Dreams of Leaving

The Return of the Native

On the last Saturday in November Mary did something she had never done before. She arrived at The Bunker without telling Moses first. No note, no phone-call, no prior arrangement. She appeared at the top of the stairs in a black dress fastened at the throat with a diamanté brooch. She wore a black wool coat thrown over her shoulders like a cape. She brought cool air into the room with her.

He noticed the driving-gloves in her left hand. ‘Are we going somewhere?’ he asked her.

‘Yes.’ She seemed to weigh the silence before adding, lightly, ‘We’re going to see your parents.’

‘What?’

‘You heard me. We’re going to see your parents.’

‘Today?’

‘Now.’

‘But,’ Moses panicked, ‘but they don’t know we’re coming.’

‘So what are you going to do? Call them up and say, “Hello, can I come and see you for the first time in twenty-five years?”’

‘Twenty-four and a half, actually.’

‘Or maybe you’d like to send them a quick telegram? Hi stop. My name’s Moses stop. Remember me? stop.’

Moses grinned despite himself, then immediately looked worried again. ‘But listen, Mary,’ he said, ‘how do we know they still live there?’

‘How do we know they don’t until we try?’

He paced up and down in front of the window, his right eye blinking as it always did when he was nervous. Mary watched him from the sofa, one leg tucked underneath her body, elegant, mischievous — determined.

Then he swung round, hands spread. ‘There’s no point just turning up. I mean, what if they’re out?’

‘What if they’re having a garden party? What if they’re having sex? What if they’re horribly deformed?’ Mary threw her hands up in exasperation and caught them again.

He frowned. ‘I suppose so.’ He was thinking hard now. ‘But hold on,’ he quickened, sensing a loophole he might wriggle through, ‘we don’t even know where this New Egypt is.’

‘Don’t we?’

‘No, we don’t. And I don’t have a map either. Sorry about that.’ He spread his hands again, grinning this time.

Mary grinned back, slid a hand into her bag. The hand emerged with a Shell Road Atlas. ‘I’ve got a map,’ she said, ‘and I know where New Egypt is.’

‘Shit.’ There was no way out of this. ‘Where is it then?’

But Mary wasn’t telling. She handed him his coat instead, led him downstairs to the car and opened the door. ‘Get in,’ she said.

He obeyed. Reluctantly.

Soon they were leaving the southern suburbs of the city. Frost glazed the rooftops of the last few houses; net curtains, like another kind of frost, hid the windows. Then open country, a dual carriageway through brittle woods. A new roundabout, fat yellow bulldozers, mud the colour of rust. The sky cleared. The grey turned blue. Sun struck through the windscreen, bounced off Mary’s diamanté brooch.

He turned to her with a puzzled look. ‘You know, I think I recognise this road. Should I recognise it?’

Mary shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

He studied the road in greater detail. Yes. There, for example. He remembered laughing at that signpost (PICNIC AREA I HARTFIELD 4) because it sounded like a football result.

‘Are you sure we haven’t driven down this road before?’ he asked.

‘I have, lots of times, but never with you. Oh,’ and she smiled across at him, ‘I almost forgot. Look behind your seat.’

He reached round and pulled out something he had no trouble recognising: a bottle of twelve-year-old malt whisky.

‘It’s for you,’ she said. ‘You can open it if you like.’

‘For me? Why?’

‘It’s not every day you go and meet parents you’ve never seen before, is it?’ she said.

*

It had been all right to begin with. The drive south. The sunshine. The whisky. But now he had the map on his knee and the village was less than an inch away and he was trembling. It was a feeling he hadn’t known for years, this trepidation, and it made a child of him. He wanted a hand to cling to, a bed to hide under. He wanted to turn round and run off in the opposite direction.

What was he going to say to them, these parents?

He tried out a couple of approaches in his head.

Polite: ‘Good afternoon. Mr and Mrs Highness?’ No, they’d probably take him for a Mormon and slam the door in his face.

Tantalising: ‘Mr and Mrs Highness? I’ve got some rather good news for you.’ Then they’d think that they’d won the pools or something. What a let-down when they discovered the truth.

Direct, but awkward: ‘Um, hello. My name’s Moses. I’m your son, I think.’ What would they do? Faint? Burst into tears? Pretend they didn’t understand (‘Moses?’ A blank look — affable, but blank. ‘Sorry, son. You must be confusing us with someone else.’)

He just couldn’t imagine it.

And now they were turning off the main road. A country lane took them up a steep hill in a series of tight curves. New Egypt appeared on a signpost for the first time (NEW EGYPT ) but it didn’t sound like a football result and he wasn’t laughing. They began to descend. A sign loomed on the right-hand side. Two grey metal stanchions buried in tall grass and ragged ferns.

NEW EGYPT

He reached for the bottle again, now almost empty. He smiled fleetingly. Mary thought of everything. She was an expert in a crisis. She ought to be. She had caused enough of them herself. Look at her now. So serene. Whisky always did that to her. He hoped they didn’t get stopped by the police. Unlikely, though. There wouldn’t be many –

Police.

Suddenly everything connected.

‘I have,’ he cried out. ‘I knew it.’

Mary stamped on the brakes. The car slewed into the hedge that lined the road. ‘Moses,’ she said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t shout like that.’

‘I have been here before,’ he said.

She switched the engine off and leaned back against her door. She lit a cigarette. ‘So tell me about it.’

He told her the whole story of the drive down to the south coast in July. The bizarre slobbering policeman. The motorbike disguised as a wheelchair. Old Dinwoodie in his flying-helmet.

‘How extraordinary,’ she said when he had finished. ‘Just think. That Dinwoodie might be a friend of your father’s.’

Moses looked dubious. ‘I don’t know. He looked like he’d just escaped from a mental home or something.’

Mary threw her cigarette out of the window. She started the engine, shifted into gear and pulled back on to the road.

‘I’m rather looking forward to this,’ she said.

*

They approached the village along a street of identical red-brick houses. They saw nobody. No movement in the windows, no smoke rising from the chimneys.

They reached a crossroads and turned left up the high street. They circled the village green. One peeling sightscreen. A duck-pond brimming with sky. No ducks, though. The clock on the church tower had stopped at ten past seven. Moses wondered how long ago.

‘I feel like the last person alive,’ Mary said.

Moses nodded. She was speaking for both of them.

There seemed to be no centre to the village. After passing the post office for the second time, she stopped the car outside a pub.

‘You might as well ask in there,’ she said.

‘Ask?’

‘Yes, ask. Where your parents live. That’s why we’re here, Moses. Remember?’

He leaned out of the window. The pub, he saw, was called The Legs and Arms. On the sign hanging above the doorway a pair of legs and arms, both disembodied, engaged one another in a sort of clumsy pink swastika.

‘Take a look at this place, Mary.’

‘Are you going in or not?’

‘The name, Mary. Did you see the name?’

She sighed. ‘I suppose I’m going to have to do this myself.’

‘No, it’s all right. I’m going.’ He opened his door and clambered out.

When he first pushed through the double-doors he thought the pub was empty. The silence. The gloom. The stale smells of peanuts, spilt beer, cheap cigars. Then he began to notice people. Half dozen or so. All sitting on their own in different corners. Not a word from any of them. Only, now and then, the rustle of a coat, the clink of a glass, a sigh. He walked up to the bar. A man slumped on a stool with a pint of bitter and a whisky chaser. He wore a green anorak and a pork-pie hat. He had a boxer’s face: dented in some places, swollen in others. Then Moses noticed the broken bloodvessels showing like red threads in the surface of the man’s skin. Not a boxer’s face. A drunk’s.

‘Excuse me,’ he said.

The drunk’s head rotated slowly, sideways and upwards. ‘Hundred yards,’ he said. A sluggish voice, blurred words. His eyes kept sliding away.

‘Excuse me,’ Moses said. ‘I need some directions.’

‘After all those years. Hundred yards then bam.’ The drunk’s elbow jerked. Beer slopped on to the bar, frothy as bile.

Moses nodded. He looked round casually for someone else.

‘Tell us about your stomach muscles, they said. Tell us what you do with your missus.’ The drunk’s face twisted with sudden frenzy. ‘Those filthy bastards.’ He aimed a soiled and trembling finger at Moses’s chest. ‘I could’ve done it, though. I could’ve bloody done it.’

Loop-tape in his head, Moses thought. That’s what happens in pubs. You get these weirdos. You come in halfway through and it sounds like gibberish. You wait an hour or two till they get round to the point where you first came in and you listen to the whole thing again. And sometimes it begins to make sense. Sometimes. But he didn’t have an hour or two today.

He noticed an old lady over by the window. Sun poured through the glass. She sat in its cold transparent glow, spotlit, brittle, both hands clasped on the head of her cane. Her chin moved rhythmically, as if she was chewing something. He approached.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for Mr and Mrs Highness. I wondered if you — ’

The old lady raised eyes of the palest blue. They seemed to look beyond him to a scene of utter horror.

‘You had better ask my husband,’ she said.

‘Your husband?’ Moses glanced round.

‘Oh no. He isn’t here. He’s at home. On the manor, you see. Lord Batley never leaves the manor.’ She shuddered. ‘Never.’

‘You’re Lady Batley?’

The old lady lifted her chin an inch. Not pride exactly, but the memory of pride. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am.’

‘Lady Batley — ’ Moses was squatting beside her now — ‘I’m trying to find Mr and Mrs — ’

‘I sometimes come here for a glass of white wine. I don’t think there’s any harm in that.’ She smiled at him. Looking into her eyes was like looking down through fathoms of clear water to something lying on the ocean-bed. It gave him a kind of vertigo.

‘Of course, I don’t know what Oscar would say,’ she quavered. ‘Oscar doesn’t like to see women drinking alone. He disapproves.’ She lifted one dappled hand to her breastbone. ‘He tried to die once, you know. I told him, I told him it was no good. He promised me that he would never do it again.’

‘Never do what?’ Moses asked.

Lady Batley stared at him. ‘Die,’ she said.

She sat there chewing in the cold light. He could see straight through her skin to the tangle of veins beneath. One coiled on her left temple as if squeezed from a tube of pale-blue oil-paint.

He stood up.

Walking back across the pub, he stopped to look at a picture on the wall. It was a drawing of a policeman. Cut from a magazine, by the look of it. Two darts pinned it to the flock wallpaper. One through each eye.

Moses frowned, looked around. A woman had just appeared behind the bar. She was washing glasses. A little routine, she had. Into the water, on to the brush, into the water and out. Nice rhythm. All right, he thought. One last attempt.

‘Do you know where I could find Mr and Mrs Highness?’ he asked her.

It was the drunk, surprisingly, who reacted. ‘What about Highness?’

Moses held up a picture of his parents standing outside their house. ‘Do Mr and Mrs Highness still live here?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘You mean they’ve moved?’

The drunk seemed to find this extremely funny. ‘Moved? Did you hear that, Brenda? “Have they moved?” he says.’

The woman behind the bar allowed herself a sour smile.

‘Where are they then?’ Moses asked.

‘Only one of them’s moved.’ The drunk released this information with a sly glance.

‘Which one?’

‘Mrs Highness.’

‘So she’s left her husband?’

The drunk cackled. ‘In a way, yes.’

Suddenly Moses understood. ‘She’s dead?’

‘Yeeaahh. Wa-hay.’ The drunk banged the bar with his red hand. ‘What a clever boy. Yeah, died in the home, she did.’

‘In the home?’

‘The loony-bin, the nuthouse, the funny-farm. Where anyone with any sense round here ends up.’ He sucked down the last of his beer. ‘Are you a detective?’

