Dreams of Leaving

The Bond Street Mandarin

It was one of those terraced houses in Holland Park, white as icing and set back at a discreet distance from the road. The façade showed only as a few luminous holes in a high black screen of trees. The front garden had been allowed to run wild; a mass of shrubs and bushes, it sloped down to the railings which, like a row of policemen, held it back from the pavement. Gloria led the way up the flagstone path, chipped, uneven, lethal in the dark. One of her stiletto heels stuck in a crack and she nearly fell.

‘Bit early for that,’ Louise laughed, catching her from behind.

Gloria made a face. They were in different moods tonight, but maybe the party would even things out. The front door stood ajar. Music pulsed out of the gap. She paused on the bottom step.

‘What’re you doing?’ Louise’s blonde hair was a magnet for what little light there was.

‘Cigarette,’ Gloria said.

She fumbled in her bag. They both lit cigarettes. Just then the gate at the end of the garden creaked. More people arriving.

‘Come on,’ Louise said, taking Gloria’s arm. ‘Let’s give it half an hour and then make off with the silver.’

Gloria smiled faintly. They ran up the steps and pushed through the door. They had to wait inside the hallway because two men were trying to manoeuvre an upright piano into one of the downstairs rooms. One of the men wore a winged superhero cap. The other was pissed and giggling. It was taking for ever and it wasn’t funny.

‘Maybe you’d better come back later,’ the man in the cap grinned, meaning, Gloria suspected, Stay, I fancy you.

‘Maybe I won’t bother,’ she said. She wondered why she had come in the first place. She felt jaded, highly strung, unlike herself. Parties. Just a lot of fucking babble. And there was always some jerk with a chainsaw laugh that sliced through all the other voices and set your teeth on edge. Christ, she thought, I am in a bad mood.

‘Gloria?’

Gloria turned. It was Amy. Amy wore a pink designer cocktail dress. Her smile was a strip of white neon in the gloom of the hall. She held a piece of cake and a lit cigarette in one hand, and a glass of champagne and a toy revolver in the other. Embracing would be difficult.

Amy aimed her gun at Gloria. ‘Peeow,’ she went. Some people said Amy was a scream.

‘Amy! What’re you doing here?’ Gloria had to heave the words into her mouth. They felt like too much luggage.

Amy took a step backwards, mimed astonishment. ‘It’s my party, Gloria.’

Christ, so it was. Gloria had forgotten. She shook her head at Amy, attempted a grin. ‘My memory sometimes,’ she said.

‘So anyway,’ Amy swept on, ‘how’ve you been?’

‘Oh, you know. OK.’

‘Still singing?’

‘When I can be bothered to open my mouth.’ Gloria turned to Louise. ‘This is Louise. Friend of mine.’

Amy acknowledged Louise with a wave of her hand. The smoke from her cigarette did something Chinese in the air.

‘What’s the piano for?’ Gloria asked.

‘Somebody’s playing later on. Marvin Gaye’s brother or something.’ Amy’s hand moved through the air again, suggesting mysterious and glamorous events. Her champagne glass tilted, anointing a white tuxedo as it went past. Not that Amy noticed.

‘Is he any good?’ Louise asked.

Amy’s mouth hung open for a moment, and Gloria wondered why it seemed so dark in the hallway all of a sudden. Then she realised. Amy wasn’t smiling any more.

The doorbell rang and Amy went to answer it. Gloria and Louise seized their opportunity and slipped upstairs.

‘Jesus, someone should pull her plug out,’ Louise said. ‘Did you see the way she chucked champagne all down that guy’s back?’

Gloria turned on the stairs and flung her arms out wide. ‘Marvin Gaye’s brother,’ she proclaimed grandly.

They collapsed on each other laughing, then both thought the same thought and looked round. They didn’t want to offend Marvin Gaye’s brother and for all they knew he could have been standing right behind them.

*

Moses and Eddie arrived late. They had been delayed by two litres of Italian red wine and a Hawaii Five-0 video. Moses hummed the theme tune all the way from Vauxhall Bridge to Holland Park. Eddie wrestled with the car radio, but couldn’t shake the interference. A joint crackled in his fingers.

‘Music,’ he muttered. ‘Where’s the music?’

The party proved easier to find. Moses parked fifty yards down the road and they walked back. A girl with pale skin and black lips opened the door and draped herself along the leading edge. She was gazing at Moses and Eddie, but they seemed to have no more significance for her than the bushes or the garden path. Either she was very cool or she was very fucked in the head. Moses didn’t know which, and hesitated.

Eddie moved in front of him and explained that they were very old friends of the people who were throwing the party. The girl’s see-through eyes fixed on Eddie’s face. She let the door swing open.

‘You’re so predictable,’ Moses told him.

Eddie smirked. ‘I got you in, didn’t I?’

‘I didn’t need to “get in”,’ Moses said. ‘I was invited.’

They rifled the kitchen for something more vicious than Cinzano Bianco. Five minutes of frustration and contempt, then joy as Moses turned up half a bottle of brandy under the sink. Somebody had obviously hidden it there for later on. But, as Eddie said, later had a way of turning into never.

Moses poured them both a glassful and tucked the bottle inside his jacket. They wandered out into the corridor. Moses noticed a girl standing alone at the foot of the stairs.

‘Promise me one thing, Eddie,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’

‘Don’t do another Barbara on me tonight, OK?’

‘I wouldn’t do that, Moses.’

‘I mean it, Eddie. I don’t want any more of your bloody messes to clear up.’

Eddie shrugged, smiled. A girl in red approached. Her eyes seemed to stick to Eddie, pulling her head round as she passed by. With Eddie there would always be messes.

‘I’m going to look for Louise,’ Moses said. ‘See you later.’

