‘I come from a small mining-town,’ she went on. ‘We moved away when I was nine. That’s why I haven’t got an accent any more.’
‘Was your father a miner then?’
‘No, he was a teacher. My grandfather was a miner, though. My grandfather — I remember him so vividly. Especially the back of his neck. He had these lines, hundreds of lines that criss-crossed, made diamond shapes. The lines were all ingrained with black. The coal-dust, I suppose. It gets into your skin. Becomes a second skin.
‘I used to call them necklaces, those tiny strings of diamond shapes. Grandpa’s necklaces. It used to make him chuckle. My mother tried to put a stop to it. “Men don’t wear necklaces, Mary,” she used to say. As if it was something I didn’t know. She was a very stupid woman. Missed the point completely.
‘Grandpa was special. He was a man and he wore necklaces. I thought that was absolutely wonderful, whatever my mother said. Sometimes he wore a scarf, for his bronchitis, and I would pester him until he took it off. “I want to see your necklaces, Grandpa,” I used to say. “Show me your necklaces.” And he would slowly loosen his scarf, making a game of it, chuckling his deep chuckle and shaking his head as if he had never heard anything like it.
‘But I think it scared him in a way. I think he was always listening out for my mother. Ready to pretend nothing was happening if she came in. Why do parents do that? Why do they try to close you down like that?’
‘Well, you don’t, do you?’ Moses said.
‘Of course not.’ Such vehemence in her voice. She might have been disagreeing with him. Sometimes she seemed to be correcting not what he said but how he said it. As if his emphasis had been all wrong.
Then she added, wistful now, ‘I suppose I learned something.’
‘What about your father?’
‘He was a quiet man. No necklaces. He would do anything to avoid an argument, anything for a bit of peace and quiet. The only time I can remember him raising his voice was when he left the dinner-table once and stood in the doorway and shouted, “I’M NOT GOING TO ARGUE, MAEVE.” Maeve was my mother.’
She was laughing, but Moses thought he detected a new brightness in her eyes: tears.
‘Poor old Dad,’ she said. ‘I haven’t thought about him for so long. She killed him, really.’
‘Your mother?’
Mary nodded. ‘She needed drama. She needed scenes. That’s where her momentum came from. But he couldn’t take it. One of them had to give. He used to think that she would run out of steam if he kept quiet, but silence made her hysterical. She would work herself up into a frenzy. It was frightening, like watching someone having a fit. And he would be sitting in his chair, waiting for it all to blow over. Looking so small. Scared. Not even daring to look up. He would just sit there, waiting for it to end so he could light his pipe and switch on the radio and draw rings round the names of horses in the back of the paper.’
She fell silent, one hand in the hair at the back of her neck. After staring at the grass for a while, she said, ‘They never should’ve married.’
‘Then you wouldn’t be here,’ Moses said, ‘sitting on this hill with me and Rebecca. Then you would’ve missed all this.’
Mary smiled. ‘I’d be somewhere. I would’ve forced my way into the world somehow.’
Her airy confidence annoyed him. ‘Yes,’ he persisted, ‘but not here.’
‘No,’ she agreed, ‘not here.’ The distinction didn’t seem to be important to her.
Then a familiar but anxious voice called from the bottom of the hill. ‘Moses? What do I do when I want it to come down?’
They both laughed at the look of utter helplessness on Rebecca’s face. Helplessness in the face of insurmountable odds.
That picnic on Parliament Hill set one or two new precedents. It shifted the scene away from the house in Nio and on to more neutral territory. It also disrupted the neat pattern of Sundays only. It meant that, in future, they could meet wherever they liked, with or without the children, and on weekdays too. Mary taught part-time, so she often had free mornings or afternoons. Moses, of course, was always free. They began to go on expeditions, locally at first, in Muswell Hill, then further afield, as if their courage was growing. They discovered some unusual places: a church in Epping Forest, a pub in Rotherhithe, a stretch of canal in Kensal Rise. Slowly they were building up common ground, creating, as it were, their own private frame of reference.
The impetus came mostly from Mary — an abrupt phone-call or a note, sometimes posted, sometimes delivered by hand, never more than a sentence long, and signed simply ‘M’. Once or twice she even arranged trips over Sunday lunch. Everything was done naturally and openly, everything was above board and beyond suspicion. It was strange, but he often had to remind himself that, after all, they had absolutely nothing to hide. The conditions for guilt existed without the grounds for feeling guilty. Just occasionally he felt burdened somehow as if he had become the repository of a trust that he knew he was going to betray. He wondered how that had come about. Would come about. If it came about.
One fact stood out clearly enough. Some kind of bridge was being built. And he was walking over it as easily, as thoughtlessly as in a dream, simply because it was there.
*
One Thursday evening in September Moses arrived home to find a note slipped under his front door. Feel like a drink? M. He turned round to see Mary standing behind him.
‘Well?’ she grinned. ‘Do you?’
They drove north in Mary’s 1968 Volvo. The sky predicted thunder, black stormclouds edged in gold. Mary wore a tight black dress, black gloves to the elbow, red lipstick.
‘Let’s stop at the first pub we see,’ she said, ‘and sink a few Martinis.’
The first pub they saw was somewhere in Highgate: brown curtains, Skol beer-mats, nothing special. Mary walked up to the bar to order their drinks. Moses took a table by the window. He watched the bartender reach for a bottle of dry Martini.
‘No, no, not that,’ he heard Mary call out. ‘Real Martinis. You know. American Martinis.’ She wasn’t being high-handed or condescending; she just seemed amused at the misunderstanding.
The bartender (thin, whiskery, whisky-sour) stared, first at Mary, then at Moses, and Moses suddenly realised what he must be thinking. The age difference. The tight dress. The lipstick. Prostitute, he was thinking. And the word was making an ugly screeching sound in his mind. Nails on a blackboard. Painted nails.
Mary didn’t seem to have noticed. She was giving the bartender instructions. ‘Large gin. Dash of dry Martini. Just a dash, mind. A green olive, if you’ve got one. And no ice, of course.’
‘Of course.’ The bartender stared at her for a moment longer. He seemed to want her to know exactly what he thought of her. Then he began to put the drinks together. In his own sweet time. With infinite distaste.
Eventually he set the glasses down in front of her. One slopped over.
‘Sorry, madam,’ he smirked, ‘but we don’t usually get your type in here.’ And, turning his back on her, he busied himself with a couple of dirty glasses.
Moses felt anger well up inside him, hot and sudden, like blood from a deep cut.
‘I know what he’s thinking,’ Mary said when she sat down, ‘and I know what you’re thinking. Don’t let it get to you, Moses. If I can deal with it so can you.’ She raised her glass. ‘Cheers.’
He knew she was right, but he couldn’t help himself: the bartender had crawled under his skin. He hated people who stood their weakness on a pedestal, who thought their small minds gave them the right to sit in judgment over others. His anger simmering, he ostentatiously lit a cigarette for Mary. The bartender was still polishing glasses. His eyes would swivel in their direction every now and then and slide away again whenever Moses looked up. A few locals sat on stools at the bar. Their eyes swivelled too.