The downstairs bar was a riot of chintz and ormolu. Not a soul in sight. Even the barman was only half there. It took a few seconds of wild gesticulation to alert him to their presence. To make up for lost time they downed six gin fizzes between them in slightly less than half an hour.
‘It’s the crying,’ Moses explained to Gloria. ‘You have to replace the tears, you see.’
Gloria speared a green olive. ‘Something that occurred to me,’ she said. ‘If you don’t know where your parents live, or even who they are, what made you think they came here?’
‘Yes, that was strange,’ Moses said. ‘When I opened the suitcase, there was this postcard lying in the bottom. I think it must’ve fallen out of the album. Anyway, it was a picture of this place, and it had a name on the back of it. Dogwood Hall. I looked it up in the phone book, found out it was a hotel, and here we are.’ He scooped up a handful of peanuts. ‘The album seems to cover a period of about four or five years. Two or three years of courtship and two years of marriage. Since the postcard probably fell out of the album, I thought they must’ve stayed here during that time. Who knows, I might even’ve been conceived here.’
‘It’s a pretty strange story, Moses,’ Gloria said.
His eyes dropped from the wedding-cake ceiling to her face. Now he understood why he had brought Gloria along, why he had told her rather than Jackson, say, or Eddie. They would never have believed him. She did.
Gloria stirred the remains of her third drink with her finger. She was trying to imagine a life without parents. She found it almost impossible. Everything had revolved around her parents – or rather her parents had made everything revolve around her. She had been an only child and she had never doubted that they doted on her. Her every move had been recorded and cherished. She knew when she was born, she knew what her first joke was, she knew who had come to her first birthday party (she even had a movie of it). Her parents had given her everything – a swing in a rose-arbour when she was six, a thoroughbred pony when she was ten, a sports car (now written off) when she was seventeen, and a home throughout, for Christ’s sake, a stable home. She felt unbelievably lucky all of a sudden, lucky and guilty. She remembered a line that she sometimes used at parties. ‘I was a spoilt child.’ Pause. ‘Spoilt but not ruined.’
A waitress appeared in the doorway. ‘Mr and Mrs Highness? Your table’s ready.’
*
It was quarter past eleven when they staggered out of the dining-room. They hardly recognised the hallway. Vases loomed and undulated, portraits leered, walls curved away, carpets suddenly had gradients, and the corridor turned corners far too soon. Somewhere at the end of all this was room number 5.
Gloria, marginally the steadier of the two, played safe and stuck to the banisters. Moses, veering wildly, mowed down a suit of armour which had stepped out in front of him. The helmet crashed to the floor. Taj Mahal, already tucked up in bed with a history of the British Empire, heard the clatter of metal and thought: saucepans.
Back in the hallway, Moses, startled by the suit of armour, lurched sideways, collided with a table, and fell full-length on the carpet. A vase of lilies rocked and toppled over.
‘It’s the first time I’ve ever stayed in a hotel, you see,’ he mumbled. ‘I’m not used to it.’
Gloria was still clutching the banisters. Her stomach ached with laughter. ‘You poor orphan,’ she said.
Water began to drip on to Moses’s neck from the overturned vase.
‘Gloria,’ he said. ‘I think it’s raining.’
He climbed to his feet, then stooped to retrieve the helmet, but kicked it with his size 12 foot before his hand could reach it. The helmet rolled under the table. Still stooping, he peered into the darkness between the legs of the table and began to call the helmet terrible names.
‘Moses. Quick.’ Gloria waved at him from the stairs. Frantic spastic agitations of her left hand. ‘Quick. Before somebody comes.’
She left the safety of the banisters and stood the vase upright. Then she tugged on one of Moses’s arms. He responded, straightened up too fast, overbalanced, and fell backwards against the staircase, taking Gloria with him. The hallway shook. An oil painting slid sideways on the wall.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Poltergeist.’
They sprawled in a heap at the foot of the stairs. Hysterical. Incapable of movement.
Amazingly, nobody came.
