Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

He looked down at her and said, ‘Well, it is now, anyway.’

Hand in hand, they strolled up a mud track between massed banks of blackberry bushes and old man’s beard. Gloria noticed a stile set back in the hedgerow and a field beyond.

‘What about in there?’ she said.

They surveyed the field together. Lining one side, a row of silver birches, their bark scalloped, edged in black, catching the sun like the scales on fish. Tough springy grass sloped up to a copse at the far end. No sign of any livestock.

‘A perfect field,’ Moses said.

He vaulted over the stile. Gloria handed him the Thermos and followed, pinching her skirt between finger and thumb, as ladies descending staircases in ballgowns do. Moses, waiting below, ran a hand up her thigh. It encountered nothing but warm bare skin. Gloria smiled. Moses began to understand the full significance of the skirt.

They sat side by side on the grass. They drank vodka and breathed the lush agricultural air. Gloria said she could smell magnolia and Moses agreed, even though he couldn’t really think what magnolia smelt like. It was that kind of field.

Soon she was arranging herself on top of him, and it wasn’t long before he was inside her in a way that she had engineered and he was very happy with. Her skirt hid their four legs and far more besides.

‘You’re cunning,’ Moses said. The skirt, he meant.

Gloria smiled. ‘Someone’s got to think ahead.’

They fell silent, moved together. For a while it seemed as if Sussex might prove to be more accommodating than Leicestershire. Gloria could have been a tree doing its exercises. Sometimes her body shuddered as if a gust of wind had caught it, and one arm rose into the air beside her ear, the hand clenching and unclenching. Her eyelids trembled like leaves. Moses grasped her by the waist with both hands, twisted his face sideways into the grass. He closed his eyes. No sky any more. Only this green smell and the arching of his back. It was extraordinary how quickly she could move him from humour to ecstasy.

Then he heard the cough.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he came back to say.

But they had both heard it. A harsh bronchial cough, such as belonged in a doctor’s waiting-room rather than in an area of outstanding natural beauty, if not for its own sake, for theirs. Gloria had the presence of mind to leave her body exactly where it was.

‘Pretend we’re having a fight,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll do the talking.’

Moses began to struggle, though not too hard, for fear of displacing the skirt.

A man leaned over the stile. He wore a flat cap and a pair of shabby corduroys. A burlap sack bulged on his back. His tiny eyes circled the field, moving jerkily as flies, then settled on the young couple in the grass below.

‘That’s a private field, that is,’ he observed.

Gloria launched into a complicated story about how they were driving down to visit friends on the south coast and how they had stopped to stretch their legs and how they had then got into an argument and how they were now sorting out their differences and how they would soon be on their way because they were already late for lunch.

The man said, ‘Ah.’

Gloria assured him that it would only be a matter of a few minutes and that they would leave the field exactly as they had found it because they both had a great respect for the countryside, in fact they adored it, and what they were supposed to be doing this weekend, actually, was looking for a house, the house they would live in after they had got married, though, after today, she was having second thoughts about the whole thing.

The man eyed them with suspicion, a look that seemed to reflect, more than anything else, the immense gap between their lives and his, a look that had a gloating lascivious edge to it that made them both uneasy. They were relieved when he hoisted his sack higher on his shoulder and took a step backwards. But there he paused again.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘but don’t think I don’t know what you’re really up to.’ He nodded, coughed, spat twice, and, turning away, disappeared up the track.

‘Well, we’ve tried Sussex and we’ve tried Leicestershire,’ Gloria said, as they walked back to the car. ‘How many counties does that leave?’

Moses didn’t know.

‘What a country,’ Gloria sighed. ‘We’ll just have to keep trying, I suppose. One day, somewhere, it’ll happen.’

Moses agreed that this was a desirable goal and one that would prove most satisfying, he thought, when accomplished.

They climbed back into the car. Moses started the engine. They looked at each other and sighed again.

‘Coitus interruptus,’ Moses said.

They drove away.

*

Fifteen minutes later they were passing through a village when Moses said he had to stop for a piss.

‘Can’t you wait until we get out into the country?’ Gloria asked him.

Moses swung the car on to a grass verge. ‘Oh, this’ll do.’

They had stopped outside the last house in the village. A simple redbrick house with a glass porch, white windows, and a blue front door. A framed notice, protected by a sheet of glass and mounted on two wooden posts, grew out of the low privet hedge that separated the front garden from a narrow strip of asphalt pavement. Moses, squinting, could only read the word POLICE. That’s a funny place for a police notice, he thought.

Gloria got out and, leaving her door open, eased up on to the bonnet, wincing as the heat from the engine seeped through the thin fabric of her skirt. Moses crossed the road. He scaled a ditch and stood facing away from the car.

‘Carthorse,’ Gloria jeered.

Moses turned and grinned at her over his shoulder. He was about to say something when a movement behind her distracted him. The blue front door was opening. A policeman emerged.

Moses’s heart plummeted down through his body like a lift with the cables cut. He clutched, one-handed, at the place where it had once been. He had just remembered the Thermos of vodka on the floor of the car. And the coke in the glove compartment. And Gloria had mentioned something about having some grass on her. He tried to warn her by making a serious face but all she did was make faces back. He watched helplessly as the policeman came up behind her.

‘Good afternoon, miss,’ the policeman said.

Gloria leapt off the bonnet.

‘I’m sorry,’ the policeman said. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’

‘I didn’t hear you,’ Gloria said.

The policeman smiled remotely. ‘People in the village say I have a very soft tread.’

By now Moses was standing next to Gloria. Tiny wet spots spattering the front of his trousers testified to the haste with which he had finished his business on the other side of the road.

‘Good afternoon, officer,’ he said. He hoped it sounded brisk enough. But co-operative at the same time.

‘You know, for a moment,’ the policeman said, transferring his gaze from Gloria’s face to Moses’s, ‘I thought you were going to piss all over my hedge.’

Moses and Gloria both laughed — rather too abruptly, perhaps. The policeman waited until they had stopped and then smiled unnervingly as if he knew something which they were only pretending to know.

As he turned his attention to the car, however, a change came over him. He became more enervated, less sinister. He seemed to find the number-plates particularly interesting.

‘This your car, is it?’ he asked, managing to translate his mounting excitement into an official question.

Moses said that it was.

‘May I ask where you’re coming from?’

‘London.’

‘London,’ the policeman repeated in a voice that had thickened like soup. He rolled the word sensually on his tongue. He seemed to regret that there were only two syllables; Aberystwyth, for instance, would have been better. None the less, saliva was beginning to flood into the narrow troughs between his cheeks and his gums.