Moses smiled. ‘Not a detective, no.’

‘Not a policeman, are you? Not a bloody copper?’

‘No.’

‘Thank Christ for that.’ The drunk slung his glass across the bar. ‘Give us another, Brenda.’

‘You’ve had enough,’ Brenda said. ‘Time you went home, Joel.’

‘Ah, come off it, Brenda. Give us a pint.’

Turning her back on him, Brenda reached up and rang a bell. ‘Drink up, please. We’re closing now.’

‘Brenda, it’s not even two o’clock yet,’ Joel protested.

Brenda ignored him.

He rolled his eyes, shook his head. ‘All right then, give us a half.’

Still Brenda said nothing.

Joel cuffed his empty glass aside and lurched towards the door.

‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ Moses said to Brenda, ‘but could you just tell me where this house is?’

She took one look at the picture and gave him a set of simple directions. The house, she told him, was no more than two hundred yards away.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

Brenda’s hard face softened a touch. ‘You don’t come from around here, do you?’

He hesitated, then shook his head.

‘Count your blessings,’ she said. She rang the bell again. ‘Come on, you lot. Let’s have your glasses now.’

People began to rise from their chairs as if from the dead.

Outside the pub Moses bumped into the drunk, almost knocked him over.

‘You’re a bloody policeman, you are,’ the drunk shouted. He grabbed at Moses’s sleeve with a scaly hand. ‘I know a policeman when I see one. You’re a bloody policeman.’

Moses shook himself free. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.

He turned and walked back to the car.

‘Bloody policeman,’ the drunk jeered after him.

Moses opened the door of the Volvo and climbed in. Mary was smoking. Blue veils swirled around her face. She watched him through them.

‘Looks like you made a new friend,’ she said.

*

She started the engine. ‘You were ages. I thought you’d made a run for it.’

‘I almost did,’ he said.

They drove past the drunk. He was still standing on the pavement, waving his fist and shouting obscenities.

‘Why’s he calling you a policeman?’ she asked.

Moses shrugged. ‘Because I was asking questions, I suppose.’

‘So what did you find out?’ She slowed down, weaved in and out of the potholes in the road.

‘My mother’s dead. She died in a mental home or something. I couldn’t really understand everything. Turn right here.’

They passed a row of terraced houses. Paint had dropped from the façades, lay on the ground like old leaves. Scrap metal sprawled on unmown lawns. A car with no wheels stood in a driveway. They saw no people. Not even any children.

‘My father’s still alive though,’ he added. ‘Apparently.’

He lit a cigarette, inhaled. The smoke came out with a sigh. ‘It should be down here somewhere on the left. On the corner. That’s what the woman said.’

‘Are you all right?’ Mary asked him.

He nodded. ‘I think so.’

They both recognised the house at the same time.

It had aged since the photographs. The front lawn had lost grass as old men lose hair. Bleached grey wood showed through the paintwork round the windows. A section of guttering lay on the garden path. A shattered roof-tile too. No parasol, of course. When Moses peered through a downstairs window he saw a sofa with no cushions and a fireplace stuffed with crumpled newspaper, no real signs of life.

They stood on the porch. The doorbell didn’t seem to work (Mary had listened through the letter-box), so they tried the brass knocker instead. Solid thuds echoed through the house like hammerblows. Nobody came.

‘Doesn’t look like there’s anybody there.’ Moses couldn’t keep the relief out of his voice. Now they could drive back to London with clear consciences, he was thinking. At least they had tried.

‘Let’s go round the back,’ Mary said.

He followed her, dread rising suddenly in him like floodwater.

Mildew grew on the side wall of the house. A drainpipe had come away; it stretched across the concrete path, a spindly fallen tree. The back door was green. Somebody had nailed a piece of hardboard over one of the glass panels.

‘After you,’ Mary said.

Moses turned the handle. The door grated open. He glanced over his shoulder at Mary, saw encouragement in her smile.

He found himself in a corridor. He picked his way over the scattered bones of a bicycle. Several massive cardboard boxes had been stacked against the wall. There was scarcely enough room to squeeze by. He tilted his head sideways to read one of the labels. THREE-PIECE SUITE, it said. ARMCHAIR He moved on, passed an open doorway. The kitchen. A fridge gaped at him, nothing in its mouth. The house smelt unused, unlived-in. But a queer sourness hung around the edge of that smell, a sourness he couldn’t quite identify: something like fish, something like sweat, something like margarine.

At the bottom of the stairs, he hesitated.

‘Hello?’ he called out.

But too softly. He cleared his throat.

‘Is anybody there?’

Something shifted overhead. Something creaked.

‘Bugger off,’ came a hoarse voice. ‘Bugger off and leave me alone.’

Moses stepped backwards.

Mary touched him lightly on the wrist. ‘Go on,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’

He began to tiptoe up the stairs. The higher he went, the sourer the smell became. More like rotten fish now, old sweat, rancid margarine. And tinged with the reek of stale cigarettes. The fifth step from the top groaned under his weight.

‘Bugger off I said,’ came the voice again, still hoarse, but angrier. ‘Get out of my house.’

Moses had reached the landing. He passed one closed door, then a second. A third, to his right, stood ajar. He pushed on the varnished wood and it gave. In the widening gap, he saw an old man on a double-bed.

The old man wore a pair of glasses, a pale collarless shirt and a green cardigan (whose smooth brown buttons looked like chocolates). Nicotine had stained the lenses of his glasses yellow and one of the arms had been mended with black insulating-tape. He had the most enormous beard. Three feet long and almost as wide. If you had walked down the street behind him, you would have been able to see it protruding from either side of his head. Once black, now threaded with minute white hairs, it spread down over his chest and tucked into the V of his cardigan. With his glasses and his beard he looked, Moses thought, like a man in disguise; it would have been difficult to describe his eyes, for instance, or his mouth.

A beige horse-blanket concealed the lower half of the old man’s body. His hands rested on the outside. They were beautiful hands. Stained, like the glasses, but ascetic, tapering and permanently curved, as if made to bless the small round heads of children. One lay flat, palm down, beside his thigh. The other held a cigarette.

That the old man chainsmoked was obvious from a glance at the dented saucepan which served as his ashtray. It was piled high with cigarettebutts. The cigarette-butts had outgrown the saucepan, overflowed on to the bedside table, outgrown that too, and overflowed on to the floor. From there, of course, they could fall no further, so they had begun to pile up again. They behaved in exactly the same way as snow does. They might have fallen from the sky. Even as Moses stared, entranced, the old man squeezed the end of his latest cigarette between finger and thumb and tossed the new butt on to the mountainous heap of old ones. It tumbled from the saucepan on to the table, from the table on to the floor. It might have been a demonstration of how the system worked. The old man folded his hands on the blanket. He seemed to be waiting for Moses to speak.

‘Mr Highness?’

The name sounded so strange in his mouth, felt as awkward as a stone. This was the confrontation he had dreamed of. All those hours in phone-boxes. Fingers black from thumbing through directories. The reek of urine in his nostrils, in his soul. Another Highness! How could he ever have imagined that it would happen not in America but in Sussex, not with a stranger but with his father?

‘Who the bloody hell are you?’ the old man said.

Moses didn’t hesitate now. ‘I’m your son. Moses.’

A new stillness seemed suspended in the room.

‘I thought you were a policeman,’ the old man said. ‘Or the bloody priest.’ He almost smiled.

‘No.’

The old man shifted in bed, using an elbow to raise himself higher on his soiled stack of pillows. He lit a cigarette, dragged hard. When he spoke again, no smoke came out. He must have absorbed it all.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose you had better sit down.’ He indicated two simple wooden chairs by the far wall. ‘Bring them over.’

Moses crossed the room and returned with the chairs. He placed them side by side next to the bed. He offered one to Mary. They both sat down. He couldn’t help noticing the sheet that the old man was lying on. It started out white at the edge of the bed and, after moving through various shades of grey, turned almost black, a glossy black, as it slid beneath his body.

‘I’m afraid I’m not used to entertaining.’ The old man’s smile of apology closely resembled pain. He lifted his cigarette to his lips and sucked smoke deep into his lungs. His eyes drifted from Moses to Mary for a moment.

‘I’m sorry,’ Moses said. ‘This is Mary. She’s a very close friend of mine.’

‘George Highness,’ the old man said.

They both leaned forwards and shook hands.

It was all so improbable. Moses became daring. ‘You didn’t expect me then?’

The old man took this seriously. He lowered his eyes. ‘No, I never expected to see you again. Of course, I imagined you. Many times. I even imagined you sitting where you’re sitting now. But they were all ghosts, different ghosts of you. The real you had gone.’ He lifted his head. ‘I could never imagine how you’d look. It’s curious, but I think you look more like your mother, actually.’

‘My mother?’

‘She’s dead,’ the old man said quickly. ‘She died eight years ago.’

‘I know.’

‘You know?’ The old man seemed alarmed. ‘How?’

‘Somebody in the pub told me.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know his name. He was wearing a green anorak. He was drunk.’

‘Ah yes, the greengrocer.’ The old man drifted on his bed for a while as if on a raft. ‘But did I ever think that you’d come back?’ He shook his head and his beard rustled against his shirt. ‘No. Never. I never hoped for that.’

Half an inch of ash toppled off the end of his cigarette and landed in the lower extremities of his beard. He brushed it away with deft practised movements of his fingertips. It seemed to distract him from something he had been about to say. A silence fell.

Eventually he said, ‘You must have a lot of questions.’

‘My mother,’ Moses said. ‘She died in a mental home, didn’t she?’

‘He told you that too?’

Moses nodded.

‘That bloody gossip, I could kill him.’ The old man’s head jerked fiercely towards the wall. ‘Yes, she died in the mental home just outside the village. She had been in there for twelve years.’

‘What was wrong with her?’

‘Oh,’ and he twirled his left hand in the air beside his ear, ‘they had names for it. They called it manic depression. They said she had an avoidant personality. They had all kinds of fancy names. But the truth was far more simple, really. She was born in New Egypt. She was a New Egyptian. The world, even this tiny world, hurt her physically. It hurt her the way sun hurts people with fair skin. She wanted shade. She stayed in bed all the time. She drew the curtains on her life. She wanted to die. Nothing I could say to her made any impact whatsoever. I told her I loved her. I told her I needed her. She listened, but she didn’t really hear. Her pain was so great, I suppose, that she couldn’t even begin to imagine mine. There was nothing I could say to her, nothing that would make the slightest difference. I couldn’t tell her life was wonderful. It wasn’t and she knew it wasn’t. I couldn’t paint a glowing picture of the future. We didn’t have a future. She knew that too. She may have been disturbed or mentally ill or whatever you choose to call it, but she understood what life in this village meant. Means. It means boredom, loneliness and despair. And this, I suspect, touches on the question you must be longing to ask. Why did we get rid of you? That’s the big question, isn’t it? Am I right?’

Moses nodded.

‘We got rid of you,’ the old man said, ‘because we didn’t want you to turn out like us. We didn’t want you to turn out like everybody else in this bloody village. We wanted you to have a better chance in life — ’

‘But what’s so terrible about life in this village?’ Moses interrupted.

The old man let out a high-pitched yelp and doubled up. His cigarette flew from between his fingers. His glasses clattered to the floor. Convulsions racked his entire body. Several seconds passed before Moses realised this was laughter, laughter that had developed into a coughing fit.

‘Christ,’ the old man wheezed. He leaned back against his soiled pillows, flushed and breathless. ‘Christ, that was a good one. A bloody good one. Are you hungry?’

