Dreams of Leaving (29 page)

‘Well,' Gloria was pouring the champagne, ‘you got there in the end.'

‘I always do. It's just that the middle can sometimes take a very long time.'

‘Which can be a good thing,' Gloria said, ‘in certain circumstances.' She slipped her clothes off, slipped into bed.

‘I think I follow you,' Moses said. And did.

He turned out the one light they hadn't broken.

Gloria had draped the pink dress over a high-backed chair. In the moonlight the chair disappeared. It looked to Moses as if somebody was wearing the dress, somebody invisible, leaning towards him, bending over him, saying goodnight –

*

Gloria had opened the window. It was late. She leaned on the sill and blew smoke out into the night. It was so quiet after London, so quiet she could hear the blood hissing in her ears. She didn't feel tired any more, or drunk. If anything, the champagne had straightened her out. No tennis court lay below her, only a lawn, but she shivered as she remembered her dream.

‘Moses? Are you awake?'

‘Yes.' He sounded comfortable over there in the bed.

‘Moses, I'd like to go rowing. What do you think?'

He sat up. ‘
Rowing?'

Gloria faced into the room and made her hands into fists. She held them out in front of her and pulled them towards her chest several times, energetically.

‘Ah,' Moses said. ‘Rowing.'

‘There's a boat on the lake,' Gloria said. ‘I saw it when we arrived this afternoon.'

She could just make out the shape of Moses putting his feet on the floor.

‘So,' he said. ‘Rowing, is it?'

There was nobody about downstairs. The grandfather-clock in the hallway made them jump and cling to one another as it struck quarter past two. They walked over the blue-grey lawn, their feet soundless on the grass. The lake looked bright and black and waterproof. It could have been a giant tarpaulin spread out on the ground.

They found a boat complete with oars moored to the jetty. Gloria stepped in first, then Moses cast off and jumped on board. They almost capsized. The water made fleshy noises as it slopped against the sides.

‘This is like being drunk,' Moses said.

Gloria laughed. ‘You
are
drunk.'

She sat in the stern, hugging her knees, and watched Moses steer away from the jetty, noting the slight frown of concentration as he manipulated the oars, his head moving this way and that, judging distances seriously. Tiny creases appeared in the place that was made for creases in between her eyebrows. They signified emotion of the deepest kind.

‘Moses,' she said in a voice that rose into the night sky like a full moon, ‘I think, in a curious way, I love you.'

Moses pulled on the oars, and pulled with such vigour that the boat was halfway round the lake (and Gloria was flat on her back in the stern with her legs in the air) before he replied.

‘That,' he said, ‘is a very exciting thought.'

They were late for breakfast.

The hotel guests stared. Perhaps they had been woken in the night by the crash of falling armour, perhaps they had heard a boat on the lake in their dreams, or perhaps they were just senile, staring but seeing nothing. Most of them seemed to be approaching the end of their meals and would soon be gone. For breakfast read life, Moses thought.

The young couple (as they were probably now being called) sat at their table for ages, talking and smoking and drinking coffee. There was no rush; the sky showed blue at the top of the window and a 22-carat sun gilded the trees with layers of gold leaf. They knew the fine weather was going to last because Jackson had forecast rain. He had advised Moses to take along plenty of waterproof clothing. Foolish well-meaning Jackson.

On their way to the gardens at midday they passed the suit of armour in the hall and noticed that the helmet had been returned to its proper place.

‘Did I really?' Moses said.

‘You know you did,' said Gloria.

Moses paused on the front steps, his spirits lifted by the warmth of the morning and the light breeze that was carrying, as if on a silver tray, the unexpected smell of wild strawberries. Gloria looked stunning, almost edible, in her pink angora cardigan and her flaring yellow skirt and her sunglasses (for her hangover, she said). Moses had dressed all in white. Shirtsleeves rolled back along his forearms and a pair of loose-fitting cricket-flannels. Standing together in front of the hotel, they might have been posing for a photograph.

