She settled back in her seat again and glanced secretly at his profile, what she called his driving face, as it rushed motionless across a landscape of white houses. But surely it couldn’t just be clothes, she found herself thinking. Before her mind could start inventing possible contents, she shut it off. She didn’t want to guess. It would ruin things. It was curiously reassuring, comforting almost, to know that, sometime in the future, the mystery would be explained. That was what knowing people was all about, wasn’t it? In fact, the more she thought about the suitcase (in the abstract, that is), the more at ease she felt. It seemed to epitomise their relationship. Anticipation, excitement, surprises.
She leaned her head against the back of the seat and watched the trees flick by. Tree after tree after tree lining the main road. All the same make, all identical in age. All their intervening distances measured and exact.
Complete opposite of the suitcase, really.
*
Country and western music on the radio.
Moses often listened to country and western music because he didn’t like it. If you listened to music you liked all the time, he had told Gloria, then pretty soon you didn’t like it any more. That was what had happened with country and western music. Once he had really liked it. But he had listened to it all the time. And now he didn’t like it any more. So he could listen to it all the time without worrying.
Gloria didn’t have strong feelings one way or the other. She sang along, inventing words and making Moses smile. The day warmed up, and a dull haze accompanied their drive north, hanging over the monotonous deserted landscape, denying it greenness. The exit after Leicester, Moses turned off the motorway and it wasn’t long before the road narrowed, acquiring ditches and hedges, and a high stone wall loomed up on the left, dusty and crumbling, the texture of stale cake, with overhanging cedars, their great flat branches reaching out like plates.
‘This is it,’ Moses announced, ‘by the look of it.’
He swung the car into a gravel driveway. Stone dogs sat on the gateposts, their ears pricked, their eyes blind. Gloria peered through the windscreen for a glimpse of the hotel, but the driveway denied her that, winding first through trees — pines planted close together, gloom gathering between their tall red trunks — then through giant clumps of rhododendrons and hydrangeas. Gradually, on the left-hand side, the shrubbery thinned out, and Gloria caught flashes of a green lawn slick with recent rain. Beyond it lay a boating lake. A jetty crouched over the water on dark rotting stilts. A few conifers, almost black, clustered round the edge like mourners.
‘Yes, this is it.’ Moses nodded to himself. ‘I recognise it from the postcard.’
‘What postcard?’ Gloria asked.
‘You’ll see.’
Moses parked in front of the hotel. They both got out.
Standing beside the car with her coat over one arm and her case in her hand, Gloria stared up at the facade. The name — DOGWOOD HALL — in white foot-high letters. Ivy trimmed close to the pale yellow stone. Blank windows. Neat, well-groomed, oppressive. Even the gravel at her feet looked arranged.
She noticed a bare patch where Moses must have skidded when he turned the car round. We’ve messed up their drive, she thought. And then, Why did he bring me here?
‘Are you coming?’ Moses called out from the porch.
Gloria looked up, smiled weakly. ‘Yes,’ she said. But first she covered the bare patch over, using the toe of her shoe.
*
Moses strode towards the reception desk. He felt powerful, executive. A man with a mission. Moses, he said to himself. Moses Highness.
He put his two suitcases down, leaned on the counter, and waited while the receptionist finished shuffling his papers. The receptionist was superbly bald, his head a pale yellow dome of polished marble. It had the allure of a piece of sculpture and, for one awful moment, when the man bent down to pick up a sheet of paper disturbed by the wind from the open door, Moses thought he was going to reach over and stroke it, which was what he always did with sculpture. Fortunately the receptionist straightened again quickly, as if he had had some kind of premonition.
‘Can I help you?’ he enquired.
‘Yes,’ Moses said. ‘I’d like a double room, please.’
‘A double room.’ The receptionist blew a little stale air out of his wrinkled sphincter of a mouth and opened the hotel register. ‘Can I have your name, sir?’
‘Highness. Moses Highness.’
The receptionist’s head began to wobble violently on his narrow shoulders. He stood behind his counter and stared at Moses, his mouth a widening rift in the lower half of his face. It was like watching an earthquake in an art gallery. What if the head toppled? Moses thought. Would his reflexes be quick enough to catch it before it hit the floor and shattered into a thousand pieces? He couldn’t bear the idea of looking down and seeing one baleful eye looking up at him.
At that instant, Gloria appeared in the doorway, clasping her overnight bag in front of her with both hands.
‘And this,’ Moses said, unable to restrain himself, ‘is Mrs Highness.’
‘One moment.’ The receptionist stepped backwards through a red curtain into some inner sanctum.
‘He’s extraordinary,’ Moses whispered to Gloria.
Gloria clutched his arm.
Her grip tightened as the red curtain parted again. During his absence the receptionist had managed to regain absolute control of his head. Whether he had some surgical machine or device behind the curtain or whether he had simply applied a soothing lotion they would never know, but, whatever the remedy, his head was as firm as yours or mine as he asked Moses to sign the register.
‘I hope you don’t mind me asking,’ Moses said, ‘but have you been working here a long time?’
‘Yes,’ the receptionist said, staring at Moses with his lidless eyes. ‘Yes, you could say that.’
‘By a long time, I mean thirty years. Have you been here that long?’
‘Yes, I’ve been here about thirty years.’
Moses leaned closer. ‘I’m only asking because I think my parents stayed here, probably during the fifties, and I was wondering if, by any chance, you remembered them.’
The receptionist tilted his head sideways (Careful! Moses thought) and read the name in the register. ‘No, I don’t think so. I would have remembered a name like that.’ And his upper lip lifted, raising the lid on a keyboard of discoloured teeth. It was a ghastly smile.
Moses drew back, disappointed. ‘Well,’ he sighed. ‘I suppose it was worth a try.’
The receptionist laid the key of room number 5 beside the register. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, sir. How long will you be staying?’
‘We’re just here for the weekend.’
‘It’s not often we have young people here,’ and the receptionist’s head began to wobble again. ‘I hope you enjoy your stay.’
Moses thanked him.
‘Second on the left at the top of the stairs,’ the receptionist said, and disappeared behind his red curtain again.
*
Gloria climbed the stairs ahead of Moses and waited for him at the top. There was a surprising delicacy, even tenderness, about the way he handled the older of the two suitcases. It looked like a child in his grasp, she thought. A child clutching its father’s hand.