Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

‘Let’s have a look in here,’ she said. She took Moses by the hand and pulled him towards a ramshackle greenhouse. It must have been at least fifty foot long. Four steps of broken brick led down to the door.

Moses shoved the door open, jarring the loose panes of glass. A dense sweet heat enveloped his face.

Tomatoes. Thousands of them.

He led Gloria down the aisle that ran between the raised flower-beds, marvelling at the abundance of tomato-plants, marvelling too at the ancient lead irrigation-pipes and the massive sticky cobwebs slung across the winch-handles for the windows overhead. At the far end, and solid as an altar, was a stone sink. The priest was a rake.

It was sweltering in there. Drawing breath was like lifting a weight inside your body. Gloria removed her cardigan. Her white silk top caught on her nipples, then fell sheer, away from her rib-cage and her smooth flat belly.

‘There is something about the smell of things growing,’ Moses said, running the tip of his tongue up the side of her neck.

Things grew.

Gloria turned hard against him, and there was the taste of salt in their kiss. Moses began to undo his trousers.

‘Moses,’ Gloria whispered, pulling away and swatting his flies with the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘In the greenhouse?’

‘Your idea,’ Moses said.

His hands slid under her skirt and inside her pants, pulling her towards him. He took her buttocks in both hands and lifted her slightly, then he was inside her, Gloria clinging to him, both arms round his neck, her heels locked behind his knees, her pants dangling from her left ankle.

Then:

Moses couldn’t be certain, but he thought he saw the green door move. Yes, it had. Slowly it eased open and a bald man in a brown jacket came into view.

‘Jesus,’ Moses said. ‘Taj Mahal.’

Gloria, thinking this was some new description of bliss, murmured agreement.

‘The man in reception,’ Moses hissed. ‘Look. Over there.’

Gloria opened her eyes. ‘Oh Christ.’

Moses staggered behind a large water-can with Gloria still attached, but this sudden movement, coupled with the shock of Taj Mahal’s appearance, proved too much for him: he came.

‘Oh no ,’ he groaned.

Still supporting her, he lowered her down on to her haunches, came out of her, and placed a hand over her cunt. Gloria squeezed her legs together, her eyes liquid.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘It’s all right.’

‘It was that Indian bastard. Where is he now?’

Gloria raised herself a fraction, peeped through the tangle of tomato-plants. ‘He’s over by the cabbages.’

‘I hope he hates tomatoes,’ Moses whispered. ‘I hope he’s allergic.’

They both watched, breath held, fingers crossed, as Taj Mahal scrabbled about in the earth on the far side of the garden. It was stifling now — the sun beating down through the glass roof, the suspense. Moses pushed Gloria’s hair back from her forehead and licked a bead of sweat from between her moist breasts. He kept his hand pressed to her cunt, catching the stuff as it came out of her. He liked the feeling of having the whole of that part of her in one hand.

Five minutes later, to their great relief, Taj Mahal left the garden, a small bunch of root vegetables in his hand. Moses and Gloria looked at each other, their flushed faces, their dishevelment, and started laughing.

‘He would’ve died,’ Gloria said.

*

Back in the room that afternoon, Moses opened the suitcase and took out the album. Its blue cardboard cover had been printed to resemble crocodile skin, and the word Photographs had been engraved across the bottom right-hand corner in an elegant gold script; a blue tasselled cord bound the pages together. Moses sat down next to Gloria on the bed and began to show her the pictures.

The first few were landscapes. They all had titles (written in a white chalk pencil because the pages were black) — titles like Grape Meadow and Hazard Copse. Then came several views of a country village entitled, simply, Our Village: a sunlit street, a row of shops (was that a greengrocer’s?), a policeman on a bicycle.

Gloria frowned. ‘This could be anywhere.’

‘I know,’ Moses said. ‘But look.’ He pointed at a picture of the village church. In the background, in the distance, something had caught the light, showed silver through the dark grey trees. ‘Isn’t that a river?’

‘So?’

‘Well, you remember what I said about the sound of running water?’

‘But Moses,’ Gloria said, ‘that could’ve been anything. It could’ve been your father having a bath.’

‘Maybe.’ Moses didn’t sound convinced.

As they went through the album, Gloria could see a story emerging — a rural setting, a man, a woman, courtship, marriage, a house, a baby — a story that would have struck her as romantic and touching, but perfectly ordinary, had it not been for the air of profound despondency that all the pictures seemed to breathe, release into the room around her. It was nothing she could put her fìnger on, just the sense that something was being held back. She tried to explain this to Moses.

‘Jesus, I think you’re right,’ Moses said. ‘I’d never really seen it that way before, but you’re right. There’s no real joy there, is there?’

Gloria turned back a few pages. ‘Especially your mother,’ she said.

The photographs showed a woman in her twenties. Tall, almost statuesque, yet ill at ease. She seemed always to be shying away from the camera. Her smile looked awkward, unconvincing, as if she had been told to smile when, in reality, she was feeling something else, as if smiling was a skill which she had still to master. Alice, Summer 1953, for example, where she was crouching on a white garden chair, her back curved, a cup in her left hand. A straw hat with a huge floppy brim shielded her eyes from the glare. She shrank back into the shadow it afforded her, surprised — no, more than that: alarmed. Or The Boundary 1949. In this one she wore a white blouse and a floral skirt, but the vivacious clothes clashed with her mood. She stood pressed against a tree, almost pinned to the bark, her hands in front of her, one clasping the other. There was always that sense of straining for effect. There was always that false note.

‘What boundary, I wonder?’ Gloria said.

Moses didn’t know. But her question had made an important point. They could guess, they could speculate, they could fantasise. Further than that they couldn’t go.

Moses’s father, on the other hand, appeared confident, resourceful even. Moses turned to his favourite picture, Birdwatching 1955. His father stood in heroic semi-profile, a tall square-shouldered man with unruly black hair and kind eyes, remarkably similar in build, funnily enough, to Uncle Stan. He had dressed with a certain amount of panache: a Paisley scarf folded across his chest and tucked into a high-buttoning check jacket, a triangle of patterned handkerchief showing in his breast pocket, a shooting-stick under one arm, a newspaper ( Sporting Life? ) under the other. In his right hand he held a pair of binoculars. Hence the caption.

‘Maybe he was just a better actor than your mother,’ Gloria said.

Moses thought she was exaggerating.

Gloria shrugged. ‘OK, what about this one then?’ She was pointing at a picture that was titled Our Ambition 1954. — ‘How do you explain that?’

A country road stretched along the bottom of the picture. Beyond it lay a grass bank and a row of peeling silver birches. Beyond them, a gypsy caravan with big spoked wheels and a chimney that looked like a crooked toadstool growing out of the roof.