The house distracted him, though, with floor after floor of lavish rooms. Beyond a pair of locked French windows a conservatory glimmered, its glass solarised by moonlight, its plants in jagged silhouette. Chandeliers of crystal chinked and glittered overhead. Two dozen bottles of champagne littered the top of a grand piano. A lot of people stood about — plastered, but ornately, like the ceilings. He was drawn into a few desultory conversations. He gave facetious answers to predictable questions. What did he do? He was a missionary, he sold insurance, he worked in a factory that made disposable rubber-gloves. Where did he live? Worthing (he was older than he looked). The brandy dwindled.

Emerging from the second-floor toilet, he was trapped by a man with a beard, glasses and a tartan shirt. The man smoked roll-ups (as a matter of principle, no doubt) and measured out his words like little parcels of brown rice.

‘A pink nightclub? Interesting. Now tell me. How did that come about?’

Moses began to explain, then lost interest. Left a sentence dangling. The man was lighting another of his cigarettes. The wisps of stray tobacco glowed red like filaments. Moses suddenly felt like snatching the cigarette out of the man’s mouth and hitting him. Thok! Right in the middle of that earnest political face of his.

The man blew his match out, looked up. ‘You haven’t finished your story.’

‘No,’ Moses said.

*

At one in the morning he was leaning against a wall on the third-floor landing. He was drinking red wine again. An open bottle stood at his feet. He felt relaxed, awake. The wall he was leaning against was a good wall.

There was still no sign of Louise. He asked Eddie if he had seen her. Eddie said he hadn’t.

‘Let’s go downstairs,’ Eddie said, ‘and talk to people.’

‘What people? I like it standing here. I don’t want to talk to people.’

But life has things up its sleeve that it can produce at a moment’s notice. Life is a great magician. Look:

‘Who’s that girl with the eyebrows?’ Moses asked suddenly.

‘Which girl with the eyebrows?’

‘That girl with the eyebrows.’

Eddie turned and stared into a room across the landing. It contained about twenty people. At least half of them were girls. And, so far as he could see, all the girls had eyebrows.

‘They’ve all got eyebrows,’ he said.

‘Sometimes, Eddie,’ Moses said, ‘just sometimes, I think you do it on purpose,’ and with a kind of weary strength he seized Eddie by his jacket lapels, hoisted him, and pinned him to the wall like the social butterfly he was.

‘All right then,’ Moses said, ‘let’s try again. Who’s that girl with the earrings? The diamanté earrings.’

Eddie studied the open doorway very hard.

‘I can see two of those,’ he said finally, grinning at Moses

‘No kidding. One in each ear?’

‘No. Two girls, I mean. With diamanté earrings. Two girls. Four earrings. All diamanté:’

Moses let Eddie go. It was useless. It really was.

He shook his head and sank down on to the top step, his face in his hands. Even with his eyes covered over he could see her. And it had been her eyebrows that he had noticed first. They were pencil-straight, charcoal-dark, and they slanted at an angle to one another like the hands on a clock. When he first saw her, they said quarter to two. And it was. He would always remember that, and would be able to pinpoint their anniversaries exactly, to within the minute. She would like that, he thought.

He was still sitting there in his own personal darkness wondering whether she would ever have time for him when he heard Eddie’s voice whisper in his ear.

‘Her name’s Gloria.’

Moses squinted through his fingers. ‘How do you know?’

‘I asked her.’

Gloria? He had never met anyone called Gloria before, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to now. He was happy with his small life. There had been girls in the past — a week here, six weeks there, months in between sometimes — but the affairs, if that wasn’t too pretentious a word for them, had always tailed off somehow. Things began in a heightened state — sex on coke, something like that — then rapidly went downhill. The more you got to know someone, the less you actually liked them. Nothing in the cupboard except skeletons. Something had been knocked together, improvised, faked really, so it wasn’t long before cracks showed. How terrible that felt. To look at someone and suddenly realise the two of you had fuck all in common, nothing except the day of the week and the sheet you were lying on. Girls thought him nice, funny, strange at first. They ended up accusing him of vagueness and indifference. They shouted things like, You’re incapable of having a relationship. He agreed with them, not knowing any other answer, not wanting to make excuses. Their anger, his sadness. And that was it.

He was no Eddie, though. He could have counted his previous lovers on the fingers of one hand. Well, two maybe. Just.

But now there was this Gloria. The same old pattern reared its ugly head. He felt painfully divided into areas of fascination and dread. Gloria. What kind of name was that, anyway?

Shit, he thought. Not all that again. You expect some things at a party. You expect a certain amount of drinking. Yeah, drinking’s definitely involved. Drugs too, usually. You expect a bit of idle gossip, bullshit, repartee. And there’s usually a guy in a tartan shirt and a beard who you have to try and avoid. What else? Well, there’s always the chance of a fight or a brush with the law. You might throw up too. Blackout, even. Tailspin. Head down the bowl. All that. But — he looked up and yes, she was still there and yes, she was still beautiful — someone called Gloria, someone with extraordinary eyebrows called Gloria, you didn’t expect that. No, you didn’t expect that at all.

And what if she was interesting too? He watched disconsolately as she said something and the two men she was with bent double laughing.

He moaned. He sat on the top step. People kept squeezing past him and saying sorry, and jogging his shoulder with their knees. He sat there, his face propped in hands that would probably never touch the girl with the eyebrows.

‘What’s wrong?’

Eddie was back again. In the dim greenish light of the landing, he definitely looked too good-looking to have been born in Basingstoke. Moses sighed. All the demons were coming out tonight.

‘Gloria,’ he said.

‘What about her?’

‘She’s beautiful, I think.’

Eddie nodded.

‘And interesting.’

‘She’s a singer,’ Eddie said.

‘How do you know?’

‘She told me.’

Well, that’s it, Moses thought. He reached for his wine with a distant smile. Either Gloria was unattainable or she was Eddie’s, it didn’t really matter which. She was already moving out of reach, he saw, turning her back on him, walking away into the room.

Gloria. What kind of name was that, anyway?

