Dreams of Leaving (27 page)

‘Yes, this is it.' Moses nodded to himself. ‘I recognise it from the postcard.'

‘What postcard?' Gloria asked.

‘You'll see.'

Moses parked in front of the hotel. They both got out.

Standing beside the car with her coat over one arm and her case in her hand, Gloria stared up at the facade. The name – DOGWOOD HALL – in white foot-high letters. Ivy trimmed close to the pale yellow stone. Blank windows. Neat, well-groomed, oppressive. Even the gravel at her feet looked arranged.

She noticed a bare patch where Moses must have skidded when he turned the car round. We've messed up their drive, she thought. And then, Why did he bring me here?

‘Are you coming?' Moses called out from the porch.

Gloria looked up, smiled weakly. ‘Yes,' she said. But first she covered the bare patch over, using the toe of her shoe.

*

Moses strode towards the reception desk. He felt powerful, executive. A man with a mission. Moses, he said to himself. Moses Highness.

He put his two suitcases down, leaned on the counter, and waited while the receptionist finished shuffling his papers. The receptionist was superbly bald, his head a pale yellow dome of polished marble. It had the allure of a piece of sculpture and, for one awful moment, when the man bent down to pick up a sheet of paper disturbed by the wind from the open door, Moses thought he was going to reach over and stroke it, which was what he always did with sculpture. Fortunately the receptionist straightened again quickly, as if he had had some kind of premonition.

‘Can I help you?' he enquired.

‘Yes,' Moses said. ‘I'd like a double room, please.'

‘A double room.' The receptionist blew a little stale air out of his wrinkled sphincter of a mouth and opened the hotel register. ‘Can I have your name, sir?'

‘Highness. Moses Highness.'

The receptionist's head began to wobble violently on his narrow shoulders. He stood behind his counter and stared at Moses, his mouth a widening rift in the lower half of his face. It was like watching an earthquake in an art gallery. What if the head toppled? Moses thought. Would his reflexes be quick enough to catch it before it hit the floor and shattered
into a thousand pieces? He couldn't bear the idea of looking down and seeing one baleful eye looking up at him.

At that instant, Gloria appeared in the doorway, clasping her overnight bag in front of her with both hands.

‘And this,' Moses said, unable to restrain himself, ‘is Mrs Highness.'

‘One moment.' The receptionist stepped backwards through a red curtain into some inner sanctum.

‘He's extraordinary,' Moses whispered to Gloria.

Gloria clutched his arm.

Her grip tightened as the red curtain parted again. During his absence the receptionist had managed to regain absolute control of his head. Whether he had some surgical machine or device behind the curtain or whether he had simply applied a soothing lotion they would never know, but, whatever the remedy, his head was as firm as yours or mine as he asked Moses to sign the register.

‘I hope you don't mind me asking,' Moses said, ‘but have you been working here a long time?'

‘Yes,' the receptionist said, staring at Moses with his lidless eyes. ‘Yes, you could say that.'

‘By a long time, I mean thirty years. Have you been here that long?'

‘Yes, I've been here about thirty years.'

Moses leaned closer. ‘I'm only asking because I think my parents stayed here, probably during the fifties, and I was wondering if, by any chance, you remembered them.'

The receptionist tilted his head sideways (Careful! Moses thought) and read the name in the register. ‘No, I don't think so. I would have remembered a name like that.' And his upper lip lifted, raising the lid on a keyboard of discoloured teeth. It was a ghastly smile.

Moses drew back, disappointed. ‘Well,' he sighed. ‘I suppose it was worth a try.'

The receptionist laid the key of room number 5 beside the register. ‘I'm sorry I couldn't help you, sir. How long will you be staying?'

‘We're just here for the weekend.'

‘It's not often we have young people here,' and the receptionist's head began to wobble again. ‘I hope you enjoy your stay.'

Moses thanked him.

‘Second on the left at the top of the stairs,' the receptionist said, and disappeared behind his red curtain again.

*

Gloria climbed the stairs ahead of Moses and waited for him at the top. There was a surprising delicacy, even tenderness, about the way he handled the older of the two suitcases. It looked like a child in his grasp, she thought. A child clutching its father's hand.