The path they took reproduced, in miniature, the twists and turns of the nearby river. It led away from the hotel, then doubled back and worked its way round to the old stables and outhouses. Trees arched overhead, meshed in a green ceiling, allowed only random shafts of sunlight through. Gloria walked in front, swinging her bare legs, turning every now and then to say something, patches of light illuminating different parts of her in turn – the hem of her skirt, one half of her face, the back of a knee – as if she had been invested with the memory that he had shared with her the previous night.

After twenty minutes or so they reached a point where the path veered away from the river and the trees thinned out. Gloria lifted a hand and pointed to a green door in an old brick wall.

‘What's that?'

‘Let's look.'

The green door wasn't locked. They pushed it open, the paint flaking away under their fingers, and found themselves in a vegetable garden.
There was an inert humid weight to the air as if it had been trapped inside those old brick walls for centuries, but there was a peace too, a lush sense of peace, as if it was content with its imprisonment. Countless passageways ran between head-high rows of sweet-peas, broad-beans and fruit-bushes. It would be the perfect place, Gloria was thinking, to sleep for a hundred years, like in the fairy-tales.

‘Let's have a look in here,' she said. She took Moses by the hand and pulled him towards a ramshackle greenhouse. It must have been at least fifty foot long. Four steps of broken brick led down to the door.

Moses shoved the door open, jarring the loose panes of glass. A dense sweet heat enveloped his face.

Tomatoes. Thousands of them.

He led Gloria down the aisle that ran between the raised flower-beds, marvelling at the abundance of tomato-plants, marvelling too at the ancient lead irrigation-pipes and the massive sticky cobwebs slung across the winch-handles for the windows overhead. At the far end, and solid as an altar, was a stone sink. The priest was a rake.

It was sweltering in there. Drawing breath was like lifting a weight inside your body. Gloria removed her cardigan. Her white silk top caught on her nipples, then fell sheer, away from her rib-cage and her smooth flat belly.

‘There is something about the smell of things growing,' Moses said, running the tip of his tongue up the side of her neck.

Things grew.

Gloria turned hard against him, and there was the taste of salt in their kiss. Moses began to undo his trousers.

‘Moses,' Gloria whispered, pulling away and swatting his flies with the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘In
the greenhouse?'

‘Your idea,' Moses said.

His hands slid under her skirt and inside her pants, pulling her towards him. He took her buttocks in both hands and lifted her slightly, then he was inside her, Gloria clinging to him, both arms round his neck, her heels locked behind his knees, her pants dangling from her left ankle.

Then:

Moses couldn't be certain, but he thought he saw the green door move. Yes, it had. Slowly it eased open and a bald man in a brown jacket came into view.

‘Jesus,' Moses said. ‘Taj Mahal.'

Gloria, thinking this was some new description of bliss, murmured agreement.

‘The man in reception,' Moses hissed. ‘Look. Over there.'

Gloria opened her eyes. ‘Oh Christ.'

Moses staggered behind a large water-can with Gloria still attached, but this sudden movement, coupled with the shock of Taj Mahal's appearance, proved too much for him: he came.

‘Oh
no
,' he groaned.

Still supporting her, he lowered her down on to her haunches, came out of her, and placed a hand over her cunt. Gloria squeezed her legs together, her eyes liquid.

‘Sorry,' he said.

‘It's all right.'

‘It was that Indian bastard. Where is he now?'

Gloria raised herself a fraction, peeped through the tangle of tomato-plants. ‘He's over by the cabbages.'

‘I hope he hates tomatoes,' Moses whispered. ‘I hope he's allergic.'

They both watched, breath held, fingers crossed, as Taj Mahal scrabbled about in the earth on the far side of the garden. It was stifling now – the sun beating down through the glass roof, the suspense. Moses pushed Gloria's hair back from her forehead and licked a bead of sweat from between her moist breasts. He kept his hand pressed to her cunt, catching the stuff as it came out of her. He liked the feeling of having the whole of that part of her in one hand.

Five minutes later, to their great relief, Taj Mahal left the garden, a small bunch of root vegetables in his hand. Moses and Gloria looked at each other, their flushed faces, their dishevelment, and started laughing.

‘He would've died,' Gloria said.

