That feeling of not knowing what to say.
He had sat in the car, on the gravestone, tongue-tied, panic-stricken, his bowels churning. Part of him hated her for attacking him there, in the area of trust and confidences. Another part of him applauded her, told him she was justified. He liked to appear as the victim of mysterious and tragic circumstances, he liked to manipulate people, he liked the sound of his own voice. He liked being thought of as special. What had she said? Something about disembowelling for tourists. She was right. She had been hard with him in precisely those areas where Gloria, say, had been soft. She had been accurate. That thought startled him. Suddenly it seemed as though she had passed a test which he, unwittingly, had put her through.
*
The next Sunday the weather broke.
Moses woke to the sound of a roof-tile shattering on the street below. Thunder in the distance, constant thunder, as if the world was ill. Wrapped in his dressing-gown, he stood in his bleak kitchen, swallowing coffee and watching the rain come down. After what Mary had said, he had made a few enquiries regarding the whereabouts of his parents, but he had drawn a complete blank.
On Friday evening he had phoned Uncle Stan and Auntie B. Auntie B had answered.
‘You know, I thought that suitcase would upset you, Moses,’ she had said.
She was so straightforward about things, Moses thought. Mary would probably adore her.
‘A bit of a funny idea, really,’ she had gone on, ‘leaving a suitcase like that.’
‘You’re absolutely sure there wasn’t an address anywhere?’ Moses had said. ‘What about on that letter?’
‘Oh no, there was nothing. Nothing at all. Only a “to whom it may concern”. I don’t think they wanted anyone to know who they were.’
Moses had asked her for the address of the orphanage where he had grown up. He phoned the orphanage on Saturday morning. He spoke to a Mr Parks (Mrs Hood had died, apparently).
‘Even if we had that kind of information,’ Mr Parks said, ‘we couldn’t possibly divulge it. Not to anyone.’
Divulge. Really, he said that.
‘I’m not anyone,’ Moses said. ‘I’m the person involved.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s not our policy to – ’
‘I don’t think you heard me, Mr Parks. It’s my parents I’m looking for. My own parents.’
‘I’m very sorry.’ Mr Parks appeared to be gloating then. ‘We can’t help you.’
Moses slammed the phone down.
He resorted to directories, though without his usual enthusiasm. He spent most of Saturday afternoon in the Trafalgar Square post office. He thumbed through every directory he could lay his hands on. He came out with black fingers and a headache.
Perhaps his parents were ex-directory. Perhaps they didn’t have a phone. Perhaps they had emigrated. Or died, like Mrs Hood. He was beginning to wonder whether in fact he had ever actually had any parents. Perhaps he was a miracle of science. Or perhaps he had been delivered by a giant stork.
The perhapses seemed to go on for ever.
He turned round to see smoke rising from the grill. His toast was on fire. The last of the bread too. He switched the grill off and blew the flames out. He waited for the toast to cool, then he scraped the burnt bits off. He tried to spread it with butter, but the butter had been in the fridge for too long. Suddenly there were fragments of toast shrapnel all over the kitchen floor.
After sweeping up his breakfast with a dustpan and brush, Moses went and stood by the window. Rain. Grey skies. Misery. He watched a woman walk towards the bus-stop, hunched under a green umbrella. She was probably just tucking her chin into her collar to keep from getting soaked, but to Moses it looked as if she was carrying the heaviest umbrella in the world.
*
He dressed slowly and drove north through the drenched empty streets. It was no longer a decision whether or not to go to Muswell Hill on Sundays. It had become imperative, automatic, like breathing.
Mary opened the front door. She was wearing a faded black dress fastened at the waist with one of Sean’s studded leather belts. She had a scarf round her neck, wispy, cloud-grey, made of something diaphanous like chiffon. Her fairy-tale look. She eyed him suspiciously.
‘I didn’t think we’d see you again,’ she said. ‘Not for a while, anyway.’
He wiped the rain out of his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘Why not?’
