Dreams of Leaving (19 page)

‘Post them,' George snapped, and hung up.

As he reached for his tartan dressing-gown, his body began to shake.

*

Alice, Alice, Alice.

He tried to use the sound of her name to bring her back. It had been so long. He was in danger of losing his sense of her. It would be as if she had never been.

He tried to gather solid details. To give her death, in distance, substance.

That green-blonde hair, scraped back in a denial of its beauty. Her shoes scattered, often singly, throughout the house, the insteps cracked, the heels trodden down. The time when, pregnant, she walked naked down the stairs to breakfast. And later, in the winter, the tip of her tongue on her top lip as she trickled peanuts into the miniature wire cage in the garden so the birds wouldn't starve. And that blurred smile, almost tearful, flung his way like a handful of grain, breaking up as it arrived.

Her smiles always blurred, as if seen from a moving train.

Her eyes always creased at the edges by dreams of leaving.

And how he would come back sometimes to find the doors locked and the curtains drawn. How he had to break into his own house. And all the breakfast things still standing on the table. Immovable from hours of being there. Petrified.

The butter decomposing on a china dish.

Wasps suffocating in the marmalade.

Such padded silence.

It was summer, the hot summer of 1959, but she wouldn't have the windows open. When he asked her why – a stupid question, but he could think of no others – she turned her smudged and punished eyes on him and said, ‘Go away.'

Him, the world, everything.

For hours, for days, she lay upstairs. Once he walked into her bedroom, sat down on the quilt. In the darkness he mistook her shoulder for her forehead. The bed shook with her crying.

‘Why are you crying, Alice?' he asked her. ‘Tell me why you're crying.'

‘I don't know, I can't help it, it just happens, I don't know why, I'm happy really – ' It all came flooding out until she was crying so hard her words lost their shape, became unintelligible.

She was committed in 1960. She committed herself, really. She wanted it. That was one day he didn't have to search his memory for. Maroon ambulance, black mudguards. Big silver headlights. And Alice shuffling down the garden path, taller than the two nurses who supported her. Eyes rolling upwards in their sockets. Frightening white slits. Regal somehow. But mad. Or not mad, perhaps, but painfully, unbearably unhappy. Mauve smears on her white exhausted face. Channels worn by the passage of tears. He remembered thinking, Alice is escaping. For the Belmont Mental Home, ironically, stood some three miles beyond the village boundary.

She only came back to the house once. And talked about prisons constantly. And the prisons kept shrinking. First it was the village. Then it was their house on Caution Lane. In the end, of course, it was her own body.

Alice is escaping.
Well, now she had.

Perhaps he shouldn't cry for her. He had read somewhere that tears are like ropes: they tie a person's soul to the earth. Now the prisons no longer existed for her she was free. And he should let her go.

He sat in the kitchen and reviewed the twelve years he had spent alone. He had sung in the choir, and his voice – a bass baritone – had performed respectably enough. He had given lectures in the church hall under the watchful eye of the Chief Inspector, lectures on the history of the region, the traditions and the crafts. He had never really socialised, but nor had he been rude when approached.

And then there had been his book.

He rose to his feet and walked into the front room. Selecting the smallest key from the bunch he kept in his pocket, he unlocked the lid of his writing-desk. He reached in and pulled out a bundle of paper. About a hundred typed pages. His secret manuscript. The title scrawled in spindly black capitals:

He weighed the book in his hands. Not much to show for almost a year's work, but then he had scrapped a good deal. Besides, it had served its
purpose. It had got him through those first few months of living without Alice. Plunging into a personal history of the village, he had found that he lost track of time, that he could put his loneliness to good use, that he could exorcise the ghost that Alice had become. He remembered those hours, days, weeks at the writing-desk with a kind of grateful nostalgia.

Shifting a pile of old newspapers, George sank down on to the sofa. He loosened the red string that bound the manuscript and turned the title-page. He skimmed across the opening sentence with a wry smile (I was born in the most boring village in England). With Alice still in mind, he moved forwards to his chapter on escape and began to read.