Mary wasn’t.

‘I could eat something,’ Moses said.

‘Go downstairs,’ the old man said to Moses. ‘You’ll find some tins in the kitchen cupboard. Biscuits too, if I remember rightly. Bring them up here. And a couple of forks. This is going to take some time so I think we should eat first.’

Moses ran down the stairs. He edged round the gas-cooker and into the kitchen. The wallpaper (orange and yellow discs) hung limply from the corners of the room. Sheets of newspapers dated 1970 covered most of the brown lino floor. Grease had clogged the transparent plastic air-vent in the window above the sink. Somebody had hurled a stack of dirty washing-up into the rubbish-bin — and none too recently, by the look of it.

The kitchen cupboard had lost both its handles so he had to prise the twin doors open with a carving-knife. The contents of the cupboard were as follows:

The bottom shelf: seventy-seven tins of John West sardines in tomato sauce.

The middle shelf: thirty-nine packets of Embassy Number One filter cigarettes.

The top shelf: a screwdriver, a Christmas card, and one half-eaten packet of Butter Osborne biscuits.

Shaking his head, Moses selected four tins of sardines and lifted down the biscuits. He found two bent forks in the drawer under the sink. He couldn’t see any plates (except for the ones in the rubbish-bin). That was the lot then. He hurried back upstairs.

The two of them were laughing when he walked in. The old man quickly included him. ‘Did you find everything?’

‘Eventually,’ Moses said. He unloaded his supplies on the bed.

Cigarette in mouth, the old man picked up a tin of sardines, tore off the packaging, slipped the key over the metal tab, and deftly unrolled the lid. Then he crushed his cigarette out and reached for a fork. Just by watching him you began to get an idea of how many tins of John West sardines he must have eaten in the past (and how many tins of John West sardines he would probably eat in the future). He ate rapidly but with finesse, spearing whole fish with a single lunge of the fork and inserting them into his already revolving jaws. Drops of tomato sauce splashed on to his beard and lay there glistening like berries. When he had finished he put the two empty tins on the windowsill behind him, wiped his fingers on the sheet, and lit a cigarette. The meal had taken him slightly less than three minutes.

‘Now then,’ he began, and the efficiency with which he had disposed of his sardines carried over into his voice, ‘you asked me a question. You asked me what was wrong with the village.’ He suppressed a smile. ‘I could answer that question with one simple word. Can either of you guess what that word might be?’

Both Moses and Mary shook their heads.

‘Fear.’ The old man pronounced the word with immense relish. ‘Fear.’ He paused to pick a sliver of fish from between his teeth. He seemed, at the same time, to be savouring the taste of the word. ‘But that is to begin at the end,’ he went on. ‘It has taken me a good forty years to arrive at that simple conclusion. And before you can arrive there, you have to know everything. Or almost everything. If you want to understand completely, that is. So what I’m going to do now, if you’re agreed, is to give you a brief history of New Egypt. The history I started once, but never finished. And remember one thing: nobody — and I mean nobody — has ever heard this before.’

And so he began to talk.

And they perched on their hard chairs and watched the slow upward trickle of smoke from his constant stream of cigarettes.

The sun strained through the cloudy windows. The afternoon faded.

They listened to his voice.

A voice roughened by years of chainsmoking and loneliness, but an articulate voice because he had, in his time, delivered lectures in the village hall and sung in the church choir.

A voice issuing from a mass of filthy sheets and crushed cigarette packets and empty sardine tins.

*

He described the people of New Egypt. Their limited horizons. Their inbreeding. Their sterility. He dissected them without pity, without prejudice. He threw their organs around on his bloody marble slab. He showed how apathy was like castration, how it had made them impotent. All his frustrations, all those months of silence (‘You’re the first people I’ve spoken to since August’), came spilling out. His concave hands scooped at the soupy air like ladles. His beard quivered. He had come alive.

His excitement reached a peak when he turned to the subject of the police. The Pharaohs of New Egypt! He exposed their hierarchy, their hypocrisy, their own peculiar brand of fear.

‘It’s their job,’ he explained, ‘to see that the village behaves in an ordered and harmonious way. But how do you define order? If I had to define it, I would say that order is morale, system, purpose. Order is rising at dawn, regular mealtimes, mowing your lawn. Order is brisk trading and a growing population. Order can be heard, for example, in the crying of a newborn baby or the chimes of an ice-cream van. In New Egypt, though, you won’t find any of those things. There is no order. So what do the police do? They’re forced to include in their definition of the word positive actions of any kind. Order is defined as the opposite of apathy. Order is energy, initiative. And it’s in this way that drunkenness, fraud, theft, arson, rape, even murder come to be welcomed by the police as being ultimately beneficial to the community. Something has happened. Somebody has done something. Crime is proof that the village is alive and kicking. Crime is order.’

‘Crime is order?’ Moses laughed. ‘I like that.’

The old man lifted one stained finger. ‘Except when it becomes part of an escape-attempt, of course. You see, the establishment of order here in New Egypt presupposes one simple fact: the continuing existence of the village itself. Let one person leave and in no time at all you’d have everybody leaving. Hey presto, no New Egypt. It would become a gap on the map, a ghost village, a sociological monument. A community of twenty-nine policemen with no one to protect and nothing to enforce. That’s why they do everything in their power to keep us here. You remember I told you that we grow up with our own nursery rhymes? Well, I’m going to give you an example of what I mean. This is one of the most well known. If you were to walk past the village school during lessons, chances are you’d hear it floating out of one of the classrooms. Every child in the village knows the words. Your mother,’ and he turned solemn eyes on Moses, ‘used to sing it all the time.’

He pulled himself up in bed, cleared his throat and began to sing. The tune reminded Moses of ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’. Equally mournful, equally forlorn. The song would normally be sung by the high clear voices of children. The old man’s voice, ravaged and gravelly, gave it new bitterness, added poignancy.

The world is a dream,

It will always be so.

Our life is a stream

With nowhere to go.

The sky’s always crying,

The willow tree weeps.

We’re living, we’re dying,

We’re here for keeps.

The wind comes to stay,

The rain and the snow;

They’re here for a day

Or a week, then they go.

But we’re here for life,

From our very first breath;

Come trouble, come strife,

We’re here until death.

The world is a dream

That we never had.

Our life is a stream

Of tears so sad.

We do nothing but dream,

It will always be so.

Things are just as they seem.

We have nowhere to go —

No sooner had he finished singing the last line of the song than he broke down and began to cough again. His head jerked forward repeatedly as if somebody was shoving him in the back.

‘I shouldn’t sing,’ he gasped.

Mary left the room to fetch some water. Moses could only look on helplessly as the old man struggled for breath. The old man described the village so objectively that it was easy to forget that he actually lived there. When he told stories and sang songs he was describing himself. A life of soiled sheets and furniture in boxes. A life of squalor, withdrawal and gloom. We’re here for life. We’re here until death.

Mary returned with a glass of water.

‘Thank you,’ the old man whispered. He drank, then he collapsed against his pillows. He let his eyes close. A few drops of water trembled in his beard.

When he opened his eyes again he said, ‘That was the first time I’ve sung anything in seven years.’

‘Well, you sang beautifully.’ Mary said. ‘Really quite beautifully.’

‘You know, people used to think that song was anonymous,’ he told them, ‘but I did a bit of research and I discovered that it was written by a man called Birdforth.’ He paused and glanced at them significantly. ‘Birdforth was chief of police from 1902 to 1916.’

Moses’s eyes widened at the sinister implications.

‘That’s right,’ the old man said. ‘Brainwashing. Propaganda. All quite deliberate. And very, very insidious.’

He gulped at his water. ‘You see, most people don’t even realise. They can’t be bothered to realise. It’s easier not to. But every so often,’ and his eyes flickered like dark agile fish in the deep lenses of his glasses, ‘every generation, perhaps, somebody a little bit different comes along. Somebody with their own private vision. Somebody with a dream. Fanatics, you might call them. And they’re the people the police have to watch out for. Because they’re the people who will, at some point in their lives, throw caution to the winds, fly in the face of everything they’ve ever learned, and try to do the one thing that nobody has ever done before: escape.’

He gave them examples: ‘Tarzan’ Collingwood, Mustoe the greengrocer, Tommy Dane. Something that had been cloudy in Moses’s mind now began to sharpen, resolve itself, assume a shape. Until he could restrain himself no longer.

‘Old Dinwoodie,’ he cried.

The old man’s voice cut out in mid-sentence. ‘How do you know about that?’

Moses began to tell him the story of the drive through New Egypt in July. Mary had heard it already; she excused herself and left the room.

When Moses had finished, the old man lay back, his fingers plaited on his beard, his eyes trained on some far corner of the room. ‘Well, well,’ he murmured. ‘If that isn’t a curious twist of fate.’

‘Where’s old Dinwoodie now?’ Moses asked.

The old man hesitated. ‘He’s dead.’

‘Oh no.’ Moses stared at the floor.

‘Don’t blame yourself. If you hadn’t helped to stop him escaping, somebody else would have. He would never have got away. Not old Dinwoodie. He was doomed from the start. I told him so myself and he never spoke to me again after that. There’s no point feeling guilty about it. You didn’t even know what was happening.’

Moses nodded. He tried to believe what he was hearing. But what damage you could do, he thought. What damage you could do when life blindfolded you.

‘Was he a friend of yours?’ he asked.

‘No, not really.’ A bleak smile passed across the old man’s face. ‘In a place like this you don’t have any friends.’

Mary returned with a tray. On the tray stood three mugs, a tin of powdered milk and a green china vase.

‘I couldn’t find a teapot,’ she explained, ‘so I improvised.’

The old man shaded his eyes with his hand. ‘Is that tea?’

‘It is.’

‘Where on earth did you find tea? Last time I looked — March, I think it was — I couldn’t find any. Not a single leaf. Where was it?’

‘Under the sink.’

‘Good lord. Was it? Good lord. How extraordinary.’

Mary poured the extraordinary tea. The old man cradled his mug in both hands. He sipped noisily, his moustache extending over the rim.

‘Christ, this is damn good,’ he said. ‘Uncommonly good. I’d almost forgotten what tea tasted like. Bloody good.’

‘Something I’ve noticed,’ Mary said. ‘All your escape stories are about men. Haven’t any women ever tried to get away?’

‘Women?’ The old man wedged his mug into a fold in the blanket. ‘There was one woman.’

He lit a cigarette and leaned back. Smoke filtered out of his nostrils. He was taking his time. He knew he had an audience.

‘Her real name was Miss Neville,’ he said, ‘but we all called her the mad lady. She lived behind the church. Strange house. Dark-red bricks and all the window-frames painted green. She had a withered leg so she couldn’t get about very much. She walked very slowly with two sticks, or sometimes she used crutches. You hardly ever saw her. She loved animals, especially birds. Storks used to land in her garden and, once, a flock of swallows hibernated in her kitchen instead of flying south for the winter. She had a special way with birds. She could talk to them and they understood her. Most people in the village thought she was some kind of witch. The children were frightened of her.

