Alan was trying to balance a spoon across his forefinger. ‘Think of it as a test,’ he said.
‘I’m not in the mood for tests,’ Mary snapped.
Alan smiled.
Alison said, ‘I’ll make some tea.’
‘Tea?’ Mary made it sound like a four-letter word.
Moses had noticed before how Alison and Mary swapped roles. When Mary became impetuous or extreme, Alison humoured her, made sensible suggestions, as a parent would. The look that Mary gave Alison as Alison put the kettle on was one of pure truculence.
‘My children.’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘Where do they get all this virtue from? All this common sense? It’s beyond me. Utterly beyond me.’
Moses had been doing some lateral thinking. Suddenly he hoisted himself upright. ‘There’s one place we didn’t look.’ He jumped to his feet. His chair crashed over backwards. He threw the kitchen door open and took the stairs in three giant bounds. The house shuddered at his enthusiasm. Alison rolled her eyes and sighed. Several people watched the kitchen ceiling as Moses tramped overhead.
Silence.
Then: ‘Hold the tea.’
Moses appeared in the doorway like a champion, a bottle held aloft. ‘Brandy!’ he cried.
Applause from the people gathered round the table. A piercing two-fingered whistle from Mary.
‘Where was it?’ Alan asked.
‘In the cistern.’
Rebecca wrinkled her nose in disgust.
‘That would explain the missing label.’ Alan turned the bottle in his hands as if he was an expert in the field of bottles found in cisterns.
‘The cistern.’ Alison’s voice was edged in sarcasm. ‘Of course.’
‘Extraordinary,’ Mary said. It was a word she rarely used. She looked very pleased with Moses.
After that incident they all became firm believers in the mysterious powers of alcohol.
*
As summer faded, moths invaded the city. Their sturdy furry bodies cannoned off lampshades and windowpanes. They were constantly flying into Mary’s face as if she was the only source of light. When they died their wings crumbled into a fine bronze dust that nobody could remember seeing before.
One Sunday night, after everyone had left, Moses was drinking gin on the terrace with Alan and Mary when Rebecca appeared on the kitchen doorstep. She was holding a sheet of paper very carefully in both hands.
‘I thought you were in bed,’ Alan said.
‘I was,’ she answered, ‘until I found this.’
In her white nightie, she looked like a tiny priestess as she advanced over the flagstones towards them, her eyes trained on the sheet of paper between her hands, her lips pressed together in concentration. On the paper lay the remains of a giant moth, two inches long, its soft grey fuselage still intact, its wings, almost gold, disintegrating.
‘Look at this dust,’ she said. ‘It shines.’
‘So it does,’ Mary said. She fetched a mirror from the kitchen, then she began to smear the gold dust on to one of her eyelids with the tip of her little finger.
‘What are you doing, Mum?’ One hand gripping the arm of Mary’s chair, standing on tiptoe so she could see, Rebecca was perfectly poised between horror and fascination.
Moses and Alan exchanged a faint smile.
When Mary had completed both eyelids she said, ‘Well? How do I look?’
Rebecca stared at her mother. ‘It looks like real make-up.’
‘Of course it does. That’s why the ugly god used it.’
‘What ugly god?’
A very long time ago, Mary began, moths used to live for seventy years, just like human beings. In those days the gods who looked after the world were very decadent. They sat around in the sky, they drank a lot, they dressed up and went to parties. One day they decided to hold a ball. It would be the grandest ball ever.
On the evening of the ball one of the gods was sitting in front of his mirror. He was very miserable. He was in love with the queen of the gods who was the most beautiful and unattainable of women, but he was so ugly that she had never noticed him. ‘I’m so ugly,’ he moaned. ‘If only I was beautiful too. Then perhaps she would notice me.’
At that moment a moth flew in through the open window. It fluttered and flapped around the room for a while, then it suddenly dropped on to the ugly god’s dressing-table. The ugly god was somewhat startled. At first he thought the moth was just tired, but when he turned it over gently with his finger he realised that it was dead. First his ugliness and now this death. He was about to heave a long sigh when he noticed a deposit of fine dust on the end of his finger. A glittery coppery dust. A glamorous dust. Sitting up a little straighter in his chair, he touched the moth again with his finger. Then he touched the skin above his eye with the same finger, once, very delicately. He looked in the mirror and smiled at what he saw.
He caused quite a stir when he arrived at the ball that night. Several of his friends didn’t even recognise him. Ladies bought him drinks and paid him compliments. The queen’s suitors huddled in a corner, pointing and muttering, their eyes green with envy.
And then the trumpets sounded and the queen of the gods made her entrance. Surrounded by giant male bodyguards, she looked as beautiful and unattainable as ever. When she passed the ugly god, however, she paused.
‘You’re beautiful!’ she cried. ‘Who are you?’
The ugly god bowed low and told her his name.
‘Come to my chamber tonight,’ the queen commanded him, ‘and we shall be lovers.’ And with a rustle of silk and gossamer she was gone.
The ugly god was immediately mobbed by a host of jealous suitors.
‘What’s your secret?’ one of them hissed. He wore the same lipstick as usual. Made from the juice of crushed rose petals. Very dreary.
The ugly god was still dazed, as much by the queen’s beauty as by her invitation. ‘A special powder,’ he said.
‘What powder?’ hissed another. He had dyed his hair with a solution distilled from the bark of silver birches. Old hat.
The ugly god realised that he had already said too much. ‘I cannot say,’ he said. And smiled in a most infuriating way.
He spent an exquisite night with the queen, but by the next morning the powder of the wings of the moth had rubbed off and he was ugly again.
‘Get out of my sight!’ the queen cried when she awoke. ‘God, I must’ve been drunk last night!’
The ugly god was chased out of the palace in disgrace. On the street he met two of his friends. ‘Hello, ugly,’ they said. They were full of gossip about the mysterious stranger who had attended the ball and spent the night with the queen. ‘Weren’t you there?’ they said. ‘Didn’t you see him?’ But the ugly god was too sad to reply. He had lost the queen’s love and he didn’t know how to win it back.
When he reached home he sat down at his dressing-table. He had no powder left. He had used it all the previous night. That was the trouble. The powder of the wings of moths was a very rare substance.
And then he had a brainwave. He put on his divine robes, stood at the open window and, drawing himself up to his full height, raised his right hand. ‘I hereby decree that from now on,’ he said, ‘moths will only live for one day.’
Back inside his room he could scarcely contain his delight. He jumped up and down and shook his fists in a very ungodlike manner. If moths died often enough then he would never run out of their magical powder. So he would always be beautiful. And the queen would love him for all eternity.
He returned to the palace wearing some of his new make-up. The queen embraced him. ‘Oh, how beautiful you are! How could I have sent you away?’ she cried. ‘What a terrible hangover I must’ve had! You must come and live with me for ever! I command it!’