‘That man gives me the creeps,' she said as Moses reached her.

He chuckled. ‘What did his head remind you of?'

Gloria shuddered. ‘I don't know.'

‘Do you know what I thought?'

She shook her head.

‘Taj Mahal.'

Gloria had to laugh. His face sometimes.

Moses unlocked the door of their room. It seemed cold inside because everything was green. Counterpane, curtains, carpet, wallpaper, lampshades, telephone. Everything. A few ungainly pieces of furniture stood against the walls. A tallboy. A wardrobe. A sideboard, its marble top veined like Gorgonzola. The bathroom had a chessboard tile floor. A jungle of silver pipes and fittings grew out of the back of the lavatory and up the wall. The taps on the basin said HOT and COLD. The wooden handle on the end of the lavatory chain was the shape of a slim pear. Gloria knocked it with her hand so it swung. Then she leaned over the bath and twisted the hot tap. Scalding water gushed.

‘I'm going to have a bath,' she called out, ‘then you can tell me all about these mysterious parents of yours.'

Moses smiled at her through the gathering steam, then withdrew into the room. He walked to the window. A lawn lay below, spread like a cloth of alternating pale-green and dark-green stripes, and stapled to the ground by croquet-hoops. Beyond the lawn, maybe a hundred yards away, the tarnished metal of a lake, fenced on its far side by a line of poplars that looked mauve, French somehow, as mist stole in behind them to remove the view.

The first weekend in June. Somewhere north of Leicester. He wondered why he had come all this way. Those questions he had put to Taj Mahal, had he really expected any answers, any joy? It had been too much to hope for. Still, he clung to the fantasy that his parents might once have stayed at the hotel, might have been happy there. Yes, maybe there was sufficient justification in that. Some kind of logic, at least. His homage to that secret world between the names. A message spirited across the years. Standing in their footprints.

He turned away from the window. He took a book out of his suitcase, tried to read, but found he couldn't concentrate. He could hear Gloria swirling water around. He walked towards the bathroom door.

‘Hey, Gloria,' he called out. ‘Any room for me in there?'

She laughed. ‘You must be joking.'

*

After their bath they climbed into bed, their bodies warm and damp between the crisp sheets. They made love quietly, as if someone was listening. When they finally looked away from one another, dusk had inked the windows in, like the o's in school textbooks. They lay there, not talking.

Gloria felt relaxed, drowsy. Moses had rolled over on his side, his back to her, his breathing soft and regular. She closed her eyes and her mind drifted loose, drawing pictures, spinning riddles. It was one of those dreams you seem to have under control,
seem
to, but the dream is strong, it strains at the leash, it knows pretty much where it wants to go; you think you're leading it and it ends up taking you for a walk. It began with a conscious thought or a spoken phrase, she couldn't tell which. It sounded in her head so clearly that she wasn't certain whether she had said it out loud or to herself:
I know what's going to happen
–

She was standing by the door facing into the room, her arms behind her back, the palms of her hands against the panelled wood as if she was holding it shut. The tall window in front of her was blue-black, a syringe glutted with blood.

What a mess it would make, she was thinking, if I opened it.

And, glancing down at her cotton summer frock, her bare legs, her little girl's white socks, she shuddered; the feeling was like opening the fridge on a hot day and standing in front of it with nothing on.

Moses was in the room too, she noticed. Over by the bed. There was a suitcase on the floor beside him, and he hunched over it, fumbling with the locks. He turned and looked in her direction several times, but didn't seem to see her. He acted as if she wasn't there at all. This was such a strong impression that she thought, Maybe I'm not.

At last he got it open. The inside, she saw, was lined with blue velvet and moulded into holes and slots of differing shapes and sizes, each one snugly filled by a piece of polished black metal.

Moses sat down on the bed facing her and slowly but professionally assembled the gun. This took time. It was a complicated thing. The only sounds in the room for a while were the clicks and squeaks of its interlocking sections and appendages.

She was going to ask Moses a question, but thought better of it. He seemed so removed. An automaton.