*

Sitting on the stairs, he remembered an incident that had occurred the year before on Bond Street. He had been on his way to some job interview. The discomfort came back to him. A humid grey morning. He was late, sweating, his open coat tugging at his legs. It had been like walking in water. He hadn’t really noticed the two girls coming towards him, but, just as he stepped into the gutter to let them by, one of them shot a hand out with something orange in it. He stopped dead, stared, drew back — all in one fluid instinctive movement.

‘Would you like a mandarin?’ the girl said.

Moses was momentarily stunned, paralysed by the bizarre simplicity of this. A mandarin. On Bond Street. He gazed at the surprising fruit, then at the girl whose palm it nestled in. She looked eager and harmless.

‘No,’ he said, ‘no thanks,’ and hurried away, as if from a threat, a piece of unpleasantness.

The girl shrugged. Shadows entered the open pores in the skin of her face. She looked injured somehow.

He didn’t get the job.

Afterwards he thought about the mandarin. He saw it again, resting solidly, like an orb, in the cupped palm of the girl’s hand. It looked complete, sure of itself. It seemed, in retrospect, to be glowing, like something invested with real magic powers. And he had turned it down. He had said no to the mandarin.

He was certain now that he had failed some kind of test on Bond Street that morning.

But there was another way of looking at it too. In the end, of course, it was just a mandarin, a pleasantly refreshing citrus fruit, and why hadn’t he accepted it for what it was? It wasn’t poisonous, was it? It wouldn’t bite. I mean, for Christ’s sake, he even LIKED mandarins.

But he had said no.

Similarly now. He could ignore this — he checked again: yes — beautiful girl who he now knew was called Gloria. Simply pretend she wasn’t there. But he knew what would happen. This Gloria, she was another mandarin. And she would glow in his memory, glow and glow, taunting, unforgettable.

A big blue satin bow appeared in front of Moses’s eyes. It was attached to a blue dress and, inside the dress, was a girl. She was standing two steps below him, holding two glasses of wine.

‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I would. Definitely. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed.’

*

After that things happened very fast and in a way that seemed surprising and confusing at the time but entirely logical in retrospect. Moses was standing on the landing with his new drink when Eddie edged out of a nearby room. Moses heard a soft groan come from somewhere behind him. He turned just in time to see a blonde girl crumple vertically, in slow motion, like one of those old brick chimneys being dynamited.

‘Louise!’ Moses cried.

He reacted quickly, catching her before she hit the floor. He whipped the brandy out and moistened her lips with the few drops that remained.

‘What are you doing?’ came a voice from the stairs.

Moses swung round in a kind of frozen tango position, Louise flung over his arms, head back, eyes closed. It was Gloria. He almost dropped everything and ran.

‘It’s — it’s brandy,’ he stammered.

‘What happened?’ Gloria asked.

‘What happened?’ Louise murmured, eyelids flickering.

Moses spoke to Louise. ‘You fainted.’

He lowered her gently until she was sitting on the carpet with her back against the wall. Gloria knelt down, brushed the damp hair out of Louise’s eyes.

‘What happened?’ she asked again.

‘It was a friend of mine,’ Moses explained. He knew this was going to sound implausible, but he decided it would be better to tell the truth. ‘He’s got these strange powers, you see. He can walk into a room and everybody stops what they’re doing and turns round and stares. The whole room sort of freezes. It’s some kind of chemical thing, I think. Sometimes people forget what they’re doing completely, or pass out like Louise just did. He was here a minute ago, so I think that’s probably what happened.’

‘You know Louise?’ Gloria asked.

‘I’m a friend. We work in the same place. Well, sort of work. Me, I mean.’

Gloria smiled. ‘You must be Moses.’

Her voice was menthol-cool, slightly husky, amused. Her lips moved like two halves of a dream that makes you feel good all day. Her eyebrows said ten past nine.

‘Hello, Gloria,’ he said.

*

‘How did you know my name?’ she asked.

He didn’t answer. He just sat on the carpet next to Louise, and smiled. A boldness had descended on him like a black cloak with a scarlet lining. He suddenly felt a bit like Dracula — sinister, magnetic, predatory.

‘I think Louise could use some air,’ he said.

Gloria suggested the garden. Moses guided Louise down the stairs. They followed Gloria into the kitchen, through a sunroom, and out on to a wide paved verandah.

It was a cold still night. The remains of the rain that had fallen earlier dripped from the trees. A stone balustrade, upholstered in moss and topped with giant carved urns, ran the length of the back of the house. Gloria led Moses and Louise down a flight of steps. They crossed a lawn. A high hedge loomed. They passed under an archway and into a miniature formal garden. Now and then somebody laughed or screamed inside the house, but otherwise they only heard the party remotely, like a TV three rooms away.

‘It’s good to be outside,’ Moses said.

Gloria took a deep breath, a form of agreement perhaps.

‘I feel better already,’ Louise said, and promptly stumbled on a loose slab of stone and almost toppled into the ornamental pond.

‘I give up with you,’ Moses said.

‘Bloody footpath,’ Louise said. ‘Jesus.’

‘Honestly,’ Gloria said, ‘fancy leaving a footpath there like that. Somebody could hurt themselves.’

Moses laughed.

‘What are you in such a good mood for, Gloria?’ Louise said. ‘I thought you hated this party. I thought you were leaving.’

‘Changed my mind.’

The two girls sat down at opposite ends of a stone bench. There would have been room for Moses between them — just — but Moses, imagining that nearness to Gloria as a kind of heat and not wanting to be burned, stood by the pond instead.

Silence. The city’s parody of silence. Murmuring voices, a hiss of distant cars on wet roads, the hum of a million lit buildings. Something moved in the pond. Moses bent down.

‘Hey, there are real goldfish in here.’ He could see a whole shoal of them gliding through the water. Fat gold missiles fired into the darkness at the end of the pond.

