Mary finished her drink. ‘Not bad,’ she said cheerfully, ‘for somebody who’s never made one before.’
Moses tried to smile.
‘Would you like another?’ she asked him.
‘Somewhere else,’ he said.
Instead of following her to the door, he walked up to the bar. The bartender, still polishing, pretended not to notice him.
‘Listen you,’ Moses said in a low voice, ‘if you ever do anything like that again, I’m going to come in here and knock your fucking head off, all right?’
He waited long enough to see the bartender’s face take on a certain rigidity, the rigidity of fear, then he turned away.
‘That’s assault,’ Mary told him when he joined her outside.
‘I didn’t touch him.’
‘You threatened him, though.’
Moses opened his mouth to say something, then changed his mind.
She linked her arm through his. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever go there again.’
‘No,’ he said.
A few yards short of the car, he stopped. Shaken, yet strangely ignited. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve never done anything like that before.’
They told the story over lunch the following Sunday. It rapidly became spectacular. Mary hadn’t left the pub at all, she had slouched against the wall, filing her nails, a gangster’s moll, while Moses, mafioso, did terrible things to the whiskery bartender: he had shaken the bartender by the scruff of the neck until his false teeth flew out; he had cleaned Mary’s shoes with the bartender’s face; he had thrown whisky around and reached slowly for his lighter while the bartender gaped, grovelled, dribbled like a fire-hose in a drought. The story changed and grew with every telling; it became more vicious, more surreal, more just. It always went down well at lunches and parties. ‘Oh Mary,’ someone would clamour, ‘tell them the one about Moses. You know, the time he blew up that pub in Highgate.’ Before long the incident had distorted beyond all recognition. Even the memory blurred. Only the names remained the same.
*
Mary and Moses.
This intimacy grew, slowly as a plant or a face, its slowness old-fashioned (something Mary claimed to be herself). It was like the colour of a leaf changing. It used the slipping of summer into autumn as a metaphor to describe itself. One week it was green, the next it was orange, and the week after that it was red. Something had happened in between, some gradual yet tangible chemical development had taken place. She had spoken once of starting something that you can’t control. He had forgotten the context, but remembered the words. They surfaced whenever he thought about her.
He returned again and again to the same point. It wasn’t that she was beautiful. He never stood and looked at her and thought, as he might have done with Gloria: she’s beautiful. It was an attraction of a different nature altogether. It transcended simple good looks. It almost transcended definition. He only knew that when he was with Mary he felt an affinity that was unthought-out, unforced, uncanny. He felt good. And he marvelled at how effortlessly that feeling had come into being. Only the thought of her marriage, her family, brought him back to earth, anchored him. And she talked about them regularly and passionately. Take Alan, for instance. She was still in love with him, she said. He was the only man in her life. He knocked everybody else into a cocked hat. She fought for Alan even though there was no fight going on. Hold on, Moses wanted to say to her sometimes, I agree with you. They were surrounded by natural obstacles: Alan, Alison, Sean, Rebecca — her love for them, his too. It was reassuring, in a way. It meant that nothing bad could happen.
Inevitably, perhaps, he saw less of Gloria. He called her less. And he was surprised to discover that he didn’t miss her at all. Late one Sunday night (one of the nights he actually managed to make it back to The Bunker) she called him.
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day,’ she said. ‘Where’ve you been?’
She probably hadn’t meant it to sound like that, but that was how it came out. He told her the truth. ‘I went out to lunch. At the Shirleys’.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Alison’s family. The Alison who used to be with Vince. I told you.’
‘Oh yes.’ Her voice sounded flat. As if all the lifeblood had been drained out of her.
‘You sound strange,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine. Just tired, that’s all. Anyway, look, what I wanted to ask you was, do you want to do something on Thursday night?’
Her voice had lifted, seeking brightness in his reply, but he didn’t have to think very hard to remember that he had already arranged to meet Mary on Thursday. He carried the phone over to the window. No cars were waiting at the lights so when the lights changed nothing happened. Sunday night. Almost two o’clock. Dead time.
‘Hello?’ came Gloria’s voice. ‘Are you still there?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I can’t. I’m doing something on Thursday.’
A moment silence, then: ‘That’s what I thought.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That’s what the phone’s been trying to tell me all day. When I called you this morning, it just rang and rang, and nobody answered. I didn’t call you this afternoon because I thought, all those times I called in the morning and nobody answered, that was a good piece of advice. You’re wasting your time, kind of thing. You might as well forget it, save yourself a lot of trouble. Looks like it was right, doesn’t it? Shame I didn’t listen.’
‘You got through,’ he said. Beginning to wish she hadn’t.
‘Yes. I got through.’
He had never heard her sound so low. ‘Do you want me to come over?’
She hesitated. ‘No, it’s too late. And anyway, you don’t want to, really.’
It was almost a question, it called for a denial. Moses didn’t answer. He felt so tired. He wanted to go to bed alone. Not talk. Drift into sleep.
‘All right. Look. See you around, OK?’ Gloria said, staccato now. ‘Bye.’
She hung up.
He listened to the buzzing for a while, then he put the phone down.
Two minutes later he was sitting on the bed unlacing his boots when the phone rang again. He had thought about ringing her back when she hung up like that, but he had decided against it. He didn’t know what to say to her. Any conversation they had now would run round in vicious circles. Telephones solve nothing, he told himself. And he heard Mary’s voice calling him an escapist. Now Gloria was calling him back and he would have to talk to her anyway. He didn’t want to answer, but he had to, really. She knew he was there. He could hardly pretend to be asleep already. He walked back into the next room, his bootlaces trickling on the floor behind him. He picked up the receiver and looked at the ceiling. ‘Hello?’
It wasn’t Gloria.
A voice, high-pitched, sexless, ageless, chanted:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again —
‘Who’s this?’ Moses said.
Silence. Then, very faintly, the sound of breathing. Light and quick. Excitement, he thought. And imagined a child on the other end. But knew this was no child.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘Don’t you remember me?’ the voice whispered. Then hung up.