Dreams of Leaving

Strange Time for a Drowning (1956)

It was a hot day to be wearing black. The coffin-bearers counted themselves fortunate. The coffin resting on their shoulders measured less than four feet in length. It was also empty. The child’s body had never been found.

Very few people had turned out for the funeral. A gaunt bearded man, an ungainly blonde woman and five police officers. Two men in shabby black suits took up the rear of the procession. One of them, Dinwoodie by name, wore a sling on his right arm. He had pale swivelling eyes and long hair that was prematurely grey. The other ran the village greengrocer’s shop. Their heads tilted sideways and inwards like two halves of a reflection so they could hear each other without raising their voices. They had allowed a small gap to open up between themselves and the five policemen. That they were linked, as if by an invisible cartilage, to the main body of the procession was obvious from their conversation.

‘So what do you think?’ Dinwoodie spoke in a hoarse whisper.

‘Think?’

‘About the baby. Do you think he really drowned in the river?’

The greengrocer squinted into the sun. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s the story that’s going round.’

‘That’s not what I’m asking.’

‘Is he really dead, do you mean?’

Dinwoodie nodded. His eyes lit like hot ashes.

‘Well, if he’s not,’ the greengrocer said, ‘where is he?’ A logical man, the greengrocer.

‘That’s what I’m getting at,’ Dinwoodie said. Sweat oiled the working parts of his face. It was sweltering outside, but it was not the heat that he felt.

The greengrocer waited for his friend to elaborate. They passed a marble cross that had been carved to look like wood. A heap of stone fruit and vegetables adorned the base. The greengrocer’s grandfather.

‘What I’m getting at is, could he have escaped?’ Dinwoodie said.

The greengrocer raised an eyebrow. ‘A thirteen-month-old baby?’

‘All right. Could his escape have been — ’ and here Dinwoodie paused, searching for the appropriate word — ‘have been,’ he continued, ‘engineered?’

‘Ah,’ the greengrocer said. A logical man, but not an excitable one.

‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

‘Well what do you think?’

‘It’s never been done before,’ the greengrocer said.

‘So far as we know,’ came Dinwoodie’s fierce whisper.

‘So far as we know,’ the greengrocer agreed.

One of the police officers walking in front of the two men twisted his head and glared in their direction. Dinwoodie lowered his eyes. He examined the flagstone path as it passed beneath his feet. The stones were uneven. Weeds pushed through the cracks like mysteries demanding solutions.

‘There seems to be some tension,’ the greengrocer observed, ‘among certain members of our local police force.’

Dinwoodie’s pale eyes glowed. His hand, trembling, clutched at the air. ‘Is it any wonder?’ he said. ‘They never found the baby’s body, did they? The mystery hasn’t been solved. It’s just being buried, that’s all.’ He drew a large yellow handkerchief out of his pocket and began to mop his forehead and his upper lip. ‘We’re burying an empty coffin here. An empty coffin. Don’t you see, Joel? They’re admitting they’ve failed. The police have failed — maybe for the first time. Do you know what that means? It means there’s hope for us, Joel. There really is.’

Joel sighed. As if the sun had slid behind a cloud, gloom moved over his face. ‘You’ll never know.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘I’m telling you,’ the greengrocer said. ‘You’ll never know. Who are you going to ask? The police?’ He snorted. ‘There’s no way you’ll ever find out.’

‘Ah, this fucking village,’ Dinwoodie snapped. ‘You too.’

Chief Inspector Peach (known behind his back as ‘The Fuzz’) swung round, his lower lip jutting, his face pink with indignation. ‘Gentlemen, please. This is a funeral.’

The two men covered the remaining distance to the open grave in silence.

*

George Highness stood, gaunt and bearded, beside his son’s grave. How he loathed New Egypt, he was thinking. How he loathed and detested the place. Hate massed in his fists, drew the blood out of his knuckles, tightened the stringy muscles in the back of his neck. He looked older than his twenty-nine years.

He was facing north. The cemetery fell away in front of him, sank to its knees, offering a view. Tombstones rough as dead skin. Yew trees almost black against a flawless sky of blue. Then, at the bottom of the hill, a wall which contained, if you looked closely enough (and as a child he had), every colour in existence. Beyond the wall, a row of brick cottages. Above their rooftops, the elm that told him where he lived; it stood in his front garden. Away to the left and anchored in a dip in the land, the church. Unusual stonework: green on grey days, grey on bright days like today. Timeless, ancient, solid. He didn’t believe in it. Further left, a lane dodged the pub and ran downhill past the village green. Behind him all the time, the police station. As it should be, he thought. A brief smile twisted one side of his mouth.

He turned back to the grave. He watched the empty coffin being lowered into the ground. What a farce this was. He glanced across at Alice, his wife. Tension bunched in her shoulderblades so that, in profile, she looked almost hunchbacked. Strands of green-blonde hair lay lank against the nape of her neck. Behind her veil her eyes were blank as stones. Her face like bread, spongy and pale. An echo of the girl he had married.

*

The first time he noticed her she was eight, a white floating girl, a twist of smoke against the grey trees on the western edge of the village. He began to run across the field. Twice he turned his ankle on a furrow. It didn’t matter. He ran on. He had to close the distance between them. Catch her before she vanishes, he had told himself. A curious thing to say. But so right, so instinctively right, he would realise later.

He must have been eleven. Even then he had felt the pull of her strangeness and how magnetic somehow her frailty was. Close up, among tree-trunks veined with ivy and bindweed, her feet lost in leaves the colour of rust, she had the awkward grace of a bird. A stork, perhaps, or a heron. She had the same elongated neck, the same brittle stumbling legs.

He stood in front of her getting his breath back. She wasn’t looking at him. He asked her name.

‘Alice,’ she said. Without moving her feet, she turned away so he could no longer see her face. Rooted to the ground she seemed. A bird that would never fly. He could have seen it then. In that first meeting.

‘What are you doing out here?’ he asked her.

‘I was alone.’

Her hands moved among the folds of her white dress. Three years younger than he was, she seemed wiser, more adult. Like blotting-paper she soaked up the messy ink of his questions.

Still something possessed him to say, ‘Not any more,’ and she turned towards him and looked at him as if he had just spoken for the first time.

