Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

Table kills itself.

On his way into the café, Moses passed Eddie. Eddie looked up, but nothing registered on his face. He had a split lip and a smear of oil on his forehead. His grazed hands dangled in his lap. He obviously wasn’t going to explain what last night had been about.

Moses carried two cups of coffee out on to the grass and handed one to Gloria. She was sitting on the mauve table, elbows on her knees. He suddenly remembered the man with the dyed black hair and the vermilion shirt, the man who laughed like a train, and smiled to himself.

‘I bet I know who painted this table,’ he said.

Gloria held her cup close to her lips and stared at the horizon, her face in profile against the dull sky. Her mood had altered in the last five minutes. It was as if she had woken up without thinking and had now remembered something depressing.

He asked her if she was all right.

She nodded.

She found her cigarettes and lit one. She let the smoke drift out of her mouth without seeming to notice.

He asked her if she wanted to go.

She shrugged. It must have meant yes, though, because she threw her cigarette away and picked up her bag.

They searched half-heartedly for Louise. They couldn’t find her anywhere so Moses wrote a note. Louise, it said, we were very tired and had to go. Thank you for the wonderful party. Lots of love, Moses and Gloria. He left it with the woman who ran the café.

Vince had been watching Moses from his table on the sun-terrace. Now he came over and asked if he and Debra could have a lift back. Moses told him yes.

Eddie was sitting on a bench outside the café. He looked more than ever like a statue, not because of his classic features or his athlete’s physique, but simply because he watched them leaving with blank eyes. He didn’t even wave goodbye.

Moses and Gloria didn’t talk on the way back — but then they never seemed to talk much on the way back from places. And this time, maybe because of the other two, Gloria didn’t sing either. The only sound, apart from the hum of the engine, was a very soft sound, softer than a hundred tons of cotton wool, almost unidentifiably soft, and heard by Moses alone: it was the sound of Alison’s mother chainsmoking cigarettes through a six-inch cigarette-holder. The only time anyone spoke was at the beginning of the journey when Debra asked Moses whether he could possibly drop her in Lewes.

‘No problem,’ he said.

It was only later that he realised, with a stab of disappointment, that this meant taking a different route and that they would not now be driving back through that strange village.

During the last few days of July the temperature soared. Heat welded the end of one month to the beginning of the next, and hardly anybody noticed the join. A middle-aged man was arrested for jumping naked into the Serpentine. Summer at last.

The first Sunday in August Moses drove north-west across London, an A — Z open on his lap. He had been invited to Alison’s parents’ house for lunch. He was to drive to the Shirleys’ house and back again so many times during the coming weeks that the route quickly stuck in his head, became automatic, second nature. Years later, driving a different car, going in a different direction, he would sometimes slip into one part of it by chance — only two or three streets, perhaps, but he would recognise the sequence — and he would wonder why it seemed so familiar. And sometimes he would remember, with a feeling that was like hunger or butterflies, the way it tightened his stomach, turned it over. With a feeling that was like homesickness.

He left The Bunker at noon. He hadn’t thought to park in the shade (this was England, after all), and the air had massed inside his car, dense and sweltering, essence of leather. He wound all the windows down, rolled up his sleeves, and drove fast. One hand on the gearstick, one on the wheel. Eyes screened by sunglasses. And slowly the stubborn air broke up. The city looked evacuated, streets beaten flat by a high sun, the chill tunnels of tube stations gaping and empty. 82 degrees, the radio said. Unbelievable, this weather.

He arrived at the house to find the front door ajar. A cool hallway smelling of cinnamon and hyacinth and antique furniture. Dark-blue walls hung with charcoal drawings. Distant voices rooms away.

Nobody heard him knock.

He crossed the threshold, the sun pressing on his neck, his shoulderblades. At the end of the hall a second door, also open, framed two girls in leotards practising handstands on a square of sunlit grass. New noises now. Laughter and jazz. The delicate percussion of glasses. The snap of cards.

He waited.

Then a woman with a shock of messy glossy black hair stepped backwards into the hall, talking to somebody he couldn’t see. When she turned and noticed him, he flinched, moved forwards suddenly, as if she had caught him redhanded at something.

‘Are you a burglar?’ she asked him. She cocked an eyebrow, used only half her mouth to smile with.

‘No,’ he said. And, smiling back, he felt the heat issuing from her slightly bloodshot blue eyes. Her satin dress crumpled as she moved, like the air above a fire.

‘In that case,’ she said, ‘how about a glass of white wine?’

The woman was Mary Shirley, of course, and though he couldn’t fault Vince’s savage rendering of detail — she wore black, carried a six-inch cigarette-holder between the first and second fingers of her left hand, talked like an old movie — he couldn’t help feeling, at the same time, that there was something about her, a presence, perhaps, that Vince had chosen not to mention. As soon as he walked into that rundown red-brick house, as soon as he saw her in context, smoke curling like a blue creeper up her arm, he knew that Vince’s words had become redundant, that he could leave them behind on the porch. It was strange ground for him, as it must once have been for Vince, but he felt no unease, only the pressure (almost sensual, this) of his own aroused curiosity.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘That would be very nice.’

*

He watched Mary arrange herself on an upholstered cane chair in the garden. She folded her legs beneath her and stood a bottle of vodka upright against the backs of her knees. She lit one cigarette after another and dropped her ash on the lawn. In the sunlight her skin looked pale, almost soggy, but her eyes travelled lightly over everything, and she gave the impression, without speaking or moving, that she was orchestrating what went on around her, that she could steal the show at any moment she chose. Into one silence she inserted the following words:

‘I’ve been having terrible dreams.’

She lifted her eyebrows, swirled the vodka in her glass. People began to listen.

‘What dreams?’ This was Rebecca, Mary’s youngest.

‘It was sunset,’ Mary said, ‘and I was standing on a footpath somewhere in the country. The sun was going down behind a ridge and the sky was green and orange, the colour you get when you burn copper. A row of spiky black figures were walking along the ridge. They were carrying sacks on their backs.’

She leaned sideways, tossed her cigarette into the nearest flower-bed.

‘I was terrified, for some reason. I stood there, hoping desperately that they wouldn’t notice me. But I knew how powerful their eyes were. Distance and darkness were nothing to them. And the more I worried about whether or not they were going to notice me, the more real that danger became. It was almost as if they could hear me worrying.’

Moses, who knew that feeling, nodded to himself.

‘Then, suddenly, I was in a small room. The walls of the room were solid with cages, and inside the cages were jackdaws, hundreds of them. The room was full of the sound of their wings thrashing. I remember thinking: This is what panic sounds like. The figures I had seen up on the ridge were in the room too. Silent hooded figures. And that’s when I made the connection. Those sacks on their backs, they had been full of jackdaws.