‘After last Thursday I thought you’d probably stay away. Lick your wounds. I wouldn’t have blamed you, actually.’ She smiled faintly, and he smiled back, then looked away.
‘You’re not quite over it yet,’ she said, ‘are you?’
He breathed in deeply. ‘No.’
She seemed to approve of this. She took a step backwards and looked at him again, afresh almost. ‘Christ, you’re soaked,’ she laughed. ‘Come on in and get some dry things. We’re getting drunk as usual.’
He followed her straight upstairs. ‘Who knows,’ she joked over her shoulder, ‘maybe I’ll attack you again later on.’
‘There’s nothing left to attack.’
She stopped on the top step, smiled down at him. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that.’
Lunch was spaghetti bolognese, a tossed salad, and bottles of Chianti on the oak table in the kitchen. Moses drank quickly, with exhilaration. The glasses of wine were a series of weights. Suddenly the scales tipped and he was drunk again.
After the meal he washed up unsteadily. Broke a plate. Outside the rain sluiced off the roof, flooded the terrace.
Rebecca, drying, groaned. ‘I wanted to go out.’
They left the saucepans to soak and played the rain game with Alan. The rain game is easy. All you have to do is say what the rain is coming down in.
Alan said, ‘Buckets.’
Moses said, ‘Ten-gallon hats.’
Rebecca said, ‘Swimming-trunks.’
In theory the rain always stopped before you ran out of containers. Not on this particular afternoon. It went on raining using containers they had never even heard of.
It was still raining two hours later when, after a series of twists and turns, the conversation arrived at marriage.
‘You’re lucky,’ Moses was telling Alan. ‘Your marriage is the kind of marriage I’d want if I was married.’ He was entering the third stage of drunkenness now: the earnest stage (the fourth was loss of memory and balance, the fifth was coma). He poured himself another glass of wine. Like the rain, it didn’t look as if it would be running out in the near future.
‘It’s your sense of priorities,’ he went on. ‘I mean, you’re each other’s priority and because you know you’re each other’s priority you can act like you’re not. You can go anywhere, do anything. Maybe sometimes it looks like you’re putting other things first, but that doesn’t matter because deep down you know, you see. If you’re Alan you know that Mary’s always there, and if you’re Mary you know that Alan’s always there – ’
‘And if you’re Moses,’ Mary interrupted from her green chair in the corner, ‘you know that Alan and Mary are always there.’
‘Yes,’ he had to admit, ‘that’s probably true.’
‘And if you’re Alison,’ came Sean’s voice from the scullery, ‘you know that Vince’s always there.’
‘ That is not true,’ Alison cried, though she knew it was.
Mary smiled down into her drink. ‘Vince,’ she murmured.
Moses set that smile against the things that Vince had said about her. And couldn’t help himself. ‘You know what he said about you, Mary?’
‘Who? Vince?’ Mary said. ‘No. Tell me.’
‘He said you act like time’s stood still for twenty years.’
Mary’s face lifted, lit up. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘My God, that’s absolutely right. All this – ’ and Moses took it that she meant this heady Muswell Hill air she breathed, the spirit of the house, her happiness – ‘it hasn’t changed in twenty years. How wonderful!’
He had to laugh because she looked so victorious, so fulfilled, as if she had just won a prize. He knew how much Vince would have hated him for telling Mary what he had said about her. But how much more Vince would have hated the fact that she had taken the insult as a compliment, that she had discovered a new truth in those bitter words. Outmanoeuvred again. Bitch.
And suddenly Moses saw her as some brilliant species of fish. She exploited to the full the privacy and depth and space of the element she moved in. One moment she tilted her scales to catch the light and masqueraded as a piece of reflected sky, or travelled incognito through the darkness of the ocean bed. The next she lay on the surface, all gall and nonchalance and dazzle. And when those crude hooks ploughed or wheedled their way through the water towards her, she slipped past them with infinite grace, infinite delight.
Fishwoman, he thought.
Some day he would tell her that and make her laugh.