They had met by chance and their friendship continued as a kind of planned coincidence. This understanding arose: he looked for her, she waited for him. He always knew where to find her — by the river, in the woods beyond the allotments, up on the hill behind the police station (from there, you could see the village as it really was, a group of houses huddled in a hollow in the land, bound on one side by the river’s thin grey cord and on the other two by trees which, from that distance, all too closely resembled fences) — and soon they were spending so much time together on the village boundaries that people began to think they were up to no good. The truth was simpler, though still ominous, perhaps. They wanted privacy, secrecy. They needed territory they could call their own. So they went to the edge of the village. Had to go to the edge. There were no halfway houses. They both understood this early on and recognised it in each other. Peach recognised it too. He wrote a short memo regarding the two children. The police were alerted. Gently.

An endless source of fascination for George, those boundaries. Marked on the map, but invisible in real life. Invisible but concrete because people had believed in them for so long. He was overawed by the power beliefs could generate. He could even hear it. Like electric fences, the boundaries seemed to hum when he approached. He knew them off by heart, as he knew the names of the twenty-nine policemen who took turns to patrol them. The twenty-nine real policemen, that is. How many dummy policemen there were he had never been able to work out. They were always moving them around.

One of Peach’s inspirations, the dummy policemen. They were built out of straw, as scarecrows were, but instead of being dressed in rags they wore proper uniforms — helmets, truncheons, the lot. They stood in realistic positions throughout the village and the surrounding countryside. Their eyes always seemed to be staring at you. In poor light they looked as real as real policemen. It was an immensely cunning, uncanny and economical device.

They terrified Alice. She said they looked like dead bodies propped up. Whenever she saw one she had to poke or tickle it just to make sure it wasn’t alive. She was convinced that, sooner or later, one of them would begin to wriggle and giggle on the end of her finger. She dreaded the moment. She had another theory. She thought their faces resembled the faces of policemen in the village. ‘Look,’ she would cry, ‘here’s Peach.’ And George would tilt his head on one side, try to see the likeness. He wanted to believe her. She invented nicknames for them too. Peach she called ‘Melon’ because he was ‘much bigger than a peach’ or ‘Gooseberry’ on account of his short prickly hair. Marlpit was ‘The Waterfall’ because he dribbled so. Hazard she described as ‘the one with a face like a shovel’ so he became ‘Shovelhead’. But when she heard their heavy boots come crashing through the undergrowth she would flatten herself against the ground until it seemed the earth would open up and swallow her. Her eyes staring, her blonde head pressed sideways into the leaves, she would always whisper the same words:

The world is a dream

It will always be so –

It was the beginning of a nursery rhyme that every child in the village knew off by heart. It was what the boots meant.

*

By the time she was fifteen Alice was already moving out of reach, her mind a wild garden where only weeds grew. Their age-difference was beginning to count now. George tried with his own sharpening intelligence to cut through to her, to clear some ground, but no matter how hard he tried the jungle always grew back. Rain would fall overnight and in the morning he could no longer tell where he had been.

He remembered finding her once that year sitting in the tall grass on the hill behind the police station. He sat down beside her. She acknowledged his presence with a slow hydraulic turning of her head, so smooth and slow that, horrified, he thought of a machine.

‘Who are you?’ she asked him.

It wasn’t a joke, and he didn’t try to laugh it off.

The jungle always grew back.

It was during the same year that Tommy Dane made his famous escape attempt. Everybody knew about Tommy Dane. He was a phenomenon. So much so that a new word had been invented to describe him. Juvenile delinquent. George remembered thinking how complex, how grand, that sounded. Like a title or something. Tommy obviously thought so too. He certainly did his best to live up to it.

When he was seven years old he cut a rat’s throat during needlework class. A live rat. He used a pair of nail-scissors. The rat died theatrically on the scarred lid of his desk. When he was twelve he got a 22-year-old girl pregnant. The girl claimed that he had tied her to a tree with coat-hanger wire and then raped her. Tommy denied it, but people believed the girl. At sixteen he set fire to his parents’ house while they were asleep inside. They survived. The house burnt to the ground. Tommy decided it was time to leave home.

Rumour had it that he had staged a fake accident on the main road outside the village, using a stolen hayrick, his father’s bicycle and a gallon of fresh pigs’ blood. He arranged the hayrick and the bicycle so it looked as if the two had collided, then lay down on the tarmac with his head in a puddle of blood. He hijacked the first car that stopped for him. He climbed into the back seat and, brandishing a fiendish homemade bomb, shouted, ‘Get going, you bastards, or I’ll blow us all sky-high.’ Accounts of exactly what followed vary, but, somehow or other, the bomb exploded in Tommy’s face. The driver of the car (a spirited chap from the south coast, retired brigadier apparently) pulled into the side of the road, sprinted to a public phone-box, and called the nearest police station. Which just happened to be New Egypt.

George would never forget that afternoon. He was standing outside the post office with Alice when they brought Tommy in. It didn’t look like Tommy. Glossy yellow blisters, smooth as mushrooms, swelled on the left side of his face and the palms of his hands. One eye was a bloated purple slit. His hair must have caught fire at some point because it had shrivelled, coiled into a few black springs. He had no eyebrows any more. Invisible slings held both his arms stiff and crossed in front of his chest.

‘Where am I?’ he whimpered. Poor Tommy really didn’t seem to know.

Peach glanced round as if he too wasn’t quite sure, the sarcastic bastard. He took a deep breath and let the air out again in several tense instalments. By the time his answer came, it had acquired immense dramatic power. ‘New Egypt,’ he said.

Tommy Dane began to cry.

Peach put an arm round the boy’s shoulders, then looked up as if he expected cameras to be rolling. It was a historic moment, certainly. The rebel tamed, the system triumphant. The record intact. Nobody had ever succeeded in escaping from the village. And nobody ever would, Peach’s smile seemed to say. Later that day he threw a small drinks party at his house in Magnolia Close.

And Tommy? He went back to live with his parents in temporary accommodation, a pre-fab hut behind the vicarage. He died at the age of twenty-four. Some said he had committed suicide. According to the doctor (a more reliable source, perhaps), he simply lost the will to live. The events of that day closed a whole avenue of fantasy for George. If Tommy couldn’t leave the village, he reasoned, then nobody could. He was stuck there for life and he had better get used to the idea. He had just celebrated his eighteenth birthday.

Two years later he asked Alice to marry him.

