Rupert Thomson: Dreams of Leaving

He glanced down. Moses lay still, but his eyes seemed lit from the inside. That’s because he knows something good is happening, George thought. Babies always know.

Mist clung to the world like a new dense air, like sweat on skin. The gate didn’t creak for once. No lights in any of their neighbours’ houses. The inanimate was on their side. They had accomplices everywhere. It was going to work.

George slipped across the lane that wound behind their house. He cleared the stile. Ahead of him now stretched the bridleway where girls sometimes rode horses. Blackberry bushes banked high on either side. A ditch offered a hiding-place, should they need one. One hundred yards on, the hedgerow subsided, merged with the undergrowth. The track narrowed, ran into a copse, lost its identity. Trees meshed overhead, weeds sprang up. Now he was walking through a dim green tunnel. Birds sang in harsh sporadic bursts. Otherwise only the creak of the basket and the soft thudding of his shoes on the packed mud.

Five minutes later, as they were leaving the cover of the wood, some instinct made George look over his shoulder. And there, wrapped in shadow, casual and terrifying, stood a policeman. The policeman stared at George and George, transfixed, stared back. Neither of them moved or spoke.

It was several long seconds before George realised that it was only a dummy. It hadn’t been there two days ago. They must have moved it. They were always doing that, the bastards. Even when he had turned his back on the dummy, he could feel its supernatural presence, the pressure of those blank white eyes.

He stood at the edge of an open field. Cows often grazed there in the daytime. Now it seemed empty, an arena of dull grass, occasional highlights of dew. Beyond this field, another field. Beyond that, the river. This was the most dangerous part. He could imagine the colour blue appearing, on the very border of visibility, but spreading like ink until it surrounded him.

He began to walk.

He had to stop every so often to alter his grip on the basket, to switch Moses from one arm to the other, to wipe the lenses of his glasses, but he never stopped for long and when he started again he always walked faster than before. His eyes probed the mist and it broke up into marbles, weightless, grey and white, jostling, colliding. After that he kept his eyes on the path. At last the ground began to slope down and he heard the trickling of the river.

When he reached the place where the rushes grew he squatted down. He opened the lid of the basket and laid Moses inside. He left the lid open while he fitted the suitcase into the brackets he had built on to one side of the basket. He used the leather strap that bound the suitcase to lash it into position. There were two makeshift pockets on the other side of the basket. These he filled with stones to act as ballast. He sat back on his heels and pushed at the suitcase with spread fingers. It seemed secure enough. His only lapse into sentimentality, this suitcase. He had packed it the previous night. It contained a few mementoes of their all too brief family life together. Also inside the suitcase was a carefully worded (and unsigned) letter instructing that the contents were to be ‘held in trust for Moses George Highness until he attains the age of twenty-five’. No reasons were given for the abandonment of the baby. The fewer clues, the better.

The sky had expanded above their heads. The mist was beginning to lift. A tractor snarled two or three fields away. He had to get back.

He bent down and kissed Moses. Moses tugged at his hair.

‘Moses,’ he whispered. ‘That hurts.’

Moses gurgled.

George tried to imagine his son’s future face, the face this face was a blueprint for, but nothing came. He fastened the lid and waited. He couldn’t form the word goodbye — not even silently. It stuck like a fishbone in his throat and would choke him. He lifted the basket in both hands and set it down in the shallows. The rushes, stiff, abundant, held it fast. He rolled it from side to side to test for buoyancy and removed two or three stones from the right-hand side. It was as stable as it would ever be. He gave it a firm push. The rushes parted. The basket floated out into the current, stern swinging anti-clockwise, and began to slide downstream. He watched it dissolve into the mist.

He stood up. Wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Brushed some mud off his coat. A greyness invading him, gloom in his blood. He turned away and, walking fast, reached home in ten minutes. So far as he could tell nobody saw him return.

Alice was sitting at the kitchen table. She had been staring at the door. When he opened the door and appeared in the gap, she stared at him with equal blankness. Sleep had swollen her eyelids, creased one side of her face.

‘Is it done?’ she asked. Her voice flat and neutral. An automatic pilot through the storms in her head.

He nodded. ‘It’s done.’

*

At midday George called the police and reported his son missing. The Chief Inspector would be there in fifteen minutes, he was told. He replaced the receiver and looked across at Alice. He had talked to her earlier that morning.

‘Alice,’ he had said, sitting down at the kitchen table, ‘I’ve got to talk to you.’

Her face, sullen, lifted an inch. ‘Talk then.’

‘Now we’ve got this far, I don’t want to risk ruining the whole thing.’

Her resentment crystallised. ‘We’ve?’

‘We did this together, Alice. We thought it would be the best thing for Moses, remember?’

Alice frowned.

‘What I wanted to say was, let me do the talking. When Peach comes, I mean.’

The skin of her face seemed to stretch thin with fear. ‘Peach? Is he coming?’

‘Probably. But don’t worry. I’ll talk to him.’ He took her hand. It felt soggy. Her entire body was soaked in grief. ‘You’re upset,’ he said. ‘If he asks you anything, you’re upset. Do you see?’

‘I am,’ she said.

Too intent on his own line of thought, he didn’t grasp hers.

‘Upset,’ she added.

‘I know.’ And then, not liking himself, but seeing a necessity, ‘That should make it easier, shouldn’t it?’

The rims of her eyes, red as they were, registered a faint irony.

‘We wanted this for Moses,’ he reminded her, aware that this wasn’t the whole truth.

Her face collapsed again.

‘I don’t know,’ she wept. ‘I don’t know.’

From an upstairs window he watched Peach arriving. Peach was a burly pear-shaped man. He wore his grey hair in a crewcut. His lower lip jutted. He could look brutal or avuncular at will with scarcely an alteration in expression. His legs moved smoothly (and independently, it seemed, of his body) as he negotiated the garden path. He was flanked, as always, by two officers. Dolphin and Hazard. Both hard men.

When the bell rang George answered the door. He ushered the three policemen into the lounge. Alice shrank against one end of the sofa, her hand closing round the sodden ball of her handkerchief. Ignoring George’s offer of a seat, Peach stood in silhouette against the window. Dolphin and Hazard took the armchairs on either side of the fireplace. Peach wasted no time in coming to the point.

‘When,’ he said, ‘did you last see your son?’

‘At around eleven-thirty,’ George told him. ‘It was a sunny day and we’d left him at the bottom of the garden in his pram. Alice was upstairs cleaning. I was in the kitchen preparing some lunch. When I went out to check him the pram was still there but he was gone.’

Peach massed at the far end of the room. Absorbing information. Blotting out the light.

‘I couldn’t have been more than twenty yards away from him the whole time,’ George added, ‘but I never heard a thing.’