Then there was Hermann von Weltraum and his wife, Lottie. (‘Astrologers,’ Heather explained, ‘from Munich.’ Moses thought momentarily, almost wistfully, of Madame Zola, Famous Clairvoyant. He wondered if the Germans were Famous Astrologers. Looking at Hermann’s prissy pink face he doubted it somehow.) And Romeo Pelz, a clothes designer, and his male assistant, Derek. (‘Romeo,’ Heather lowered her eyes, ‘lives up to his name.’) And Christian Persson, a member of the Swedish delegation for human rights and a man, Moses saw, with absolutely no sense of humour. Christian Persson introduced Moses to the Very Reverend William Cloth, vicar of the parish. Heather moved away to fetch Moses a drink. He would need one, the glimmer in her eyes seemed to say.
The religious atmosphere of the group was quickly dispelled by the apparition of a short muscular woman with glazed brown eyes. She had dark curly hair and wore a caftan. If she had had a beard as well as a moustache, she could have passed for Demis Roussos. She was, in fact, Margaux Kampf, an actress.
‘I’m Margaux,’ she purred. ‘With an x.’
Moses looked puzzled. ‘I didn’t hear an x. Did you hear an x, Mr Persson?’
The Swede’s pale-blue eyes opened wide. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand.’
‘It’s on the end, lovey,’ Margaux growled. ‘It’s a silent one.’
Jesus, Moses thought. He looked across at the Reverend. The Reverend was also thinking Jesus, by the look of it.
‘I’m Moses,’ Moses said. ‘No x.’
‘That’s cute,’ said Margaux. ‘What do you do?’
‘I’m an escape-artist,’ Moses said. ‘Watch.’ And he turned round and walked away.
Heather moved towards him with a glass of champagne. ‘Is this all right, Moses? Or would you prefer something stronger?’
Moses assured her that champagne was quite strong enough for him.
Heather smiled past him. ‘Here’s someone I don’t need to introduce you to.’
‘Champagne’s quite strong enough for me.’ Gloria was mimicking him. ‘What’re you up to, Moses?’
She was all lit up tonight with the thrill of being on her own ground. She wore a bottle-green turtleneck, a black moiré skirt, black tights. Jet earrings swung against her pale neck. Her dark eyes trained on his face like search-lights, scanning him for signs of misbehaviour.
He smiled. ‘I’m trying to make a good impression.’
‘You’re full of shit, Moses,’ she said.
He held up a finger. ‘Not completely. I’ve got some news for you. You’re singing at The Bunker. I’ve fixed it up with Elliot.’
‘I take back everything I said.’ She took his face between her hands and kissed the tip of his nose. Then pulled away laughing. ‘I know what you’ve been doing. You’ve been taking speed.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I just tasted it. On the end of your nose.’
They were still laughing when a man in a pale grey suit appeared at Gloria’s elbow. ‘May I be introduced?’
‘Dad,’ Gloria said, ‘I’d like you to meet Moses. Moses, this is my father.’
The two men shook hands.
Mr Wood had a way of looking at you from under his eyelids that made you feel as if you were testing his patience. He doesn’t like me, Moses thought. He watched Gloria move away, and it seemed as if she was taking his joy and spontaneity with her. He didn’t want to be left alone with Mr Wood. There was only one way to talk to this manicured man, he sensed, and that was politely. The prospect of having to be polite depressed him.
‘This house is amazing,’ he blurted out and instantly regretted it; Mr Wood looked like the kind of man who expected precision not superlatives.
‘I suppose a lot of people say that,’ he added, trying to salvage something from the wreckage of his opening remark.
The ice squeaked in Mr Wood’s glass, but didn’t quite break. Moses felt like the Titanic. Sinking fast.
‘Yes,’ Mr Wood said. ‘Most people say that.’
Perhaps he felt, during the brief silence that followed, that he had been a little too abrupt or uncharitable because he then offered to show Moses the plans of the house, if he was interested, that is.
Moses said he was. I suppose most people say that, he thought.