They were sitting by the river. Side by side, as usual. Nine years of rehearsal for this moment. The month was September, the sunset that evening almost Victorian in its coyness, layer on layer of respectable black and grey. Then, unexpectedly, just as he spoke, the sky lifted its huge gathering skirts to reveal an inch of pink flesh, the hint of a calf. His scandalous proposal. Embarrassed, he glanced across at her. But she was staring at the river, her eyes flicking left to right, left to right, trying, it seemed, to follow separate pieces of water as they floated downstream. He knew she had heard him. He gave her time, as he had always done. He waited. The sky’s lights dimmed, the darkness of a cinema then. Side by side, their elbows almost touching, their dim profiles silver-lined. And then, when he could no longer see her face, she whispered, simply, ‘Yes.’

Afterwards he never asked her why she had accepted him. He could only suppose that he had got closer to her than anybody else, so close that she had been able to show him how far away she was from most people. A curious basis for a marriage, perhaps, but not untypical of the village where they lived. In those days, of course, he had still believed that her darkness would lift, that some kind of wind would spring up inside her and blow it all away like so many clouds. He had never imagined that it would thicken until the air of their marriage became impossible to breathe, until it was suffocation for her to live in the same house with him.

In bed she froze before he even touched her. Her body locked, keys turned in all her muscles. He could find no way to open her. He talked to her, but there were no magic words.

One night, months after the wedding, she called out. ‘Help me.’

He thought she was talking in her sleep and lay still.

‘Help me,’ came her voice again. ‘Please.’

He climbed out of his bed and into hers. He put his arms around her, but he could no more bend her than he could have bent a plank of wood. She would snap first. He held her, tried to still the trembling beneath her rigid surfaces. He held her until dawn came, watched the grey light wash into the shallow trough of her forehead, felt her nearest leg twitch under her nightgown, twitch again, then slowly begin to thaw, to stretch and flex until, curled into a foetal ball, she slept.

Aching and exhausted, he dropped away into a deep well of sleep, daylight a silver hole the size of a coin somewhere far above. He woke three hours later. Rose up through many layers of sleep in one breathless second. This sudden consciousness felt like vertigo. The bed was empty on Alice’s side, moulded but cold. Brushing the covers aside, he stood up, stumbled on to the landing.

‘Alice?’ His voice came to him as if through undergrowth.

He tried again. ‘Alice? Alice?’

Her face floated, bland and round, into the darkness at the bottom of the stairs. ‘What is it, George? What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. I just thought — ’

‘I was in the kitchen. Making breakfast. I wanted to surprise you.’ She smiled up at him.

Sometimes he wondered which one of them would go mad first.

*

After eight years of marriage Alice became pregnant. They couldn’t believe it. They had long since resigned themselves to a life barren of children. And given the village they lived in, perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea. It was no place for children, they told themselves. In fact, it could be seen as selfish, cruel even, if not actually criminal, to want to bring a child into their bleak doomed world.

But when Alice’s tests proved positive those layers of justification fell away like scaffolding no longer needed. Their marriage rose into the air, sheets of glass and gleaming steel, founded in rock, challenging the sky. They were giddy for days.

And Alice changed. It was like the simple tilt of a Venetian blind: she suddenly afforded views into herself that he had never known (or even guessed) existed. She sang in the mornings, she came down to breakfast naked, she altered her hairstyle. A new woman. Was it because there was now somebody inside her beside herself to think about? He didn’t know — and, superstitious where Alice was concerned, didn’t ask either. He remained astonished and grateful. They both felt rewarded. They made all kinds of plans.

‘We’ll plant roses in the garden,’ George said. He hated gardening.

‘We’ll paint the house,’ Alice said. She hated decorating.

‘We’ll shoot Peach,’ George said. They both hated Peach.

They began to laugh.

‘We’ll shoot the whole bloody lot of them,’ George said.

‘We’ll go away,’ Alice said.

Neither of them noticed the transition.

‘We’ll buy a caravan,’ George said.

‘A gypsy caravan.’

‘We’ll travel all over the country. Like gypsies.’

‘We’ll go everywhere. We’ll see things.’

‘We’ll get married again.’

‘A gypsy wedding.’

‘Jump over a fire hand in hand.’

‘You playing a Spanish guitar.’

George laughed. ‘You in one of those big whirly skirts.’

‘We’ll live happily ever after,’ Alice said. ‘Like in fairy stories.’

Roses were planted and the house was painted, but they skilfully ignored the point at which their fantasies failed to face reality. Happiness had turned them into children. The mood of innocence lasted, swept them into 1955.

On May 22nd, almost two weeks late, Alice went into labour. After thirteen hours she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. He weighed 11 Ibs 3ozs (a local record) and he had a widow’s peak which, according to George, signified a life of great good fortune. Otherwise there was nothing particularly unusual about him. Because both George and Alice had always liked the story about the Israelites crossing the Red Sea — in their eyes, of course, the pharaoh was a policeman — they decided to call their son Moses. There was hope in a name like that.

Alice returned home.

Two weeks later George found her in the scullery cupboard. She was vomiting. On the floor beside her stood an empty tin of baking yeast.

‘I wanted to rise,’ she whispered, when she could speak again. ‘I wanted to rise out of this place.’

He could almost have laughed, but a weight descended, crushing all humour, however bitter, crushing all thought. In the squalid darkness, squatting among hoes and rakes, smells of compost and turpentine, jamjars of nails, his wife’s face gave off the palest light. He knelt beside her, took her awkwardly in his arms. It wasn’t resistance that he encountered then, it was fear, stealing like a numbness through her flesh, stiffening her limbs. He heard the distant jangle of keys.

After that he would often hear her sobbing behind locked doors or see her crouching by the hedge at the end of the garden, the sun pouring its harsh light on her like scorn. She was sliding backwards and he couldn’t get a grip on her. She had lost interest in everything, Moses included. His size frightened her. His demands made her feel powerless: he was so strong. She wished, she told George once (her face caged in her hands, tears trickling through the bars of her fingers), that she had never had him. George could only gaze at her. It was such a brutal transformation.

