Moses groaned. ‘A boxer? Trust me to get hit by a boxer.’
‘Ridley threw him out. You should’ve seen it. He just picked him up by the scruff of the neck and chucked him in that skip. The guy was furious. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so furious. But Ridley just stood there with his arms folded and said, “I don’t want to see you again. Ever.”’ Gloria laughed and shook her head.
‘I wish I’d seen it,’ Moses said.
‘You were lying on the floor. You must’ve been out cold for about two minutes.’
Moses touched his cheek. ‘D’you think anything’s broken?’
‘I don’t know. It might be an idea to check.’
‘Have my head examined, you mean.’ Moses grinned. ‘Shit, it even hurts to grin.’
Gloria drove him to St Thomas’s in Waterloo. The doctor, an urbane Pakistani, told him that he had sustained a hairline fracture of the right cheekbone. It would heal naturally, he said. As for the eye, that was just a broken bloodvessel. He wrote Moses a prescription. There didn’t appear to be any concussion, he said, but he advised Moses to take things easy for a few days.
‘If I was you,’ he concluded, stroking his neck with an elegant tapering finger, ‘I should try not to get into any more fights with boxers.’
Moses promised to avoid anyone who looked even remotely like a boxer.
On the way back to The Bunker Gloria turned to him. ‘You know something else that happened last night? After I’d finished singing, Ridley came up to me. Oh shit, I thought, what’ve I done now? But he just put his hand on my shoulder and smiled and said, “That was fucking diamond.”’
Rockets in July
The Rover touched fifty-five as an art collector touches his own private Rodin. Moses loved his old car. Gloria had wanted to hire a Porsche to drive down to Louise’s party in (these girls with parents in Hampstead!), but a Porsche, they found out, cost about £130 a day and neither of them had that kind of money. Gloria capitulated gracefully. She settled for half a Porsche which, when commuted into powders and liquids, turned out to be a gram of coke and a Thermos of Smirnoff and crushed ice. Much more sensible.
‘So where is the party exactly?’ Moses asked her.
Gloria, navigator for the trip, snuggled down in her seat. ‘A place called Star Gap,’ she said. ‘It’s somewhere on the south coast. Don’t worry. We’ll find it.’
Moses nodded.
They had left the rain behind in Purley (where rain belongs) and as the car swung away from a roundabout and climbed up through the trees towards Godstone the sun broke through, beat like a sudden drum rhythm in his blood. He wound the window down, listened to the cymbal hiss of tyres on the wet road. Gloria put sunglasses on and pretended to be an Italian movie-star. Smiles journeyed between them. So did the Thermos of vodka.
They had been driving for an hour when Gloria sat up.
‘What about a deviation?’ she suggested.
Moses narrowed his eyes. ‘In what sense of the word?’
‘I thought that, on this occasion,’ she said, in a voice that left him in no doubt, ‘the two senses of the word might be combined in a single act.’
Moses smiled.
‘It’ll be the first time, you see. Outdoors, I mean. We can’t really count that greenhouse in Leicestershire, can we?’
Moses agreed that they couldn’t really count the greenhouse in Leicestershire.
Gloria consulted the map. ‘Now, let’s see. We’ll be passing through a big patch of light green soon and, according to this, light green means either forest, woodland, or an area of outstanding natural beauty, so what I— ’
‘That means that if you were on the map,’ Moses interrupted, ‘you’d be light green.’
‘That’s very nice of you, Moses,’ Gloria said, colouring slightly (though not light green). ‘Anyway,’ she went on, after they had kissed dangerously (Moses always closed his eyes when he kissed), ‘what I was going to say was, why don’t we deviate somewhere in this area of forest, woodland or outstanding natural beauty?’
‘Exactly what I was thinking. How far is it?’
‘About seven miles.’
Moses stamped on the accelerator. The needle on the speedometer swung wildly between fifty-eight and sixty-five mph.
Porsche indeed. Who needs a Porsche?
*
They parked on a scenic bank of leaf-mould about half a mile up a lane that led eventually, so Gloria maintained, to a village called Balls Green. Gloria was so taken with the name that she was all for checking it out right away until Moses leaned over and, resting a hand on her wrist, gently reminded her that their departure from the main road (deviation in the first sense) had a specific purpose (deviation in the second sense) and Gloria was so overwhelmed by his logic and his singlemindedness that she instantly put all other thoughts out of her head.
They had a line of coke each in the car. Gloria began to slip out of her shorts.
‘In here?’ Moses looked surprised.
Gloria laughed. ‘No. I’m just changing.’
From surprise to bewilderment. ‘Changing?’
‘You’ll see.’
Outside the clouds parted to reveal a sky of almost transparent blue. Trees shifted their leaves and branches like people exercising. The air had warmed up.
Moses stood a little way from the car and let the sun move over his face.
Then Gloria was walking towards him in a long black skirt that she had fastened at the waist with a studded leather belt. She put an arm round him. ‘You know what I think, Moses? I think this is an area of outstanding natural beauty.’
He looked down at her and said, ‘Well, it is now, anyway.’
Hand in hand, they strolled up a mud track between massed banks of blackberry bushes and old man’s beard. Gloria noticed a stile set back in the hedgerow and a field beyond.
‘What about in there?’ she said.
They surveyed the field together. Lining one side, a row of silver birches, their bark scalloped, edged in black, catching the sun like the scales on fish. Tough springy grass sloped up to a copse at the far end. No sign of any livestock.
‘A perfect field,’ Moses said.
He vaulted over the stile. Gloria handed him the Thermos and followed, pinching her skirt between finger and thumb, as ladies descending staircases in ballgowns do. Moses, waiting below, ran a hand up her thigh. It encountered nothing but warm bare skin. Gloria smiled. Moses began to understand the full significance of the skirt.
They sat side by side on the grass. They drank vodka and breathed the lush agricultural air. Gloria said she could smell magnolia and Moses agreed, even though he couldn’t really think what magnolia smelt like. It was that kind of field.
Soon she was arranging herself on top of him, and it wasn’t long before he was inside her in a way that she had engineered and he was very happy with. Her skirt hid their four legs and far more besides.
‘You’re cunning,’ Moses said. The skirt, he meant.
Gloria smiled. ‘Someone’s got to think ahead.’
They fell silent, moved together. For a while it seemed as if Sussex might prove to be more accommodating than Leicestershire. Gloria could have been a tree doing its exercises. Sometimes her body shuddered as if a gust of wind had caught it, and one arm rose into the air beside her ear, the hand clenching and unclenching. Her eyelids trembled like leaves. Moses grasped her by the waist with both hands, twisted his face sideways into the grass. He closed his eyes. No sky any more. Only this green smell and the arching of his back. It was extraordinary how quickly she could move him from humour to ecstasy.
Then he heard the cough.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he came back to say.