Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

‘No noise restrictions here,’ he said.

‘So will you try and arrange it for me?’ Gloria said. ‘You know, sometime.’

‘If we’re still together.’

Gloria smiled. ‘You’re stealing my lines.’

Upstairs, she flung her coat on to the chair by the door.

‘Oh,’ Moses said.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s just that my ghost might be sitting there.’

‘Your ghost?’

‘Yes. She sits there sometimes, I think. It’s her chair.’

‘You’ve got a ghost in here?’

‘Yes. Well, Jackson thinks so, anyway. I’ve never seen her.’ Moses was smiling. He was imagining the ghost sitting on the chair with Gloria’s coat over her head. Will somebody please get this coat off my head? ‘She’s harmless, though,’ he went on. ‘Sometimes I talk to her without even knowing it. I think we get on quite well, really. Jackson would’ve told me if we didn’t.’

Gloria shook her head. ‘I never know what to believe with you. Tell you one thing, though. You’re right about the music. It’s — it’s everywhere.’

She wasn’t exaggerating.

There was music in the floorboards, music in the walls, music in the windows, music in her earrings, music in the black mass of her hair, music in her eyebrows, music in the way Moses was looking at her, music in his voice as he said, ‘Let’s go to bed’, music in her passage across the room towards him, music in the hinges of the bedroom door, music in their first quick kiss, more music in their second slower one, music in their undressing, music in his hands running over her skin, music in hers as they guided him in, music in the opening and closing gaps between their bodies, music in her orgasm, music in his, music as he turned, like the page of a score, away from her, music in their breathing as it slowed down, deepened, music in their sleeping, music in their dreams –

And music in Gloria’s coat, it seemed, as it slid slowly from the chair on to the floor.

*

On the following Saturday morning Moses picked Gloria up from her flat in Victoria. He had cashed the sheet-money and filled his car with petrol. They were going away for the weekend. The weekend he had promised her.

It wasn’t until they were driving up Maida Vale that Gloria happened to glance over her shoulder and see the two suitcases on the back seat.

Why two? she wondered.

She twisted round in her seat. One of the suitcases was compact — the kind of overnight bag that she herself had brought along. The other, though no larger, looked older, sturdier. Two leather straps held it fast, buckling at the front like belts. The locks were shaped like arrowheads, and halfway between them two words had been discreetly embossed in gold: REAL COWHIDE. At one end, where the hinges were, the leather had darkened as if it had been left standing in water. The most surprising thing about it, though, was the fact that it was there at all. They were only going to be away for two nights. Her mouth framed a question, but never asked it. The weekend had been Moses’s idea. He would tell her in his own good time.

She settled back in her seat again and glanced secretly at his profile, what she called his driving face, as it rushed motionless across a landscape of white houses. But surely it couldn’t just be clothes, she found herself thinking. Before her mind could start inventing possible contents, she shut it off. She didn’t want to guess. It would ruin things. It was curiously reassuring, comforting almost, to know that, sometime in the future, the mystery would be explained. That was what knowing people was all about, wasn’t it? In fact, the more she thought about the suitcase (in the abstract, that is), the more at ease she felt. It seemed to epitomise their relationship. Anticipation, excitement, surprises.

She leaned her head against the back of the seat and watched the trees flick by. Tree after tree after tree lining the main road. All the same make, all identical in age. All their intervening distances measured and exact.

Complete opposite of the suitcase, really.

*

Country and western music on the radio.

Moses often listened to country and western music because he didn’t like it. If you listened to music you liked all the time, he had told Gloria, then pretty soon you didn’t like it any more. That was what had happened with country and western music. Once he had really liked it. But he had listened to it all the time. And now he didn’t like it any more. So he could listen to it all the time without worrying.

Gloria didn’t have strong feelings one way or the other. She sang along, inventing words and making Moses smile. The day warmed up, and a dull haze accompanied their drive north, hanging over the monotonous deserted landscape, denying it greenness. The exit after Leicester, Moses turned off the motorway and it wasn’t long before the road narrowed, acquiring ditches and hedges, and a high stone wall loomed up on the left, dusty and crumbling, the texture of stale cake, with overhanging cedars, their great flat branches reaching out like plates.

‘This is it,’ Moses announced, ‘by the look of it.’

He swung the car into a gravel driveway. Stone dogs sat on the gateposts, their ears pricked, their eyes blind. Gloria peered through the windscreen for a glimpse of the hotel, but the driveway denied her that, winding first through trees — pines planted close together, gloom gathering between their tall red trunks — then through giant clumps of rhododendrons and hydrangeas. Gradually, on the left-hand side, the shrubbery thinned out, and Gloria caught flashes of a green lawn slick with recent rain. Beyond it lay a boating lake. A jetty crouched over the water on dark rotting stilts. A few conifers, almost black, clustered round the edge like mourners.

‘Yes, this is it.’ Moses nodded to himself. ‘I recognise it from the postcard.’

‘What postcard?’ Gloria asked.

‘You’ll see.’

Moses parked in front of the hotel. They both got out.

Standing beside the car with her coat over one arm and her case in her hand, Gloria stared up at the facade. The name — DOGWOOD HALL — in white foot-high letters. Ivy trimmed close to the pale yellow stone. Blank windows. Neat, well-groomed, oppressive. Even the gravel at her feet looked arranged.

She noticed a bare patch where Moses must have skidded when he turned the car round. We’ve messed up their drive, she thought. And then, Why did he bring me here?

‘Are you coming?’ Moses called out from the porch.

Gloria looked up, smiled weakly. ‘Yes,’ she said. But first she covered the bare patch over, using the toe of her shoe.

*

Moses strode towards the reception desk. He felt powerful, executive. A man with a mission. Moses, he said to himself. Moses Highness.

He put his two suitcases down, leaned on the counter, and waited while the receptionist finished shuffling his papers. The receptionist was superbly bald, his head a pale yellow dome of polished marble. It had the allure of a piece of sculpture and, for one awful moment, when the man bent down to pick up a sheet of paper disturbed by the wind from the open door, Moses thought he was going to reach over and stroke it, which was what he always did with sculpture. Fortunately the receptionist straightened again quickly, as if he had had some kind of premonition.

‘Can I help you?’ he enquired.

‘Yes,’ Moses said. ‘I’d like a double room, please.’

‘A double room.’ The receptionist blew a little stale air out of his wrinkled sphincter of a mouth and opened the hotel register. ‘Can I have your name, sir?’

‘Highness. Moses Highness.’

The receptionist’s head began to wobble violently on his narrow shoulders. He stood behind his counter and stared at Moses, his mouth a widening rift in the lower half of his face. It was like watching an earthquake in an art gallery. What if the head toppled? Moses thought. Would his reflexes be quick enough to catch it before it hit the floor and shattered into a thousand pieces? He couldn’t bear the idea of looking down and seeing one baleful eye looking up at him.