‘Bugger off I said,’ came the voice again, still hoarse, but angrier. ‘Get out of my house.’
Moses had reached the landing. He passed one closed door, then a second. A third, to his right, stood ajar. He pushed on the varnished wood and it gave. In the widening gap, he saw an old man on a double-bed.
The old man wore a pair of glasses, a pale collarless shirt and a green cardigan (whose smooth brown buttons looked like chocolates). Nicotine had stained the lenses of his glasses yellow and one of the arms had been mended with black insulating-tape. He had the most enormous beard. Three feet long and almost as wide. If you had walked down the street behind him, you would have been able to see it protruding from either side of his head. Once black, now threaded with minute white hairs, it spread down over his chest and tucked into the V of his cardigan. With his glasses and his beard he looked, Moses thought, like a man in disguise; it would have been difficult to describe his eyes, for instance, or his mouth.
A beige horse-blanket concealed the lower half of the old man’s body. His hands rested on the outside. They were beautiful hands. Stained, like the glasses, but ascetic, tapering and permanently curved, as if made to bless the small round heads of children. One lay flat, palm down, beside his thigh. The other held a cigarette.
That the old man chainsmoked was obvious from a glance at the dented saucepan which served as his ashtray. It was piled high with cigarettebutts. The cigarette-butts had outgrown the saucepan, overflowed on to the bedside table, outgrown that too, and overflowed on to the floor. From there, of course, they could fall no further, so they had begun to pile up again. They behaved in exactly the same way as snow does. They might have fallen from the sky. Even as Moses stared, entranced, the old man squeezed the end of his latest cigarette between finger and thumb and tossed the new butt on to the mountainous heap of old ones. It tumbled from the saucepan on to the table, from the table on to the floor. It might have been a demonstration of how the system worked. The old man folded his hands on the blanket. He seemed to be waiting for Moses to speak.
‘Mr Highness?’
The name sounded so strange in his mouth, felt as awkward as a stone. This was the confrontation he had dreamed of. All those hours in phone-boxes. Fingers black from thumbing through directories. The reek of urine in his nostrils, in his soul. Another Highness! How could he ever have imagined that it would happen not in America but in Sussex, not with a stranger but with his father?
‘Who the bloody hell are you?’ the old man said.
Moses didn’t hesitate now. ‘I’m your son. Moses.’
A new stillness seemed suspended in the room.
‘I thought you were a policeman,’ the old man said. ‘Or the bloody priest.’ He almost smiled.
‘No.’
The old man shifted in bed, using an elbow to raise himself higher on his soiled stack of pillows. He lit a cigarette, dragged hard. When he spoke again, no smoke came out. He must have absorbed it all.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose you had better sit down.’ He indicated two simple wooden chairs by the far wall. ‘Bring them over.’
Moses crossed the room and returned with the chairs. He placed them side by side next to the bed. He offered one to Mary. They both sat down. He couldn’t help noticing the sheet that the old man was lying on. It started out white at the edge of the bed and, after moving through various shades of grey, turned almost black, a glossy black, as it slid beneath his body.
‘I’m afraid I’m not used to entertaining.’ The old man’s smile of apology closely resembled pain. He lifted his cigarette to his lips and sucked smoke deep into his lungs. His eyes drifted from Moses to Mary for a moment.
‘I’m sorry,’ Moses said. ‘This is Mary. She’s a very close friend of mine.’
‘George Highness,’ the old man said.
They both leaned forwards and shook hands.
It was all so improbable. Moses became daring. ‘You didn’t expect me then?’
The old man took this seriously. He lowered his eyes. ‘No, I never expected to see you again. Of course, I imagined you. Many times. I even imagined you sitting where you’re sitting now. But they were all ghosts, different ghosts of you. The real you had gone.’ He lifted his head. ‘I could never imagine how you’d look. It’s curious, but I think you look more like your mother, actually.’
‘My mother?’
‘She’s dead,’ the old man said quickly. ‘She died eight years ago.’
‘I know.’
‘You know?’ The old man seemed alarmed. ‘How?’
‘Somebody in the pub told me.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know his name. He was wearing a green anorak. He was drunk.’
‘Ah yes, the greengrocer.’ The old man drifted on his bed for a while as if on a raft. ‘But did I ever think that you’d come back?’ He shook his head and his beard rustled against his shirt. ‘No. Never. I never hoped for that.’
Half an inch of ash toppled off the end of his cigarette and landed in the lower extremities of his beard. He brushed it away with deft practised movements of his fingertips. It seemed to distract him from something he had been about to say. A silence fell.
Eventually he said, ‘You must have a lot of questions.’
‘My mother,’ Moses said. ‘She died in a mental home, didn’t she?’
‘He told you that too?’
Moses nodded.
‘That bloody gossip, I could kill him.’ The old man’s head jerked fiercely towards the wall. ‘Yes, she died in the mental home just outside the village. She had been in there for twelve years.’
‘What was wrong with her?’
‘Oh,’ and he twirled his left hand in the air beside his ear, ‘they had names for it. They called it manic depression. They said she had an avoidant personality. They had all kinds of fancy names. But the truth was far more simple, really. She was born in New Egypt. She was a New Egyptian. The world, even this tiny world, hurt her physically. It hurt her the way sun hurts people with fair skin. She wanted shade. She stayed in bed all the time. She drew the curtains on her life. She wanted to die. Nothing I could say to her made any impact whatsoever. I told her I loved her. I told her I needed her. She listened, but she didn’t really hear. Her pain was so great, I suppose, that she couldn’t even begin to imagine mine. There was nothing I could say to her, nothing that would make the slightest difference. I couldn’t tell her life was wonderful. It wasn’t and she knew it wasn’t. I couldn’t paint a glowing picture of the future. We didn’t have a future. She knew that too. She may have been disturbed or mentally ill or whatever you choose to call it, but she understood what life in this village meant. Means. It means boredom, loneliness and despair. And this, I suspect, touches on the question you must be longing to ask. Why did we get rid of you? That’s the big question, isn’t it? Am I right?’
Moses nodded.
‘We got rid of you,’ the old man said, ‘because we didn’t want you to turn out like us. We didn’t want you to turn out like everybody else in this bloody village. We wanted you to have a better chance in life — ’
‘But what’s so terrible about life in this village?’ Moses interrupted.
The old man let out a high-pitched yelp and doubled up. His cigarette flew from between his fingers. His glasses clattered to the floor. Convulsions racked his entire body. Several seconds passed before Moses realised this was laughter, laughter that had developed into a coughing fit.
‘Christ,’ the old man wheezed. He leaned back against his soiled pillows, flushed and breathless. ‘Christ, that was a good one. A bloody good one. Are you hungry?’
Mary wasn’t.