Mr Wood took him over to the far side of the room. He unrolled a giant scroll of paper, spread it flat on the table, and pinned the corners down with glass weights. Then he began to talk quietly about the juxtaposition of planes, the distribution of space, and so on. Moses now remembered Gloria mentioning her father and architecture in the same breath, and suddenly all the pieces fell into place.
‘So you designed this house yourself?’
‘That’s right,’ Mr Wood said, as if Moses had finally found the answer to an extremely simple riddle, as if Moses’s surprise was, in itself, surprising.
Mr Wood was an attractive man. Very attractive. He was one of those people who look ten years younger than their age, even though you don’t know how old they are. But Moses had one problem with him. He behaved like one of his own technical drawings. He was what he did. He was too designed. The neatness of his features and his suit. The efficiency of his gestures. The measured way he used words – the way you might use bricks. And his smile, a ruled line across his face that, even now, seemed to be disclaiming any beauty the building might have achieved over and above its functional perfection. That’s all very well, Moses thought, but where does Mrs Wood fit in? He had instantly picked up on the playful streak in her, yet the only thing he had noticed in the house so far that in any way resembled her or might be seen as her doing was the vase of wild grasses on the coffee-table. And there couldn’t be much room in a technical drawing, he imagined, for a vase of wild grasses. He suddenly felt the urge to rescue her from all this. To ride into the white house on a black horse. To snatch her up from under her husband’s perfect nose. To save her from sterility, these expensive chains, this rich death. A rustling distracted him. Mr Wood was rolling up his plans with brisk dry movements of his hands.
*
Moses subsided on to a settee with a fresh glass of champagne. He had wanted to speak to Gloria, but she was tied up with friends of her mother’s. Disconsolate, he faced into the room, watched the guests manoeuvring.
Romeo Pelz, for instance, whose eyes were black except for one tiny silver point at the centre of each pupil, had his arm round Derek’s narrow shoulders and was extracting, by the look of it, some kind of promise or assurance. Derek listened, eyes half-closed, mouth widened like a cat’s, and revolved his head, first clockwise, then anti-clockwise.
Mrs Violet de Light, a shivery woman of forty-fivish with a bell of grey hair and darting eyes (her husband was a publisher, Moses remembered Heather telling him, and she worked on several committees), leaned against the wall in the space between two paintings, her scrawny body twisting sideways and upwards towards Christian Persson like a lightning-struck tree, her ear no more than an inch from his blond Don Quixote beard and his mauve lips as he told her that, no, it wasn’t so much religion that mattered in his work as morality. Mrs de Light quivered with fascination at the word.
Ronald, a journalist, stood by the bookcase. He was gulping neat vodka and casting long shadowy glances in the direction of a girl called Phoebe (whose professional name, Moses had heard someone bitch earlier on, was Dolores). Phoebe was being clutched from behind by the tanned Prince Oleander. His rugged face nuzzled her neck. One of his hands steadied her hip; the other gripped her wrist and guided it smoothly this way and that. Some kind of impromptu tennis-lesson, presumably. A backhand pass. Prince Oleander was having trouble keeping his eye on the imaginary ball. He seemed more interested in the way Phoebe’s breasts were plunging against the two flimsy strips of pink material that made up the top half of her dress. Moses saw Ronald’s grey face sag. This was one game the journalist would never win.
John Dream, meanwhile, was leafing through a book in the comfort of an armchair. He occasionally l
ifted a hand to pat the crinkly greying waves of his hair. He patted them very carefully as if they were priceless or easily frightened.
The Very Reverend Cloth stood in the middle of the room, transferring his vacant pulpit gaze from one passing guest to the next. Nobody stopped to talk to him, with the exception of Heather who might have been a puppeteer the way she brought sudden jittery life to those rather wooden limbs.