When Moses was six weeks old, Alice drew the curtains and went to bed. In desperation George consulted the village doctor, a fussy bald man with a moustache like Stalin’s. The doctor used reassuring phrases — nothing to worry about, it’s only post-natal depression, perfectly normal — and prescribed a course of iron pills. ‘Time,’ he said to George. ‘Give her time.’ But time had always been difficult for Alice, and George wasn’t reassured. Meanwhile Moses was growing, changing, almost oblivious, as if his life had an uninterruptable momentum of its own. He slept the whole night through without waking and, for the first two months, slept in the mornings too. Once he had mastered the art of sitting up, he seemed content to spend the day on the floor, one hand on his stomach, thumb in his mouth, smiling. He had one solemn expression which he put on rather deliberately, like a cap. He seldom cried and seldom moved. In retrospect, then, a most unusual baby.

George had to learn motherhood. He sterilised bottles, changed nappies, wheeled Moses around in his new maroon pram. He even knitted Moses a simple romper-suit. He told Moses stories about New Egypt, and Moses often looked as if he was listening. Piece by piece, an extraordinary idea occurred to George. The picture, when he had assembled it, shocked him, shook him with its implications, but as the months went by it tightened its hold. First it became possible, then logical, and finally the only alternative. He realised that regardless of, because of Alice’s condition, he would have to share it with her.

‘Alice,’ he said one evening after a dinner that he had cooked and she hadn’t touched, ‘there’s something I’ve got to say.’

‘What.’

‘We have to let Moses go.’

Her eyes flickered, widened, but she said, ‘Yes.’

George’s patience had been fraying for days. Now it tore. ‘Jesus Christ, Alice,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t just say yes. Say what you mean.’

She sat motionless. Then she began to shiver. The wave of his anger subsided. Shame flowed into the spaces it had left.

‘Listen to me,’ gently now. ‘We have to get Moses out of this village. I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve got a plan.’

Alice said nothing.

‘I know there’s only an outside chance, but it’s the only chance he’s got. It’s worth it, for him. For us too, in a way.’

‘In what way?’ Her voice was so soft that the silence bullied it.

‘We’d be thinking about something other than ourselves. Maybe that would bring us together again. Maybe it would — ’ but he broke off, aware that he was walking into fantastic territory. ‘We have to do it. We have to try and give him what we never had. We owe it to him.’

‘I don’t know — ’

‘We owe it to him. What have we got to lose? Fuck all.’

His language had coarsened recently. The frustration, he told himself. The sheer bloody frustration of it all. He looked across at Alice. Her unwashed hair hung in limp greenish strands. Her centre-parting had the pinkness of a scar. She avoided his eyes.

‘You hate me,’ she said.

He sighed. ‘Alice, you know that’s not true.’

‘You’re bored with me. You hate me.’ Her voice had grown hard, serrated, but when she lifted her eyes to his the water in them warped and trembled like the air above a fire.

‘No.’ He reached across the table and took one of her hands. ‘I love you, Alice. I always have. You know that.’

She looked down again. Tears began to splash on to her skirt. Because he couldn’t see them falling from her eyes, they seemed to have nothing to do with her. This tyrant sadness had invaded her, was running her. She lacked the strength to fight it.

‘I love you,’ he repeated. ‘We only have each other. What else do we have?’

Her mouth tightened, shrank. ‘You want to take my child.’

George climbed to his feet. He paced round the kitchen. He let his eyes travel over things: the chipped spout on the teapot; the cobwebs slung between the cooker and the fridge; the lino floor curling at the corners as if stale; cracks, like black hairs, on the cups and plates; the window a tiny dribbling pane of glass. He felt as if he was walking on the ocean bed. If he opened his mouth to scream, he would drown.

‘Look at us,’ and he was still circling the room, ‘just look at us. We’re pitiful. Absolutely bloody pitiful. What can we do? Nothing. Not a damn bloody thing, Alice.’ He rested one hand on the back of a chair, pinched his eyes with the other. ‘But Moses — ’ and, using the boy’s name, his voice lifted as if in prayer. He sensed a change in the quality of his wife’s silence. He took it as approval. Or, if not approval, acquiescence at least.

The next day he dressed warmly in his old sheepskin coat and walked down to the river. It was a raw sunless afternoon in January. His breath streamed out behind him, a white scarf in the wind. It had been raining for days and the mud track sucked at his boots. He passed the tree-house that he and Alice had built fifteen years before. A few lengths of wood, blond and curiously straight, among the sinuous green branches. Dismantled by the wind, by other children. Almost unrecognisable now. When he reached the river, he squatted down and began to pick the bulrushes, snapping them off at the waterline so he would have a good length to work with. He kept going until he could no longer feel his hands. He held his hands out in front of him, red up to the wrists, and smiled. Something was happening. Something was actually happening. He gathered up his bundle of rushes and walked home across the fields.

He visited the river almost every day for five or six weeks. Sometimes lithe, sometimes sluggish, it was always there, alive, developing, like the drift of his thoughts. It gave him lessons in momentum, it taught him persistence. Some days he would sit on the bank and watch it go by, watch an endless array of objects twist and roll and jink their way downstream — sticks, cans, leaves and once, improbably, a wardrobe, its slim mirror bright as a knife in a drawer. Downstream. That was where Moses was going. In a basket made of rushes and sealed with pitch. That was the plan.

Alone on the bank, he would run through the mechanics of the plan, weigh up the coincidences it depended on, wonder, above all, at the cheek of it, and slowly it would begin to flow in his head, washing obstacles away, and he would know then that it was right, that it could work, that if he didn’t at least give it a try then the rest of his life would be a cowering, a ritual of flagellation, a bottomless pit of remorse. He knew the dangers too. They showed themselves often enough. Policemen appeared from nowhere, propelled by curiosity. They scrutinised his armfuls of rushes. They asked innocent loaded questions.

‘Rushes, Mr Highness?’

‘Yes, officer.’ And then, ‘My wife, you know. She loves having greenery around the place.’ Absolute crap, of course. In her present state, she couldn’t have cared less. And how he longed to sound defiant. To say, for example, ‘That’s right, officer. They’re rushes.’ Or even, ‘Yes. So what?’ He resisted. These would have been cheap victories. He forced himself to think in campaign terms.

But it wasn’t only the police he had to contend with. Once he came back from the river to find Alice waiting, hands on hips, in the kitchen. It was Valentine’s Day.

‘Hello, Alice,’ he said, kicking off his Wellington boots. ‘God, it’s beautiful out there.’ He felt good after his walk, his mind honed by the wind and cutting cleanly.