Finally he stood up and walked to the window. He opened it. All the blood, she noticed, stayed outside. She looked over his shoulder as he squatted down and, resting the gun on the windowsill, squinted along its gleaming barrel.

She saw herself walking across the tennis court in the garden below, trailing a black headscarf along the grass. (She recognised the scarf; it was the silk one, her favourite.) She was wearing a white summery dress fastened at the waist by a wide mauve ribbon. She didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular. Just walking.

The barrel of the gun tracked across until her head appeared in the centre of that tiny stylised spider's web. She chose that moment to glance up at the window, her eyes and mouth no more than dark smudges in the flat paleness of her face. Moses's finger tightened, squeezed the trigger. A thin jet of water spurted from the barrel.

She was standing by the door as before.

‘
Look
at me,' she was saying. ‘I'm
soaked.'

She glanced down at herself. Her summer dress, her legs, her socks, were drenched. With blood, she noticed, quite casually.

‘I'm sorry,' Moses said, sitting by the window, cradling the gun in his elbow. ‘It was only a joke.'

He smiled. It was such a distant smile. It was like watching someone smiling on Mars.

Gloria woke convinced that she had been awake the whole time, that it had been a daydream. It was only when she looked at her watch that she realised that she had been asleep for over an hour. Moses was still fast asleep, facing her now, one arm reaching out towards her from under his cheek. She wondered if
he
realised he was asleep. She thought it was funny that she hadn't been lying in bed with him in the dream because the room she had dreamt about was the room they were in now. The dream had used such recent, present things. She shivered, remembering the innocent way she had looked at the blood on her dress and her legs; she hadn't really known what it was. She hadn't been frightened, though, she remembered, and was surprised by that. And that smile on his face at the end, a slight variation on his usual smile, but not so different, really, now she thought about it. She looked down at him. The smile was on his face now, she saw. She shook her head. He was the only man she had ever known who actually slept with a smile on his face.

Without waking him, she got out of bed, walked into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror. She looked at the mirror rather than at herself. Tiny brown marks round the edge like liver spots. Old mirror. She picked up a glass from the shelf, filled it with cold water, and gulped it down.
Then she ran another bath, colder this time. Another bath? she thought. What's got into me?

She had already decided not to tell Moses about her dream, but one of the first things he said when he shuffled into the bathroom with one red cheek from where it had pressed against his arm was, ‘Do you want to know what I've got in my suitcase?'

Gloria studied her feet. They didn't reach the end of the bath. Nowhere near.

‘Have you been reading my thoughts?' she said.

‘I never read people's thoughts. They're private.' He grinned, sat down on the toilet seat. ‘You know, I've got the feeling you're going to like what I've got in that suitcase.'

So, Gloria thought. Probably not a shotgun kit then.

Moses tilted his head, narrowed his eyes. ‘Is that your second bath in two hours or did I dream we went to bed together?'

‘It wasn't a dream,' Gloria said.

*

Still drying herself, Gloria watched from the bathroom as Moses knelt down on the carpet and snapped the locks open. He lifted the real cowhide lid to reveal a mass of noisy tissue-paper. As he removed the layers, Gloria padded into the room on her bare feet, one towel twisted into a turban for her hair, another wrapped round her slender body almost twice. She stood behind him, one hand resting on his shoulder.

‘It's a dress,' was all she could, rather obviously, say.

‘Yes, it's a dress,' Moses said. ‘I think it must've belonged to my mother.'

Gloria was uncertain how to react. Standing behind him, she could only guess at his face. He had told her nothing about his parents, not a single word, but the act of opening the suitcase seemed to have dimmed the lights in the room, lit candles, started something. The dress rustled like a chasuble as he unfolded it, releasing an incense that was fragile with age and storage. He held it up for her to see.

The style was early fifties, she guessed. A tight, shaped bodice, a narrow waist with a white plastic belt, and a layered, frothy skirt, just below knee-length, which, if danced in, would whirl out horizontally, spinning and billowing. The colour was a soft damask pink with white polka-dots. A real dancing dress.