‘Real goldfish.’ Gloria’s voice mocked him slightly.

He looked over his shoulder, tried to read something more than mockery into that, but her face, backlit by the bright windows of the house, was illegible.

‘Well, you know,’ he said, ‘in a house like this I thought they’d be motorised or something.’

There he was trying to explain himself and they were laughing at him. I’m making her laugh, he realised. And the thought soared in his head like an anthem.

*

Gloria left Louise sitting on the bench and walked across the grass. She paused some distance away. She seemed to be examining a statue of an angel. Moses waited a few moments, then followed her.

When he reached her he didn’t give himself time to think or reconsider. ‘I’d like you to come away with me,’ he said.

‘Now?’ She kept her voice light, detached. Almost visible, it floated through the air towards him.

‘No, not now. Well — maybe. But that’s not what I meant.’

‘What did you mean then?’

‘I meant,’ and he paused, this was sounding dreadful, ‘some weekend.’

‘I don’t even know who you are.’

He swallowed. ‘I’m not dangerous. Really I’m not.’

She tilted her face towards his. He saw a quizzical smile, the fire of curiosity beginning to burn. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think you are. But I really can’t afford anything like that at the moment. I’m not working, you see.’

‘I thought you sang,’ Moses said, remembering.

She smiled. ‘Not often enough.’

A pause.

‘Tell you what,’ Moses said. ‘I got £80 the other day. For sheets and things. We could use that.’

‘Sheets? What sheets?’

‘Sheets. A man from the DHSS came round to see me. He told me I could claim for lots of things that I wasn’t claiming for. “Like what?” I said. “Like sheets,” he said. So I claimed for sheets and a couple of days ago I got a cheque in the post. £80.’

Gloria was laughing. ‘You’re making this up.’

‘I’m not. I got it yesterday. No, the day before. Really.’

‘Hold on,’ Gloria said. ‘What if this man comes round again and wants to see your new sheets?’

‘Shit. I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘Well,’ Gloria said, ‘he probably won’t.’

‘He might, though.’ Moses, worried now, clutched at his hair. ‘I mean, that’s just the kind of thing they do, isn’t it?’

‘Moses, I’m sorry I said that. I’m sure he won’t come back.’

‘He will. I bet he will, the bastard. You know what they’re like. They’ve got clipboards and pencils attached to them with grubby little bits of string. They wear those pullovers. They make you feel guilty even when you haven’t done anything — ’

Gloria touched his arm. ‘There’s got to be a way round it.’

Moses looked down at her hand. ‘You’re right,’ he said.

Gloria smiled as she saw the anxiety lift and a look of deep reflection take its place.

‘I know,’ he cried, ‘I’ll borrow some sheets from Eddie.’

‘Who’s Eddie?’

‘Eddie’s the man who made Louise faint.’

Gloria began to laugh again. ‘I don’t believe any of this.’

‘People never believe me,’ Moses said, ‘but it’s all true.’

‘He’s lying,’ Louise said, walking towards them. ‘He’s always lying.’

Moses swung round. ‘What do you know, Louise? All you can do is fall over at parties — ’

‘I didn’t fall over — ’

‘— because you’ve drunk too much — ’

‘I didn’t drink — ’

‘— and then,’ Moses said, grinning, ‘and then you go and sleep with people like Elliot— ‘ He wrinkled his face up in disgust. ‘I just don’t understand how you can — ’

‘You bastard, Moses.’

‘Who’s Elliot?’ Gloria asked.

‘A very good friend of Louise’s,’ Moses told her behind his hand. ‘You know.’

Louise advanced on Moses.

‘Look, if you’re feeling better, Louise,’ Moses said, backing towards the house, ‘maybe we should go back inside and look for Marvin Gaye’s brother. I’ve always wanted to meet Marvin Gaye’s brother. Apparently he’s much more interesting than Marvin — Ow! — Louise! — ’

*

‘Tell you the truth,’ Louise said, when she had done with Moses and they were inside again, ‘I don’t give a fuck about Marvin Gaye’s brother. I’m going to look for the toilet instead.’ She left Moses and Gloria at the foot of the stairs.

‘That girl.’ Moses shook his head. ‘Where did you meet her?’

‘I’ve known her practically all my life,’ Gloria told him. ‘My parents play tennis with her parents. You know how it is.’

Moses didn’t, but he was willing to learn.

In the meantime, they had climbed to the second floor. They timed it badly. They were just passing a room where fifty people were dancing to salsa when Amy blundered out. Three beads of sweat trickled from her hairline. Noticing Gloria, she stopped blundering and began, miraculously, to float. Moses recognised her because she was still wearing that awful blue satin bow. Gloria recognised her because she had no choice.

‘Darling,’ Amy oozed. A fourth bead of sweat appeared. Any more of those, Moses thought, and she’ll have a tiara.

‘Amy, this is Moses,’ Gloria said. ‘Moses, Amy.’

Amy studied Moses, her entire face twisting away from the cigarette that she was holding to the corner of her mouth. ‘We’ve met,’ she declared, swaying a little from the waist.

‘That’s right,’ Moses said. ‘You had two glasses of wine and you suddenly felt greedy so you gave one to me.’

‘I felt sorry for you, darling. Sitting on the stairs all alone like that. What were you doing?’

‘I was thinking about fruit,’ Moses said. ‘Mandarins, actually.’

Amy arched her left eyebrow, smiled out of the side of her mouth, then drew hard on her cigarette. These were separately machined actions. ‘I like that,’ she said.

‘Thank you,’ Moses said.

‘Tell me — ’ and Amy turned to Gloria — ‘is this man anything to do with you?’ Her lips chopped the smoke from her cigarette into signals that were very obvious.

Gloria considered Moses for a moment. Amy waited, eyelashes clashing. Moses thought of insect-feelers and shuddered.

‘Not yet,’ Gloria said finally, smiling.