‘I was frightened of her too, but I was curious. One day — I suppose I must have been nine or ten — I went to visit her. I just walked up the drive and knocked on her front door. There was no answer, so I went round to the back and peeped in through her French windows. And there was old Miss Neville sitting in a high-backed chair. She was clapping her hands. Not rhythmically, the way you might clap to music, but a sort of double clap, as if she was summoning a servant. Her hair kept falling in her eyes, I remember, and her eyes were glowing yellow in the dark room, and her mouth was hanging open. She looked very strange, transported almost. For a moment I couldn’t work out what on earth she was doing. Then I saw the birds –

‘There were about eight of them, all the same size, dark grey, and when Miss Neville clapped her hands they rose into the air, all at the same time, straight up into the air like helicopters. And every time she clapped her hands they performed a new trick, a new manoeuvre. They flew round and round the room in perfect formation. They hovered in mid-air. They did all kinds of symmetrical things. I couldn’t believe my eyes, of course. I just stood at the window and stared. I completely forgot that I had no business to be there. And I suppose she must have seen me because the next thing I knew the door opened and she was standing in front of me.

‘“What do you want, young man?” she said. “I came to visit you,” I said. “Did you?” she said. “Did you indeed? Well, I suppose you’d better come in then, hadn’t you?” She had this queer way of stretching her neck out and looking down at you sideways. She was wearing a huge shapeless dress. As big as a tent, it was. And dark green, with little bits of velvet stuck all over it.

‘She hobbled back into the room on her crutches and I followed her. I have never been to a zoo, but her house smelt the way I imagine a zoo to smell. Sweet somehow. A curious mixture of musk and chicken-feed and manure. You know, I’ve never forgotten the smell of old Miss Neville’s house. And the mess. Feathers, balls of fur, bird-lime, mouse-droppings, cat-hair, frogspawn — you name it. I’d never seen anything like it. I suppose it was a zoo, really.

‘She gave me a tour of the place first. Animals everywhere. “Look where you’re going,” she told me. “I don’t want you treading on any of my family.” Some of the rooms had straw on the floor. Others had sawdust. She had covered the floor of one of the rooms about a foot deep in mud. It had grass and plants and flowers growing in it. It was just like being outside. Wasps buzzing around. Bees too. She had two bathrooms and both the bathrooms were like aquariums. Full of fish. On the third floor she had a snakehouse. A room that had been heated to a special temperature. Absolutely crawling with snakes. Ten she had, including a python. The whole room seemed to be alive and slithering about. And then there were the birds, of course. She let them fly all over the house. Wherever we went, they landed on her head, her hands, her shoulders, or talked to her from some perch up near the ceiling. Sometimes she waved them away, saying something like, “Not now, not now.”

‘Anyway, after she had showed me round, she insisted that I stayed for tea. “I expect you’d like some lemonade, wouldn’t you,” she said. “Little boys like lemonade.” I told her that I liked lemonade very much. So she led me along a gloomy passageway and down a flight of steep stone steps. We went through a door and she switched on a dim light. We were in the cellar. I looked round and saw rows and rows of bottles. They were all lying in racks like wine, but they weren’t wine, they were lemonade. She had stuck labels on all the bottles and every label had a year on it, the year that she had bought that particular bottle. Some of those bottles of lemonade were thirty years old. “I like to have lemonade in the house,” she said, “just in case the vicar drops in.” In her book, you see, vicars always drank lemonade. Vicars and little boys. She selected a bottle for me and held it up to the light. “1919,” she said. “A rather good year, don’t you think?” I thought it best to agree with her. So, for tea, I drank lemonade that was nearly twenty years old, ate a few stale wafer-biscuits, and talked to Miss Neville, who sat there with a dove perched on her head the whole time. She was bats, of course, but really very kind. Afterwards I thanked her and went home.’ The old man paused and scratched his beard, the part that nestled under his left ear. ‘Now remind me. Why was I talking about Miss Neville?’

Moses grinned. ‘You were going to tell us about how she tried to escape.’

‘Of course I was. That’s right. Christ, I’m getting old. Completely forgot.’ The old man tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail, stuck it in the corner of his mouth and lit it. The empty packet joined dozens of identical empty packets on the shelf above his bed. ‘It must have been a year or two later. 1938, 1939, something like that. A policeman, I don’t remember which one, found Miss Neville lying in a field on the outskirts of the village. It was dawn. She had broken her hip. She was wearing some sort of leather harness round the top half of her body. No sign of any sticks or crutches anywhere. After being taken to the doctor, she was interrogated by Peach. She didn’t deny having tried to escape. In fact, apparently she told him that the only reason she had left it until so late in her life was because she couldn’t bear to be parted from her animals. Then he asked her the obvious question, “How did you get as far as that without your crutches?” “I flew,” she said. “flewo?” Peach said. “My birds,” she said. “They carried me.”

‘And you know something?’ The old man leaned forwards, his speech accelerating. ‘I believe it. After what I saw in her sitting-room that afternoon I definitely believe it. There was a magic about that woman. Not strong enough to break the spell of the village, perhaps,’ and his hand twirled in the air again, ‘but what could be that strong? Can you imagine, though? Miss Neville being carried through the sky at dawn by a flock of birds. Like a parachute. A parachute of birds. What a sight that must’ve been! What a magnificent sight!’

Moses gazed through the window. He was trying to imagine a woman in a huge green dress flying through the sky. It was difficult. In this village he found himself approaching the limits of his imagination.

‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘I mean, how did it happen, d’you think?’

The old man shrugged. ‘Nobody really knows. She must have fallen, that much is obvious. Perhaps the birds lost their grip. Perhaps something frightened them. I don’t know. In any case, she was dead in two years. Complications with the broken hip.’

‘Sad story,’ Mary said.

‘Sad, but not so very strange. Everybody fails, you see.’

Moses smiled. ‘Not everybody,’ he said, ‘surely.’

‘Well, no,’ the old man admitted. ‘Not everybody, I suppose.’ He shook his head as if he still found the whole thing pretty hard to believe. ‘You see,’ he went on, ‘most people fail because they think that escape’s impossible and the police are infallible. When you’re faced with those two beliefs, it paralyses you. Escape is a dream, a song you sing, a story you tell, but not something you ever seriously think of doing. Not if you’ve any common sense. Anybody actually attempting to escape steps beyond the bounds of reality. They become unreal, even to themselves. They dress up as Tarzan, they build toy bombs, they pretend to die. No wonder they fail. In the end, all they succeed in doing is making the police museum the most interesting place in the village. The secret is to accept all that conditioning, be realistic about it.’

Moses looked puzzled. ‘Realistic? I don’t follow.’

‘I gave up the idea of trying to escape myself,’ the old man explained. ‘I knew I couldn’t do it. It was beyond me, quite literally. I decided to help somebody else escape instead. My son. You. And the whole time I was planning to get you out I was realistic about it. Because it wasn’t my freedom that was at stake. Because I had nothing to lose. As for you, well, you were too young to know what was happening, too young to have been weighed down, disabled by all those stories about the outside world, too young to be able to experience that sense of becoming unreal to yourself. If I failed to get you out, you wouldn’t go to pieces or turn into an alcoholic or end up in the mental home. You simply wouldn’t know any better. So you made it. The plan succeeded. And that’s what’s sustained me all these years as I’ve watched others fail around me. That and the idea that I might finally have got one over on old Peach — ’ The old man began to chuckle to himself. His cigarette shook in his curved brown fingers.

Moses now asked the question he had been dying to ask. ‘But how did you do it? How did you get me out?’

‘Oldest story in the world,’ the old man told him. ‘There’s a river that runs past the village. You may have noticed it. It’s about a mile away, across the fields. There’s one particular bend in the river where the current suddenly moves from the riverbank out into midstream. I tested it with twigs and cans. I waited for the right weather conditions, a misty morning, then I left you there, floating on the river in a basket made of pitch and rushes.’ He smiled. ‘Moses, you see?’

Moses shook his head in wonder. Then he looked across at Mary and knew that she knew what he was thinking. That pattern of light and shade. That sound of running water. Real memories.

‘So David was right all along,’ he said.

‘Who’s David?’ the old man asked.

‘David was one of the boys at the orphanage. I had a fight with him because he went round telling everyone that I’d been found by a river.’

The old man laughed, and, once again, the laughter triggered a fit of coughing. It shook him harder this time. His chest rattled like a bag of dice.

Mary held the glass out to Moses. ‘More water,’ she said.

When he returned, she had propped the old man up on his pillows. The old man’s arms lay outside the blanket, limp, stringy, palms up.

‘Are you all right?’ Moses asked him.

The old man nodded, but didn’t trust himself to speak.

Nobody had turned the light on in the room. The air had thickened, a haze of greys and blues, partly darkness, partly smoke. Hands and faces showed up pale, almost phosphorescent. A radiator began to tick in the corner.

‘Those bloody sardines,’ the old man muttered when he had recovered his breath.

He lit another cigarette. His face looked gaunt and dented in the stark orange flare of the match. His perversity resembled Mary’s, Moses thought.

‘I think we ought to leave you now,’ she was saying. ‘You should rest.’

The old man nodded.

‘Are you sure you’re going to be all right?’ Moses asked.

‘I’m fine.’ The old man spoke in a whisper now. ‘I’ve talked too much, that’s all. I’m not used to talking, you see.’

‘And you sang.’ Looking down at the old man, Moses suddenly had an idea. ‘Why don’t you come with us?’

‘I thought you might say that.’

‘Well, why not?’

The old man sighed. ‘It’s not quite as simple as that.’

‘All you have to do is get in the car.’

The old man shook his head. ‘Listen, I’ve told you about the people who live in this village. I’ve told you what they’re like. Well, I live here too. I’m one of them. I’m the same as they are.’

‘But you’re different. You — ’

The old man cut in. ‘I’m the same. Look at me. Lying in bed for years on end. I’m the same.’

Moses lowered his eyes.

‘Don’t push him, Moses,’ Mary said. ‘He has his own life here. And you have yours somewhere else. That was his gift to you.’

Moses looked up at the old man. ‘I wanted to help you, that’s all.’

‘You have helped me. By coming here. By letting me know that you’re alive. You’ve no idea how much that means.’

Moses said nothing.

‘Perhaps you’ll visit me again,’ the old man whispered, ‘sometime.’

‘Of course I will.’ Moses paused. ‘There’s one more thing I wanted to ask you. That pink dress. The one in the suitcase. Did it belong to my mother?’

‘Yes, I gave it to her, but she never wore it.’ The old man smiled sadly. ‘It was a dream of mine to take her dancing in that dress.’ He lifted a hand, let it fall again.

‘A dream of yours? Like that caravan?’

Fans opened at the corners of the old man’s eyes. ‘Like the caravan,’ he said. ‘We had a lot of dreams, Alice and I. But you were the only one that came true.’

Moses bent down and kissed his father on the forehead.

‘Something you should do,’ the old man said, mischief now in his dark eyes, ‘is to go and see your gravestone.’

‘Gravestone?’

‘Yes, gravestone. How else do you think we explained your sudden disappearance? You died, remember? You drowned in the river.’

‘I see.’ Moses had taken in so much during the past few hours that he felt as if he was about to overflow.

‘If you run into a policeman, it might be best to pretend that you’re just passing through. And don’t, for God’s sake, mention your name. As I said, you’re supposed to be dead. If they find out you’re not, well, it could be dangerous.’

‘I’ll be careful,’ Moses promised. ‘Are you sure you’re going to be all right?’

‘I’ve lived here alone for twenty years. I’ll be fine. Oh, and Moses — ’ the old man held his cigarette away from his lips and a slightly embarrassed smile appeared there — ‘next time you can talk.’

*

‘Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it?’ Mary shifted into second. The car began to scale the hill that led to the graveyard.

‘I don’t know,’ Moses said. ‘I feel a bit dazed.’

She nodded as if that made sense to her.

‘You were very quiet,’ he said.

‘It was your scene. I didn’t have a part.’

He watched her driving. You had a part, he thought.

