Sarah was sucking in air noisily, not quite crying, while Luke pretended to be watching a man with a badge walk into a crowded, brightly lit saloon.
Mary straightened and looked at her mother, daughter, mother again. She turned away and began to put the cups back on the tray. “I suppose you’ll be going out later,” said her mother, as Mary went towards the kitchen.
“Yes, Mother, I shall be going out later.”
Mary smoothed down her gray skirt and reached around behind to lower the toilet seat. Sitting, she lifted her heeled shoes from the plastic bag she had been carrying and wiped a scuff mark from the upper of one of them with a sheet of toilet paper. Wriggling her feet down into them, she squashed the soft-soled flatties she’d been wearing into her handbag; the striped plastic bag she stuffed down behind the pipe that ran from the cistern to the bowl. She stood then, wincing as the back of her left shoe bit into her skin. Why hadn’t she remembered to bring a plaster that she could have put on beneath her tights? Now she would have to hope that whatever they did, she wouldn’t have to walk too far.
She flushed the toilet and unbolted the cubicle door.
Makeup bag resting on the narrow ledge-How did they expect you to balance anything on something that wasn’t wide enough for a cat to walk along? — Mary applied some blusher, wondering again how it was she could still have freckles around her nose this far into autumn.
Lipstick.
At least, she hadn’t had to go through this with her mother; the questioning she had had to endure all the time she was at secondary school and beyond. Where are you going? Who are you going to meet? Which pictures? And the hand that would reach out to smear Miners makeup across her face: don’t imagine that’s going to wash with me, young lady, you don’t cover yourself in this just to go to the Odeon with a girlfriend.
True or false, true or false, it had never mattered.
You can’t lie to me, I’m your mother.
Yes, mother. She pressed her lips together tightly and then pulled them apart, making a soft popping sound. Well, it’s just as well you no longer ask.
An ageless woman in a bulked-out coat like tinted sacking came in, pushing a small boy before her. “In there. Go in. In there, stupid!” The door slammed shut.
Mary slid the black brush into the mascara and lifted up her eyelid with a finger. That’s what she’d have me looking like, done-for and sexless. Like her. God, she’s not yet sixty herself. Doesn’t she ever think about it? Ever? Mary clicked the mascara shut, pulled a comb a few more times through the ends of her hair. Not that that was why she went with them. Men. It wasn’t for the sex, which was just as well because half the time there wasn’t much sex at all. Oh, there was the talk, that and a bit of last-minute poking and grabbing when it was all too late and any interest she might have had had fallen away somewhere between the awkward silences and obvious lies.
“So,” she addressed her reflection aloud, “it’s a good thing I’m not desperate for it, isn’t it?”
Behind her a toilet flushed, a door banged, and for a moment the woman’s eyes caught hers in the mirror.
“Look where you’re going,” she said to the boy. “You’re always under my feet.”
Mary zipped up her makeup bag and put it away. Checking her watch, she saw that she still had twenty minutes, which was as well for she always liked to be there first and waiting. That way she had the advantage: she was always the one to pick them out, make the approach. That was the only way she would have it. That bit of control. Besides which, if she didn’t like the look of them-the least little thing-she’d walk right off and leave them there. Wandering up and down, walk and turn, walk and stop, check the watch, the clock across the square, walk some more.
Once she’d come back more than two hours later and this whippet of a bloke had still been there, eyes glazed over, cigarette cupped in his hand, waiting in the slow fall of rain.
Tonight, though-Mary stepped out on to the street, pressing the button at the pedestrian crossing-she had a feeling it was going to be all right. The way he’d written, that had convinced her of that. Not full of himself, the way some were, making out like they were a cross between Sylvester Stallone and Shakespeare. He wasn’t a wimp, either-some of them sounded as if they’d gone down on their hands and knees before they set pen to paper.
And that was another thing. She turned down past the post office, thankful she didn’t have far to go, there was a blister coming up over her heel already. His writing. Sophisticated, that’s what she’d have to call it. Ink, too, real ink, not biro. Almost fancy. Well, nothing wrong with a man who was a bit fancy. Maybe he’d fancy her.
Crossing the square between the lager drinkers and the pigeons, Mary smiled: her fancy man.
She asked for a port and brandy and took it to her usual place, moving a stool along to the curve of the bar so that she had a good view of the door without being right on top of it. That way she had plenty of time to be sure. Behind her the drummer was unfastening his cases, beginning to assemble his kit. Mary sipped her drink and tried to ignore the faint itch of sweat just below her hairline. Relax, she told herself. Relax: you’ll know him when he comes.
Twelve
You didn’t only find dust in disused rooms: once, pulling out the empty whitewood chest, he had found a baby bird. Cocooned in a spider’s web and resting back on outspread wings, its beak and belly gave it the look of some prehistoric creature here in miniature. Days old, only hours. Carefully, he had prized the web from round about it, closed his mouth, and blown away the dust; when he cupped his hand beneath the bird and lifted it up, the wings disintegrated at his touch. Between the pages of a book he found a letter from his former wife which contained the words for ever. Tonight, searching for Bud, who had not appeared at the sound of cat food being scraped into bowls, he had picked from between some old magazines a picture postcard from Ben Riley.
Come on in, the message had read, the water’s fine!
On the front of the card, an expanse of land pushed back towards a range of mountains, snow at their peaks; the moon rising pale through a lot of sky. Not a sign of water anywhere the eye could see.
Resnick and Ben Riley had walked the beat together for the best part of two years. One Saturday in four they would walk down through the Meadows and over Trent Bridge, stand on the terraces, and watch their colleagues sitting below, helmets off and on the ground beside them. On the way back, Ben would drop into the cycle shop and discuss the comparative merits of machines and gears, while Resnick flipped through the new releases in the jazz specialists along the street. Now Arkwright Street had been pulled down and most of the small rows of adjoining terraces along with it. Where they used to stand to watch the Reds, others now sat in executive boxes with the televisions tuned to the racing. Resnick had started watching the team on the other side of the river. And Ben Riley was out in Montana.
Resnick supposed that was where he was.
At first there had been letters, postcards from trips Ben had made-Custer’s Battlefields; the Breaks of the Missouri; Glacier National Park; Chicago-and then, inevitably, Christmas greetings that arrived mid-January and for the past few years nothing at all.
On the way past the bathroom, Resnick heard a familiar, pathetic mewing. Pepper was curled asleep around the top of the laundry basket and, somehow, Bud had managed to get trapped inside it, pitifully tangled amongst Resnick’s soiled shirts.
On the way to the kitchen, the cat purring, nuzzling the crook of his arm, Resnick lifted the stylus back on to Johnny Hodges. Ben Riley, he was thinking, had been the best man at his wedding. Resnick set the cat down by his bowl and smiled: just as well somebody was.