‘Oh well, in that case,’ Amy said, and stalked off, all haughty angles.

‘Thank Christ she’s gone,’ Moses said.

‘You shouldn’t have flirted with her.’ Gloria’s eyes were glittering with pieces of white light.

‘Flirted with her?’

‘Yes,’ Gloria said. ‘You were flirting with her.’

‘Was I?’ Moses was genuinely shocked. ‘I wasn’t.’

But Gloria just smiled at him. ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘I’ve just remembered where we might find Marvin Gaye’s brother.’

She led him back downstairs to a room by the front door. ‘In there,’ she said.

The door stood ajar, and they could hear somebody playing the piano inside, soft disconnected notes. Moses pushed the door open. They paused on the threshold.

The man sitting at the piano was black. He wore a blue suit and a mustard roll-neck sweater. Did he look like Marvin Gaye? What did Marvin Gaye look like? Moses couldn’t remember. Anyway, the man was alone. There was nobody else in the room. Moses felt awkward, guilty somehow, as if they had stumbled into someone’s private grief. He examined the room carefully. Yes, the man was alone all right. Nobody was listening to Marvin Gaye’s brother playing the piano. Moses tugged nervously on Gloria’s arm. He was fucked if he was going to hang around in a room full of nobody listening to a famous person’s brother play the piano. Too embarrassing.

‘Let’s go,’ he whispered. ‘Quick, before he sees us.’

As they backed away, on tiptoe, the pianist turned round. He didn’t look surprised or hurt or angry. Not a bit. In fact, he seemed very relaxed. He was even smiling.

‘Can I help you people?’

‘Well, OK,’ Moses said. ‘Are you by any chance Marvin Gaye’s brother?’

‘No,’ the pianist said. ‘Are you?’

Moses laughed. ‘Somebody told us that Marvin Gaye’s brother was going to play the piano tonight.’

The pianist scratched his head with one long humorous finger. ‘I didn’t know he had a brother.’

‘I bet he hasn’t got a brother,’ Moses said.

Gloria summed up. ‘Amy’s always been full of shit.’

*

They found an unopened bottle of Chianti in the kitchen — the way the wine was lasting, anyone would think Jesus was going to play the piano — and wandered back upstairs to look for Louise. They came across Eddie in the Chinese room.

‘Look who it is,’ Eddie said.

‘What’ve you been up to?’ Moses asked him.

Eddie eyed Gloria. ‘I could ask you the same question.’

‘Oh, you re Eddie,’ Gloria said. ‘The one with the special powers. How exciting. To have special powers.’

Eddie seemed amused. ‘Highness has a vivid imagination,’ he told her.

‘Highness?’

‘Some people call him Highness.’

‘Some people are drunk,’ Moses said. ‘I’m thinking of leaving. What are you doing?’

Eddie grinned. ‘I’m thinking of leaving.’

‘Alone?’

‘No.’ Eddie turned to a shy girl in tight jeans who had, until now, been attached to the back of his shirt. ‘This is Dawn,’ he said. Or it could have been Diane. Or Doreen. Moses didn’t quite catch the name.

Dawn/Diane/Doreen smiled hello. A red ribbon blushed in her black hair like a moment of embarrassment.

‘Where’s Louise?’ Gloria asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Moses said.

‘Police,’ somebody announced calmly.

Later Moses wondered how this had carried above the soundtrack of the party. Some words had more punch, perhaps.

‘It’s a raid,’ came the same calm voice.

There was a general furtive surge in the direction of the door, as if people were pretending that they weren’t really leaving. Out on the stairs, the urgency increased and Moses was swept along, Gloria in front of him, Eddie and D/D/D somewhere behind.

Two officers with flat hats and glistening moustaches flanked the front door. One of them tipped his face at Moses.

‘Not driving tonight, are we, sir?’

‘Beep beep,’ came a voice from the stairs.

Everybody laughed.

‘I don’t — ’ Moses began, but the policeman, scowling, waved him through.

At the bottom of the steps Moses put his arm round Gloria. She leaned into him a fraction, just enough to tell him that she had been waiting for that. He felt her ribs tremble under his fingers. She glanced up, lips parted. He bent over her. His tongue brushed her teeth. Bedtime.

Louise’s face floated into the corner of his eye. ‘Somebody chucked a brick through the window,’ she was saying.

They reached the pavement. Everybody had left the party at the same time, and small groups of people stood about looking out of context. Two panda cars nuzzled the kerb. Their blue disco-lights were flashing, but nobody was dancing. D/D/D shrank against a tree, her coat thrown over her shoulders.

‘Where’s Eddie?’ Moses asked her.

She shrugged. She looked puzzled, derelict, cold.

Oh Christ, he thought.

‘We’ve lost Eddie,’ he told the other three. ‘I’m just going to go and have a look for him. Wait for me, won’t you?’

Gloria sent a queer little smile through the darkness towards him. He hesitated, self-conscious suddenly. ‘I won’t be long,’ he said.

Inside the house a few people lay against the walls. Too smashed to move, react or care. Moses stepped over bodies, bottles, ashtrays — the rubble of a party. Music was still playing in the evacuated rooms, loud abrasive music, someone’s expression of defiance. He asked one girl whether she had seen a man who looked like a statue. She stared right through him. It was a conspiracy, he decided. A conspiracy of statues.

After about five minutes he gave up. He almost broke his ankle on the way downstairs, but it was less out of drunkenness than out of impatience to be with Gloria again. He cursed Eddie as he rubbed the ankle where it had turned over. What was the point of all these escape-acts anyway? Who did he think he was? The Houdini of love? Fuck him.

He limped out through the door and down the steps. Long splinters of glass from the shattered window made Egyptian shapes on the footpath: pyramids, sabres, crescent moons. The trees creaked overhead, shone black, dripped moisture. Three figures waited by the gate with questions on their faces.

‘No luck, I’m afraid,’ he told them.