*

Back in the room that afternoon, Moses opened the suitcase and took out the album. Its blue cardboard cover had been printed to resemble crocodile skin, and the word
Photographs
had been engraved across the bottom right-hand corner in an elegant gold script; a blue tasselled cord bound the pages together. Moses sat down next to Gloria on the bed and began to show her the pictures.

The first few were landscapes. They all had titles (written in a white chalk pencil because the pages were black) – titles like
Grape Meadow
and
Hazard Copse.
Then came several views of a country village entitled, simply,
Our Village:
a sunlit street, a row of shops (was that a greengrocer's?), a policeman on a bicycle.

Gloria frowned. ‘This could be anywhere.'

‘I know,' Moses said. ‘But look.' He pointed at a picture of the village church. In the background, in the distance, something had caught the
light, showed silver through the dark grey trees. ‘Isn't that a river?'

‘So?'

‘Well, you remember what I said about the sound of running water?'

‘But Moses,' Gloria said, ‘that could've been anything. It could've been your father having a bath.'

‘Maybe.' Moses didn't sound convinced.

As they went through the album, Gloria could see a story emerging – a rural setting, a man, a woman, courtship, marriage, a house, a baby – a story that would have struck her as romantic and touching, but perfectly ordinary, had it not been for the air of profound despondency that all the pictures seemed to breathe, release into the room around her. It was nothing she could put her fìnger on, just the sense that something was being held back. She tried to explain this to Moses.

‘Jesus, I think you're right,' Moses said. ‘I'd never really seen it that way before, but you're right. There's no real joy there, is there?'

Gloria turned back a few pages. ‘Especially your mother,' she said.

The photographs showed a woman in her twenties. Tall, almost statuesque, yet ill at ease. She seemed always to be shying away from the camera. Her smile looked awkward, unconvincing, as if she had been told to smile when, in reality, she was feeling something else, as if smiling was a skill which she had still to master.
Alice, Summer
1953, for example, where she was crouching on a white garden chair, her back curved, a cup in her left hand. A straw hat with a huge floppy brim shielded her eyes from the glare. She shrank back into the shadow it afforded her, surprised – no, more than that: alarmed. Or
The Boundary 1949.
In this one she wore a white blouse and a floral skirt, but the vivacious clothes clashed with her mood. She stood pressed against a tree, almost pinned to the bark, her hands in front of her, one clasping the other. There was always that sense of straining for effect. There was always that false note.

‘What boundary, I wonder?' Gloria said.

Moses didn't know. But her question had made an important point. They could guess, they could speculate, they could fantasise. Further than that they couldn't go.

Moses's father, on the other hand, appeared confident, resourceful even. Moses turned to his favourite picture,
Birdwatching 1955.
His father stood in heroic semi-profile, a tall square-shouldered man with unruly black hair and kind eyes, remarkably similar in build, funnily enough, to Uncle Stan. He had dressed with a certain amount of panache: a Paisley scarf folded across his chest and tucked into a high-buttoning check jacket, a triangle of patterned handkerchief showing in his breast pocket, a shooting-stick under one arm, a newspaper (
Sporting Life?
) under the other. In his right
hand he held a pair of binoculars. Hence the caption.

‘Maybe he was just a better actor than your mother,' Gloria said.

Moses thought she was exaggerating.

Gloria shrugged. ‘OK, what about this one then?' She was pointing at a picture that was titled
Our Ambition 1954.
– ‘How do you explain that?'

A country road stretched along the bottom of the picture. Beyond it lay a grass bank and a row of peeling silver birches. Beyond them, a gypsy caravan with big spoked wheels and a chimney that looked like a crooked toadstool growing out of the roof.

Gloria answered her own question. ‘It looks to me as if they just wanted to get away from everything. And I'm not surprised, really. Look at the house. It looks really depressing.'

True, Moses thought. Despite the open windows and the parasol planted at a jaunty angle in the lawn (it must have been summer), the house looked withdrawn, lifeless, blind. The attempts at gaiety had fallen flat. The house where they had (presumably) lived together. The house where he had (presumably) been born.