Rupert Thomson: Dreams of Leaving

In bed she froze before he even touched her. Her body locked, keys turned in all her muscles. He could find no way to open her. He talked to her, but there were no magic words.

One night, months after the wedding, she called out. ‘Help me.’

He thought she was talking in her sleep and lay still.

‘Help me,’ came her voice again. ‘Please.’

He climbed out of his bed and into hers. He put his arms around her, but he could no more bend her than he could have bent a plank of wood. She would snap first. He held her, tried to still the trembling beneath her rigid surfaces. He held her until dawn came, watched the grey light wash into the shallow trough of her forehead, felt her nearest leg twitch under her nightgown, twitch again, then slowly begin to thaw, to stretch and flex until, curled into a foetal ball, she slept.

Aching and exhausted, he dropped away into a deep well of sleep, daylight a silver hole the size of a coin somewhere far above. He woke three hours later. Rose up through many layers of sleep in one breathless second. This sudden consciousness felt like vertigo. The bed was empty on Alice’s side, moulded but cold. Brushing the covers aside, he stood up, stumbled on to the landing.

‘Alice?’ His voice came to him as if through undergrowth.

He tried again. ‘Alice? Alice? ’

Her face floated, bland and round, into the darkness at the bottom of the stairs. ‘What is it, George? What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. I just thought — ’

‘I was in the kitchen. Making breakfast. I wanted to surprise you.’ She smiled up at him.

Sometimes he wondered which one of them would go mad first.

*

After eight years of marriage Alice became pregnant. They couldn’t believe it. They had long since resigned themselves to a life barren of children. And given the village they lived in, perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea. It was no place for children, they told themselves. In fact, it could be seen as selfish, cruel even, if not actually criminal, to want to bring a child into their bleak doomed world.

But when Alice’s tests proved positive those layers of justification fell away like scaffolding no longer needed. Their marriage rose into the air, sheets of glass and gleaming steel, founded in rock, challenging the sky. They were giddy for days.

And Alice changed. It was like the simple tilt of a Venetian blind: she suddenly afforded views into herself that he had never known (or even guessed) existed. She sang in the mornings, she came down to breakfast naked, she altered her hairstyle. A new woman. Was it because there was now somebody inside her beside herself to think about? He didn’t know — and, superstitious where Alice was concerned, didn’t ask either. He remained astonished and grateful. They both felt rewarded. They made all kinds of plans.

‘We’ll plant roses in the garden,’ George said. He hated gardening.

‘We’ll paint the house,’ Alice said. She hated decorating.

‘We’ll shoot Peach,’ George said. They both hated Peach.

They began to laugh.

‘We’ll shoot the whole bloody lot of them,’ George said.

‘We’ll go away,’ Alice said.

Neither of them noticed the transition.

‘We’ll buy a caravan,’ George said.

‘A gypsy caravan.’

‘We’ll travel all over the country. Like gypsies.’

‘We’ll go everywhere. We’ll see things.’

‘We’ll get married again.’

‘A gypsy wedding.’

‘Jump over a fire hand in hand.’

‘You playing a Spanish guitar.’

George laughed. ‘You in one of those big whirly skirts.’

‘We’ll live happily ever after,’ Alice said. ‘Like in fairy stories.’

Roses were planted and the house was painted, but they skilfully ignored the point at which their fantasies failed to face reality. Happiness had turned them into children. The mood of innocence lasted, swept them into 1955.

On May 22nd, almost two weeks late, Alice went into labour. After thirteen hours she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. He weighed 11 Ibs 3ozs (a local record) and he had a widow’s peak which, according to George, signified a life of great good fortune. Otherwise there was nothing particularly unusual about him. Because both George and Alice had always liked the story about the Israelites crossing the Red Sea — in their eyes, of course, the pharaoh was a policeman — they decided to call their son Moses. There was hope in a name like that.

Alice returned home.

Two weeks later George found her in the scullery cupboard. She was vomiting. On the floor beside her stood an empty tin of baking yeast.

‘I wanted to rise,’ she whispered, when she could speak again. ‘I wanted to rise out of this place.’

He could almost have laughed, but a weight descended, crushing all humour, however bitter, crushing all thought. In the squalid darkness, squatting among hoes and rakes, smells of compost and turpentine, jamjars of nails, his wife’s face gave off the palest light. He knelt beside her, took her awkwardly in his arms. It wasn’t resistance that he encountered then, it was fear, stealing like a numbness through her flesh, stiffening her limbs. He heard the distant jangle of keys.

After that he would often hear her sobbing behind locked doors or see her crouching by the hedge at the end of the garden, the sun pouring its harsh light on her like scorn. She was sliding backwards and he couldn’t get a grip on her. She had lost interest in everything, Moses included. His size frightened her. His demands made her feel powerless: he was so strong. She wished, she told George once (her face caged in her hands, tears trickling through the bars of her fingers), that she had never had him. George could only gaze at her. It was such a brutal transformation.

When Moses was six weeks old, Alice drew the curtains and went to bed. In desperation George consulted the village doctor, a fussy bald man with a moustache like Stalin’s. The doctor used reassuring phrases — nothing to worry about, it’s only post-natal depression, perfectly normal — and prescribed a course of iron pills. ‘Time,’ he said to George. ‘Give her time.’ But time had always been difficult for Alice, and George wasn’t reassured. Meanwhile Moses was growing, changing, almost oblivious, as if his life had an uninterruptable momentum of its own. He slept the whole night through without waking and, for the first two months, slept in the mornings too. Once he had mastered the art of sitting up, he seemed content to spend the day on the floor, one hand on his stomach, thumb in his mouth, smiling. He had one solemn expression which he put on rather deliberately, like a cap. He seldom cried and seldom moved. In retrospect, then, a most unusual baby.

George had to learn motherhood. He sterilised bottles, changed nappies, wheeled Moses around in his new maroon pram. He even knitted Moses a simple romper-suit. He told Moses stories about New Egypt, and Moses often looked as if he was listening. Piece by piece, an extraordinary idea occurred to George. The picture, when he had assembled it, shocked him, shook him with its implications, but as the months went by it tightened its hold. First it became possible, then logical, and finally the only alternative. He realised that regardless of, because of Alice’s condition, he would have to share it with her.

‘Alice,’ he said one evening after a dinner that he had cooked and she hadn’t touched, ‘there’s something I’ve got to say.’

‘What.’

‘We have to let Moses go.’

Her eyes flickered, widened, but she said, ‘Yes.’

George’s patience had been fraying for days. Now it tore. ‘Jesus Christ, Alice,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t just say yes. Say what you mean.’