‘You can say that again.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Learning,’ she mocked, and waved a hand in the air, palm up, as if scattering seed. ‘Learning, he says. You’ve got a lot to learn if you ask me.’
‘I’m sorry, Alice. I just don’t follow you.’ His mind not cutting quite as cleanly as he had thought.
Her sudden fury released a blast of heat in the cold room. ‘Spending all your time with these,’ she screamed and grabbing a handful of rushes from a vase on the dresser hurled them, stiff and dripping, at his face. They landed on the floor with a slap. ‘And none of it with me,’ she went on. ‘Now do you follow?’
George wiped his face with the back of his hand.
‘If you want to learn something,’ Alice sneered, ‘why don’t you try learning something about marriage?’
Still George said nothing. He was staring at the rushes. They lay on the floor like a prophecy or an omen.
Then her voice sank back into listlessness as she told him, ‘They’re beginning to drive me mad.’
He decided that, from then on, he would only pick what he needed. He would hide the rushes out of sight at the top of the house. If the police came round and asked where all the ‘greenery’ was, he would have to dream up a new story.
As he watched Alice fly from the room, her arms angled back like wings, it struck him that this plan of his could be seen as nothing more than an attempt to set some vivid daring achievement against a marriage that had become lack-lustre, irredeemable. But he loved Alice. He still loved her. And her unhappiness hurt him all the more because he lacked the power to alter it. He had tried. God knows he had tried. He now knew that her only happiness lay in sleep, in unconsciousness, and finally, he supposed, in death. Moses, though. He could do something there. However risky, however far-fetched, however painful it might prove to be.
He locked himself in the attic at night and worked for hours at a stretch. He had never been practical so he took a certain pride in the acquisition of this new and utterly manual skill. He suffered untold setbacks and began to understand why he had heard so little about basket-weaving. Awkward, monotonous, maddening work.
Then, one night, he found himself watching in fascination as the rushes began to flow from between his clumsy hands, braiding, interlacing, reproducing in their twisting plaits, in their infinite and subtle shades of green, the currents of the river they had grown in. His confidence rose, bobbed on the surface of his darker thoughts. He knew he could build a basket that would float, he knew the river would carry his son. He became impish and for the first time in years looked as young as he really was, if not slightly younger. He danced a jig in the spotlight of his desk-lamp. He unleashed silent cries of jubilation. He saw a policeman turn into the street below, a truncheon swinging from his wrist. From his attic window, the chink in the curtains narrowed to an inch, George mocked the policeman as he passed.
‘You fool,’ he hissed. ‘Fool bobby. Look at you. Bobby fool.’
It was four in the morning before his excitement died down and he could sleep.
During the hours of daylight he hid the basket under a torn sheet in the corner of the room. It looked like a miniature ghost — the ghost Moses would become. It looked capable of uncanny things. It radiated power. The various materials he had used lay scattered on the floor — dried rush-stems cut to length, coils of thin blond rush-stems stringy as hair, pots of rush-glue that he had made by boiling the base of the stalks — and the reek of pitch hung in the air, so acrid that it was almost visible. How long before it crept downstairs, spread through the house, filtered out into the village? How long before the police started poking their noses in?
In ten days he had finished. He took Alice by the hand and led her up to the attic. A drab spring day. Wind nagging the wet trees. When he drew the cover off, she held her face in both hands as if it contained something that she was afraid she might spill. She examined the basket with nervous fingertips, her left eye twitching. He had been standing close to her, his arm touching hers, but now he stepped back, allowed her room to speak.
‘It’s beautiful. It’s — ’ and she hunted for more words with her hands as if they might be found on her person somewhere, in a pocket, perhaps, or up a sleeve. ‘It’s, it’s,’ and they came tumbling out, ‘it’s like an ark, isn’t it, George?’
George clapped his hands, then brought them to his lips. ‘That’s exactly what it is,’ he cried. ‘It’s an ark. Of course. Oh, Alice. You’re — ’
He couldn’t speak. In that moment he had seen his wife transformed again. She had forgotten herself so rarely during their nine years of marriage. He opened his arms, offered her an avenue. She closed her eyes and turned into it, blind. They clung to one another. Just there and then, the room darkening, rain closing in and shutting out the world, she was with him.
‘Alice,’ he murmured. ‘I love you.’
*
A misty dawn in the June of that year. Trees’ branches blurred, hands gloved in white lace. The fields beyond the trees invisible.
The sun, the world, invisible.
Ideal conditions.
Since his birth, Moses had been growing at a startling rate and now, at thirteen months, he already measured over two and a half feet. George knew he had to act fast. If he left it any longer the whole thing would be impossible.
He turned away from the bedroom window. Alice was still asleep, her many anxieties holding her down, weights on her body, weights on her eyelids. She slept late these days. After that morning in the attic she had curled in on herself like a snail, all her life inside, withheld. When he tried to speak to her, she flinched, backed away, hands muffling her ears. She didn’t want to listen any more.
He crossed the landing to his son’s room. Moses lay on his back. He was gazing at his fish mobile. The window stood open a notch and cool air flowed in. Finned shapes swam in the gloom. When he noticed his father standing above him, one of his hands began to strike the air. Sounds that had the feeling of words and the complexity of sentences bubbled from his mouth. He would be talking in no time.
George reached down and lifted him out of his cot. The baby’s feet pumped the air like someone treading water. A trickle of silvery drool spilled from the corner of his mouth and ran down George’s sleeve. Moses grinned.
‘Thank you, Moses,’ George said. ‘Thank you very much.’
He carried Moses downstairs. He opened the kitchen door and groped one-handed for the light. The window jumped back, turned blue. The mist a bandage on the sky. The sun would soon bleed through.
He changed Moses on the kitchen table then set him in the high-chair while he made breakfast. Baked beans, toast and tea for him. Porridge with brown sugar, blended banana and a bottle of milk for Moses.
‘All your favourites, Moses,’ he said. ‘A real feast.’
Where would his next meal come from? What would it be? Who would be holding him? George squeezed his eyes closed for a moment, tilted his head back. His mind bustled with questions, a thousand voices babbling at once. He looked down at Moses, ran his hand through the widow’s peak. The hair stood up in a dark crest then fell forwards in wisps on to the baby’s forehead.
Remember these final moments.
The night ebbing. Trees rising out of the sky — dark islands, jagged coastlines.
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