A silence followed. The sun, setting behind an oak, punched fierce orange holes in its black, almost metallic foliage. By the time they passed through the cemetery gate the colours in the sky were vanishing. Still, they found the grave easily enough. Moses knelt down in the grass and tried to decipher the inscription. Mary wandered off to look at the church.

It was true what he had told her. He was having trouble finding room to store everything he had heard that afternoon. The places where it should have gone were already crammed with all kinds of junk from his own life. And yet so much of what he had heard, it seemed, was his own life too. He would have to squeeze it in somehow. It was a strange idea. Like trying to put foundations in a building that had already been completed. Unsettling. He heard footsteps behind him. He turned round, expecting to see Mary. Instead he saw a policeman.

‘Good evening, sir,’ the policeman said.

Moses thought it wise to match the policeman’s politeness. ‘Good evening, officer.’

‘A pleasant cemetery.’

‘Very pleasant.’

‘Even at night.’

There was just the suggestion of an interrogative in the policeman’s amiable remarks, as if he didn’t really understand why somebody should be visiting a cemetery at night and would quite like to know.

Moses hesitated.

Suddenly the policeman’s forefinger flew up to his chin and stuck there. ‘Forgive me if I’m mistaken, sir,’ he said, ‘but aren’t you the gentleman who assisted PC Marlpit in the Dinwoodie case?’ His eyes glittered against the brooding sky.

Moses was too surprised to lie. ‘How did you know that?’

The policeman’s forefinger edged from his chin to the side of his nose where it slid rhythmically against the fleshy curve of his nostril. ‘PC Marlpit described you in great detail. He was, I believe, quite struck by your appearance. PC Marlpit is one of my oldest friends. We shoot together.’

‘Shoot?’

‘Pheasant,’ the policeman said, ‘and grouse, when they’re in season. Otherwise bottles in my back yard.’ The way he lowered his eyes and smiled, he might just have given away a slightly embarrassing secret.

‘Interesting,’ Moses said.

‘Something occurs to me. If you were to accompany me to the police station, I’m sure the Chief Inspector would be delighted to meet you and thank you personally for your part in the unfortunate affair.’

‘I don’t know. We really ought to be getting back.’

‘We?’ The policeman scoured the air for evidence of a second person.

‘She’s looking at the church,’ Moses explained.

The policeman nodded to himself. His eyes returned to Moses’s face. ‘It would take up very little of your time, sir. The station is just behind us. A minute’s walk away. If the lady wouldn’t mind, that is.’

‘If the lady wouldn’t mind what?’ Mary said, appearing out of the darkness.

‘Going to the police station,’ Moses said. ‘The Chief Inspector would like to thank me for what I did in July.’

‘Splendid,’ Mary said. ‘I’ve never met a real Chief Inspector.’

The policeman smiled modestly as if the Chief Inspector had been an invention of his. ‘That’s settled then.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘If you’ll just follow me.’

‘What are you trying to do?’ Moses hissed at Mary as the policeman moved away across the graveyard. ‘Get me arrested?’

‘What for? Coming back to life? Not being dead?’

Mary’s voice was calm, but the calmness hid currents of excitement. He knew this mood of hers.

‘Besides,’ she added, ‘don’t you want to meet this famous Peach? Aren’t you curious?’

‘No.’

The policeman turned round. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Nothing,’ Mary said.

‘I’m sorry. I thought you were talking to me.’

‘No,’ Moses said. ‘We weren’t.’

The policeman dropped back to join them. ‘It’s my hearing, you see,’ he explained. ‘It’s very acute. Take music, for instance. When I listen to music I always have the volume on zero. That’s quite loud enough for me. But my wife,’ and he chuckled nasally and shook his head, ‘she can’t understand it. She says what’s the point of listening to music you can’t hear.’

Moses and Mary exchanged a look behind his back.

They were climbing a steep flight of stone steps now. The police station, a red-brick building with tall narrow windows, seemed to be positioned high above the rest of the village. Only the church tower came close. A chill wind rose. The trees shifted and dipped, hiding the scattered lights below. For a few seconds the village no longer existed.

When they reached the front door, the policeman stood to one side, his face polite and blue in the light of the frosted-glass POLICE lamp. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘After you.’

They walked into a spacious draughty hallway paved with green linoleum. It smelt of bleach, polish, disinfectant. The antiseptic stench of power.

‘As you can see,’ the policeman said, indicating several of his colleagues who were gathered at the far end, under the clock, ‘this is a twenty-four-hour operation.’

I bet it is, Moses thought.

‘I beg your pardon?’ the policeman said.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ Moses said.

‘Forgive me,’ the policeman said. Using the heel of his hand, he banged first one ear then the other, let out a brief but violent guffaw and, excusing himself, marched over to the duty desk where he exchanged a few words with a police officer whose face looked as if it had been hit several times by a hammer.

‘The Chief Inspector will see you immediately,’ he called out. ‘Won’t you come this way?’

He led them down a green corridor which, despite being lit by rows of white fluorescent tubes, gave the impression of dimness. Pipes bulged on the ceiling like veins. Moses heard a long drawn-out groan come from somewhere. It hung on the air, then silence and their footsteps took over, seemed to collaborate, pretend the groan had never been uttered.

‘I don’t like this place,’ he whispered in Mary’s ear. ‘I don’t like this place at all.’

They stopped in front of a door that looked like the door to a strongroom. Grey metal plates. Rivets. The words CHIEF INSPECTOR PEACH stencilled in black. The policeman knocked in a way that suggested both firmness and awe. A deep voice told them to enter.

Peach was seated behind a monumental bureau desk. His hands lay loosely clenched on its polished surface, flanked by piles of paper and trays of pens.

‘This is the gentleman who assisted PC Marlpit in the Dinwoodie case,’ the policeman announced. ‘He just happened to be passing through, sir.’

Did I say that? Moses wondered.

‘Thank you, Grape.’

Peach rose majestically and eased round his desk, but when he saw Moses standing there something curious happened. His entire body stiffened. His eyes seemed to freeze over. Ice and menace in his gaze. Moses steeled himself for some kind of impact. But then the moment passed, the chill lifted, and Peach was extending a plump hand.

‘Delighted to meet you, er — ’

‘Shirley,’ Moses said.

‘Unusual name for a gentleman,’ Peach observed.

‘Mr Shirley.’

‘Ah, Mr Shirley.’

They both laughed quickly.

‘And this,’ Moses said, ushering Mary forwards, not a trace of hesitation now, ‘is Mrs Shirley.’

Peach took Mary’s hand in both of his. ‘Of course. Delighted, Mrs Shirley.’

While Peach was shaking hands with Mary, Moses stared at him. Peach was an amazingly pear-shaped man. His cheeks were wider than his forehead and his hips were wider than his shoulders. He had a bully’s crewcut, and his drooping lower lip made him look as though he wouldn’t believe a word you said. Moses knew he would have to watch himself. It wasn’t only Peach either. There was that constable standing by the door. He could hear what you were saying even when you weren’t saying anything.

Peach waved the couple to a matching pair of seats and returned to his leather chair behind the desk. ‘PC Marlpit informed me of the part you played in the apprehension of Dinwoodie, and I must say that I’m very glad to have the opportunity of thanking you in person.’

‘Not at all,’ Moses said. ‘It was nothing.’

‘If only all the members of the general public were so co-operative,’ Peach crooned.

Peach was a sort of oral masseur. It was a sensual pleasure to listen to his genial rumbling voice and he knew it. He used its soothing modulations to soften you up. He lulled you into a false sense of security. And then he pounced. Framed portraits of his predecessors hung on the wall behind his head like warnings. One of those stern men would be Birdforth, Moses was thinking. The sly and lyrical Birdforth. 1902–1916. He glanced across at Mary. She seemed to be ignoring the danger. Or, if not ignoring it, flirting with it.

‘I’m only sorry I missed out on all the excitement,’ she was saying in a breathy version of her voice.

Peach smiled at her indulgently. ‘And where were you at the time, Mrs Shirley?’

The way he posed this question — so benign, so interested — you would never have guessed that it had been used a million times before, and nearly always during police grillings. So casual, this Peach. So dangerous.

‘Oh, I was at home,’ Mary laughed, ‘with the children.’

She was good at this, Moses saw. She was better than he would ever be.

‘A mother’s work,’ Peach mused. ‘More difficult even than a policeman’s, wouldn’t you say?’ He swung a few degrees on his chair to include Moses. ‘You’re fortunate, Mr Shirley, to have such a charming and conscientious wife.’

Moses smiled graciously. ‘Just as a matter of interest,’ he said, ‘how is PC Marlpit?’

Peach picked up a paperweight (a cluster of houses trapped in clear acrylic) and revolved it in his fingers. ‘PC Marlpit’s a fine officer,’ he said, ‘but he does tend to get a little excitable at times — ’

‘I noticed,’ Moses said.

‘— so I have to ground him occasionally, take him off active duty and give him some quieter employment here in the station. You may laugh at this, Mr Shirley, coming from the city as you do, but life in a village breeds its own peculiar tensions and stresses. Most of my officers are rested from time to time.’

‘No, I understand that.’ Moses smiled. ‘Well, please give him my regards when you next see him.’

‘You can do that yourself.’ Peach rose smoothly to his feet. ‘After the way you helped us, I thought the least we could do would be to give you a brief tour of our police station. In the course of the tour we should come across PC Marlpit. I believe he’s on duty today.’

‘How wonderful,’ Mary said (overdoing it a bit, Moses thought). ‘I’ve always wanted to see the inside of a police station.’

‘Most people do their best to avoid it.’ Peach tucked the corners of his mouth in so that tiny humorous dimples appeared in his cheeks.

Mary put a hand on Peach’s arm. ‘Very witty, Chief Inspector. I’ve never thought of it like that.’

Smiling, Peach ushered them out of the office.

He showed them round at a leisurely pace. He pointed out features and facilities with graceful movements of his hands. He seemed particularly proud of what he called the residential quarters. They comprised a large bedroom with four single beds, a common-room which boasted a colour TV and several leather armchairs, and a kitchenette complete with a breakfast bar and the biggest toaster Moses had ever seen — with its curved stainless steel top and its spindly splayed legs, it looked like a spaceship and toasted twelve slices at once.

‘Hungry policemen,’ Moses said.

‘Yes,’ Peach said. ‘They like their toast and marmalade.’

He combined these bland remarks with glances of chilling power, taking place at the edge of Moses’s vision, sensed rather than seen.

Moses was beginning to feel uneasy. He tried to distract Peach with questions. He pointed to a corrugated-iron building on the far side of the courtyard. ‘What’s that building over there?’ he asked, though he knew perfectly well.

Peach peered through the window as if he wasn’t quite sure which building Moses was referring to.

Moses nudged him with the words, ‘That corrugated-iron building.’

‘That,’ Peach said eventually, ‘is the police museum, Mr Highness.’

Too shocked to speak, Moses stared at the Chief Inspector’s back. He knew Peach could hear the fear in his silence. His heart was banging against his chest like a fist. Peach could probably hear that too.

‘Mr Shirley,’ he said, and knew he had hesitated too long. ‘My name is Mr Shirley.’

Peach swivelled, his eyes close-range, the colour of guns. ‘I do apologise. I don’t know what I was thinking of.’

Moses stepped past him to the window. Say something.

‘Would it be possible to see the museum, Chief Inspector?’

‘I’m afraid not. The museum’s closed at present. For renovation work.’ Peach’s lies were even smoother than the truth.

‘Pity,’ Moses said. ‘Some other time, perhaps.’