In the meantime the rain was still falling, collecting in deep pools on the terrace, the perfect background to his thoughts.
*
Evening had fallen. Moses had fallen too, snapping the back off a kitchen chair (Alan had laughed and said, ‘It’s all right, I like stools’). Now he stretched out on the living-room floor, a tumbler of brandy in his hand. Alison sat crosslegged in front of the TV; there was a crackling as she drew a brush through the forest-fire of her hair. Sean was beating Alan at pool upstairs. Rebecca was in the bath. He wondered where Mary had disappeared to, and the thought lifted him effortlessly to his feet.
Outside the rain had stopped because everybody had forgotten about it. The eaves and drainpipes of the house creaked with the last of the downpour. A few pale clouds overlapped at a great height.
He found her sitting on the low brick wall separating the Shirleys’ front garden from their next-door neighbours’. She wasn’t wearing any shoes.
‘Haven’t you got cold feet?’ he said.
She didn’t react.
He tilted his head back until it was parallel with the sky. It was so dark up there. Giddy and unending. Stars staggered. One tripped and fell a million miles.
‘What did you mean,’ she said finally, ‘by that little monologue about my marriage?’
‘I meant what I said.’
‘It sounded like a challenge.’
‘To do what?’
‘I think you know the answer to that. I also think you’re playing games.’ When he didn’t respond, her eyes turned on him and her voice hardened. ‘Playing games,’ she said, ‘with me.’
‘What about you? Aren’t you playing games?’
‘That’s not my style.’
‘What do you call what you’re doing then?’
‘Fear. Risk. Confusion. Take your pick.’
‘I don’t see what the difference is.’
She reached out, placed a hand on the back of his head and drew his mouth towards hers. She kissed him with closed lips. As the first kiss merged into a second then into a third, her lips gave, parted under his. He tasted wine and through the wine he tasted her.
She leaned back against the wall, stared uphill into the sky. ‘That’s the difference, Moses. I really do it. You don’t.’
He didn’t say anything.
‘You know, sometimes,’ she said, ‘you can hear the motorway from here.’ It might have been a private joke, the way she smiled.
He couldn’t hear the motorway. That breathy silence could have been anything. He was drunk, he was thinking, but not drunk enough. Panic.
Mary’s head, resting on her knees, moved from side to side as if she was denying something. ‘What am I doing?’ she murmured. ‘What am I doing? What are you doing?’
‘Sitting on the wall,’ he said.
‘Sitting on the fence,’ she came back instantly. And smiled at him sideways, through her hair, her lips shining like dark glass.
In that moment he felt her quickness could get them out of anything. He didn’t believe what she said about confusion and fear and risk. This was Mary. She was extraordinary. They would be all right.
*
He woke early as he always did in strange beds. He had a headache and creases on his cheeks from sleeping face down. When he tiptoed downstairs through the quiet house he found Mary in the kitchen. She was making toast and coffee. The open window let birdsong and a suggestion of sunlight into the room.
‘It’s going to be a nice day,’ she said. ‘I thought perhaps we could go for a walk on Hampstead Heath.’
‘Don’t you have to work?’
Smiling, she handed him a piece of toast. ‘I’m ill,’ she said.
They left the house just after seven and drove to the Vale of Health. Mary parked the car next to a deserted fairground. She pointed at the dodgems rimmed with orange rust and standing at curious angles to one another. ‘People at a party,’ she said, and once again he saw that nothing was wasted on her. She could make the world more interesting just by looking at it.
They scaled a steep bank of bleached grass. At the top the woods began. Beech trees stood on the hard-packed mud, their trunks dusted with green, their leaves sapped of life, shot through with holes, ready to drop, their roots rising through the surface of the ground.
Moses bent down. ‘They look like ribs,’ he said, ‘the ribs on starving horses.’ He glanced up to see Mary watching him with a curious smile on her face. It made him feel as if he had been doing something slightly eccentric. He began to get a glimmer of the reason why she liked to be with him.
