She sat motionless. Then she began to shiver. The wave of his anger subsided. Shame flowed into the spaces it had left.
‘Listen to me,’ gently now. ‘We have to get Moses out of this village. I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve got a plan.’
Alice said nothing.
‘I know there’s only an outside chance, but it’s the only chance he’s got. It’s worth it, for him. For us too, in a way.’
‘In what way?’ Her voice was so soft that the silence bullied it.
‘We’d be thinking about something other than ourselves. Maybe that would bring us together again. Maybe it would — ’ but he broke off, aware that he was walking into fantastic territory. ‘We have to do it. We have to try and give him what we never had. We owe it to him.’
‘I don’t know — ’
‘We owe it to him. What have we got to lose? Fuck all.’
His language had coarsened recently. The frustration, he told himself. The sheer bloody frustration of it all. He looked across at Alice. Her unwashed hair hung in limp greenish strands. Her centre-parting had the pinkness of a scar. She avoided his eyes.
‘You hate me,’ she said.
He sighed. ‘Alice, you know that’s not true.’
‘You’re bored with me. You hate me.’ Her voice had grown hard, serrated, but when she lifted her eyes to his the water in them warped and trembled like the air above a fire.
‘No.’ He reached across the table and took one of her hands. ‘I love you, Alice. I always have. You know that.’
She looked down again. Tears began to splash on to her skirt. Because he couldn’t see them falling from her eyes, they seemed to have nothing to do with her. This tyrant sadness had invaded her, was running her. She lacked the strength to fight it.
‘I love you,’ he repeated. ‘We only have each other. What else do we have?’
Her mouth tightened, shrank. ‘You want to take my child.’
George climbed to his feet. He paced round the kitchen. He let his eyes travel over things: the chipped spout on the teapot; the cobwebs slung between the cooker and the fridge; the lino floor curling at the corners as if stale; cracks, like black hairs, on the cups and plates; the window a tiny dribbling pane of glass. He felt as if he was walking on the ocean bed. If he opened his mouth to scream, he would drown.
‘Look at us,’ and he was still circling the room, ‘just look at us. We’re pitiful. Absolutely bloody pitiful. What can we do? Nothing. Not a damn bloody thing, Alice.’ He rested one hand on the back of a chair, pinched his eyes with the other. ‘But Moses — ’ and, using the boy’s name, his voice lifted as if in prayer. He sensed a change in the quality of his wife’s silence. He took it as approval. Or, if not approval, acquiescence at least.
The next day he dressed warmly in his old sheepskin coat and walked down to the river. It was a raw sunless afternoon in January. His breath streamed out behind him, a white scarf in the wind. It had been raining for days and the mud track sucked at his boots. He passed the tree-house that he and Alice had built fifteen years before. A few lengths of wood, blond and curiously straight, among the sinuous green branches. Dismantled by the wind, by other children. Almost unrecognisable now. When he reached the river, he squatted down and began to pick the bulrushes, snapping them off at the waterline so he would have a good length to work with. He kept going until he could no longer feel his hands. He held his hands out in front of him, red up to the wrists, and smiled. Something was happening. Something was actually happening. He gathered up his bundle of rushes and walked home across the fields.
He visited the river almost every day for five or six weeks. Sometimes lithe, sometimes sluggish, it was always there, alive, developing, like the drift of his thoughts. It gave him lessons in momentum, it taught him persistence. Some days he would sit on the bank and watch it go by, watch an endless array of objects twist and roll and jink their way downstream — sticks, cans, leaves and once, improbably, a wardrobe, its slim mirror bright as a knife in a drawer. Downstream. That was where Moses was going. In a basket made of rushes and sealed with pitch. That was the plan.
Alone on the bank, he would run through the mechanics of the plan, weigh up the coincidences it depended on, wonder, above all, at the cheek of it, and slowly it would begin to flow in his head, washing obstacles away, and he would know then that it was right, that it could work, that if he didn’t at least give it a try then the rest of his life would be a cowering, a ritual of flagellation, a bottomless pit of remorse. He knew the dangers too. They showed themselves often enough. Policemen appeared from nowhere, propelled by curiosity. They scrutinised his armfuls of rushes. They asked innocent loaded questions.
‘Rushes, Mr Highness?’
‘Yes, officer.’ And then, ‘My wife, you know. She loves having greenery around the place.’ Absolute crap, of course. In her present state, she couldn’t have cared less. And how he longed to sound defiant. To say, for example, ‘That’s right, officer. They’re rushes.’ Or even, ‘Yes. So what?’ He resisted. These would have been cheap victories. He forced himself to think in campaign terms.
But it wasn’t only the police he had to contend with. Once he came back from the river to find Alice waiting, hands on hips, in the kitchen. It was Valentine’s Day.
‘Hello, Alice,’ he said, kicking off his Wellington boots. ‘God, it’s beautiful out there.’ He felt good after his walk, his mind honed by the wind and cutting cleanly.
‘Don’t tell me,’ she snapped. ‘More bloody rushes.’
He looked up at her in surprise. She so rarely swore. And the air in the kitchen suddenly seemed compressed, squeezed into a space too small for it.
‘I need them,’ he explained. ‘I need them to practise with. I’m still learning, you see.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Learning,’ she mocked, and waved a hand in the air, palm up, as if scattering seed. ‘Learning, he says. You’ve got a lot to learn if you ask me.’
‘I’m sorry, Alice. I just don’t follow you.’ His mind not cutting quite as cleanly as he had thought.
Her sudden fury released a blast of heat in the cold room. ‘Spending all your time with these,’ she screamed and grabbing a handful of rushes from a vase on the dresser hurled them, stiff and dripping, at his face. They landed on the floor with a slap. ‘And none of it with me,’ she went on. ‘Now do you follow?’
George wiped his face with the back of his hand.
‘If you want to learn something,’ Alice sneered, ‘why don’t you try learning something about marriage?’
Still George said nothing. He was staring at the rushes. They lay on the floor like a prophecy or an omen.
Then her voice sank back into listlessness as she told him, ‘They’re beginning to drive me mad.’
He decided that, from then on, he would only pick what he needed. He would hide the rushes out of sight at the top of the house. If the police came round and asked where all the ‘greenery’ was, he would have to dream up a new story.
As he watched Alice fly from the room, her arms angled back like wings, it struck him that this plan of his could be seen as nothing more than an attempt to set some vivid daring achievement against a marriage that had become lack-lustre, irredeemable. But he loved Alice. He still loved her. And her unhappiness hurt him all the more because he lacked the power to alter it. He had tried. God knows he had tried. He now knew that her only happiness lay in sleep, in unconsciousness, and finally, he supposed, in death. Moses, though. He could do something there. However risky, however far-fetched, however painful it might prove to be.