Peach turned away, tugging on an earlobe.

He took them through a sort of operations room next and there, on a converted ping-pong table, stood a detailed scale model of New Egypt. Moses hovered above the village, looking down. He could see everything that the old man, his father, had described: the house where the mad lady lived, the stretch of field the greengrocer had tried to cross, the rushes growing beside the river — even the elm outside his father’s bedroom window. And how many more stories there must be, he thought, unknown or still untold.

‘We had it specially built by the people at Hornby,’ Peach breathed over his shoulder. ‘What do you think?’

‘All you need now,’ Moses said, ‘are a few little flags to show where the enemy are.’ He snickered at his own joke.

Peach withdrew. ‘And this,’ he called out, moving towards a door that had the word ACCOUNTS stencilled across its one glass pane in black capital letters, ‘is where we keep Police Constable Marlpit.’

The door rattled open in his hand. Marlpit was bent over, neck exposed as if for a guillotine, face two inches from the top of his desk. Either dozing, Moses thought, or subjecting his figures to the closest possible scrutiny.

‘Marlpit,’ Peach boomed, ‘I have somebody to see you.’

Dozing, Moses decided, as Marlpit jerked upright, his eyes unnaturally wide, a caricature of alertness.

‘Oh — yes — ’ the constable stammered. Saliva welled behind his teeth. ‘Most certainly. What a surprise. What a pleasant surprise. How are you, sir?’

‘Very well, thank you,’ Moses said.

They shook hands.

‘And your young ladyfriend?’ Marlpit grew brighter by the second like a bulb that’s about to burn out. ‘How’s your young ladyfriend? Delightful girl, I thought.’

Peach stepped in diplomatically. ‘This, Marlpit, is Mrs Shirley. Mr Shirley’s wife.’

Marlpit blushed from the neck upwards. He removed his helmet. The colour rose past his eyebrows, beyond his hairline. ‘Oh — I — very pleased to meet you, madam.’ He bowed two or three times in a way that made him look, for those few seconds, peculiarly oriental.

‘You’ll have to forgive him,’ Peach whispered as he pulled the door shut. ‘He’s still in a state of some confusion, the poor fellow.’

You’re a sadist, Moses thought, and I don’t like you. But he smiled as if to say he quite understood.

‘Well, that just about wraps it up.’ Peach’s chest swelled as he breathed in. ‘Except for the cells, of course.’

‘Oh, we have to see the cells,’ Mary said.

Peach led them into a short passage with grey walls and a concrete floor. ‘Now, as you might imagine, there isn’t a great deal of crime in New Egypt so we only have two cells.’ He spread his plump hands. ‘One for you, Mr Shirley, and one for your wife.’

Moses stayed well back from the doors. You never know.

Mary had already peered inside. ‘Why are there tables instead of beds?’ she asked.

‘That’s a good question. We used to give our prisoners beds. Used to, that is, until one man tore his mattress-cover into strips, fashioned a primitive rope out of them and — ’ Peach jerked one clenched fist away from his neck in an unmistakable gesture. He turned to face Moses. ‘The man’s name,’ he said, ‘was Dinwoodie.’

‘How awful,’ Mary said.

‘Most unfortunate,’ Peach agreed, still staring at Moses. ‘One of those things.’

Moses said nothing.

‘So now the prisoners sleep on tables,’ Peach said. ‘It’s better to be on the safe side, don’t you think?’

‘Quite,’ Mary said.

Peach escorted his two visitors to the front door of the police station. ‘Once again,’ he said, ‘thank you for your help.’

‘Thank you,’ Mary said, ‘for the wonderful tour.’

They all shook hands again.

Then Peach suddenly took a step backwards and looked Moses up and down in an extremely cunning way. ‘Have you ever seriously considered a career in the police force yourself, Mr Shirley?’

Moses was flabbergasted. ‘Well, no — ’

‘A man of your imposing size and initiative,’ Peach continued seductively, ‘would be a credit to any branch of our organisation. You would make a magnificent policeman, I’m sure. What do you think, Mrs Shirley?’

Mary took Moses by the arm. ‘I don’t think it’s ever crossed his mind — has it, darling?’

A sickly smile spread over Moses’s face.

‘Well, if you should ever consider it, feel free to get in touch with me.’

Peach was rubbing his hands together, radiating good nature. ‘I don’t have any great influence, of course, but I would be happy to go through the details with you. Think about it, anyway.’ He raised a hand, turned on his heel, and was gone, all in one fluid, smoothly executed manoeuvre.

Still arm in arm, Moses and Mary walked back down the steps.

‘Going to join the force then, are you, Mr Shirley?’ Mary teased him.

But Moses didn’t even smile. ‘He knew,’ he said.

‘He knew what?’

‘He knew who I was.’

‘Peach?’

Moses nodded.

‘How could he know that?’

‘I don’t know. But he did. I felt it right away. Something, anyway. And then he called me Mr Highness, sort of by mistake. He was testing me, I suppose.’

Mary pulled away from him. ‘When did he call you Mr Highness?’

‘Oh, he was clever. He waited till you were on the other side of the room. He chose his moment perfectly. He’s a real cunning bastard.’

Mary stood among the tombstones, hands on her hips now, two lines engraved between her eyebrows. ‘I don’t understand this, Moses. How could he possibly know?’

‘I’ve no idea. But he did. He definitely did.’ He looked round, his right eye twitching, then he whispered, ‘That’s why he came out with all that stuff about joining the police. It was like he was saying, you belong here, your place is in the village.’ He stepped backwards, almost tripped over his own gravestone. ‘It was like a threat. But in code.’

The wind lifted. Leaves scuttled across the path.

He looked at Mary, but Mary seemed at a loss for words. Here was something that even she couldn’t explain.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s get out of here.’

*

He opened the window an inch, let the slipstream take his cigarette. The air had cooled, sharpened. They were driving through remote countryside, a landscape of hollows and copses, secrets and ambiguities. Not a house for miles. The headlights soaked up endless twisting road.

Mary had insisted on taking the scenic route back, one of her oldest rules being never to do the same thing twice.

‘But it’s so dark,’ he had pointed out.

‘So what? It’s the principle of the thing.’ Mary had been at her most dogmatic.

‘But you can’t see anything when it’s dark. What’s the point of taking the scenic route when you can’t see anything?’

She had dismissed his arguments with the words, ‘Don’t be so pedantic, Moses.’

And he had sighed and given up.

He had wanted to put distance between himself and New Egypt, he had wanted the comfort of other cars, larger towns, crowds, but Mary drove north then east, the loneliest road she could find. Through the rear window he watched the village sink into its dip in the land, a few weak lights extinguished by the rising ground. They had got away. And London lay ahead, beyond those trees. Soon the headlights, so ostentatious now, would dissolve in the city’s orange glare. In retrospect, his fear seemed melodramatic, absurd, almost hilarious.

They had been driving for about fifteen minutes when the car suddenly swerved, bumped against the lip of a ditch and stalled.

‘Fuck,’ Mary said.

She banged the steering-wheel with the heel of her hand.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘The clutch. Something’s happened to the clutch.’

‘Let me have a look.’

Moses flicked the interior light on, then reached down with his left hand, his head resting sideways on Mary’s thigh.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘The cable’s snapped.’

‘Can you mend it?’

‘No.’

They stared at each other.

‘Now what?’ she said.

He consulted the map. ‘We’re miles from anywhere.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘No joke, I’m afraid.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Well, don’t blame me,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t the one who wanted to do the scenic route.’

She glared at him.

He looked down at the map again. ‘And you know what? One of the nearest places is still New Egypt.’ He allowed himself a soft sardonic laugh. ‘There’s only one place that’s nearer and that’s Bagwash. What I suggest we do is ditch the car and walk to Bagwash. It’s about five miles.’

‘What’s this Bagwash? Sounds like a launderette.’

‘It’s a village. It’s got a church, a pond, a Roman remains — an obelisk — ’

‘Sod the obelisk. What about a garage?’

He gave her a withering look. ‘You can’t tell that by looking at a map. Come on, Mary. You ought to know that.’ He knew she hated the word ought — she thought it ought to be removed from the English language — but he wanted to provoke her.

‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why ought I to know that?’

‘Because you’ve been driving longer than me. Much longer. Because you’re older.’

‘You bastard.’ She twisted in her seat and swiped him with her driving-glove.

He poked her in the ear with his finger. ‘Much older,’ he said.

She began to beat him about the head with her handbag. It was a deceptive handbag. It looked ladylike, but it could hold a litre of vodka, no problem. It hurt.

In retaliation he seized her nose between finger and thumb. Her mouth opened. He stuffed it with a tissue. ‘Bless you,’ he said.

Their frustration slowly distilled, first into laughter, then into sex.

Afterwards Moses said, ‘The light was on the whole time.’

‘I always fuck with the light on,’ Mary said. ‘I like to see what I’m doing.’

‘But anyone could’ve seen.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘What if Peach — ’ Moses didn’t finish his sentence.

Mary leaned back against the door and looked at him. ‘What is it now, Moses?’

‘Nothing,’ he said.

*

After walking for twenty minutes they reached a junction. BAG WASH ], the signpost said.

‘Four and a half miles,’ Mary groaned. She sat down on the grass mound at the foot of the signpost and began to take off her shoes.

‘What are you doing?’ Moses said.

‘My feet hurt.’

‘Oh, Christ.’ He moved out into the middle of the road. He looked first in one direction, then in the other. No cars. Not the remotest suggestion of a car. Not even the feeling that a car might once have passed this way. They were going to have to walk.

‘Come on, Mary.’ He took her by both hands and pulled her to her feet. ‘It’s only about an hour.’

‘My legs are half the length of yours,’ she said. ‘Two hours.’

He studied her as closely as was possible in the extreme darkness. ‘They can’t be half the length,’ he grinned, ‘can they?’

They stood face to face and measured legs.

‘All right,’ Moses conceded five minutes later (during which time comparison had also been made between their mouths, and between one of Mary’s breasts and one of Moses’s hands), ‘one and a half hours.’

They began to walk.

High hedges hemmed the road in on both sides. Sometimes the wind blew and trees became haunting instruments. Otherwise silence. When they talked, the night sounded like an empty room. When they didn’t, Moses heard noises. The blood in your ears, Mary reassured him. But Moses was thinking of Peach, the stealthy Peach, he was imagining the Chief Inspector following in their tracks, rubbing his plump hands together, he was hearing the sinister whisper of skin on skin, so when Mary stopped and said, for the fifth time, ‘What’s that?’ he walked on, snapped, ‘Nothing.’

‘It is,’ she cried. ‘Look. Headlights.’

He swung round and saw two yellow trumpets playing over the dark landscape. He stepped back into the ditch. Shielding his eyes, he could just make out the shape of a truck. One wheeze of its brakes and it had obeyed Mary’s waving arms and stood, shuddering, asthmatic, on the road. He moved sideways out of the glare. A man with a square face leaned out of the cab, a shiny leather cap pushed to the back of his head.

‘Our car’s broken down,’ Moses said. ‘Any chance of a lift?’

The man told them to hop in.

Like drunkenness the relief then. Moses sat between Mary and the man in the cap and talked non-stop, raising his voice above the wail of the engine.

‘We just spent the day in New Egypt. About ten miles down the road. Do you know it?’

The man shook his head. He drove with his arms draped round the wheel, his hands almost meeting at midnight.

‘My dad lives there. I hadn’t seen him for ages. Not since I was a baby actually. Then we met a couple of policemen. Got a tour of the station and everything. One of them even offered me a job. Then the clutch went on the way back.’

