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:
NEW EGYPT — AN UNFINISHED HISTORY.
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.