*
Some time later they reached the landing. They began the search for their room-key. Moses had had it last, of that they were convinced. An excuse for Gloria to fumble around in various parts of his body. She found it accidentally in his trouser pocket while looking for something else. They missed the lock with it four times each.
‘I’ve had men like this,’ Gloria said.
She succeeded with her fifth attempt and they both fell into the room. They began to undress instinctively. Then Moses froze, one leg in and one leg out of his trousers. He had had a thought that was cold, green, and explosive.
‘Champagne,’ he cried. He toppled sideways, arms flailing, and knocked the lamp off the bedside table. The bulb blew with a soft contemptuous pop.
‘Yes,’ came Gloria’s voice from somewhere.
Moses peered over the bed. She was lying on the floor in her blouse and tights, her head under the table, her legs askew. One of her shoes was in the bathroom, the other was in the waste-paper basket. She looked like a car-accident.
He clambered to his feet, crossed the room, and stood over her, swaying dangerously. ‘Your eyebrows say quarter to two,’ he said. ‘It must be our anniversary.’
‘Already?’ Gloria murmured.
‘I’m going downstairs,’ he said, ‘to find a bottle of champagne.’
Opening the door, he began to look for a way round the outside edge. Gloria crawled towards him, one hand outstretched, pointing.
‘Trousers,’ she said.
‘What?’
She touched his bare thigh. ‘Trousers.’
‘Don’t touch me,’ he screamed. ‘Otherwise something terrible could happen.’ An erection now, he was thinking, would make it much harder to leave the room.
He returned some twenty minutes later covered in mud. The first thing he saw when he opened the door was Gloria wearing the pink dress. She held her arms away from her sides and twirled once, unsteadily. The skirt whirled out into the air. The sound of lightly falling rain.
‘I knew it.’ He leaned back against the door. ‘I fucking knew it.’
‘What?’ Gloria said. She had tried the dress on without thinking, simply because it had been lying there on the bed, but once it was on she had kept it on because it fitted so well that it felt as if it belonged to her.
‘You in that dress,’ he said. ‘It’s perfect for you. You ought to keep it.’
‘I couldn’t possibly. It’s your mother’s.’
‘Keep it.’ Moses waved his arms about for emphasis. ‘What do I want with a dress?’
He smelt almost sober as he kissed her because she had taken his breath away. He reached behind her and began to unfasten the dress. The rasp of the ancient zip was followed by a sharp knock on the door. If you could hear an exclamation mark, he thought, that’s what it would sound like.
‘Come in,’ he called out.
A waitress wheeled in their champagne on a silver trolley. Then she smiled and withdrew.
‘What’s all that mud?’ Gloria asked.
‘I got lost,’ Moses explained. ‘I opened what I thought was the door to the bar and suddenly found myself outside. At first I didn’t believe it. I thought they’d just turned the lights off or something. Then I tripped over a cauliflower. That’s when I realised I wasn’t in the bar – ’
‘Well,’ Gloria was pouring the champagne, ‘you got there in the end.’
‘I always do. It’s just that the middle can sometimes take a very long time.’
‘Which can be a good thing,’ Gloria said, ‘in certain circumstances.’ She sl
ipped her clothes off, slipped into bed.
‘I think I follow you,’ Moses said. And did.
He turned out the one light they hadn’t broken.
Gloria had draped the pink dress over a high-backed chair. In the moonlight the chair disappeared. It looked to Moses as if somebody was wearing the dress, somebody invisible, leaning towards him, bending over him, saying goodnight –
*
Gloria had opened the window. It was late. She leaned on the sill and blew smoke out into the night. It was so quiet after London, so quiet she could hear the blood hissing in her ears. She didn’t feel tired any more, or drunk. If anything, the champagne had straightened her out. No tennis court lay below her, only a lawn, but she shivered as she remembered her dream.
‘Moses? Are you awake?’
‘Yes.’ He sounded comfortable over there in the bed.
‘Moses, I’d like to go rowing. What do you think?’
He sat up. ‘Rowing?’
Gloria faced into the room and made her hands into fists. She held them out in front of her and pulled them towards her chest several times, energetically.