‘Don’t tell me,’ she snapped. ‘More bloody rushes.’

He looked up at her in surprise. She so rarely swore. And the air in the kitchen suddenly seemed compressed, squeezed into a space too small for it.

‘I need them,’ he explained. ‘I need them to practise with. I’m still learning, you see.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Learning,’ she mocked, and waved a hand in the air, palm up, as if scattering seed. ‘Learning, he says. You’ve got a lot to learn if you ask me.’

‘I’m sorry, Alice. I just don’t follow you.’ His mind not cutting quite as cleanly as he had thought.

Her sudden fury released a blast of heat in the cold room. ‘Spending all your time with these,’ she screamed and grabbing a handful of rushes from a vase on the dresser hurled them, stiff and dripping, at his face. They landed on the floor with a slap. ‘And none of it with me,’ she went on. ‘Now do you follow?’

George wiped his face with the back of his hand.

‘If you want to learn something,’ Alice sneered, ‘why don’t you try learning something about marriage?’

Still George said nothing. He was staring at the rushes. They lay on the floor like a prophecy or an omen.

Then her voice sank back into listlessness as she told him, ‘They’re beginning to drive me mad.’

He decided that, from then on, he would only pick what he needed. He would hide the rushes out of sight at the top of the house. If the police came round and asked where all the ‘greenery’ was, he would have to dream up a new story.

As he watched Alice fly from the room, her arms angled back like wings, it struck him that this plan of his could be seen as nothing more than an attempt to set some vivid daring achievement against a marriage that had become lack-lustre, irredeemable. But he loved Alice. He still loved her. And her unhappiness hurt him all the more because he lacked the power to alter it. He had tried. God knows he had tried. He now knew that her only happiness lay in sleep, in unconsciousness, and finally, he supposed, in death. Moses, though. He could do something there. However risky, however far-fetched, however painful it might prove to be.

He locked himself in the attic at night and worked for hours at a stretch. He had never been practical so he took a certain pride in the acquisition of this new and utterly manual skill. He suffered untold setbacks and began to understand why he had heard so little about basket-weaving. Awkward, monotonous, maddening work.

Then, one night, he found himself watching in fascination as the rushes began to flow from between his clumsy hands, braiding, interlacing, reproducing in their twisting plaits, in their infinite and subtle shades of green, the currents of the river they had grown in. His confidence rose, bobbed on the surface of his darker thoughts. He knew he could build a basket that would float, he knew the river would carry his son. He became impish and for the first time in years looked as young as he really was, if not slightly younger. He danced a jig in the spotlight of his desk-lamp. He unleashed silent cries of jubilation. He saw a policeman turn into the street below, a truncheon swinging from his wrist. From his attic window, the chink in the curtains narrowed to an inch, George mocked the policeman as he passed.

‘You fool,’ he hissed. ‘Fool bobby. Look at you. Bobby fool.’

It was four in the morning before his excitement died down and he could sleep.

During the hours of daylight he hid the basket under a torn sheet in the corner of the room. It looked like a miniature ghost — the ghost Moses would become. It looked capable of uncanny things. It radiated power. The various materials he had used lay scattered on the floor — dried rush-stems cut to length, coils of thin blond rush-stems stringy as hair, pots of rush-glue that he had made by boiling the base of the stalks — and the reek of pitch hung in the air, so acrid that it was almost visible. How long before it crept downstairs, spread through the house, filtered out into the village? How long before the police started poking their noses in?

In ten days he had finished. He took Alice by the hand and led her up to the attic. A drab spring day. Wind nagging the wet trees. When he drew the cover off, she held her face in both hands as if it contained something that she was afraid she might spill. She examined the basket with nervous fingertips, her left eye twitching. He had been standing close to her, his arm touching hers, but now he stepped back, allowed her room to speak.

‘It’s beautiful. It’s — ’ and she hunted for more words with her hands as if they might be found on her person somewhere, in a pocket, perhaps, or up a sleeve. ‘It’s, it’s,’ and they came tumbling out, ‘it’s like an ark, isn’t it, George?’

George clapped his hands, then brought them to his lips. ‘That’s exactly what it is,’ he cried. ‘It’s an ark. Of course. Oh, Alice. You’re — ’

He couldn’t speak. In that moment he had seen his wife transformed again. She had forgotten herself so rarely during their nine years of marriage. He opened his arms, offered her an avenue. She closed her eyes and turned into it, blind. They clung to one another. Just there and then, the room darkening, rain closing in and shutting out the world, she was with him.

‘Alice,’ he murmured. ‘I love you.’

*

A misty dawn in the June of that year. Trees’ branches blurred, hands gloved in white lace. The fields beyond the trees invisible.

The sun, the world, invisible.

Ideal conditions.

Since his birth, Moses had been growing at a startling rate and now, at thirteen months, he already measured over two and a half feet. George knew he had to act fast. If he left it any longer the whole thing would be impossible.

He turned away from the bedroom window. Alice was still asleep, her many anxieties holding her down, weights on her body, weights on her eyelids. She slept late these days. After that morning in the attic she had curled in on herself like a snail, all her life inside, withheld. When he tried to speak to her, she flinched, backed away, hands muffling her ears. She didn’t want to listen any more.

He crossed the landing to his son’s room. Moses lay on his back. He was gazing at his fish mobile. The window stood open a notch and cool air flowed in. Finned shapes swam in the gloom. When he noticed his father standing above him, one of his hands began to strike the air. Sounds that had the feeling of words and the complexity of sentences bubbled from his mouth. He would be talking in no time.

George reached down and lifted him out of his cot. The baby’s feet pumped the air like someone treading water. A trickle of silvery drool spilled from the corner of his mouth and ran down George’s sleeve. Moses grinned.

‘Thank you, Moses,’ George said. ‘Thank you very much.’

He carried Moses downstairs. He opened the kitchen door and groped one-handed for the light. The window jumped back, turned blue. The mist a bandage on the sky. The sun would soon bleed through.

He changed Moses on the kitchen table then set him in the high-chair while he made breakfast. Baked beans, toast and tea for him. Porridge with brown sugar, blended banana and a bottle of milk for Moses.

‘All your favourites, Moses,’ he said. ‘A real feast.’

Where would his next meal come from? What would it be? Who would be holding him? George squeezed his eyes closed for a moment, tilted his head back. His mind bustled with questions, a thousand voices babbling at once. He looked down at Moses, ran his hand through the widow’s peak. The hair stood up in a dark crest then fell forwards in wisps on to the baby’s forehead.

