His reply was greeted by a burst of applause. Davies froze in stupefaction, one knee in the air, until he realised that it was the crowd three pitches away (who had just seen Darling SGB of the First XV go over for a try to put the school ahead of its local rivals).
‘Davies never forgave me for that,’ Moses said. ‘You know what he wrote on my report? He wrote: Highness seems totally uninterested in any form of physical exertion whatsoever.’
‘Nicely put,’ Mary said, ‘but no longer entirely true, I suspect.’
Moses laughed.
He had never been to Kenwood House before, but it seemed appropriate to be seeing it at eight o’clock on a Monday morning, as if that specific time and place had been reserved long in advance. He had the feeling that, although everything was unusual, everything was as it should be.
Mist dressed the trees in grey uniforms, confined the world to little more than the footpath they were walking along. They reached a ditch. He jumped over. Mary stooped to examine a dam of twigs and leaves. She almost lost her footing on the bank. She was no athlete either, he saw. She would probably have talked to horses too. He held a hand out to her and helped her across.
They sat down on the grass beside the lake, the house a suggestion of white in the mist behind them. Mary leaned back against him, her head resting on his stomach. It was strange, her lying against him like that. In a flashback he saw Gloria in the same position, that Sunday morning on the beach. That kind of duplication worried him; it was as if, sooner or later, all human contact fell into the same tired easy patterns. He wanted to establish a difference between the two. He bent over and kissed Mary’s mouth. It was cool, closed; it didn’t move under his.
The sun pressed through the mist, brought out a fluorescence in the grass, a pallor in her skin, then it withdrew again, turned back into an area of brightness in the sky. The pressure of her head on his body spread, ran through his blood until he was alive to every part of her: the veins on her hand, the gleam in her hair, the curve of her nearest breast whose shape he still didn’t know. It was like being injected with some kind of slow drug that convinced him once again just how extraordinary she was – an injection she could quite reasonably deny all knowledge of, and would, knowing her.
It was a game, whatever she said. And, as in any game, there were rules. She laid down two rules that morning on the heath. The first after several minutes of silence. She levelled her chin at him suddenly, reminding him of a general, her profile in relief against a battalion of trees. ‘Nothing is to be destroyed,’ she said.
He said nothing.
You, me, him, us, them, he thought. A tall order, that. Like a tray stacked high with crockery. A cup slides towards one edge. You tilt the tray to try and save it. A plate falls off the other end. Crash. Nothing is to be destroyed, he repeated to himself. He looked at her and saw what they had together as a circus-act.
And the second?
‘You must never let me fuck you,’ she said. ‘Never.’ And when she saw him smiling, ‘No, I’m perfectly serious, Moses. Even if I ask you to, you must never let me. Promise me that.’
Even then he had a presentiment of how erotic a rule like that could be. Was that the reason for it, though? He never knew with Mary. She experimented with herself. ‘I put myself through things,’ she had told him once, and he remembered thinking of lions and hoops of fire. Still smiling, he nodded. He promised.
‘You see,’ she said, ‘I’ve never done this before,’ and her eyes dilated, somewhere between triumph and fear.
‘I don’t understand. Never done what before?’
‘I’ve only been with Alan. That’s it. That’s all I know.’
He found this almost impossible to believe. She had led him, he felt, to believe the opposite. And he had never kissed anyone who kissed so well. But then there was a certain innocence about her kiss that made him think: Well, perhaps she is telling the truth. An innocence that her experience, such as it was, had done nothing to corrupt or transform.
So they were agreed: their relationship was to continue as it had started – orally.
One question wouldn’t go away, however. Mary had made the rules – but was she going to stick to them? After all, everybody knows what rules are for. And Mary was perverse enough to do exactly that.
*
‘That looks forbidden,’ Mary said. ‘Let’s try it.’
She backed the Volvo on to the grass verge and switched off the engine.