They stood there for a moment longer, shoulders hunched against the chill, all staring in different directions.

Moses leaned on the railings. He watched the road curve out of sight, dissolve into the mist. Someone had bought hundreds of aerosols of fine rain and sprayed them into the orange air that hung around the street-lamps.

Then Gloria came up, touched his arm. ‘Where did you leave the car?’ she asked, her face a mask of black and silver.

*

Moses dropped Louise and D/D/D in Victoria and now he was driving south down Vauxhall Bridge Road, alone with Gloria. They hadn’t needed to discuss anything. It was one of those tacit agreements, after a party, three in the morning. Things like this didn’t happen to Moses very often and when they did he was usually too drunk to notice. He was drunk now, but he was noticing.

‘Does he always do that?’ Gloria asked. ‘Disappear like that?’

She huddled down in the passenger seat, her feet tucked into the glove compartment.

Moses chuckled. ‘Yes, he does. I don’t know what it is. Maybe he gets bored. Maybe it’s all too easy for him. I don’t know.’

Gloria wound the window down an inch or two and lit a joint. The slipstream took the smoke from her lips and bent it out into the night air — a silk scarf from a magician’s sleeve. She seemed to be thinking over what he had just said.

‘Bastard,’ she said eventually. It was the last carriage in a long train of thought.

Moses glanced across at her and smiled. They kept turning towards each other at the same time as if there were magnetic forces attracting his face to hers and hers to his.

‘Are you going to stay?’ Moses asked, as he accelerated over the bridge. ‘Tonight, I mean.’

Gloria snuggled deeper in her seat. ‘Why? Have I still got time to change my mind?’

‘You’ve got about three minutes.’

Three minutes isn’t a long time and nothing had changed at the end of it except the name of the road. Suddenly they were home and in the silence as the engine died they kissed for the first time.

Moses locked the car door and stood, motionless but swaying, looking beyond the unlit windows of his flat. The world whirled. That last joint on the drive back. He could see no stars, only the racing-colours of the city sky, orange and grey. The street, high-sided, gorgelike, channelled the power of the wind. He felt as though he was being tested for aerodynamic styling, a test he would almost certainly have failed. A fine rain performed subtle acupuncture on his upturned face. He shivered. It was cold. He was out of his head. He could no longer remember how they had got there.

‘Over here,’ came a cry, blown in his direction by the wind.

Gloria was waving to him from the street-corner.

‘See this?’ she said, when he reached her. She was pointing at a poster on the door of The Bunker. It advertised an evening of jazz-funk with somebody called Jet Washington.

‘That was yesterday,’ Moses said.

‘I know that. What I mean is — ’

‘He was terrible.’

‘That’s not what I — ’

‘People threw glasses at him.’ Moses shook his head at the memory. The look of outrage on Jet’s face when a plastic glass bounced off his shoulder. The impotence. The tearful slope-shouldered way he left the stage halfway through his set.

‘Moses, will you — ’

‘Jet Washington? Moses said. The side of his mouth twisted to signify disdain.

He looked down in surprise as Gloria began to pummel him in the stomach with her tiny gloved fists. ‘Why are you doing that?’ he asked her.

‘I’m trying to get you to listen to me.’

‘I am listening.’

‘What I was trying to say was, do you think it would be possible for me to sing here?’

‘Are you a singer?’

‘You know that, Moses.’

‘You’re really a singer?’

‘Yes.’ Gloria leaned against the wall, the black plastic of her raincoat catching hundreds of slivers of silver light that twitched and shivered as she moved like broken-off pieces of Moses’s amazement. She now seemed a lot less drunk than he was.

‘What time is it?’ he asked her. (Her eyebrows said about ten to four.)

Gloria held her watch up to the light. The action was beautiful because it was so serious.

‘Five past three,’ she said.

Moses shook with laughter and almost buried her entirely in his arms.

*

Why had he come to this foreign country? he wondered, cursing himself over and over again, though it was too late now, of course. The stupidity of it. But words were talismans, there was protection in their syllables, their sounds could stop the bad thing happening. Keep talking, he told himself, because talking can save you. Keep talking. All the time dragging himself across the sand towards the cover of the trees. All the time looking over his shoulder. Looking was important too. Never turn your back.

The animal crouched twenty feet away, its striped sides rigid, its breathing invisible. There are no tigers in the desert, he told himself. But it was there all right. He could hear the rage vibrating in its chest. It trembled for a moment — power that could be held no longer — drew back, sprang. He saw the teeth, yellow, filmed over with saliva, curving down like raised knives –

Something sharp dug into his naked shoulder, and he cried out.

‘Moses,’ Gloria whispered, tugging at him.

He jack-knifed upright. A bright blue light revolved in the room. ‘What’s happening?’

‘I don’t know. I was just going to find out.’ Gloria put on one of his shirts and padded to the window.

Moses leaned on one elbow, still half asleep, bewildered. The dream lingered, mingled with the memory of recent sex. He couldn’t work out how much of the sex he remembered was real and how much dreamt. They had pulled each other’s clothes off. She had pressed her body to his.

The icy air.

Her nipples in silhouette, tiny minarets, and his hand moving over the smooth drifted dunes of her ribs, moving across the soft desert of her belly, moving down, down to the oasis. And her hand, too, had moved, following a trail of hair, discovering his scrotum, shrivelled like a dried fig with the cold, and she had bitten into it, and he had gasped a little, less out of pain than surprise, then she had lifted her head, her face invisible, and the whole thing linked with his dream because she had said something about Arabia –

‘Moses. Come here. Quick.’

He eased out of the warm bed and slipped into his coat. Gloria stood at the window. On tiptoe, her heels off the ground. His shirt-tails reaching the backs of her knees. He wanted to say something, but the feeling wouldn’t translate. He went and stood beside her.