Remember these final moments.

The night ebbing. Trees rising out of the sky — dark islands, jagged coastlines.

Daylight beginning to heat the crimson roses in the kitchen window.

The taut click of the electric clock. The knocking of a waterpipe. The shudder of the fridge.

His nerves tightened and Moses, sensing tension, pushed the teat away from his mouth.

‘It’s all right, Moses. Everything’s all right. Here.’ His soothing voice as he touched the bottle to Moses’s lower lip. Moses began to suck again, his eyes drifting out of focus.

Later there would be no way to bring this close again or make it seem real. Memory is a museum. Events mounted on pedestals, faces in Perspex boxes, emotions behind looped red ropes. Everything temperature-controlled, sealed off, out of reach. Looking only. No touching. That alone is distancing enough but sometimes, after a difficult journey, you arrive at the bottom of the steps, those grand stone steps with lions sprawled on either side, and you look up and the museum is closed. New hours, renovation work, an obscure public holiday. There is nothing for it. You turn away. Later in George’s life there would be times when he doubted whether he had actually ever had a son.

The church clock struck six. George eased the back door shut, winced as the loose glass rattled. He moved across the damp grass, a suitcase in one hand, the basket in the other and Moses, snug in a one-piece suit, lying peacefully in the crook of his right arm. Nervousness turned his belly on a spit but he no longer feared anything. Now he was outside and under way, now he felt his plan begin to stir, to breathe, to come alive, he passed through fear into excitement. His eyes flicked from side to side, missing nothing. The row of marigolds, mist frosting their warm orange glow. The top of the fence a giant saw-blade. The hinges on the garden gate coiled like springs and burgundy with rust. The way he was looking around he might have been leaving the village himself. Seeing it for the last time. The one thought that had sustained him for the past six months now lifted him again. Moses was leaving New Egypt. Leaving the place where apathy lay like a fine dust over everything. Where people gave up, broke down, turned their faces to the wall. Where lips had forgotten how to smile and danger wore a blue uniform with silver buttons. Absurd. Pathetic. Criminal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He began to walk.

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

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

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

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

‘Moses,’ he whispered. ‘That hurts.’

Moses gurgled.

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

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

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

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

He nodded. ‘It’s done.’

*

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

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

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

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

Her resentment crystallised. ‘We’ve?’

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

Alice frowned.

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

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

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

‘I am,’ she said.

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

‘Upset,’ she added.

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

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

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

Her face collapsed again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t talk so much, he told himself.

Peach could be heard jingling a selection of keys and small change in his pocket. ‘And you, Mrs Highness, were upstairs,’ he said, ‘cleaning.’

Alice whispered, ‘Yes.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Peach said.

‘Chief Inspector, please,’ George said. ‘This has been a terrible shock for my wife. She’s very upset.’

‘And not for you?’ Peach enquired.

‘And not what?’ George asked, though he had understood.

‘Never mind.’ Peach moved from the window. Light invaded one half of his face. He seemed, unaccountably, to be smiling. ‘You have no idea who could be responsible for this?’

‘No idea.’

A long silence followed. George could hear the rustle of Dolphin’s notepad and the scratching of his fountain pen. Hazard was fidgeting in his armchair. He seemed to be trying to contain violence of the most unpleasant kind. Peach stared out of the window.

‘Unusual, don’t you think,’ Peach said eventually, ‘the disappearance of a baby?’ His voice light, almost conversational.

‘Not especially,’ George replied. ‘Babies disappear all the time.’ Only to realise that he had fallen for one of Peach’s tricks. A truly grief-stricken parent would never have answered with such apparent objectivity. ‘But,’ he rushed on, wanting now to convey courage in the face of adversity, giving himself, as it were, a stiff upper lip, ‘we haven’t given up hope, Chief Inspector.’

Peach moved across the room on extraordinarily light feet. ‘And what about you, Mrs Highness? Have you given up hope?’

Alice flinched. Eyes staring. Hands clenched. Still that girl in the woods, her head pressed into the leaves. The boots, the boots.

‘I told you,’ George stepped in, ‘she’s very upset.’

Peach said nothing. He looked at Alice, then at George, then at Alice again. His lower lip moved out and back. Once. Smoothly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’ll be all for the time being,’ and, gesturing to Dolphin and Hazard, spun like a huge lubricated top in the direction of the hallway.

George followed them out and suddenly couldn’t breathe. The three policemen packed the narrow space to suffocation point. They had arrested all the light, all the air. The coarse rasping blue of their uniforms everywhere. Even their breathing seemed blue. God, how he loathed that colour now. He couldn’t even look at the sky without thinking of policemen. Peach opened the front door and passed through. A draught flowed into the house. George gulped it down.

‘Not feeling too good,’ he muttered.

Dolphin made a note of the fact on his pad.

As George closed the door, he heard Alice run up the stairs.

*

The next day, at nine in the morning, the phone rang. The Chief Inspector would like to see them. Separately. Mr Highness at two p.m. Mrs Highness at three p.m. Was that convenient?

‘What is this?’ George cried. ‘A trial? We’ve lost our son, for Christ’s sake.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Highness,’ came the official police voice. ‘It’s the Chief Inspector’s request.’

‘Well, it’s out of the question. Absolutely out of the question. Please inform the Chief Inspector that we’ll be coming together.’

The official police voice sighed. ‘At two p.m., Mr Highness?’

‘At two p.m.’

George replaced the receiver.

Peach didn’t refer to this telephone conversation when they were shown into his office that afternoon. In his mind he had probably already turned their refusal to appear separately into an admission of weakness. Which it was, of course. Instead of taking them apart one by one, in isolation, he would now attempt to play them off, one against the other. Peach sat behind his desk, his lower lip drooping with scepticism. His eyelids looked heavy, ornately wrinkled, curtains that rose and fell on mysteries that ran for years. His fingers, plaited together on the surface of his desk, reminded George improbably of the rush basket. Peach asked them both to be seated. There was a pause while he adjusted the position of a document. Then he began.

‘You know, of course, that I’m suspicious.’

George assumed a puzzled air. Aware beforehand of just how exacting this interview was likely to be, he had been practising all morning in the bathroom mirror. He felt his eyebrows slide into position, he felt ridges forming in the skin above the bridge of his nose. Perfect.