It was October now. Leaves the colour of tobacco. Air you could smoke like a cigarette. One of those days you remember years later. You don’t always remember the date or the place, sometimes you don’t even remember who you were with, but you remember the way your mind emptied out like a sigh, you remember the ease of your body’s moving, the feel of the air on your skin, the shape of a cloud, you remember a casual phrase, something somebody said without thinking, something that takes on significance purely through being remembered: That looks forbidden. Let’s try it.
A path curved away ahead of them. On the left, beyond the metal cattle-fence, a meadow sloped up to a ridge whose cutting edge had been blunted by a row of trees. To the right a high brick wall allowed them teasing glimpses of a mansion set in the middle of a private park. Once Moses saw a deer glide through the smoky distance. They followed the path for about twenty minutes until it narrowed, ducked into a wood.
Mary stood still, inhaled. ‘That’s so erotic.’
All that mulch and mould, she meant. All that humus, bark and fungus. Matured, ripened, sweetened in the dark container of that wood. He remembered her smiling up at him, her face between his thighs. ‘My God, how good that smells.’ And so crestfallen when he told her that he had just washed his sheets for the first time in almost four weeks. ‘Four weeks,’ she had groaned. ‘What a terrible waste. How could you do something like that, Moses? How could you throw it all away?’ In mourning, almost. He had looked puzzled and amused. He had never thought of dirt like that before.
Now she was standing next to him, her eyes flecked with silver, saying, ‘Jesus, you know what this is like? This is like having my face in your pants.’
They lay down on the noisy leaves, each sensing the other’s body stirring under all the layers of clothing. One hand eventually discovering the warm pale flesh of her stomach made her gasp. She curled round, took him in her mouth so softly, so gradually, that he didn’t have to will his orgasm; it rushed him from a distance, threw him backwards, shook him like a fit. She drank him, spilling nothing.
Afterwards she moved towards his mouth.
‘Taste yourself,’ she said.
The air lay cold against their faces, everywhere except their lips which it couldn’t reach. The leaves crumbled into dust under their bodies.
He drew back so he could look at her.
‘You don’t seem so tall when we’re lying down,’ she said. ‘Maybe we’ll have to lie down more often in the future.’
He smiled.
‘And that taste,’ she said. ‘That taste in the daytime. That too.’
He leaned above her watching the light, the white October light, run like acid into all the lines on her face, making them deeper, more pronounced. He traced one that curved through the thin mauve skin beneath her eye.
‘You look older outdoors,’ he said, meaning he liked the way she looked.
She lay back, looked up at him. It was her look. It came at you horizontally (vertically, in this case). Shrewd eyes, head cocked, mouth pushed forwards, almost pouting. It was amused, sceptical, challenging, but most of all it was enigmatic since she used it as shorthand and he could never gauge its meaning.
‘I’m forty,’ she said. ‘Next year I’ll be forty-one.’
He lay back, his head next to hers in the leaves. ‘I was thinking,’ he said. ‘Does Alan know anything about this? I mean, if he knew, what would he think?’
Mary sighed. ‘How should,’ I know? I told you. I’ve never done this before. I have no idea.’
‘You don’t think he suspects?’
‘Why should he? He trusts me. He hasn’t got any suspicion.’
She saw Moses frown. ‘I’ll spell it out for you,’ she said. ‘I’ve been married for nineteen years. I know Alan and he knows me. It’s close, you know? Even after all this time. And I would never leave him. Not for you. Not for anyone. And you know that too, if you’re honest with yourself. That’s why you’re in this thing. It’s safe.’
He realised that she was angry because she thought he was trying to put her marriage in a box, and nobody could do that to her marriage. He wasn’t, though. He only wanted to know what it felt like to be in the middle.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you don’t understand what I’m trying to say.’
‘If you can’t be clear, that’s your problem. I’m not an interpreter.’
Moses sat up, looked away from her.
‘I’m a wife and a mother,’ Mary said. ‘Whatever else I am comes third.’
