted it in silence.

Peach leaned back and crossed his legs. An inch of white and slightly dimpled ankle showed above his regulation grey sock.

George dabbed at the cut on his face, and waited.

Peach shifted his weight on to the other buttock. ‘Even so,’ he resumed, ‘it must have come as something of a shock.’

George confirmed this, then added, ‘But perhaps she’ll be happier now.’

‘Like your son?’ Peach’s voice had sharpened. He held it, like a knife, to George’s throat.

‘Yes,’ George stammered, ‘I suppose so.’

‘By happier,’ Peach pressed on, ‘I take it you mean out of the village.’

‘By happier,’ George said, ‘I mean dead.’

‘But we don’t know that, do we?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Peach slowed down, so George would miss none of his meaning. ‘We don’t know that your son is dead. Or do we?’

George blinked. ‘We must presume so.’

He began to understand why Peach had insisted on the privacy of his study. But why now? After all these years?

‘Or do we?’ Peach repeated.

‘I’m sorry, Chief Inspector. I don’t know what you’re driving at.’

‘Don’t put that act on with me,’ Peach bellowed. Suddenly his teeth seemed very close to the front of his mouth.

Then his voice dropped into its lowest register. ‘I’d like you to come clean with me, Mr Highness. Get the whole thing off your chest. Once and for all. You’ll probably feel much better for it.’

Panic rose in George. The room swam.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t.’

Peach braced his hands on his knees. He stood up. ‘My handkerchief, please.’

‘What?’

‘My handkerchief.’

‘Oh yes.’ George opened his hand. The handkerchief lay crushed into a tight ball on his palm like a confession.

‘Give it to me.’

George did as he was told.

‘Now,’ Peach said, ‘stand up.’

George stood. And though he wanted to look away he couldn’t. The Chief Inspector’s face filled the field of his vision. He saw things he had never seen before: the tiny pinpricks in the wings of Peach’s nose; the diagonal lines stretching from Peach’s temples to the place where his eyebrows almost met; the figures-of-eight in the irises of Peach’s cold grey eyes.

‘You see,’ Peach said, ‘I know.’

The breath powering these words pushed into and across George’s face. He smelt triumph in that breath. He smelt domination. Peach knew.

He knew whether Moses was alive or dead. He knew the truth. And that meant that he, George, would never know. Peach would never tell him. Peach would only taunt him, torment him. Play on his uncertainty. The fragility of his hopes.

He let his eyes close.

Peach had won.

*

George took to his bed, partly to rest his twisted ankle (sustained when Wragge pulled him backwards off the stone mushroom) and partly out of a deep sense of demoralisation.

He didn’t answer the doorbell when it rang. From his bedroom window, he watched the priest creep away down the garden path, his curved back sheathed in the black shell of his cassock. Another of the crushed ones.

Nor did he attend Alice’s funeral. Too upset was the story that went round — initiated by Peach, no doubt. Well, it was as good a story as any other.

During his second week in bed he wrote a poem. The first and last poem that he would ever write. He called it ‘Epitaph’.

I lie in bed

I lie in bed

I lie in bed all day

’ Cause maybe then

’ Cause maybe then

My life will go away.

I do not move

I do not move

I do not move one bit

Life’s too greedy

Life’s too sad

I want no part of it.

See, I’m no good

I’m just no good

At anything at all

I’d rather lie

In bed than bang

My head against the wall.

So why am I

So why am I

So why am I alive?

That’s the question

I’ll be asking

Till the day I die.

Meanwhile I’ll lie

I’II lie in bed

I’ll lie in bed all day

’ Cause maybe then

Eventually

My life will go away.

Self-pitying?

Yes.

Defeatist?

Yes.

Morbid?

Yes, yes, yes.

Had he stood accused of any or all of these charges, he would readily have pleaded guilty.

What else was there to look forward to now except death?

The final — the only — escape.

It was one of those terraced houses in Holland Park, white as icing and set back at a discreet distance from the road. The façade showed only as a few luminous holes in a high black screen of trees. The front garden had been allowed to run wild; a mass of shrubs and bushes, it sloped down to the railings which, like a row of policemen, held it back from the pavement. Gloria led the way up the flagstone path, chipped, uneven, lethal in the dark. One of her stiletto heels stuck in a crack and she nearly fell.

‘Bit early for that,’ Louise laughed, catching her from behind.

Gloria made a face. They were in different moods tonight, but maybe the party would even things out. The front door stood ajar. Music pulsed out of the gap. She paused on the bottom step.

‘What’re you doing?’ Louise’s blonde hair was a magnet for what little light there was.

‘Cigarette,’ Gloria said.

She fumbled in her bag. They both lit cigarettes. Just then the gate at the end of the garden creaked. More people arriving.

‘Come on,’ Louise said, taking Gloria’s arm. ‘Let’s give it half an hour and then make off with the silver.’

Gloria smiled faintly. They ran up the steps and pushed through the door. They had to wait inside the hallway because two men were trying to manoeuvre an upright piano into one of the downstairs rooms. One of the men wore a winged superhero cap. The other was pissed and giggling. It was taking for ever and it wasn’t funny.

‘Maybe you’d better come back later,’ the man in the cap grinned, meaning, Gloria suspected, Stay, I fancy you.

‘Maybe I won’t bother,’ she said. She wondered why she had come in the first place. She felt jaded, highly strung, unlike herself. Parties. Just a lot of fucking babble. And there was always some jerk with a chainsaw laugh that sliced through all the other voices and set your teeth on edge. Christ, she thought, I am in a bad mood.

‘Gloria?’

Gloria turned. It was Amy. Amy wore a pink designer cocktail dress. Her smile was a strip of white neon in the gloom of the hall. She held a piece of cake and a lit cigarette in one hand, and a glass of champagne and a toy revolver in the other. Embracing would be difficult.

Amy aimed her gun at Gloria. ‘Peeow,’ she went. Some people said Amy was a scream.

‘Amy! What’re you doing here?’ Gloria had to heave the words into her mouth. They felt like too much luggage.

Amy took a step backwards, mimed astonishment. ‘It’s my party, Gloria.’

Christ, so it was. Gloria had forgotten. She shook her head at Amy, attempted a grin. ‘My memory sometimes,’ she said.