Other people had opened their windows too, sensing tragedy as people do, intrigued because it wasn’t theirs. An ambulance had drawn up below. It stood at a curious angle to the pavement; it looked casual, abandoned. As they watched, two men in dark uniforms wheeled a stretcher out of one of the houses opposite. A black nylon shroud hid the body. It had been stretched so taut that the feet made no hill. The two men slid the stretcher into the back of the ambulance, closed the doors, and exchanged a few words. All this without glancing up once. The revolving blue light accelerated away down the road, turned left at the junction. The night became orange and grey, ordinary again. People closed their windows, went back to bed. Moses and Gloria stared down into the empty street.

It was Moses who pulled away first. He walked into the kitchen, put the kettle on. He heard Gloria shut the window.

‘I don’t feel like sleeping any more,’ she said from the doorway. ‘If I go to sleep, men in black uniforms might come and take me away.’

‘I wouldn’t let them,’ he said.

She was looking at the floor, one hand toying with the shirt’s top button.

‘I’m making some coffee,’ he told her.

‘That’s good.’

‘Lucky this didn’t happen last weekend.’

‘Why?’

‘Last weekend I didn’t have a kettle.’

Gloria laughed softly. Reaching up, she ruffled his hair. Then she left the kitchen, and he heard her moving about in the bedroom. When she returned she was dressed. She bounced her earrings up and down in her hand. They clicked like dice. He wondered if she was going to leave.

He unscrewed the lid on the coffee-jar, spooned the granules into two matching cups (they were new too), poured the boiling water on to the granules, added milk from a carton, and stirred, enjoying doing the small things slowly.

Gloria had folded her arms. She began to twist one strand of hair around her finger. ‘I wonder what happened,’ she said.

‘I don’t know.’ He handed her a cup. ‘There are a lot of old people living round here. They live here all their lives. Die here too. They never move. Some of them haven’t even been north of the river. They’ll look at you when you tell them you have and say something like, Nice up there, is it? Like it’s a foreign country or something. Well, I suppose it is for them.’ He paused. ‘We all have our foreign countries, I suppose.’

Gloria smiled at him, then, as if that movement of her lips had set her body in motion, as if one was the natural extension of the other, walked towards him, met his mouth with hers.

*

It was still dark in the living-room, so Moses switched on the lamp. It shed a soft-edged glow. He arranged a few cushions on the floor. Then he knelt down, lit the gas-heater. It sighed like the inside of a seashell.

Gloria walked over to the window again. She stared out, thinking, perhaps, of her own body wrapped in that taut cloth, of a blue light revolving in the street for her.

Without turning round, she said, ‘I wonder if that person was dead.’

‘Probably,’ Moses said. ‘They covered the face.’

He stood behind her. Over her shoulder he saw somebody drive past in a white car.

‘I still don’t know you, really, do I?’ she said. She turned to look at him, but couldn’t. He was standing too close.

‘No,’ he said.

She let herself lean back against him. ‘Too many blue lights this evening,’ she said. ‘Fucks me up, you see.’

He smiled at the way she’d said evening. It was almost morning now.

She pulled away from him again. He felt she had trusted him in that brief moment, had entrusted him with some sacred part of herself, and was now detaching herself, confident about what she had done, knowing she had left something behind. He watched her cross the room. She bent down next to his record collection. She flicked through, found Charlie Parker. She put him on. Humming the first few bars of ‘Cherokee’, she began to rummage in her bag. She held up a tiny white envelope.

‘Since we’re going to stay awake,’ she said.

He smiled.

She chopped the coke on her own mirror, her legs folded beneath her, her body in a loose Z-shape.

‘Two for you, two for me, two for later,’ she said.

She took her two and handed him the mirror. When he handed it back, she was brushing the tip of her nose with the back of her finger and he noticed a fine groove running between her nostrils and thought of Blue Rooms on south-coast piers (holidays with Uncle Stan and Auntie B) and penny-in-the-slot machines and smiled.

‘What’s so funny, Moses?’

‘Your nose. It’s like a slot-machine.’

‘No more for you then.’ She ran her finger across the dusty glass and licked it.

The lamplight was diluting fast in the greyness of daybreak. Traffic grew heavier on the main road. The record crackled to a finish.

Gloria sprang to her feet. ‘Let’s go out somewhere.’

She kept changing, landing abruptly in a new mood like a needle jumping on a record and skipping whole tracks. She was a mystery-tour of a girl. Constantly wrongfooting him. She’ll go right here, he would think (an instinct, this), she’ll definitely go right. And she’d go left. Wonderful. He delighted in being unable to predict her.

‘Let’s go and have breakfast,’ she was saying. ‘In a hotel. In Mayfair.’

She inhaled the smoke from her latest cigarette impatiently. Her eyes had the glint of solid silver cutlery. ‘What do you think, Moses?’ Standing over him now.

A smile of collaboration spread across his face like a fresh white tablecloth. He could almost feel the hands of an experienced waitress smoothing it down at the corners.

Gloria swung down on to his lap. ‘Some of those hotels have dress restrictions so we’d better ring first.’

‘OK,’ and Moses was just reaching for the phone when he realised that he didn’t have one. That, in fact, he had never had one. That he ought to have one. (He would have to speak to Elliot.)

More laughter. Another line each. The first side of Charlie Parker again (for the third time).

During the next twenty minutes they ruled out The Ritz, The Savoy, and Claridge’s. Gloria said you couldn’t eat breakfast in any of those places without wearing jackets and ties and shit like that. They decided to take a chance on Brown’s in Dover Street.

Moses switched off the (by now) invisible light, and picked up his car keys. Night was over.

*

Moses swept past reception in his leather jacket, his slipstream turning several pages of the hotel register. He parted the glass doors of the breakfast room and manoeuvred his large unshaven face into the head-waiter’s line of vision.

‘We’d like a table, please.’

‘For two, sir?’

Moses gave this a moment’s thought. ‘No,’ he said. ‘For four.’

