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 –
And here the manuscript ended. George had lost his momentum, lost interest. In that moment, the moment when he pushed his pen aside, he had realised that he was no different from any other New Egyptian. The apathy had taken hold. What better comment on the nature of the village than that its self-appointed historian had failed to complete his history of the place! How typical, how archetypal that was!
It had been ten years since he had touched the manuscript, and he now knew that he would never go back to it again. What was the point? Who could he give it to? When he died, it would fall into the hands of the police and end up in that fucking museum.
Not on your life.
He would destroy it first.
*
The following day, at three in the afternoon, a man with tangled grey hair stopped outside George’s house. It was Dinwoodie, come to pay his respects.
Dinwoodie unlatched the gate. A screech of metal disturbed a silence of dripping leaves. The gate, it seemed, was rarely opened.
He paused again, and stared up at the front of the house. Another death in the family. Another, though? He wished he knew. Even after all these years. Especially after all these years.
The front door opened before he could pretend to be moving, and George Highness emerged, wrapped in a brown overcoat and a yellow scarf. In his hand, a bunch of flowers. Dinwoodie jumped backwards, as if he had been caught red-handed at something. Which, in a way, he had been. Trespassing not so much on property as on grief. He gulped a hello.
‘Good afternoon, Dinwoodie,’ George said. To Dinwoodie, his composure seemed unnatural, suspect.
‘I – ’ he began.
‘You wanted to see me?’
‘Yes,’ Dinwoodie said. ‘I was on my way to visit you.’
‘And very nearly there, by the look of it.’ With his free hand, George indicated Dinwoodie’s feet which were planted on, if not rooted in, the garden path. ‘I was on my way out,’ he continued. ‘As you see.’
Cool customer, Dinwoodie thought. He tried again.
‘I wanted to offer you my condolences,’ he said. And then, by way of explanation, ‘The death of your wife. I’m very sorry.’
At last George looked surprised. He blinked and angled an embarrassed glance into the shrubbery that divided the path from the small front lawn. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘but it seems a little like the death of someone who was already dead.’ A smile leaked from his face. ‘If you follow me.’
‘Yes,’ Dinwoodie said. ‘Yes, I think I do.’
The two men were both shuffling on the path now. Their eyes darted here and there as if following minnows in a pond.
‘If you’re going out,’ Dinwoodie ventured finally, ‘perhaps I could join you?’
‘All right,’ George said, but it was not too grudging. ‘I’m going to the cemetery to put these – ’ he held the flowers up as if they were slightly ridiculous – ’on my son’s grave.’
Dinwoodie murmured, bowed; he might have been giving permission.
Side by side, they walked up Caution Lane. When they reached Church Street they turned right and began to climb the hill. Spring was late this year. Rain hung in the trees like pieces of broken glass. The branches, grey, spindly, arthritic, seemed to be resisting growth. Dinwoodie could hear George’s knees cracking in the silence.
‘A lot of tragedies recently.’ Dinwoodie threw out the remark, then turned eagerly to George as if he had lit a fuse that might cause George to explode with some kind of revelation.
But George had withdrawn into himself. ‘Yes,’ he said. He fitted the word between gasps for breath. It was a steep hill.
A dark horse, Dinwoodie thought. Really a very dark horse.
He increased the pressure marginally. ‘Your wife, of course. And then Joel – ’ He scanned George’s face, but George still seemed more interested in the surface of the road, so he added, a little unnecessarily, perhaps, ‘The greengrocer.’
‘I heard,’ George said. And just as Dinwoodie was about to prompt him again, George added, ‘An extravagant plan, but doomed. Doomed from the very beginning.’
Dinwoodie, the fire that he was, kindled. Fingers spread in a primitive comb, he dragged a hand through his tangle of hair.
‘Too extravagant, you think?’
George settled for the conventional response. ‘Nobody’s ever escaped. Why should an extravagant idea be more likely to succeed than a simple one?’
‘You may be right,’ Dinwoodie said. George’s gloom didn’t dismay him too much; at least they were talking now. ‘But a simple plan,’ he went on, ‘might stand a better chance, you think?’
George gave Dinwoodie a look that Dinwoodie couldn’t decipher: he saw a gloating first, then condescension, then sadness – then all three merged until he couldn’t be sure what he had seen. He decided to risk it anyway. ‘I have a plan,’ he said.
‘Really? You surprise me. What is it this time, Dinwoodie?’
‘There’s no need to be sarcastic.’
George sighed. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not myself at the moment.’