But Peach turned away from him, making an irrelevance of his expression. ‘Mrs Highness,’ he said, ‘I think you know what I mean.’

Alice’s eyes rolled sideways in their sockets.

‘You mean,’ George rushed in, ‘that someone might have kidnapped Moses? Abduction. Is that what you suspect?’

‘Abduction?’ Peach pretended to be dealing with a possibility that hadn’t occurred to him. ‘No, not abduction.’

‘What then?’

Alice sniffed. (George had told her to sniff as often as possible. At awkward moments she should cry. But only at awkward moments. Strategy, you see. Anything to distract Peach.)

‘Deception,’ said Peach, yet to be successfully distracted, ‘might be one way of putting it — ’

George altered the angle of his head. He wanted to appear just that little bit slower than he really was.

‘Subterfuge would be another,’ Peach went on. ‘Intrigue. Finagling. Machination.’ A pause. ‘Conspiracy.’

George couldn’t resist. ‘Nice words,’ he said. ‘Roget’s Thesaurus?’

Peach’s steady gaze dropped in temperature. ‘Where’s Moses?’ he snapped.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

The two men’s eyes locked.

Alice began to cry. George silently applauded her timing then, looking at her, realised that her tears were genuine. He put an arm round her and drew her towards him.

‘If we knew where Moses was,’ he said, ‘we would hardly be sitting here, would we?’

Peach considered this. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘I thought you knew everything.’

Peach eased his chair backwards. His mouth widened in anticipation of a smile. The smile never arrived. He folded his hands across his belly. Somehow he managed to make this otherwise homely gesture look threatening. Another silence began. George stared out of the office window. To kill time he counted the thorns on a rose-bush. He had reached thirty-six when Peach spoke.

‘We found a toy dog,’ he offered casually.

George shifted in his chair. ‘Oh?’

‘By the river.’

‘By the river,’ George repeated. He wondered how Peach knew that Moses had a toy dog.

‘A white toy dog,’ Peach said. Leaning forwards, he reached into an open drawer, produced the white toy dog and stood it upright on the desk.

George gasped. It was Moses’s toy dog. Alice began to cry again. This time George didn’t notice. He couldn’t understand how the toy dog had fallen into Peach’s hands. He thought he had put it into the basket with Moses. He had certainly intended to. Did this mean that Peach had found Moses too? Was this interview just another of Peach’s sadistic charades? He reached out and picked up the toy dog. He turned it over, playing for time. He was trying to remember. He knew that he had slipped it into his coat pocket that morning. He had wanted Moses to have something to hold, something to comfort him on his lonely journey downstream. But, now he thought about it, he couldn’t actually remember handing the toy dog to Moses. It must have fallen out of his pocket then. So. Peach knew nothing.

‘Yes,’ George admitted, ‘this is my son’s toy dog.’ He put it back on the desk. His hand was shaking. The dog toppled over. He smiled. He had never been able to make the dog stand up.

‘You don’t seem particularly overwrought,’ Peach observed.

‘What do you want me to do? Break down? Would that satisfy you?’ George’s voice had lifted an octave in sudden anger.

‘Just an observation,’ Peach said. Two shelves of Pelican psychology ranged behind his head. Nasty little blue spines. Titles like The Hothouse Society and Alienation and Charisma. Something of an expert on the subject, Peach.

‘Just in case you haven’t noticed, Chief Inspector, my wife’s in a terrible state,’ George said, calmer now, ‘and the way you’re conducting this interview isn’t exactly helping matters.’

‘I know your wife’s in a terrible state.’ Peach’s tone of voice implied that, in his opinion, this ‘terrible state’ had nothing whatsoever to do with the disappearance of the baby. Implied, therefore, that he was privy to the secrets of their marriage. Implied, in fact, omniscience. Such a very cheap yet complex remark. Vintage Peach.

George said nothing.

The Chief Inspector shrugged. He stood up. Walked to the window and back, twisting one palm against the other. ‘Believe me when I say this,’ he said. ‘If there is anything irregular going on here, I shall discover it. Believe me.’

‘I believe you.’

‘Good.’

‘We’ve been here over an hour,’ George said, ‘and my wife’s exhausted. May we go now?’

Peach spread his hands. They were empty of questions.

As George guided Alice towards the door (grief had made an invalid of her), Peach appeared to relent. ‘We’ll do everything in our power,’ he assured the couple, ‘to find your son.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ George muttered.

Whichever way you looked at it, it was true.

*

Nobody could have predicted the effect that the news of the baby’s disappearance would have on New Egypt. During the last two weeks of June the apathy lifted. Rumours flew the length and breadth of the community on giant wings. At first people talked of a kidnapping, a ransom — even a child molester. But then talk of an escape crept in. Stealthily, very stealthily. The few who still harboured dreams of escape themselves gathered in obscure corners of the village — under the disused railway bridge, behind the cricket pavilion, at the back of the greengrocer’s shop — to discuss whether it was possible and, if so, how it could have been done. Dinwoodie held the floor, his bony hands marshalling facts, attacking the air, his extravagant grey hair tumbling on to his high shoulders, into his eyes. The greengrocer also advanced several interesting theories. The two men could often be seen returning through the summer dusk to the privacy of Dinwoodie’s garage. In the light of a single naked bulb, surrounded by tools and grease and the dismembered limbs of motorbikes, they would squat on fruit crates, they would whisper and gesticulate, they would rail and connive. ‘It is time,’ Dinwoodie had been heard to say, ‘to make a stand.’

Towards the end of the month things began to escalate. Dinwoodie founded a secret revolutionary organisation. He called it the New Egypt Liberation Front. It was dedicated, he said, to one simple political goal: freedom from oppression. He was just hours away from distributing the first copies of his manifesto when Peach led a dawn raid on his house. Hazard broke Dinwoodie’s arm in a scuffle by the garage door. The greengrocer, who had stayed overnight to assist with the printing, escaped unseen over the garden wall. The police confiscated (and subsequently burned) all the political material they could find and Dinwoodie, clutching his useless arm below the elbow, was arrested and hauled off to the station for questioning. The NELF was officially disbanded. It had lasted slightly less than twenty-four hours.

