She sipped at her orange juice, eyes lowered. She turned the glass in her white fingers. Her gloves on the table looked like hands praying. He could sense the words building up behind her closed lips.
When he stopped talking, she hesitated, then she said, ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.’
He looked at her carefully. If his eyes had been hands, they would have been holding a wounded bird or a grenade or a piece of priceless china. That’s how carefully he was looking at her.
‘I’ve slept with Eddie.’
He leaned back. So have about two thousand other people, he thought. So what. It was an abstraction, a statistic. It had no real meaning of its own. He waited for her to go on.
‘It started at that beach party. I didn’t see you for hours. I couldn’t find you anywhere.’ Describing anxiety, her voice was calm.
He said, ‘I didn’t know where you were either.’
‘He kept appearing next to me and standing there and looking. You know that look he’s got.’
‘Yes,’ Moses said. ‘I know.’ He heard lift doors slide open and fifty sighs leave fifty pairs of lips in unison. Yes, he knew.
‘I don’t know why he chose me. It could’ve been anyone, probably. He’s strange like that.’ She paused to meditate on what she had just said.
‘He waited until I got drunk,’ she went on. ‘We kissed and things. You didn’t notice.’
‘It was dark.’
‘What?’
‘It was dark. How could I notice?’
‘You just went off somewhere. You weren’t around. You didn’t seem to care.’ She lifted her eyes to his. ‘You should’ve been around.’
‘I remember climbing the steps the next morning,’ he said. ‘Those wooden steps to the top of the cliff. It was cold. You were shivering. You’d just had a dream about somebody stealing your voice. But if they had you wouldn’t have been able to tell me about the dream.’ He smiled. ‘I remember putting my arm around you. It made climbing the steps even harder. But I wanted to. I remember that.’
She shook her head. ‘You live in a world of your own.’
A drumroll rumbled over the end of her sentence. A cymbal crashed as her eyes drifted away from his, sideways and downwards. Two men in sequined evening gowns minced on to the stage, bulbous silver microphones in their fists.
‘We’re The Revelation Sisters,’ hissed the one in red.
The name rang a bell with Moses. He stared absently over Gloria’s shoulder at the two glittering gyrating men. Their dresses split to the tops of their muscular shaved thighs. He could see the tendons flexing in the backs of their knees.
‘When I first knew you,’ she was saying, ‘you were so — oh, I don’t know — thoughtful, I suppose. You thought of everything. You really tried. But these days — I don’t think you ever think of me at all. You look at me and smile, but you’re miles away. Thousands of miles away.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘It’s like you’re on another planet or something.’
The man in the blue dress (his name was Sheila, apparently) was licking the tip of his microphone. He had a long athletic tongue. Like an animal, it was. A blind pink animal.
‘Anyway,’ she went on, when Moses didn’t reply, ‘it wasn’t until about two weeks later that we slept together. Sorry. I mean fucked.’
‘You don’t have to tell me all this, you know,’ he said, but he knew the whole thing was going to come out anyway, all over the tawdry stained table-top, all over the red plastic ashtray, the two dirty glasses and the crumpled peanut packet. People had to talk Eddie out of their systems. The number of times he had been forced to sit through that. He sighed.
‘He just came round — one Sunday, I think it was.’ She aimed a glance at him, a glance that was tipped, he thought, with spite. ‘He didn’t ring beforehand or anything. He just turned up. A knock on the door and there he was. Grinning. “Hello, Gloria,” he said. “Can I come in?”’
She let out a mocking laugh. The way she was telling it, she was rubbing salt in her own wound. And wasn’t this supposed to be hurting him?
‘Cheeky bugger,’ the man in the red dress growled. He leaned down and playfully slapped one of the audience. It was the man in the bra. His scholarly expression played truant for a few seconds.
‘You know, I never really noticed how beautiful he was before. He came in and we talked for a while, I can’t remember what about. It wasn’t important, really. After that we went to bed. He knew it was going to happen all along. He said he knew the moment I opened the door.’ She traced a pattern in the spilt beer with her fingernail. ‘I suppose I knew it too, really.’
A loud cheer turned her head. The man in the red dress had toppled off his high heels. He sprawled on the stage, legs wide apart. He had lost one of his false eyelashes.
Sheila covered his eyes with the back of his hand in a theatrical gesture of horror and despair. ‘First chance she gets,’ he said, ‘she’s on her back with her legs open.’
Gloria spoke through catcalls and raucous laughter. ‘You haven’t said anything, Moses.’
He stared at her. Something seemed different. Suddenly she had the distance of an acquaintance, suddenly he couldn’t imagine ever having been close to her, and he didn’t know why. He stared at her until her features began to come loose and revolve slowly, like twigs or leaves, on the pond of her face. What was it?
At last he realised. It was her eyebrows. They weren’t telling the time any more. They were just eyebrows. Ordinary eyebrows. Even slightly curved! He couldn’t remember this happening before. Not ever.
‘Why are you staring at me?’
His eyes drifted away from her face to the stage behind her where a drummer with a crew-cut was juggling sticks. He was remembering how once, in the middle of ‘God Bless the Child’, her eyebrows had said, miraculously, and only for a split-second, four minutes to three.
‘Say something, Moses. Please.’
He shrugged, smiled. ‘I suppose it was bound to happen, really. But it’s funny it never occurred to me. That’s the strange thing.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Everyone falls for Eddie. But it’s all right. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘What do you mean it doesn’t mean anything?’
‘It doesn’t mean anything. To him.’
‘How do you know?’
He didn’t answer her this time. It was useless. He didn’t want to have to start explaining how Eddie was some kind of statue, how he didn’t have any time, how he had to live faster than other people, how nobody could mean anything to him, how he wouldn’t want them to, how that would hold him back, make his eventual return to that pedestal (wherever it was) too difficult. And how could he tell her that he, Moses, had fallen in love with her eyebrows, but that now he didn’t feel anything for them any more, and that, from now on, as far as he was concerned, they were eyebrows just like anybody else’s?
He glanced up, as if for guidance, and saw the picture of the Matterhorn above her head. He nodded to himself. Yes, the way he felt, he might as well have been in Switzerland. Blank as those wastes of snow. Blurred as those red roses. Emotions frozen solid. He imagined Gloria walking towards him across thin ice. It cracked and squeaked under her feet. She wasn’t going to make it. And he wasn’t going to help her.
‘Let’s leave,’ he said.
In the car she turned to him. ‘So what happens now?’
‘I don’t know.’ He concentrated on the road, noticed how smoothly he was driving. All the lights changed to green when he approached as if the gods were riding shotgun. That was funny.