‘It’s going to be a nice day,’ she said. ‘I thought perhaps we could go for a walk on Hampstead Heath.’
‘Don’t you have to work?’
Smiling, she handed him a piece of toast. ‘I’m ill,’ she said.
They left the house just after seven and drove to the Vale of Health. Mary parked the car next to a deserted fairground. She pointed at the dodgems rimmed with orange rust and standing at curious angles to one another. ‘People at a party,’ she said, and once again he saw that nothing was wasted on her. She could make the world more interesting just by looking at it.
They scaled a steep bank of bleached grass. At the top the woods began. Beech trees stood on the hard-packed mud, their trunks dusted with green, their leaves sapped of life, shot through with holes, ready to drop, their roots rising through the surface of the ground.
Moses bent down. ‘They look like ribs,’ he said, ‘the ribs on starving horses.’ He glanced up to see Mary watching him with a curious smile on her face. It made him feel as if he had been doing something slightly eccentric. He began to get a glimmer of the reason why she liked to be with him.
‘Yes. Yes, they do,’ she said.
He rejoined her on the path. ‘When I was at school,’ he said, ‘I used to talk to horses.’
On Saturday afternoons, he told her, he sometimes had to play football. Matches were specially organised for the boys who were no good at games. For the spastics, as they were known. In his first year Highness MG was thirteen years old and just over six foot tall. Highness MG was a spastic.
On the one afternoon that stood for all the others in his memory a Welshman by the name of Davies took the game. Davies was an officious little bastard. He wore royal-blue track-suits and ran on the spot all the time. He was only 5′8″. Highness MG had been put down to play right-back. A real spastic’s position, right-back. So far as he could work out it meant staying at one end of the pitch, more or less out of the way, for forty-five minutes. Then, at half-time, he had to walk down to the other end of the pitch, to the area diagonally opposite, in fact, and stay there for another forty-five minutes. Unless there was injury time (what a terrible phrase; it sounded like everybody was officially supposed to hurt each other), in which case he would have to stand around for even longer. He arrived at the pitch that afternoon wearing his brand-new games jersey. The collar chafed his neck. The wind blew around his bare knees. It really was a very tedious and unpleasant business altogether.
Time went slowly. Sometimes the ball passed through his section of the pitch accompanied by rapid breathing, shouts, and the thudding of energetic boots (some spastics tried harder than others). He watched it go by like a rather dull carnival. Once the ball ran loose and rolled towards him. He lunged at it half-heartedly. The weight of his boot (size 9
, suspiciously clean) carried his leg higher into the air than he had bargained for, causing a temporary, though not total, loss of balance. For those few moments he must have looked like a clumsy can-can dancer. The ball trickled under his raised leg and into touch.
‘Oh, Midget,’ everybody yelled. ‘Come on, Midget.’
Mary interrupted him. ‘Why Midget?’
‘Because my initials are MG.’ He winced. ‘You know, in some ways, I think I hated that name even more than Foreskin.’
‘That’s because it’s true,’ Mary said. ‘In some ways you are very small.’ And when she saw the look on his face she added, ‘I’m sorry, but I mean it.’
Moses went on with the story.
Because these matches featured spastics they always took place in the most remote corners of the school grounds. On this particular afternoon they were playing right up against the boundary fence. Beyond the fence lay an ordinary field. A field with no white lines on it. A field where footballs were meaningless and the Welshman’s whistle had no power. A sensible field, in other words. At some point during the second half Midget got fed up with searching for insects in the long grass. He ached with cold and the inside of his thigh stung where the ball had struck it while he wasn’t looking (he was convinced that Puddle had done it on purpose). He wandered casually to the edge of the pitch and crossed the touchline. Sacrilege. Heresy. Taboo. He half-expected alarms to sound, dogs to start barking, search-lights to track him down in the gloom of that November afternoon, but, strangely enough, nobody seemed to notice.
He leaned on the metal fence. There was a tree in the middle of the field. Two or three horses stood in the shadow of its branches.
‘Hello, horses,’ he said affectionately.
It seemed like the first time he had spoken in ages.
They were old and tired, these horses. They had obviously had hard lives and had been put out to grass. One of them, a roan with shaggy hooves and a bulging sack of a stomach, lifted its head and shambled over.
He moved his hand out slowly, stroked the soft puffing nose.
‘What’s it like in there then?’ he said.
Then he heard the whistle screech and saw a blur of royal-blue in the corner of his eye. The horse’s eyes rolled back. It shied away from the sudden rush of colour, thudded off into the sanity of its field.
‘Goodbye, horses,’ he said.
‘What the blazes are you doing, Highness?’ Davies shouted, jogging on the spot. His voice was going up and down too.
‘Talking to the horses.’
‘Talking to the horses, sir.’
‘Talking to the horses, sir.’ Feeling like a parrot, sir.
‘And why, when you’re supposed to be playing football, are you talking to horses, Highness?’
‘They’re more interesting. Sir.’
His reply was greeted by a burst of applause. Davies froze in stupefaction, one knee in the air, until he realised that it was the crowd three pitches away (who had just seen Darling SGB of the First XV go over for a try to put the school ahead of its local rivals).
‘Davies never forgave me for that,’ Moses said. ‘You know what he wrote on my report? He wrote: Highness seems totally uninterested in any form of physical exertion whatsoever.’
‘Nicely put,’ Mary said, ‘but no longer entirely true, I suspect.’
Moses laughed.
He had never been to Kenwood House before, but it seemed appropriate to be seeing it at eight o’clock on a Monday morning, as if that specific time and place had been reserved long in advance. He had the feeling that, although everything was unusual, everything was as it should be.
Mist dressed the trees in grey uniforms, confined the world to little more than the footpath they were walking along. They reached a ditch. He jumped over. Mary stooped to examine a dam of twigs and leaves. She almost lost her footing on the bank. She was no athlete either, he saw. She would probably have talked to horses too. He held a hand out to her and helped her across.
They sat down on the grass beside the lake, the house a suggestion of white in the mist behind them. Mary leaned back against him, her head resting on his stomach. It was strange, her lying against him like that. In a flashback he saw Gloria in the same position, that Sunday morning on the beach. That kind of duplication worried him; it was as if, sooner or later, all human contact fell into the same tired easy patterns. He wanted to establish a difference between the two. He bent over and kissed Mary’s mouth. It was cool, closed; it didn’t move under his.