But the unrest spread. Several crimes were committed. A police officer was attacked by an unknown assailant in the dark alley that ran behind the post office. Dinwoodie’s repeated cries of Fascists carried from his cell in the police station to the road outside where his mother and his sister waited with blank faces and nervous hands for his release. Even more disturbing, perhaps, PC Fox reported the existence of ‘a number of wreaths and assorted bunches of flowers’ on Tommy Dane’s grave in the churchyard. The story of that desperate bid for freedom in the forties had been revived and was being retold in graphic and inflammatory detail through the village. They were witnessing, Fox suggested, the first stirrings of a Tommy Dane cult.

Once again Peach reacted with speed and efficiency. He imposed a curfew. Anybody found on the streets of New Egypt after nine p.m. would be arrested immediately. The offender would be liable to the severest penalties. Peach called an emergency meeting in the church hall to explain his decision. He had introduced the curfew, he maintained, in order to safeguard ‘our future’, the children of the village.

‘We cannot risk another tragedy,’ he declared in his most sombre voice.

George wasn’t fooled.

Two days later the discovery of the white toy dog beside the river became common knowledge and people began to talk of a drowning. George smiled to himself at this shift in public opinion. Rumours of escape were dangerous, subversive. Rumours of death, on the other hand, were quite harmless and acceptable. Peach must have leaked the information with that specific end in mind. George shook his head. How gullible, how fickle people were. How shrewd Peach was.

At the beginning of July a heatwave hit the area. The sky burned white and the clouds hissed like steam. The sun beat down on the drum of the land. People retreated indoors complaining of headaches. Volunteers for the search-parties dwindled. The gossip withered and died away. Now everybody had forgotten about him — even his mother and his sister had given up their vigil — Dinwoodie was quietly released. As apathy descended with a vengeance on the population, so the pressure on the police department began to lift — a perfect example of what Peach liked to call the scissor effect. The grass on the village green turned brown. The leaves on the trees were so dry that they clicked as if they too were made of wood. Rain became a memory. Peach declared a drought. He issued a comprehensive list of instructions pertaining to the use of water: no washing of cars, no lawn sprinklers, no baths. Now people really had something to moan about, something nice and trivial. The search-parties continued, consisting entirely of police officers. Lines of sweat-drenched uniforms could be seen combing the long grasses and the bramble-patches in the vicinity of the river. Peach ordered Dolphin, a powerful swimmer, to drag several hundred feet of the river-bed. No new clues turned up. No fresh evidence. One white toy dog. That was all that remained of Moses Highness. It was a strange time to talk of a drowning but no other conclusion could be drawn.

Towards the middle of the month, almost five weeks after Moses’s disappearance, George was summoned to Peach’s office, alone this time. A far less combative, far wearier meeting. One look at Peach’s face and George guessed.

‘Nothing new, then.’

‘Nothing new,’ Peach admitted. ‘We’ve tried everything, exhausted every possibility.’ He sighed. ‘I can only conclude that Moses, your boy, drowned in the river. We shall never know exactly how.’

George hung his head for an appropriate length of time. When he looked up, the necessary tears filled his eyes. ‘There’s really no hope?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Of course I knew there was a possibility that Moses might have, might have drowned. I just never — ’ His voice faltered and he looked away. His acting had definitely improved.

‘Well,’ Peach said, ‘I’m making it official, as from today,’ and he consulted his calendar, ‘July the fourteenth. We can’t have any loose ends, you understand. Not in a matter like this.’ He paused. ‘There will be the funeral to take care of.’

‘I know.’

‘If there’s anything I can do — ’

George scanned the Chief Inspector’s face for its usual irony. Not a trace. Genuine compassion then. Peach could be almost likeable at times. That was what made him so dangerous.

‘Thank you,’ George said.

Any elation he might have felt as he walked to the door of Peach’s office had been dismantled by the preceding weeks of pressure and suspense. And, for all he knew, Moses might really have drowned in the river.

That would have been the cruellest irony of all.

*

The priest sprinkled a handful of token soil on to the coffin lid. The grave gaped. A mouth in the ground not saying anything. Soon the sexton would arrive. Stop it up with spadeloads of earth. Stop it up for ever. Eternal silence.

George wondered.

His grandfather and his father were buried here. Now his son. In a way. He had a sudden urge to laugh, to screech with laughter, to guffaw. He coughed instead.

He glanced round. So few mourners. A dozen, if that. And half of them policemen. Things were definitely back to normal. Even now he was being watched. Perhaps he would always be. He caught Dinwoodie’s eye and felt the tug of the man’s curiosity. He would like to have let Dinwoodie into the secret (imagine his face!) but Dinwoodie had a mouth on him, everyone knew that. If it wasn’t his escape plans, it was his revolutionary party. No, he would never be able to tell Dinwoodie. Or anyone else, for that matter. He turned back in time to see the priest close his prayer-book. The priest’s sacred words were already evaporating in the heat.

The service over, there was a general adjusting of collars and veils, a general shuffling and clearing of throats. As George steered Alice away from the grave, Peach loomed, a mass of blue curves, vacuum-packed into his dress uniform.

‘Please accept my condolences,’ he said, ‘my sincere condolences,’ and rested a heavy hand on George’s shoulder.

The resonance of this gesture was not lost on George. So devious this Peach. Even now his mind would be on the move, bristling with suspicions as an army bristles with spears.

‘Thank you,’ George said. The briefness grief allows you.

But Peach was unwilling to let go just yet. ‘We did everything we could,’ he said. ‘As I’m sure you know.’

‘Oh, we know that, Chief Inspector. We know that.’ George considered the sky, its empty unblemished blue, Peach’s face a pale blur in the foreground. And he smiled. ‘If you could’ve found him, you would’ve done. I can only thank you for all you did on our behalf.’ Overdoing it a bit, perhaps, but in a kind of trance. He had climbed, it seemed, into thin exhilarating air.

Peach shielded his eyes and fell back on convention. ‘Not at all, Mr Highness,’ he said, and pleasantly enough, ‘not at all.’ Tugging at the front of his tunic he turned away to rejoin his colleagues.

Relief drifted upwards through George’s body, the faintest of breezes, cooling him, refreshing him, but not visibly disturbing his outer surfaces. He couldn’t allow relief to register. He would always be careful.

He turned to Alice, took her arm.

‘Let’s go,’ he said, ‘shall we?’ Secretly rejoicing that his plan, against all odds, had worked.