Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

Opening the door, he began to look for a way round the outside edge. Gloria crawled towards him, one hand outstretched, pointing.

‘Trousers,’ she said.

‘What?’

She touched his bare thigh. ‘Trousers.’

‘Don’t touch me,’ he screamed. ‘Otherwise something terrible could happen.’ An erection now, he was thinking, would make it much harder to leave the room.

He returned some twenty minutes later covered in mud. The first thing he saw when he opened the door was Gloria wearing the pink dress. She held her arms away from her sides and twirled once, unsteadily. The skirt whirled out into the air. The sound of lightly falling rain.

‘I knew it.’ He leaned back against the door. ‘I fucking knew it.’

‘What?’ Gloria said. She had tried the dress on without thinking, simply because it had been lying there on the bed, but once it was on she had kept it on because it fitted so well that it felt as if it belonged to her.

‘You in that dress,’ he said. ‘It’s perfect for you. You ought to keep it.’

‘I couldn’t possibly. It’s your mother’s.’

‘Keep it.’ Moses waved his arms about for emphasis. ‘What do I want with a dress?’

He smelt almost sober as he kissed her because she had taken his breath away. He reached behind her and began to unfasten the dress. The rasp of the ancient zip was followed by a sharp knock on the door. If you could hear an exclamation mark, he thought, that’s what it would sound like.

‘Come in,’ he called out.

A waitress wheeled in their champagne on a silver trolley. Then she smiled and withdrew.

‘What’s all that mud?’ Gloria asked.

‘I got lost,’ Moses explained. ‘I opened what I thought was the door to the bar and suddenly found myself outside. At first I didn’t believe it. I thought they’d just turned the lights off or something. Then I tripped over a cauliflower. That’s when I realised I wasn’t in the bar — ’

‘Well,’ Gloria was pouring the champagne, ‘you got there in the end.’

‘I always do. It’s just that the middle can sometimes take a very long time.’

‘Which can be a good thing,’ Gloria said, ‘in certain circumstances.’ She slipped her clothes off, slipped into bed.

‘I think I follow you,’ Moses said. And did.

He turned out the one light they hadn’t broken.

Gloria had draped the pink dress over a high-backed chair. In the moonlight the chair disappeared. It looked to Moses as if somebody was wearing the dress, somebody invisible, leaning towards him, bending over him, saying goodnight –

*

Gloria had opened the window. It was late. She leaned on the sill and blew smoke out into the night. It was so quiet after London, so quiet she could hear the blood hissing in her ears. She didn’t feel tired any more, or drunk. If anything, the champagne had straightened her out. No tennis court lay below her, only a lawn, but she shivered as she remembered her dream.

‘Moses? Are you awake?’

‘Yes.’ He sounded comfortable over there in the bed.

‘Moses, I’d like to go rowing. What do you think?’

He sat up. ‘ Rowing?’

Gloria faced into the room and made her hands into fists. She held them out in front of her and pulled them towards her chest several times, energetically.

‘Ah,’ Moses said. ‘Rowing.’

‘There’s a boat on the lake,’ Gloria said. ‘I saw it when we arrived this afternoon.’

She could just make out the shape of Moses putting his feet on the floor.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Rowing, is it?’

There was nobody about downstairs. The grandfather-clock in the hallway made them jump and cling to one another as it struck quarter past two. They walked over the blue-grey lawn, their feet soundless on the grass. The lake looked bright and black and waterproof. It could have been a giant tarpaulin spread out on the ground.

They found a boat complete with oars moored to the jetty. Gloria stepped in first, then Moses cast off and jumped on board. They almost capsized. The water made fleshy noises as it slopped against the sides.

‘This is like being drunk,’ Moses said.

Gloria laughed. ‘You are drunk.’

She sat in the stern, hugging her knees, and watched Moses steer away from the jetty, noting the slight frown of concentration as he manipulated the oars, his head moving this way and that, judging distances seriously. Tiny creases appeared in the place that was made for creases in between her eyebrows. They signified emotion of the deepest kind.

‘Moses,’ she said in a voice that rose into the night sky like a full moon, ‘I think, in a curious way, I love you.’

Moses pulled on the oars, and pulled with such vigour that the boat was halfway round the lake (and Gloria was flat on her back in the stern with her legs in the air) before he replied.

‘That,’ he said, ‘is a very exciting thought.’

They were late for breakfast.

The hotel guests stared. Perhaps they had been woken in the night by the crash of falling armour, perhaps they had heard a boat on the lake in their dreams, or perhaps they were just senile, staring but seeing nothing. Most of them seemed to be approaching the end of their meals and would soon be gone. For breakfast read life, Moses thought.

The young couple (as they were probably now being called) sat at their table for ages, talking and smoking and drinking coffee. There was no rush; the sky showed blue at the top of the window and a 22-carat sun gilded the trees with layers of gold leaf. They knew the fine weather was going to last because Jackson had forecast rain. He had advised Moses to take along plenty of waterproof clothing. Foolish well-meaning Jackson.

On their way to the gardens at midday they passed the suit of armour in the hall and noticed that the helmet had been returned to its proper place.

‘Did I really?’ Moses said.

‘You know you did,’ said Gloria.

Moses paused on the front steps, his spirits lifted by the warmth of the morning and the light breeze that was carrying, as if on a silver tray, the unexpected smell of wild strawberries. Gloria looked stunning, almost edible, in her pink angora cardigan and her flaring yellow skirt and her sunglasses (for her hangover, she said). Moses had dressed all in white. Shirtsleeves rolled back along his forearms and a pair of loose-fitting cricket-flannels. Standing together in front of the hotel, they might have been posing for a photograph.

The path they took reproduced, in miniature, the twists and turns of the nearby river. It led away from the hotel, then doubled back and worked its way round to the old stables and outhouses. Trees arched overhead, meshed in a green ceiling, allowed only random shafts of sunlight through. Gloria walked in front, swinging her bare legs, turning every now and then to say something, patches of light illuminating different parts of her in turn — the hem of her skirt, one half of her face, the back of a knee — as if she had been invested with the memory that he had shared with her the previous night.

After twenty minutes or so they reached a point where the path veered away from the river and the trees thinned out. Gloria lifted a hand and pointed to a green door in an old brick wall.

‘What’s that?’

‘Let’s look.’

The green door wasn’t locked. They pushed it open, the paint flaking away under their fingers, and found themselves in a vegetable garden. There was an inert humid weight to the air as if it had been trapped inside those old brick walls for centuries, but there was a peace too, a lush sense of peace, as if it was content with its imprisonment. Countless passageways ran between head-high rows of sweet-peas, broad-beans and fruit-bushes. It would be the perfect place, Gloria was thinking, to sleep for a hundred years, like in the fairy-tales.