He knew that. At the same time he found that degree of clarity a bit suspect. ‘How can you be so sure?’ he asked her. ‘How can it be so neat?’
‘It’s nineteen years of my life, Moses. If I wasn’t sure about that, I wouldn’t be sure about anything.’
‘Maybe you just described me.’
‘Maybe I did. But there’s a big difference. I’m forty. I can’t afford to be wrong.’
‘Old woman,’ he said. He knelt in front of her and put his hands on her shoulders.
‘Yes,’ she said, defiant now, leaves in her hair, ‘I am old.’
‘Kiss me,’ he said.
She stared at him steadily for a moment, then her face relaxed. She kissed him.
*
The wall seemed to go on for ever. Everything was happening on the left and Mary, brighter now as if they had, between them, cleared the air, pointed, scrutinised, cried out:
‘Look. A weir.’
The water, shaped like a comb, fell sheer into a still pool. She told him a story about a girl she had known when she was at college. The girl had drowned herself just below a weir. When they found her, she was floating, bound in weeds, like Ophelia. She had left a note behind in her room. I would have done this months ago, but I had to wait for my hair to grow.
Moses shivered.
‘And I remember everybody telling her how much nicer she looked with her hair long,’ Mary said.
Later they passed a bonfire.
‘You know what Rebecca used to call those?’ she said. ‘Cloud factories.’
Then they saw a sofa overgrown with brambles, a jay (no more than a scribble of blue on the grey paper of the afternoon), and a moon rising above the trees, as see-through as a piece of dead skin. It was one of those days when everything you see has a story attached to it, when everything you see reminds you of something else.
But nothing happened on the right. They glimpsed the house at intervals, from a number of different angles, through gaps where the wall had tumbled down, through cracks in padlocked doors and, once, through the bars of an ornate wrought-iron gateway. There was something pornographic about the way the house revealed itself. It turned them into voyeurs.
After walking for almost two hours they reached the car again.
‘How peculiar,’ Mary said, ‘to go all the way round the house like that, to go so far, without ever getting any nearer.’
It struck Moses that, on another day, they would probably have ignored the PRIVATE PROPERTY signs and scaled the wall and explored the grounds. But he said, ‘Some things are better from a distance.’
‘I hope that doesn’t include me.’
He smiled. ‘You know it doesn’t.’
But she had come perilously close, it seemed, and knew it. For that walk round the wall, he thought, had summed up their entire relationship.
Never getting any nearer.
The rules still intact.
*
Gloria phoned again.
He didn’t want to talk to her at all. He had nothing to say. He found himself feeling delayed by her call, as if he had something important to do, which he hadn’t. She sounded cheerful which made him sound depressed. His mind drifted as she talked. He said yes, no – anything, really. He didn’t care whether he gave himself away or not.
When she had finished answering the questions he hadn’t asked her she began to ask him questions.
‘Are you still seeing the Shirleys?’
‘Yes. Weekends, mostly. Sometimes I stay there a couple of days.’
‘Oh. That’s nice.’ She was trying to be big-hearted. Taking an interest in something that either upset or annoyed her. It made him want to rub her face in it. Would it be ‘nice’ then?
‘What do you do there?’
‘We get drunk, talk, go for walks– ’
‘Is she an alcoholic?’
‘Who?’
‘The mother. Mrs Shirley.’
‘No. She just drinks a lot.’
A short laugh from Gloria, but he hadn’t meant it as a joke. Then a pause. ‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘You sound a bit morose.’
‘I’m fine,’ he said, sounding morose.
‘What is it then? Don’t you want to talk to me?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. But really she was right. He didn’t want to talk to her. He couldn’t explain it to himself so there seemed little point in trying to explain it to her.
‘Can I come round?’ she was asking him now.
‘When?’ he said. Thinking tomorrow, the next day, something like that.
‘Now.’
Jesus, he thought. Then he went blank. Looked at the clock even though he already knew what time it was.