The man nodded.

‘Best thing, we reckoned, was to try and get to Bagwash. Think it would’ve taken us all night if you hadn’t come along.’

The man lifted one stubby hand off the wheel and scratched his jaw. ‘You from London?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What were you doing on that lane then?’

Moses rolled his eyes towards the roof. ‘We were taking the scenic route back.’

‘Not quite so scenic when you break down, is it?’

It was a joke and both Moses and Mary laughed and their laughter carried them through the village of Bag wash and dropped them at the gates of a modest country hotel.

‘It’s the only hotel round here,’ the man told them. ‘If I was you, I’d stay the night here, fix the car in the morning. There’s a man in the village, name of Fowler. Phone him up. He might do it.’

They thanked him for the lift and the advice, and watched as a curve in the road snuffed his tail-lights out.

In the hotel lobby, Mary asked for a telephone. ‘I want to call Alan,’ she told Moses.

‘What are you going to tell him?’

‘I’m going to tell him that we’ve broken down in the middle of nowhere and that we can’t get back tonight.’

‘It sounds awful. It sounds like you made it up.’

Mary smiled and spread her hands. ‘It happens to be true.’

While Mary went to telephone, Moses registered as Mr and Mrs Shirley. The charade he had invented for Peach seemed to have taken on a life of its own.

‘That’s odd,’ Mary said, appearing at his elbow a moment later. ‘There’s no answer.’

‘Maybe he’s gone out or something.’

She pushed her lips forward, shook her head. ‘No, he said he was staying in this evening. He had some work to do.’

‘Maybe he changed his mind.’

Mary didn’t look convinced.

‘Look, you’ll be home by tomorrow lunch-time,’ Moses told her. ‘And, anyway, you’ve been away for longer than this before without calling.’

‘I know,’ she said, ‘but something doesn’t smell right.’

*

What a day it had been. There seemed nothing for it but to get terribly drunk. After all, as Mary reminded him, it was their first night alone together.

They began with cocktails in the hotel bar, then switched to gin and tonics and carried their gin and tonics, ice ringing in their glasses like chimes, into the dining-room. Mary chose a table in the darkest corner and ordered a bottle of wine.

Moses leaned back in his chair. It felt like weeks since Mary had appeared at the top of the stairs in her black wool coat and her jewels and announced that she was going to change his life. He had been living on his nerves all day and they were beginning to fray and buckle, they were beginning to say, Go and live somewhere else for a while. Hopefully, though, there would be no more surprises. Please, he begged. No more villages. No more fathers I didn’t know I had. No more Peach.

He finished his gin and tonic and, seeking distraction, looked into the room. There was a sudden fluttering of napkins over by the window, as if two white birds had spread their wings only to discover that they couldn’t fly. Another couple had sat down to dinner. The man wore a blue blazer. Crest on the breast pocket. Anchors on the buttons, no doubt. The woman, younger by at least ten years, wore a garish red blouse. Ruffles spilled fussily over her bust. They talked so intimately, these two, that the candle on their table scarcely flickered. Their hands clasped across the condiments. Their eyes locked as if they found each other captivating. But something failed to convince. Each time the waitress came by they flinched, withdrew their hands, turned their faces up to hers with stupid eagerness. They were like two bad actors. Ham love.

The wine arrived and Moses turned his attention back to Mary.

‘Well,’ she said, pouring them both a glass, ‘now that we’ve dealt with the past, what about drinking to the future?’

‘The future,’ Moses said.

They both emptied their glasses.

As Mary poured again, Moses leaned forwards. He began to spin his knife round on the tablecloth.

‘Did I ever tell you about the policeman?’ he said.

‘What policeman?’

‘It happened about four months ago. While I was out. This policeman came looking for me, apparently. He knew my name. He asked Elliot if I was living at The Bunker. Elliot wouldn’t tell him. So he hit Elliot. Out of the blue. Knocked him right over. Then he disappeared.’

‘Who was he?’

‘That’s just it. Nobody knows. And Elliot had never seen him before.’ He swallowed a thoughtful mouthful of wine and went back to spinning his knife around. ‘I’ve got a hunch, though. About who it was, I mean.’

‘Who then?’

‘Peach.’

‘Moses,’ Mary laughed, ‘you heard what your father said. Nobody ever leaves that place.’

‘Well, how come he knows who I am then?’

‘I don’t believe he does.’

‘He used my name, Mary.’

‘I didn’t hear that.’

‘And the way he looked at me — ’

‘I’m sorry, Moses. I just didn’t get the impression that he knew who you were. I think you’re being — ’

‘Of course you didn’t,’ Moses hissed. ‘He’s an actor. Not a second-rate actor like those two over there,’ and he jerked a thumb in the direction of the two lovers, ‘a real actor. A professional.’

Mary held her elbow in the palm of her hand. Her cigarette pointed at his face. She watched him calmly through the rapid spiralling of smoke. ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to prove,’ she said.

‘I’m not trying to prove anything. I’m just saying, suppose he did leave the village. Suppose,’ and he paused for a moment, ‘he came after me.’

Mary shook her head. ‘That’s called paranoia, Moses.’

‘Is it?’ he said.

*

An hour later they were both laughing drunk.

‘And what about,’ Moses was almost weeping, ‘and what about when Marlpit said, “And how is your young ladyfriend?” and Peach said, “Marlpit, this is Mr Shirley’s wife.”’

Uncontrollable hysterics.

Then Moses suddenly said, ‘Oh, shit.’

‘What is it?’ Mary asked.

He groaned. ‘I just remembered. The young ladyfriend. I was supposed to be meeting her tonight. We had some things to sort out.’

Mary’s eyes mocked him for a moment. ‘So call her.’

‘I think I’d better.’

He clambered to his feet. The table rocked, the carpet tactfully absorbed the sound of falling cutlery. On his way to the lobby he meandered past the two lovers. They seemed drunker too. Less stilted, anyhow. Less tense. Red Blouse was ordering a trifle.

‘I shouldn’t really,’ she was saying, ‘but — ’ and her lips disappeared coyly into her mouth. What a naughty girl.

Blue Blazer came to the rescue, his chair a white charger now, his fork a lance. ‘Well, it isn’t every day, is it?’ His smiling teeth glistened beneath his RAF moustache. He could almost taste the sweet sponge and jelly of her thighs. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll have one too.’ The wicked bugger.

Still shaking his head, Moses found the pay-phone in the corner of the lobby. He lit a cigarette. He dialled Gloria’s number with a finger that seemed too big for the holes. The number rang and rang. No reply from Gloria. He dialled Eddie’s number next. He was supposed to be going too. No reply from Eddie either. Now what?

The clock above the reception desk said ten to eleven. They would probably both be at the club by now. So phone the club. But what was the name of the club? The Blue something, he remembered. Yes, that was it. The Blue what, though? Elliot would know, he thought. He dialled Elliot’s number. No reply again. He slammed the receiver down. What the fuck was going on?

He put his cigarette out. Suddenly his mouth tasted of wine and ashes. He swallowed. The taste remained. There were two worlds. One here, one out there. Nobody at home out there. Nobody listening. And him standing here, marooned in this one. A shiver ran the length of his spine. This second world, the world where he had been born, the world where he had already died once, where he could die again, crept up his nostrils, crept into his lungs, like gas. He felt the greedy breath of policemen on his neck. He turned. Nobody there.

He fought loose, won a moment of clarity. Directory Enquiries, he thought. He dialled 192. A woman answered.

‘Please can you help me?’ he began.

The woman laughed. ‘I’ll try.’

‘I’m looking for the number of a club in Covent Garden,’ he said. ‘It’s called The Blue something.’

‘That’s a funny name.’

‘I mean — ’

‘It’s all right, love. I know what you mean. Now, let me see. The Blue something — ’

He could hear her humming.

‘I suppose people don’t usually talk to you,’ he said.

‘Oh, you get the odd one or two.’

It sounded snug on the other end of the phone. It was like talking to somebody who was in bed. Somebody who had just woken up and was still drowsy and smothered in blankets. Warm as warm skin. He could’ve listened to her talk for ages. He could’ve fallen asleep in her voice.

‘There’s one man,’ she was saying, ‘he rings me up and he asks me what I’m wearing — ’

‘What do you tell him?’

‘Sometimes I tell him the truth. You know, white blouse, black skirt, shoes that leak. Other times I make things up. Once I told him I was wearing a ballgown — ’

Moses laughed. ‘You don’t mind him asking?’

‘No, I don’t mind. If it keeps him happy. We laugh a bit. You know. You get on faster if you make people laugh.’

‘It’s funny, but I like listening to your voice.’

‘Thank you. You’re not going to ask me what I’m wearing, are you?’

‘Not tonight.’

A soft laugh. ‘Here you go, love. How does The Blue Diamond sound?’

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘You are clever.’

‘Don’t. It’ll go to my head.’

She gave him the number and he scribbled it down.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose I’d better ring off now.’

That made her laugh again.

‘It’s been very nice talking to you,’ he said. ‘It really has.’

‘The Blue Diamond,’ she said. ‘You take care now. Those nightclubs — ’

‘I will. Speak to you again sometime.’

‘Goodbye.’ She hung up.

He suddenly regretted not having asked for her number. There were millions of operators and he would probably never get her again. But imagine asking for the number of someone who works for Directory Enquiries!

He smiled as he dialled The Blue Diamond. The first four times he got the engagement ring or whatever it’s called. The fifth time he got through.

‘Blue Diamond.’ A male voice this time.

‘I want to speak to Gloria, please,’ Moses said. ‘She’s singing at your place tonight.’

‘She isn’t here yet.’

‘OK, can I leave a — ’ Bip bip bip. Moses felt his pockets for change. He fed another two lops into the slot. ‘Hello? I’d like to leave a message please.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘My name’s Moses. I’ve had a breakdown — ’

‘Is that nervous or mechanical?’

Moses smiled. ‘Mechanical. Listen, my car’s broken down in the middle of nowhere so I’m not going to be able to make it tonight, OK?’

‘Sounds a bit lame, Moses.’

‘Well, it’s true. Oh, and could you send her my — ’ Bip bip bip. He felt his pockets again. No more coins. He slowly replaced the receiver.

Love, he thought. Send her my love.

*

Placing his hands on the table, Moses lowered himself towards his chair, missed by six inches and sat down rather heavily on the floor. He peered at Mary through a blur of condiments. ‘Mary,’ he said, ‘I think I’m a bit drunk.’

‘You took for ever,’ she laughed. ‘What happened?’

‘Been in different worlds. Talked to,’ and he hauled himself up on to his chair, ‘very nice operator.’

‘Did you get through?’

‘Through?’

‘Your call, Moses. To your ladyfriend.’

‘No, not really. Nobody there.’

‘I’m going to try Alan one more time.’

While Mary was away, Moses tried to establish an upright position for himself, using, as reference points, the blue china cabbage on the mantelpiece, the distant figure of Red Blouse (a suggestive fleck of whipped cream just to one side of her lips — Blue Blazer gazing, sighing, fantasising), and a picture of a white horse cantering through peppermint surf, but every time he focused on something it multiplied, had twins, triplets, quadruplets, who began to run away as soon as they were born. He couldn’t keep up. He had lost this one. The entire room suddenly took off on a victory lap.

A rush of blackness, but it was only Mary sitting down.

‘Any luck?’ he said.

She shook her head.

He thought he saw traces of abandonment on her face. Smooth damp places. Sand abandoned by an outgoing tide. Some kind of ebbing.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

She downed her brandy. ‘I’m going upstairs.’