Now and then Moses caught a glimpse of Gloria threading her way through the gathering, as sharp and bright as a needle. He saw her walk up to a young American who looked like Paul Newman. He watched Gloria listen to Paul Newman talking. She seemed to be listening with her whole body. She radiated interest like light. Paul Newman slipped an arm round her shoulders and slid a few droll words out of the corner of his mouth. They both laughed. Those few moments hauled him back to the first time he ever saw her, talking to those two men at the party in Holland Park, and suddenly it was as if the gap between them – there then, there now – had never closed, as if that first impression had stained the way he looked at her, stained it with some bitter resin that nothing they ever did together, no amount of closeness, could remove, and suddenly he wanted to be John Dream, buried in the pages of a book, oblivious, content, or home alone, pouring milk into a dish for Bird – anything but this. And Gloria chose that moment to notice him. She detached herself from the American – rather too abruptly, Moses thought – and moved towards him through the crowd. The smile she was carrying looked forced somehow, artificial. It was like watching an air stewardess moving from first class to economy, her pleasantness no longer natural but obligatory. It was like being back at the orphanage. He felt condescended to.
She sat down next to him.
‘Are you all right?’ she said.
She touched his arm. An afterthought.
He didn’t look at her.
She tightened her grip on his arm. ‘What’s wrong, Moses?’
‘Nothing,’ he said.
His arm felt pressurised. He moved it away from her.
‘You were having a better time over there,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’d better go back.’
He wanted her to understand this simple unreasonable jealousy of his, but when he lifted his eyes to meet hers, he saw that she had taken a different turning somewhere. Suddenly they were miles apart and travelling in opposite directions.
‘Is that what you want?’ she said.
He shrugged.
She got up and walked away.
He didn’t watch her go.
Herr and Frau von Weltraum, the German astrologers, took her place on the settee.
‘Do you, by any chance, speak German?’ Hermann asked, pushing his spectacles a little higher on his inquisitive pink nose.
‘Nein,’ Moses said.
Hermann found this tremendously funny, and turned to relate it to his wife. His wife leaned forwards so as to smile at the humorous Englishman.
But the humorous Englishman had left.
*
Out on the patio Moses almost tripped over Ronald the journalist. Ronald lay against the wall, legs splayed, hair plastered over his forehead.
‘What are you doing down there?’ Moses asked.
‘Drinking.’
‘What are you drinking?’
A bottle rose into the air. Moonlight silvered the transparent glass. ‘Vodka. Have some.’
‘Thank you.’ Moses swallowed a mouthful and handed the bottle back.
‘I’m Ronald,’ Ronald said. ‘Who are you?’
‘Moses.’
‘Christ.’
‘Yeah, I know.’ Moses studied the journalist with some curiosity. ‘So what are you really doing out here?’
Ronald mauled his face with his free hand. ‘I’m pissed off. Bloody pissed off.’
He had been looking for Phoebe, he explained. You know, Phoebe. The girl with the incredible tits. He had looked all over the house. No dice. So he tried the garden, didn’t he. He was just crossing the lawn when he heard this moan. Coming from the shrubbery, it was. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled the last few yards. And there she was, kneeling in the bushes, her dress pushed down to her waist, her fat breasts erotically tattooed in light and shade. Bloody marvellous sight. Except she wasn’t alone, of course. How did he know? He saw this pair of hands appear on her shoulders, didn’t he. He watched them sort of slide downwards until they were – oh Christ –
‘Prince Oleander,’ Moses said. ‘Giving her another tennis lesson.’
The journalist’s head slumped on to his chest. Then he lifted the bottle to his mouth and swallowed twice, fiercely. He had watched, he told Moses. He hadn’t wanted to. He just had to. He had watched them fucking in the shrubbery. Shuddering rubbery fucking in the shrubbery. He had watched them for ever. Well, until Phoebe started coming, anyway. That he couldn’t take. So he had dragged himself back to the patio and hit the bottle. He wanted to get shit-faced. Best way to be.
‘Are they still out there?’ Moses asked, cocking an ear.
‘I don’t know. Don’t fucking care. Thought I was in with a chance, you see. But I don’t come from Calibloodyfornia, do I.’
The vodka bottle lunged at Moses again. He shook his head this time.
‘Californication,’ Ronald said. He laughed bitterly.
Moses climbed to his feet. ‘Thanks for the drink.’
‘You going?’
Moses nodded. ‘Got to find someone.’
‘Fucking women,’ Ronald said.