‘Yes. Yes, they do,’ she said.
He rejoined her on the path. ‘When I was at school,’ he said, ‘I used to talk to horses.’
On Saturday afternoons, he told her, he sometimes had to play football. Matches were specially organised for the boys who were no good at games. For the spastics, as they were known. In his first year Highness MG was thirteen years old and just over six foot tall. Highness MG was a spastic.
On the one afternoon that stood for all the others in his memory a Welshman by the name of Davies took the game. Davies was an officious little bastard. He wore royal-blue track-suits and ran on the spot all the time. He was only 5′8″. Highness MG had been put down to play right-back. A real spastic’s position, right-back. So far as he could work out it meant staying at one end of the pitch, more or less out of the way, for forty-five minutes. Then, at half-time, he had to walk down to the other end of the pitch, to the area diagonally opposite, in fact, and stay there for another forty-five minutes. Unless there was injury time (what a terrible phrase; it sounded like everybody was officially supposed to hurt each other), in which case he would have to stand around for even longer. He arrived at the pitch that afternoon wearing his brand-new games jersey. The collar chafed his neck. The wind blew around his bare knees. It really was a very tedious and unpleasant business altogether.
Time went slowly. Sometimes the ball passed through his section of the pitch accompanied by rapid breathing, shouts, and the thudding of energetic boots (some spastics tried harder than others). He watched it go by like a rather dull carnival. Once the ball ran loose and rolled towards him. He lunged at it half-heartedly. The weight of his boot (size 9, suspiciously clean) carried his leg higher into the air than he had bargained for, causing a temporary, though not total, loss of balance. For those few moments he must have looked like a clumsy can-can dancer. The ball trickled under his raised leg and into touch.
‘Oh, Midget,’ everybody yelled. ‘Come on, Midget.’
Mary interrupted him. ‘Why Midget?’
‘Because my initials are MG.’ He winced. ‘You know, in some ways, I think I hated that name even more than Foreskin.’
‘That’s because it’s true,’ Mary said. ‘In some ways you are very small.’ And when she saw the look on his face she added, ‘I’m sorry, but I mean it.’
Moses went on with the story.
Because these matches featured spastics they always took place in the most remote corners of the school grounds.
On this particular afternoon they were playing right up against the boundary fence. Beyond the fence lay an ordinary field. A field with no white lines on it. A field where footballs were meaningless and the Welshman’s whistle had no power. A sensible field, in other words. At some point during the second half Midget got fed up with searching for insects in the long grass. He ached with cold and the inside of his thigh stung where the ball had struck it while he wasn’t looking (he was convinced that Puddle had done it on purpose). He wandered casually to the edge of the pitch and crossed the touchline. Sacrilege. Heresy. Taboo. He half-expected alarms to sound, dogs to start barking, search-lights to track him down in the gloom of that November afternoon, but, strangely enough, nobody seemed to notice.
He leaned on the metal fence. There was a tree in the middle of the field. Two or three horses stood in the shadow of its branches.
‘Hello, horses,’ he said affectionately.
It seemed like the first time he had spoken in ages.
They were old and tired, these horses. They had obviously had hard lives and had been put out to grass. One of them, a roan with shaggy hooves and a bulging sack of a stomach, lifted its head and shambled over.
He moved his hand out slowly, stroked the soft puffing nose.
‘What’s it like in there then?’ he said.
Then he heard the whistle screech and saw a blur of royal-blue in the corner of his eye. The horse’s eyes rolled back. It shied away from the sudden rush of colour, thudded off into the sanity of its field.
‘Goodbye, horses,’ he said.
‘What the blazes are you doing, Highness?’ Davies shouted, jogging on the spot. His voice was going up and down too.
‘Talking to the horses.’
‘Talking to the horses, sir.’
‘Talking to the horses, sir.’ Feeling like a parrot, sir.
‘And why, when you’re supposed to be playing football, are you talking to horses, Highness?’
‘They’re more interesting. Sir.’
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