‘If you like,’ he said finally.
‘See you in about half an hour.’
He put the phone down and began to wait for her to arrive. He resented her presumption. Inviting herself round like that. But why, in that case, hadn’t he simply said no? How was it she had acquired the power to rob him of initiative?
*
She hung her coat on the ghost’s coat-hook even though he had told her a thousand times.
‘I’m worried about you,’ she said, moving across the room towards him.
He kissed her, then he turned away. ‘Why?’
‘I think you’re getting in over your head.’
‘Over my head?’ He laughed, but there was no humour in his laugh. What right did she have to say that? ‘How do you know?’
She sat down on the sofa and lit a cigarette. He could hear it crackle in the silence as she inhaled. ‘Call it a hunch,’ she said.
He looked over his shoulder at her. It was something Mary might have said. She phrased things that way.
‘I mean, I don’t care what you do with her.’ Gloria was examining her shoes.
‘And what if I told you we don’t do anything?’
‘I don’t care. The thing is, you’re not being straight with me. You keep everything to yourself. I don’t know where I stand any more.’ She paused, looked up from her shoes. ‘That means something, don’t you think?’
Moses turned back to the window and pressed his forehead against the cold glass. He felt sick, uncertain, found out. His mind was going blank with the division of things. Down in the street he could see three children sitting on a wall. They were laughing and swinging their legs. He wanted to sit on a wall. He wanted to laugh and swing his legs.
‘Moses,’ and Gloria’s voice had softened now, ‘just tell me where I stand.’
‘It’s a friendship,’ he heard himself insisting.
She looked down at her hands. For the first time, he saw her as a nun, her smile limited and prim – superior. She was making him ridiculous. A friendship. How pompous. But what could he tell her? He tried again.
‘I like them all. The whole family. That’s why I go there. It’s as simple as that. I can’t see why you’re making it into such a great drama.’
She came and stood next to him
, her shoulder touching his upper arm. It was a forgiveness routine (for what?). He turned to look at her. She turned a moment later. They kissed. But the deeper their kiss became, the less he could see. It was all too close. He couldn’t focus. Everything blurred and swam away.
*
Sleeping together didn’t change anything. His body went through the motions – and not without a certain practised tenderness – but his mind floated free. His orgasm, when it came, seemed to happen somewhere else. It was like hearing an explosion in the distance as you walk down a quiet street: you pause for a second, listen, then walk on unaffected.
He lay on his back afterwards, one arm over his face, the other across his stomach. He wished the afternoon would accelerate into dusk so their faces became invisible. Gloria asked him what he was thinking about.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
When, actually, he was.
He was thinking about a picture he had seen while he was fucking her. Night-time. A street of ordinary houses. No lights in any of the houses, though. It had been raining in the picture. Even now the sound of a light drizzle came to his ears, scarcely audible, like the movements of insects. The street looked dark, empty, shiny. Halfway down on the left a pink sign flashed on and off … on and off … the only colour, the only life in the surrounding darkness. In neon script it said Goodbye. Just that one word. Staining the wet black tarmac pink. Nice picture. He could have watched it for a long time. It was so monotonous, so precise, so comforting. Very nice picture.
‘Nothing,’ he repeated.
*
The mood lingered.
That night, after Gloria left, he thought about Mary. He stared at the kitchen floor as he thought about her. A colour appeared: yellow. Texture followed and the yellow turned into sand. A silent wind blew and the sand drifted. Something showed through. A fragment of mosaic. He bent down, blew on it. The mosaic grew.
There could be an entire floor here, he thought. He began to remove the grains of sand with a fine toothbrush so as not to damage anything that might be there.
This is ridiculous, he thought some time later, having cleared about forty square feet of mosaic with a toothbrush. There’s probably a whole villa here. First he used a broom, then impatience gave him a shovel. His mind raced on ahead. It came back with the word city. He called in cranes, trucks, bulldozers. He supervised the excavations.
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