*
The day was catching up on Moses. Moving back indoors, shaky now, a little brittle too, he suddenly understood that the setting for the party, though extravagant and dreamlike, was at the same time perfectly stable. Cushioned on the surface, rock-solid underneath. Everything running along preordained and well-oiled lines. Crossing the living area, he saw the discreet glances of shared amusement that passed between Mr and Mrs Wood, he saw their confidence in each other, the strength of their attachment. They could invite strangers, frauds, drunks, vicars, tarts – all potential spanners in the works – to their parties, they could mix them together like some giant human cocktail, they could flirt with other people’s chaos because they knew it would never happen to them. The spanners in the works might make a pleasant tinkling sound, but they would never damage the machinery. How could he, Moses, match a performance like theirs?
As was happening more and more these days (ever since the arrival of the suitcase, in fact), Moses’s thoughts turned to his own background, setting against this brilliant suburban machinery, against this concentration of dazzle, a darkness illuminated only by a few photos in an old album and a dress that he had given to Gloria (who probably had hundreds more upstairs), and a sudden panic washed over him, the feeling that he had been squandering valuable time, that he should have been buying torches, lighting fires, calling electricians, anything to lift the darkness a little, to reveal his machinery.
Where was his machinery? Perhaps he had been the spanner in those particular works. Too big a spanner. Perhaps that explained everything.
Perhaps.
But he wanted to know.
*
Somebody had turned up the volume of the conversation. Fred Astaire was trying to make himself heard with his own version of the Cole Porter classic ‘Anything Goes’. How apt, Moses thought. Unable to find Gloria, he ended up in a lamplit corner next to Paul Newman. Next to Paul Newman stood the awful Margaux.
‘Moses!’ she cried. ‘Moses with no x! Come and talk to us!’
Moses groaned inside.
‘Have you two met?’ Margaux asked.
‘I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,’ Paul Newman said.
I don’t believe you ever will, you bastard, Moses thought. The American had a pleasant transatlantic drawl and, for a moment, Moses wished he had brought Vince along. He would have enjoyed watching Vince toss a glass of champagne in that pleasant American face.
‘This is Moses,’ Margaux was saying
. ‘Moses, this is Tarquin.’
Tarquin? Jesus.
‘Have you seen Gloria?’ Moses asked.
Neither of them had. Not recently, anyway.
‘It’s very important.’ He looked round, as much to avoid further conversation as anything else.
Ronald stumbled past, ash on his tie, flies undone. He had stuck the vodka bottle in his trouser pocket. It swung against his hip like a six-gun with no bullets in the chamber. Phoebe and Prince Oleander still hadn’t reappeared. They were probably still fucking in the shrubbery (one day my prince will come). Violet de Light, who had seen her husband stroking Margaux’s hand on the patio, had captured Romeo and was pawing him in a desperate last-ditch attempt to arouse her husband’s jealousy. Raphael de Light, the publisher, knew Romeo was gay. He wriggled with amusement in the kitchen doorway. John Dream was quietly taking his leave of Heather who, turning back into the room, caught Moses’s roving eye and came towards him.
‘Moses, are you enjoying yourself?’
‘It’s a wonderful party. Tell me. Have you seen Gloria anywhere?’
‘The poor boy’s desperate,’ Margaux said.
You cunt, Moses thought, and smiled pleasantly. He began to look round the room again. For a blunt instrument this time. Margaux drifted serenely out of range.
‘– I don’t know where she is,’ Heather was saying. She pushed her hair back from her forehead with spread fingers. An expensive smell circled her left wrist like a bracelet.
Moses felt a wave of nausea well up inside him. His body started moving up and down, up and down, a smooth well-oiled movement, almost pistonlike. The sweep of Heather’s hair became a part of this. The smell of her perfume too. He didn’t dare look at her.
‘– she could be anywhere – ’
He heard her voice through a buzz of interference. The air between them had broken up into patches of black and white. He hoped to Christ he wasn’t going to pass out. Not in Hampstead. He hoped with a desperation which, if anything, made it seem more likely to happen.
‘Got to go to the bathroom.’ Hardly able to move his lips. Mouth heavy, hydraulic. And he could see the sound waves his voice made looping out towards her. Loch Ness monsters made of words, of frequencies. There was a look of concern on her face, he thought, but it was like a bad television picture. All snow. No, bigger than snow. Black gaps between the flakes.
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