He stayed at the table for a moment, then moved off jerkily in Mary’s wake, as if attached to her by a long and invisible rope that had only tightened, taken effect, when she was twenty feet away. Umbilical, she would’ve called it. He fetched up at her side in an upright heap. Eyes vacant with alcohol. One arm held away from his body like a wing. For balance. Staring at the carpet, he wondered why anyone in their right mind would take vomit as a design motif. If he was sick, he thought, and he was sick carefully enough, maybe he could fit his sick into one of those obscene recurring patterns and nobody would ever notice.

‘You go on,’ he said. ‘Just got to ask something.’

He found their waitress in the lobby. She stood below him gazing upwards. She was very small. Tiny balls of light (reflections of the electric chandelier above) rolled about on the lenses of her glasses. He wanted to take her head in his two hands and tilt it until the silver balls stopped on the two black centres of her eyes. Instead he asked her for a local telephone directory. She produced one from behind the reception desk.

‘And two more brandies, please,’ he said.

She rolled the silver balls that were her eyes and moved off down the corridor.

He thumbed through the directory until he reached H. The same old routine, with one crucial difference: this time there had to be a Highness — Highness G, 14 Caution Lane, New Egypt. He read the names out loud to himself — ‘Hardware, Haseldine, Havana, Head — ’ he skipped a couple of pages — ‘Hick, Higgins, Hilton — ’ He must’ve missed it. He began again. Using his finger because the names were jumping. But no. No Highness. He straightened up, wrapped his hand round the lower half of his face. It could only mean one thing. His father didn’t have a phone.

On a whim, he looked up Peach. There were three Peaches, but none of them were Chief Inspectors. None of them lived in New Egypt either. Curious. Unless Peach was ex-directory, of course. He nodded to himself. Peach was cunning on two legs. Peach would be ex-directory.

The waitress returned with the brandies. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

He shook his head. He had wanted to ask his father an urgent question. He had wanted to know how Peach could possibly have discovered his identity. But now he had no way of reaching his father, not without returning to the village, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to risk that. Now he would never know. He began to walk towards the stairs.

‘Sir?’ the waitress called out. ‘Your brandies.’

*

Wallpaper like warfare. Salvoes of red roses exploding round his ears. Two brandies balanced in one hand, he ran up the corridor and burst into the wrong room. Red Blouse had changed into Pink Slip. Blue Blazer was no longer Blue Blazer; Blue Blazer hung over the back of a chair.

‘Oh, excuse me,’ Moses said, and, backpedalling, hit his head on the door.

‘No, that’s all right,’ Pink Slip said, slipping into Beige Robe (though, for Moses, she would always be Red Blouse). ‘Just leave them on the table, would you?’

Moses gaped at her. ‘What?’

‘Just leave them on the table,’ she repeated.

‘But they’re mine.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘They’re mine,’ Moses said. ‘I bought them.’

It was Red Blouse’s turn to gape. ‘Aren’t you a waiter?’

‘No,’ Moses said. Glancing down at his white shirt and his black trousers, he began to understand the misunderstanding. Red Blouse had obviously been too engrossed in Blue Blazer to notice Moses sitting in the corner of the dining-room. So it’s true, he thought. Love is a bad play and all the actors are blind.

Meanwhile Red Blouse was staring at him and all the time she was staring at him her mouth was opening wider and wider until it seemed that something must emerge. And finally it did. It was a scream. A scream so powerful that it wiped out the entire world. For some indefinable length of time (two or three seconds, perhaps — or a century, who knows?), there was no world, only scream. The scream of Red Blouse. Then it ceased and there was void, such as there was at the beginning of time before the world existed. Then the world crept back, shell-shocked, wary.

Moses began to slide backwards round the edge of the door, but he delayed long enough to see Blue Blazer (White Birthday Suit) catapult from the bathroom, skin trailing steam, trip on a pair of shoes (‘Are you all right, daaaaargh — ’) and nosedive into the carpet (Pink Buttocks, Brown Mole).

‘Sorry,’ Moses said, melting into the corridor. ‘Terribly sorry.’

Mary lay diagonally across the bed in the next room. ‘Did you hear somebody scream?’ she said, her voice sleepy with alcohol.

‘Scream?’ Moses closed the door softly behind him. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘That’s funny. I could’ve sworn I heard somebody scream.’

He knelt down beside her. ‘Brandy,’ he said.

‘How nice.’

‘Undress me,’ he whispered.

Removal of evidence.

He reached over and switched off the light.

‘No light?’ she said. ‘But I always — ’

‘It’ll make a change,’ he said, ‘won’t it?’

Sex. The perfect alibi.

*

Mary woke early the next morning. She dressed with a series of deft silent movements and left the room. In the lobby she made enquiries as to the whereabouts of a Mr Fowler, then she set off down the hill on foot. Mr Fowler, the village mechanic, proved most obliging. He told her he would tow the Volvo himself. He could have a new clutch cable fitted by midday, he assured her, twirling his spanner as a philanderer might twirl his moustache. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said.

When she returned to the hotel, Moses was awake. She gave him the good news.

‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you try Alan again?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ She came and sat on the bed. She was ninety per cent air this morning. Her fingers skimmed across his skin like a breeze. ‘Let’s go and have some breakfast, shall we?’

Ten minutes later they sauntered into the dining-room. Blue Blazer and Red Blouse were sitting at the same table by the window. No trifle fantasies today. No clasping of hands, no glances moist with furtive lust, no sweet nothings not disturbing candle-flames. No nothing. Only eyes lowered as if in shame. Blue Blazer spreading brittle toast, Red Blouse fingering the pleats in her skirt. Had Moses broken the spell by bursting in on them like that? Perhaps. But what a feeble spell then.

As Moses poured himself a cup of coffee he remembered having woken in the night. He had been lying on the counterpane, a chill on the surface of his skin. Naked. Dehydrated. No idea where he was. He could hear the radio going, low volume, something about the death of a famous comedian. He remembered feeling his way out of his dreams and across the room. Running the cold tap. Gulping two glasses of water straight down. Then, moving back towards the bed, he had paused, curious suddenly about the view from the window. He had imagined a vast dark sky, vaulted as the inside of an umbrella, and stars like punctures in the fabric, leaking weak light from behind, and the night air hissing, the night air seeming to escape, and then, below, the land falling away, hills and valleys rolling away in waves, unseen dogs barking, sleeping farms, a dim ribboning of lanes, wave on wave of invisible black hills and valleys, breaking against a distant silent horizon. When he parted the curtains he jumped back. A graveyard pressed its face to the glass. Cold gnarled stones up close. A thin tree beckoning. The stealthy bulk of a church. He hadn’t liked seeing this. He hadn’t liked seeing it alone in the dead centre of the night. He had hurried back to bed, huddled against Mary. He had buried himself in her untroubled warmth, in her oblivion.

He watched her now as she smoked and ate toast at the same time, as she swallowed the remnants of her coffee. He knew that he could admit fear to her. Admit weakness. Smallness. Anything. And that was what it was about, wasn’t it?

‘I still need you, you know.’

She looked up. ‘Why do you suddenly say that?’

‘I was just thinking,’ he said. ‘I remember you saying, a few weeks ago, in that graveyard it was, I remember you saying that it wasn’t you I needed but my parents, my real parents, and that I’d only be able to decide whether I needed you or not after I’d found them. Well, now I’ve found them, one of them, anyway, and I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided — I still need you.’

Mary smiled and came round the table and gave him a cool lingering kiss on the mouth. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Blue Blazer and Red Blouse pretending not to notice.

After breakfast they linked arms and walked outside. They followed the road that ran alongside the graveyard wall. A fresh wind blowing, laundered clouds.

‘What a lot there is to tell Alan,’ Moses said.

Mary pulled the hair away from her mouth. ‘I shall tell him everything,’ she declared, her chin in the air. ‘Everything.’

The general, he thought. His general.

‘I know you will,’ he said. He had expected her to respond like that. He knew she couldn’t tolerate restrictions of any kind. Restrictions were death to her, the stones over the wall.

Everything went so smoothly that morning, as if those few hours belonged to a different weekend altogether — Mary even allowed him to take a photograph of her (usually she shielded her face with a hand and cried, ‘No pictures,’ or asked him why he was threatening her) — and the sight of Mr Fowler standing in front of the hotel with the car when they returned from their walk seemed like a part of this.

He greeted them with a lopsided grin. ‘Good as new,’ he called out, patting the bonnet.

Mary thanked him for his trouble and wrote him a cheque.

Later they passed him on the road, his arms flexing at the elbows, the morning light hitching a lift into the village on his brilliantined black hair. They waved at him and he waved back.

*

‘I want some normal life,’ Moses said, as they eased into the heavy traffic on Camden High Street. ‘Could you drop me here?’

His gaze had fallen on the green wooden stalls of the vegetable market, the pyramids of tomatoes and oranges, the rows of aubergines, the spiky clusters of pineapples, and their colours seemed to plane the uneven surfaces in his mind, the parts that hadn’t slept enough. The sun divided a heap of newspapers into equal halves of light and shadow. A bare arm reached up and opened a third-floor window. Was that a tin whistle in the distance? He wanted to drift, mingle, breathe. It would be breaking precedent, of course — it would be the first Sunday in almost four months that he hadn’t been to Muswell Hill — but hadn’t they already broken precedent by spending the night together and besides, as Mary herself might have argued, what was precedent for?

She stopped the car opposite the tube station and, stretching across, hands resting on the wheel, kissed him once on the lips. It was a strange kiss — formal, barren, unlike her. A kiss with no history and no future. A kiss that said goodbye and nothing else. Her mouth had shut in his face like a door and she had withdrawn deep into the house to tend to something more pressing. He thought he understood as he got out. Now she was nearing home he had taken second place to her family. He leaned on the window. Stared at her.

‘You look tired,’ he said.

She nodded.

‘I’ll call you in the week.’ He never usually said things like this to her. It was that kiss. It had unnerved him somehow. He felt the car move fractionally against his body.

‘See you soon, Mary.’

He lifted his hands, stood back. She drove away. Hunched over the wheel. Like somebody driving in thick fog. He watched the car shrink, a metaphor for her withdrawal. He shrugged. Turned away. Leaving her to drive into a tragedy that he could never have foreseen because all the important things are shocks that take place on either side of your imagination.

It was Sunday afternoon.

He didn’t call her until the following Wednesday.

*

‘I’m home,’ Mary announced.

Her voice hung on in the air, a slowly dying thing.

She stood perfectly still, her hand on the edge of the front door, and listened to the empty house. The creak of a stair under no footstep. The automatic click of the kitchen thermostat. The wind testing a window in the living-room. She recognised the sounds, but she had never heard them on a Sunday before. How peculiar.

‘How peculiar,’ she said out loud. And felt a rope begin to tighten round her throat.

She took a few steps forward, down the hall, and stood in the kitchen doorway. They had the presence of inhabitants, those sounds. They had grown out of all proportion in her absence. In this silence.

She walked across the room and opened a window. Cold air flowed in over the back of her hand. Raised the hairs on her forearms.

There ought to be a note, she was thinking. But there was only a pot of cold tea. A jar of marmalade. A dirty plate.

Then a sound that didn’t belong. A guest sound.

No, not guest.

Intruder.

She turned round.

‘Mrs Shirley?’

A policeman and a policewoman stood in the kitchen doorway. Their eyes blinked like the wings of butterflies. She stared at them and saw such nervousness.

‘He’s dead,’ she said, ‘isn’t he?’