‘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 lifted 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.