Stories of escape-attempts, songs of resignation and disillusion, fantasies about the outside world abound in the village and form a unique body of local folklore. They divide into two distinct categories. On the one hand there are ballads, nursery rhymes and moral tales, all of which serve to remind people of their allegiance to the village and to persuade them, often insidiously, that the world outside is a hostile and lonely place. Great emphasis is laid on roots, the idea of a birthplace, the feeling of being among people you have grown up with. An example of this first category (which is, by the way, the official folklore of the village and is written, more often than not, by members of the police force) would be the story of the man who leaves the village in search of a better life. At the beginning he can scarcely contain his joy. The open road, the new earth beneath his feet – why, the very air smells of freedom!

Then the sky slowly darkens and rain begins to fall. The man suddenly realises that he has lost his way. The wide grey landscape is deserted. He is alone. I may be lost, he tells himself, but at least I'm free.

After walking for a while he happens across a country tavern. Soaked to the skin, he asks the landlord for shelter.

The landlord eyes him with suspicion. ‘You're not from around here, are you?' he says.

‘No,' the man says.

‘Be off with you then,' the landlord says. ‘We don't have any dealings with strangers.'

At nightfall the man reaches a small town. His feet ache. He is chilled to the bone. He turns into an alley in search of a cheap place to eat and is set upon by a gang of local youths. They beat him senseless and steal what little money he has. He sprawls among the dustbins, big round drops of rain landing on his closed eyelids like pennies thrown to a blind man. I'm still free, he mutters.

A car drives into the alley and two policemen climb out. They arrest the man on a charge of vagrancy. They call him names and lock him in a cell for the night. The man lies shivering under a single coarse blanket. He has no home, no money, no future. As day dawns he stares out through the bars. I'm free, he thinks.

George was becoming depressed. He put the manuscript aside and went out to the kitchen. When he returned five minutes later with a pot of tea and a packet of Butter Osbornes he skipped a few pages. Then he saw the
name Batley, and it opened a drawer in his memory. The Batley Affair. So long ago now. His interest awakened, he began to read again.

Oscar Batley is descended from de Barthelay who came over with William the Conqueror in 1066. He is hereditary lord of the manor and lives on the outskirts of the village in a house called Stone Hall. A man of considerable breeding, wealth and ingenuity, he has a film-star's eternal black hair and cheeks the colour of rare roast sirloin. In 1938, at the age of seventy-nine, he tried to escape. He bribed the doctor to pronounce him dead. (He decided on a sudden and tragic heart attack; after a lifetime of rich food and vintage wines, this had the ring of plausibility.) He then bribed the undertaker, not only to co-operate in the provisions for his funeral, but to build a coffin with hidden ventilation-holes. Finally he bribed the sexton to delay filling in the grave until the day after the funeral.

Batley's plan hinged on the fact that, according to ancient custom, he was entitled to be buried in an ancestral plot of land adjacent to his estate, the western wall of which happened to serve as part of the village boundary. Once the ceremony was over, the coffin would be lowered into the grave, the mourners would disperse, and Batley would wait in air-conditioned comfort until night fell. Then he would ease off the lid, clamber out of the open grave, and make good his escape across the wooded country to the west. Since he had died, the police would not be looking out for him. So the logic, presumably, went. An ingenious plan, but flawed in one fatal respect.

Batley died successfully enough. Death certificates were drawn up by the doctor and filed with the police. The coffin had been prepared in accordance with Batley's detailed instructions. The sexton had agreed to play his part (his initial misgivings overcome by a twenty-five per cent increase in his pay-off). A marble headstone had even arrived, imported from Carrara in Italy. Everything might have gone smoothly had Peach not insisted on a grand funeral procession through the village. Batley was an important local figure, Peach argued, and should be treated as such.

Batley's Victorian phaeton was wheeled out of his stables. It was repaired, oiled, and given a new coat of paint. Farmer Hallam agreed to supply two black horses for the occasion. There was a problem, however, with the plumes.