‘Ah,’ Moses said. ‘Rowing.’
‘There’s a boat on the lake,’ Gloria said. ‘I saw it when we arrived this afternoon.’
She could just make out the shape of Moses putting his feet on the floor.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Rowing, is it?’
There was nobody about downstairs. The grandfather-clock in the hallway made them jump and cling to one another as it struck quarter past two. They walked over the blue-grey lawn, their feet soundless on the grass. The lake looked bright and black and waterproof. It could have been a giant tarpaulin spread out on the ground.
They found a boat complete with oars moored to the jetty. Gloria stepped in first, then Moses cast off and jumped on board. They almost capsized. The water made fleshy noises as it slopped against the sides.
‘This is like being drunk,’ Moses said.
Gloria laughed. ‘You are drunk.’
She sat in the stern, hugging her knees, and watched Moses steer away from the jetty, noting the slight frown of concentration as he manipulated the oars, his head moving this way and that, judging distances seriously. Tiny creases appeared in the place that was made for creases in between her eyebrows. They signified emotion of the deepest kind.
‘Moses,’ she said in a voice that rose into the night sky like a full moon, ‘I think, in a curious way, I love you.’
Moses pulled on the oars, and pulled with such vigour that the boat was halfway round the lake (and Gloria was flat on her back in the stern with her legs in the air) before he replied.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is a very exciting thought.’
They were late for breakfast.
The hotel guests stared. Perhaps they had been woken in the night by the crash of falling armour, perhaps they had heard a boat on the lake in their dreams, or perhaps they were just senile, staring but seeing nothing. Most of them seemed to be approaching the end of their meals and would soon be gone. For breakfast read life, Moses thought.
The young couple (as they were probably now being called) sat at their table for ages, talking and smoking and drinking coffee. There was no rush; the sky showed blue at the top of the window and a 22-carat sun gilded the trees with layers of gold leaf. They knew the fine weather was going to last because Jackson had forecast rain. He had advised Moses to take along plenty of waterproof clothing. Foolish well-meaning Jackson.
On their way to the gardens at midday they passed the suit of armour in the hall and noticed that the helmet had been returned to its proper place.
‘Did I really?’ Moses said.
‘You know you did,’ said Gloria.
Moses paused on the front steps, his spirits lifted by the warmth of the morning and the light breeze that was carrying, as if on a silver tray, the unexpected smell of wild strawberries. Gloria looked stunning, almost edible, in her pink angora cardigan and her flaring yellow skirt and her sunglasses (for her hangover, she said). Moses had dressed all in white. Shirtsleeves rolled back along his forearms and a pair of loose-fitting cricket-flannels. Standing together in front of the hotel, they might have been posing for a photograph.
The path they took reproduced, in miniature, the twists and turns of the nearby river. It led away from the hotel, then doubled back and worked its way round to the old stables and outhouses. Trees arched overhead, meshed in a green ceiling, allowed only random shafts of sunlight through. Gloria walked in front, swinging her bare legs, turning every now and then to say something, patches of light illuminating different parts of her in turn – the hem of her skirt, one half of her face, the back of a knee – as if she had been invested with the memory that he had shared with her the previous night.
After twenty minutes or so they reached a point where the path veered away from the river and the trees thinned out. Gloria lifted a hand and pointed to a green door in an old brick wall.
‘What’s that?’
‘Let’s look.’
The green door wasn’t locked. They pushed it open, the paint flaking away under their fingers, and found themselves in a vegetable garden. There was an inert humid weight to the air as if it had been trapped inside those old brick walls for centuries, but there was a peace too, a lush sense of peace, as if it was content with its imprisonment. Countless passageways ran between head-high rows of sweet-peas, broad-beans and fruit-bushes. It would be the perfect place, Gloria was thinking, to sleep for a hundred years, like in the fairy-tales.
‘Let’s have a look in here,’ she said. She took Moses by the hand and pulled him towards a ramshackle greenhouse. It must have been at least fifty foot long. Four steps of broken brick led down to the door.
