‘Oh, excuse me,’ Moses said, and, backpedalling, hit his head on the door.
‘No, that’s all right,’ Pink Slip said, slipping into Beige Robe (though, for Moses, she would always be Red Blouse). ‘Just leave them on the table, would you?’
Moses gaped at her. ‘What?’
‘Just leave them on the table,’ she repeated.
‘But they’re mine.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘They’re mine,’ Moses said. ‘I bought them.’
It was Red Blouse’s turn to gape. ‘Aren’t you a waiter?’
‘No,’ Moses said. Glancing down at his white shirt and his black trousers, he began to understand the misunderstanding. Red Blouse had obviously been too engrossed in Blue Blazer to notice Moses sitting in the corner of the dining-room. So it’s true, he thought. Love is a bad play and all the actors are blind.
Meanwhile Red Blouse was staring at him and all the time she was staring at him her mouth was opening wider and wider until it seemed that something must emerge. And finally it did. It was a scream. A scream so powerful that it wiped out the entire world. For some indefinable length of time (two or three seconds, perhaps — or a century, who knows?), there was no world, only scream. The scream of Red Blouse. Then it ceased and there was void, such as there was at the beginning of time before the world existed. Then the world crept back, shell-shocked, wary.
Moses began to slide backwards round the edge of the door, but he delayed long enough to see Blue Blazer (White Birthday Suit) catapult from the bathroom, skin trailing steam, trip on a pair of shoes (‘Are you all right, daaaaargh — ’) and nosedive into the carpet (Pink Buttocks, Brown Mole).
‘Sorry,’ Moses said, melting into the corridor. ‘Terribly sorry.’
Mary lay diagonally across the bed in the next room. ‘Did you hear somebody scream?’ she said, her voice sleepy with alcohol.
‘Scream?’ Moses closed the door softly behind him. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘That’s funny. I could’ve sworn I heard somebody scream.’
He knelt down beside her. ‘Brandy,’ he said.
‘How nice.’
‘Undress me,’ he whispered.
Removal of evidence.
He reached over and switched off the light.
‘No light?’ she said. ‘But I always — ’
‘It’ll make a change,’ he said, ‘won’t it?’
Sex. The perfect alibi.
*
Mary woke early the next morning. She dressed with a series of deft silent movements and left the room. In the lobby she made enquiries as to the whereabouts of a Mr Fowler, then she set off down the hill on foot. Mr Fowler, the village mechanic, proved most obliging. He told her he would tow the Volvo himself. He could have a new clutch cable fitted by midday, he assured her, twirling his spanner as a philanderer might twirl his moustache. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said.
When she returned to the hotel, Moses was awake. She gave him the good news.
‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you try Alan again?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ She came and sat on the bed. She was ninety per cent air this morning. Her fingers skimmed across his skin like a breeze. ‘Let’s go and have some breakfast, shall we?’
Ten minutes later they sauntered into the dining-room. Blue Blazer and Red Blouse were sitting at the same table by the window. No trifle fantasies today. No clasping of hands, no glances moist with furtive lust, no sweet nothings not disturbing candle-flames. No nothing. Only eyes lowered as if in shame. Blue Blazer spreading brittle toast, Red Blouse fingering the pleats in her skirt. Had Moses broken the spell by bursting in on them like that? Perhaps. But what a feeble spell then.
As Moses poured himself a cup of coffee he remembered having woken in the night. He had been lying on the counterpane, a chill on the surface of his skin. Naked. Dehydrated. No idea where he was. He could hear the radio going, low volume, something about the death of a famous comedian. He remembered feeling his way out of his dreams and across the room. Running the cold tap. Gulping two glasses of water straight down. Then, moving back towards the bed, he had paused, curious suddenly about the view from the window. He had imagined a vast dark sky, vaulted as the inside of an umbrella, and stars like punctures in the fabric, leaking weak light from behind, and the night air hissing, the night air seeming to escape, and then, below, the land falling away, hills and valleys rolling away in waves, unseen dogs barking, sleeping farms, a dim ribboning of lanes, wave on wave of invisible black hills and valleys, breaking against a distant silent horizon. When he parted the curtains he jumped back. A graveyard pressed its face to the glass. Cold gnarled stones up close. A thin tree beckoning. The stealthy bulk of a church. He hadn’t liked seeing this. He hadn’t liked seeing it alone in the dead centre of the night. He had hurried back to bed, huddled against Mary. He had buried himself in her untroubled warmth, in her oblivion.
He watched her now as she smoked and ate toast at the same time, as she swallowed the remnants of her coffee. He knew that he could admit fear to her. Admit weakness. Smallness. Anything. And that was what it was about, wasn’t it?
‘I still need you, you know.’
She looked up. ‘Why do you suddenly say that?’
‘I was just thinking,’ he said. ‘I remember you saying, a few weeks ago, in that graveyard it was, I remember you saying that it wasn’t you I needed but my parents, my real parents, and that I’d only be able to decide whether I needed you or not after I’d found them. Well, now I’ve found them, one of them, anyway, and I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided — I still need you.’
Mary smiled and came round the table and gave him a cool lingering kiss on the mouth. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Blue Blazer and Red Blouse pretending not to notice.
After breakfast they linked arms and walked outside. They followed the road that ran alongside the graveyard wall. A fresh wind blowing, laundered clouds.
‘What a lot there is to tell Alan,’ Moses said.
Mary pulled the hair away from her mouth. ‘I shall tell him everything,’ she declared, her chin in the air. ‘Everything.’
The general, he thought. His general.
‘I know you will,’ he said. He had expected her to respond like that. He knew she couldn’t tolerate restrictions of any kind. Restrictions were death to her, the stones over the wall.
Everything went so smoothly that morning, as if those few hours belonged to a different weekend altogether — Mary even allowed him to take a photograph of her (usually she shielded her face with a hand and cried, ‘No pictures,’ or asked him why he was threatening her) — and the sight of Mr Fowler standing in front of the hotel with the car when they returned from their walk seemed like a part of this.
He greeted them with a lopsided grin. ‘Good as new,’ he called out, patting the bonnet.
Mary thanked him for his trouble and wrote him a cheque.
Later they passed him on the road, his arms flexing at the elbows, the morning light hitching a lift into the village on his brilliantined black hair. They waved at him and he waved back.
*
‘I want some normal life,’ Moses said, as they eased into the heavy traffic on Camden High Street. ‘Could you drop me here?’
His gaze had fallen on the green wooden stalls of the vegetable market, the pyramids of tomatoes and oranges, the rows of aubergines, the spiky clusters of pineapples, and their colours seemed to plane the uneven surfaces in his mind, the parts that hadn’t slept enough. The sun divided a heap of newspapers into equal halves of light and shadow. A bare arm reached up and opened a third-floor window. Was that a tin whistle in the distance? He wanted to drift, mingle, breathe. It would be breaking precedent, of course — it would be the first Sunday in almost four months that he hadn’t been to Muswell Hill — but hadn’t they already broken precedent by spending the night together and besides, as Mary herself might have argued, what was precedent for?