George couldn't help smiling. He was thinking of Tabasco, the undertaker. Shortly before his death, Tabasco had sat George on his knee and told him about the week Lord Batley spent in his back parlour. Tabasco had considered Batley a snob and a fraud, and he had rather enjoyed the power that the peculiar situation had bestowed on him. How Tabasco had cackled as he recalled his whispered dialogues with Batley! One, George remembered, had gone something like this:

‘What the devil's happening, Tabasco?' Batley sat in his coffin like a large disgruntled baby. ‘Why all the delay?'

‘They're going to have a special procession for you,' Tabasco told him, ‘because you're so important.'

‘Oh God,' Batley groaned and ran his hands through his black hair in
which, to Tabasco's immense satisfaction, streaks of grey were beginning to show. (So it was true: the hair
was
dyed.) ‘How long am I going to have to wait?'

‘Your guess is as good as mine. A week at least. Maybe longer. You know what this place is like.'

‘Why, for heaven's sake? What's holding us up?'

‘The plumes.'

‘
Plumes?
What plumes, man?'

‘The black plumes, your lordship. For the horses' heads. You can't have a funeral procession without black plumes. Not for someone of your distinction. That wouldn't do at all, would it?'

‘Oh, damn this bloody place to hell.'

‘I think I'd better screw you down,' Tabasco said. ‘I can hear somebody coming.'

Just an excuse, of course, to shut the bastard up.

Still smiling, George read on.

No black plumes could be found. Lord Batley grew restless in his coffin. He complained of headaches, cramps, disorientation. He moaned about the food. He cursed what he called Tabasco's ‘inefficiency'.

Meanwhile, in Magnolia Close, Hilda Peach, the Chief Inspector's resourceful wife, was improvising a pair of black plumes out of two old straw brooms.

The day finally came. It was December 15th 1938 –

How clearly George remembered that day. He must have been eleven. Clouds the colour of lead. Searing cold. His gloved hands. Alice on the other side of the street, standing between her parents, the wide dish of her face tilted at the sky like radar. Then the clatter of carriage wheels on the cobblestones. And what happened next.

– and the weather was bitterly cold. The route which the funeral procession was to follow had been mapped out by Peach himself. Lord Batley would lie in state in an open coffin. The people of New Egypt would line the streets. They would be wearing black. It would be a solemn but memorable conclusion to the life of a distinguished local figurehead.

Things turned out differently.

As the carriage slowed to negotiate the sharp bend that led to the church, PC Fisher noticed clouds of white smoke rising from the coffin. He broke ranks and hurried discreetly to Peach's side. Peach was supporting the grief-stricken Lady Batley.

‘Chief Inspector, sir,' Fisher clamoured. ‘Lord Batley's on fire.'

‘A dead man on fire?' Peach raised his eyebrows. ‘A little unlikely, don't you think?' Glancing down at Lady Batley, he seemed to be addressing the question to her. Lady Batley's eyes floated like pale helpless fish on the surface of her face.

‘I know it sounds unlikely, sir, but look. Smoke.'

Peach looked. ‘That's not fire,' he said calmly, ‘that's breath. The man is still alive.'

Lady Batley collapsed moaning against Peach's arm. He passed her unceremoniously to Fisher.

Lord Batley was removed from his coffin in full view of the villagers who had lined the streets in his honour, and escorted, under their disbelieving gaze, to the police station. His widow followed, still weeping – though for a different reason now. The funeral cortège was quietly disbanded. The villagers returned to their houses.

As a direct result of this episode, it has become much harder to die. Inhabitants of New Egypt are subjected to a series of rigorous tests before being allowed to rest in peace. Peach inspects each corpse in person. ‘One Lazarus is enough,' he is supposed to have said in that winter of 1938.

But what of those who had taken bribes from Batley?

The doctor was carefully beaten up by PC Hazard prior to having his licence to practise removed. Tabasco died two months after the funeral – in place of Batley, perhaps. The sexton, meanwhile, was given a lecture on greed by Peach and forcibly retired on a meagre pension.

And Batley?

Batley is still alive and well and living in New Egypt. He is one hundred and three years old now and is believed by many to have lost the ability to die –