The house seemed a part of this. It drew life from her, held the same philosophy, and, like a magician’s hat, conjured endless surprises: a fancy-dress party, a water-fight, a string quartet — even, once, a white rabbit sitting, like a hallucination, but perfectly content, on the bathroom floor (it belonged, Moses discovered later, to a schoolfriend of Rebecca’s). Moses found himself constantly sidetracked, constantly in demand — most of all, curiously enough, by members of the family. Rebecca, skinny, mercurial, eight years old, took him firmly by the hand that afternoon and led him off to Highgate Cemetery. To pick blackberries, she said. (They didn’t find any blackberries — it was too early, perhaps, or too late — so they picked flowers instead and drank chocolate milk in a sweet-shop and met a man with braces made of string and hands that shook even though, as Rebecca pointed out, it wasn’t cold at all; they decided to be frightened of him and ran all the way home.) Sean, quieter, darker, thirteen, came and asked Moses to help him build a cage for his rat. Alan beat him at pool on the table in the attic (a secret bottle of malt whisky in the cue-rack, laughter rising up from the garden), and arranged a bicycle-ride through old Hampstead for the following weekend. (If you had been invited once, and the family took to you, there was no need, it seemed, for a second invitation; you were simply expected.) Even Alison, less precious on her own territory, had him admiring her latest textile designs. ‘There’s no peace in this house,’ he sighed that evening, sinking into the nearest armchair. ‘No peace,’ Rebecca echoed, and jumped into his lap to prove the point.
The week trickled through his fingers like quicksand then it was Sunday again. One Sunday spilled over into the next, they blurred and formed a third, a switchback of events, an irresistible current that swept him along, that made him weightless as a piece of cork or an empty bottle. The moments he spent alone with Mary were islands he fetched up on by chance, explored, but soon left again because in that house there were always ships passing by, there was always smoke on the horizon. Though he didn’t always want rescuing.
Was it that first afternoon or another Sunday later in the month that he discovered her, perched on the upturned water-tank at the bottom of the garden, apples crushed to sweep pulp at her feet, wasps droning invisible somewhere as if the air itself was dozing, and told her, drunk now, swaying above her, that she was different?
‘Don’t fool yourself, Moses,’ she said, and some fatigue in her smile made him think for a moment that he was just another actor with the same lines, ‘I’m an ordinary woman, a perfectly ordinary woman.’
But her voice denied it. Her voice had colour, substance, contours. On her lips each phrase became a view of hills, soft rounded hills fringed by woods, green with rain, veiled in mist. He could literally gaze at her speaking.
He remembered the time he’d heard her voice on the phone, months ago now, and how it had hung on in his head, painting pictures. Then that first Sunday in Muswell Hill, he’d watched her prepare the evening meal. A cookery book lay open in her hand. Reduce the volume of the gravy, she declared, only to burst out laughing at the absurdity of the language. At one moment she could turn the recipe into an address to the troops, the next she made it sound like a prayer — to which Mary, iconoclast that she was, would probably have said, That’s exactly what it is. A prayer — but her voice always (and despite itself, perhaps) performed. So he couldn’t help smiling to himself when she told him how ordinary she was, couldn’t help smiling at the way her voice and her words, simultaneous phenomena, took different sides.
‘Why is it so important for you to be ordinary?’ he asked her.
‘Why is it so important for you to prove I’m not?’ she replied.
Most of the time she got the better of him like that.
*
Those Sundays of drinking into the small hours.
It was like a tree, Moses sometimes thought. As the night grew older, so the members of the family would detach themselves, first Rebecca, then Sean, then Alison, then Alan, until, finally, only Mary and Moses were left, clinging, very drunk, to their respective branches.
‘That’s beautiful,’ Mary said, when he told her.
Alan must have thought so too. During the next few weeks he produced a series of drawings, primitive supernatural drawings, which he called The Family Tree. The tree had six leaves and each leaf was a face. On one of the leaves Moses saw his own face, and was touched to find himself so accepted. He liked the last drawing best of all. It showed the tree at five in the morning, its branches stripped and bare, all the fallen leaves lying curled up on the ground with their eyes closed (it must have represented one of the Sundays when Moses, too drunk to drive home, had stayed overnight in the guest-room because his face was there with all the others). Alan built frames for the drawings and hung them on the kitchen wall above the Swiss cheese plant. ‘So we can look at them,’ he said, ‘while it’s actually happening.’
Every now and then there were emergencies, times when the Shirleys, either through some oversight or simply because of their own excesses, ran out of alcohol. Moses loved to watch Mary then. The horror, the panic, the outrage, that flickered almost frame by frame across her face. The glint of resolution as she took charge. ‘Listen,’ she would say, hands on hips, ‘I run a tight ship. This house cannot be dry.’ There would be groans of, ‘But we only looked last week and there was nothing then,’ and Mary would say, ‘Well, at least try.’ And so a kind of alcoholic safari would begin. They would scour the house, all but tear it apart in a desperate search for a bottle of something — anything. In the end they often found bottles in the most obvious places — in Alan’s briefcase, under Mary’s pillow. ‘You see,’ Mary would gloat over those who had doubted her. ‘You just have to believe.’
Once, though, she walked in through the back door brandishing an unopened bottle of Teacher’s. Mud streaked the glass. A snail had camped on the label. ‘Now where,’ she said, ‘do you suppose I found this?’ Nobody sitting at the kitchen table knew. ‘Under a rhubarb leaf at the bottom of the garden,’ she said. The culprit was never found. Moses suspected Rebecca, who had never concealed her scorn for the way her parents drank. ‘Alcohol,’ she would say, supremely disdainful in her glasses with their pale-blue rims, ‘I don’t need that.’
Another time they ran out at five-thirty on a Sunday afternoon. Serious. One and a half hours until the off-licence opened. One football match, two LPs, three mindless game-shows between them and a drink. Mary rose to the challenge as usual. ‘Oh, there’ll be a bottle of something somewhere. The law of probability.’ They searched the house room by room, cupboard by cupboard, drawer by drawer. Many secrets were discovered, many lost things found, but not a single bottle came to light, not unless you counted a flagon of Sean’s homemade beer, dusty and opaque, and at least five years old. Not even Mary would touch that. They returned to the kitchen and sat down at the table. The clock said five past six. It began to drizzle outside. Despondency set in.
Mary sighed. ‘This never used to happen.’