Crap, Dinwoodie thought. You’re yourself all right. He gave the churchyard gate a shove. It banged against the wall. Two crows, scared, broke away from the top of a yew tree. Black shrapnel against a lowering grey sky. George followed Dinwoodie up the path. He held his flowers upright in his hand and level with his face, the way you might hold an umbrella. As they climbed up through the cemetery, Dinwoodie’s head rang with unvoiced arguments. He wanted to believe that it was only a matter of time before George heard. But they reached the grave in silence, with Dinwoodie still uncertain how to reopen the subject. He read the inscription on the stone.
MOSES GEORGE HIGHNESS ONLY SON OF GEORGE AND ALICE
BORN MAY 22ND 1955
DIED JULY 14TH 1956
HE LIVES IN OUR THOUGHTS
Lines of scepticism showed on either side of Dinwoodie’s mouth. It was a charade. He knew, he just knew that George had pulled it off somehow. Patience failing, he struck out.
‘Your wife’s dead,’ he said, and then, with a sly weakening of emphasis that George, he felt, would detect and understand, ‘and so is your son. There’s nothing to keep you here now, George. Why don’t we join forces, collaborate, and get out of this place? What do you say?’
George squatted on his haunches, arranged the flowers in a small rusty urn. ‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘Now they’re,’ and he didn’t hesitate, ‘both dead, there’s everything to keep me here.’
‘I don’t understand. What is there to keep you here?’ Dinwoodie’s hand ransacked his hair for a reason.
‘Memories, I suppose,’ George said. ‘These graves. The graves of the people I love.’ It must have sounded sententious to him because he added, almost defiantly, ‘Besides, what’s out there, anyway?’
‘Freedom,’ escaped from Dinwoodie’s lips before he knew it.
Still meddling with the flowers, George shook his head. ‘Freedom isn’t out there any more than it’s in here.’ He glanced round at the rows of damp tombstones.
‘How do you know,’ Dinwoodie cried, his hands clutching at the air, ‘until you’ve tried?’
In a quiet voice George said, ‘Dinwoodie, when are you going to grow up?’
Dinwoodie’s face reddened as if he had been slapped on both cheeks. ‘You know,’ he said, trying to keep his voice under control, ‘I used to think you had something, George. Guts, maybe. A bit of initiative. I don’t know. That’s what I thought. But you haven’t. You haven’t got anything. You’re just a shell. I – I pity you.’
George rose to his feet. He stood at an angle to Dinwoodie. A remote smile on his fa
ce, he watched smoke drift from a chimney, fade into the sky. He had nothing to say, it seemed. Or if he had, he wasn’t going to say it.
‘Well, I’m going to try, anyway,’ Dinwoodie said. ‘And I’ll do it alone if I have to.’
George looked Dinwoodie square in the face for the first time that afternoon. ‘You haven’t got a chance, Dinwoodie. You’ll fail. You’ll end up in that police museum.’
‘Fuck you,’ Dinwoodie said.
And he whirled away down the slope, trampling on the graves of his forefathers. His mouth, thin-lipped, chapped, set in a grim smile. It felt good to be walking on the dead.
Fuck him, he thought. Fuck them all. I’m not dying here.
He didn’t look back at George Highness. They had parted in anger. He doubted they would ever speak to each other again.
*
At home that evening George couldn’t settle. He kept seeing Dinwoodie’s white impassioned face. He kept seeing Dinwoodie stride away across the graveyard, grey hair, grey raincoat flapping. With his gaunt frame and his square shoulders lifted, he had made George think of a cross. He knew in his heart, in his bones (wherever it is that you truly know), that Dinwoodie was dead.
As dusk fell, he left his house for the second time that day. Unprecedented, this. But perhaps he had some dim foreknowledge of the consequences and courted them as expiation for the way he had treated Dinwoodie. In any case, he could no longer stay indoors.
Where they had turned left out of the garden gate, he turned right and walked towards Peach Street. He could have given Dinwoodie some encouragement, he was thinking. He could have explained his theories about escape. He could even have told him about Moses. But George had kept the secret for so long that secrecy had become a habit. He saw secrecy as his plan’s foundation, its strength, a guarantee, if you like, of its success. Superstitious of him, true, but impossible now to shake off. So he had been harsh with Dinwoodie, as you might be harsh with a pestering child. And in many ways Dinwoodie was a child. His tantrums, his enthusiasms, marked him out – even from a Tommy Dane or a Joel Mustoe. Tommy Dane’s escape-attempt had been an act of violence, thoroughly in character, an integral part of his fight against authority. Joel’s, on the other hand, had been a sly private affair; the greengrocer had turned to escape, George felt, because he sought tangible proof of his superiority – out of arrogance, in other words. Only Dinwoodie had pure motives. He had said it himself. He wanted freedom. Simple as that. It would have been noble if it hadn’t been so naïve.
Dreams of Leaving Page 15