Moses shoved the door open, jarring the loose panes of glass. A dense sweet heat enveloped his face.
Tomatoes. Thousands of them.
He led Gloria down the aisle that ran between the raised flower-beds, marvelling at the abundance of tomato-plants, marvelling too at the ancient lead irrigation-pipes and the massive sticky cobwebs slung across the winch-handles for the windows overhead. At the far end, and solid as an altar, was a stone sink. The priest was a rake.
It was sweltering in there. Drawing breath was like lifting a weight inside your body. Gloria removed her cardigan. Her white silk top caught on her nipples, then fell sheer, away from her rib-cage and her smooth flat belly.
‘There is something about the smell of things growing,’ Moses said, running the tip of his tongue up the side of her neck.
Things grew.
Gloria turned hard against him, and there was the taste of salt in their kiss. Moses began to undo his trousers.
‘Moses,’ Gloria whispered, pulling away and swatting his flies with the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘In the greenhouse?’
‘Your idea,’ Moses said.
His hands slid under her skirt and inside her pants, pulling her towards him. He took her buttocks in both hands and lifted her slightly, then he was inside her, Gloria clinging to him, both arms round his neck, her heels locked behind his knees, her pants dangling from her left ankle.
Then:
Moses couldn’t be certain, but he thought he saw the green door move. Yes, it had. Slowly it eased open and a bald man in a brown jacket came into view.
‘Jesus,’ Moses said. ‘Taj Mahal.’
Gloria, thinking this was some new description of bliss, murmured agreement.
‘The man in reception,’ Moses hissed. ‘Look. Over there.’
Gloria opened her eyes. ‘Oh Christ.’
Moses staggered behind a large water-can with Gloria still attached, but this sudden movement, coupled with the shock of Taj Mahal’s appearance, proved too much for him: he came.
‘Oh no,’ he groaned.
Still supporting her, he lowered her down on to her haunches, came out of her, and placed a hand over her cunt. Gloria squeezed her legs together, her eyes liquid.
�
��Sorry,’ he said.
‘It’s all right.’
‘It was that Indian bastard. Where is he now?’
Gloria raised herself a fraction, peeped through the tangle of tomato-plants. ‘He’s over by the cabbages.’
‘I hope he hates tomatoes,’ Moses whispered. ‘I hope he’s allergic.’
They both watched, breath held, fingers crossed, as Taj Mahal scrabbled about in the earth on the far side of the garden. It was stifling now – the sun beating down through the glass roof, the suspense. Moses pushed Gloria’s hair back from her forehead and licked a bead of sweat from between her moist breasts. He kept his hand pressed to her cunt, catching the stuff as it came out of her. He liked the feeling of having the whole of that part of her in one hand.
Five minutes later, to their great relief, Taj Mahal left the garden, a small bunch of root vegetables in his hand. Moses and Gloria looked at each other, their flushed faces, their dishevelment, and started laughing.
‘He would’ve died,’ Gloria said.
*
Back in the room that afternoon, Moses opened the suitcase and took out the album. Its blue cardboard cover had been printed to resemble crocodile skin, and the word Photographs had been engraved across the bottom right-hand corner in an elegant gold script; a blue tasselled cord bound the pages together. Moses sat down next to Gloria on the bed and began to show her the pictures.
The first few were landscapes. They all had titles (written in a white chalk pencil because the pages were black) – titles like Grape Meadow and Hazard Copse. Then came several views of a country village entitled, simply, Our Village: a sunlit street, a row of shops (was that a greengrocer’s?), a policeman on a bicycle.
Gloria frowned. ‘This could be anywhere.’
‘I know,’ Moses said. ‘But look.’ He pointed at a picture of the village church. In the background, in the distance, something had caught the light, showed silver through the dark grey trees. ‘Isn’t that a river?’
‘So?’
‘Well, you remember what I said about the sound of running water?’
‘But Moses,’ Gloria said, ‘that could’ve been anything. It could’ve been your father having a bath.’
Dreams of Leaving Page 22