Dreams of Leaving (50 page)

‘That was mine when I was her age,' Mary told him. ‘When I was living in North Yorkshire. You didn't know I was a northerner, did you? You didn't know I came from a coal-mining family?'

Her revelations, he had often noticed, tended to coincide with moments of contentment, as if she felt she couldn't allow time to pass too comfortably. A coal-mining family? Perhaps that explained her coal-mine-coloured tights, her kohl-lined eyes, her attachment to black. He smiled to himself.

‘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.

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.'