‘Certainly, sir. If you’ll just follow me.’

The head-waiter, a narrow man with silver hair, threaded his way neatly to the centre of the room. Moses and Gloria followed. Somewhat less neatly.

‘Why four?’ Gloria hissed.

‘Because you get a better table that way,’ Moses hissed back.

It was five to eight. Moses surveyed the room with the superiority of somebody who hasn’t slept for thirty-six hours. There were one or two businessmen dressed like seals in sleek grey suits, their hair slicked back, still damp from the shower. An elderly couple, impeccable in cashmere and tweed, exchanged crisp pieces of information. Their limbs creaked and rustled like newspaper being folded as they shifted in their cane chairs. The light in the room, tinged with pink, felt soothing. The air smelt of coffee and oranges. It could have been summer outside. It almost was.

‘Tell you the truth,’ Moses said, after studying the menu for a while, ‘I’m not all that hungry.’

‘Neither am I.’ Gloria lit a cigarette. Smoke trickled professionally out of her nose. ‘What about some champagne then? Lanot’s only £17.'

Moses began to sweat. ‘Fine,’ he said.

Half a dozen waiters were hovering around their table in maroon and black like clumsy humming-birds. Moses signalled one over. He broke his flight pattern and stooped with a fat white pad. Moses ordered champagne, coffee, orange juice — and two fresh grapefruits.

‘Are you OK for money?’ Gloria whispered when he had left.

Moses smiled. ‘No, not really.’

‘What about the £80 you got for sheets?’

‘That’s not for breakfast. That’s for this special weekend that I want you to come on.’

‘You’re not going to tell me anything about it?’

‘No. You’ll just have to trust me.’

Gloria smiled as she crushed out her cigarette. ‘All right. I’ll pay for breakfast, you pay for the weekend. OK?’

Their waiter arrived with the champagne. As Moses watched him wave his wrists in the air, address himself to the bottle, and, teeth clamped to his bottom lip, ease the cork into his immaculate white cloth, Gloria’s words sank in.

‘You mean you’ll come?’

She nodded. ‘I’ll come.’

‘It may not be for a couple of weeks, you know.’

‘Do you think we’ll last that long?’

Moses’s laughter bounced around the room like a number of thrown balls. Knives and forks paused in mid-air. Eyes peered through eyebrows, over papers. Voices went underground, risking only whispers. Then one of the seals coughed, and the breakfast sounds pieced themselves together again into that familiar jigsaw where the sky is always at the top of the picture and children always look happy.

‘Moses,’ Gloria said, ‘nobody laughs at breakfast-time.’

It had the ring of an old Chinese proverb so they raised their glasses and drank to it, discovering, as they did so, that they were laughing again and that the proverb had, buried within it, the power of proving itself wrong — infinitely.

Something occurred to Moses.

‘Did we get any sleep last night?’

‘About an hour.’

‘What I mean is, did we have sex of any kind?’

Gloria touched her napkin to her mouth and surveyed him, the relic of a smile preserved on her face. ‘Do you know what I thought when I first saw you?’

Moses couldn’t guess.

‘It was the size of you, you see. Relative to me, I mean.’

‘What about it?’

‘I thought, If I go to bed with this man, am I going to get crushed?’

Moses looked shocked. ‘You didn’t.’

‘I did. I was really worried.’

Moses glanced down at himself, as if assessing his potential as an instrument of violence.

‘And?’ he said.

Gloria smiled. ‘You were very gentle.’

*

They had parted at Green Park. Moses’s heart pumping fast. The coke lasting. Or emotion, perhaps. Or some amalgamation of the two.

‘I’ve got to get some sleep,’ Gloria said. ‘I’m supposed to be singing tonight.’ She scribbled a few words on the back of a Marlboro packet. ‘That’s in case you want to come.’

‘Of course I want to come,’ he shouted after her as she ran away from their last kiss and down the steps into the tube station.

‘Why?’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘Do you like jazz?’

‘No,’ he shouted. Which made her laugh. And her laughter hung on in the musty tunnel long after she had gone.

‘Jazz,’ he said to himself as he walked to his car. He thought of people with names like Rubberlegs and Dizzy — funny names, made-up names, names like his. He saw trumpet-players’ cheeks blown up like bubble-gum. He saw sweat scattering like hot rain and the fingers of singers twisting round dented silver microphones and false ceilings built of smoke. He tried to fit Gloria into that.

Then it was evening and he was driving over Vauxhall Bridge. A dense fierce rain slammed into the left side of the car. On the north bank of the river the lights ran. Flood warnings on the radio. His life had been derailed by the night with Gloria. The whole thing already seemed unreal, as unreal as the tiger dream. He was thankful they had arranged to meet again so soon otherwise he might have begun to doubt whether any of it had actually happened.

‘Gloria,’ Moses said out loud.

He stamped on the accelerator and flicked into overdrive. In less than fifteen minutes he was there. The rain drenched him as he ran across the pavement. Downstairs he had to wait in a queue. Scarlet light discoloured one side of the doorman’s face the way a birthmark does. From inside came the erratic fluttering heartbeat of a double-bass. He was close to her now.

But the first person he saw in the crowded bar was Eddie.

‘You’re late,’ Eddie told him.

‘What’re you doing here?’

‘I came to see your girlfriend sing.’

‘How did you know she was singing?’

‘She told me. At the party.’

Moses shook off his coat. He pulled up a chair and helped himself to some of Eddie’s wine.

Eddie leaned across the table. ‘Did you have a good night?’

‘None of your business.’

‘Well, anyway, you’re late. She’s been on once already.’

‘What’s wrong with you? Are you speeding or something?’

Eddie chuckled.

‘So where were you?’ Moses asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Where were you hiding?’

Eddie leaned back. ‘In the broom cupboard,’ he said. ‘I think it was a broom cupboard. There was a broom in it.’

Moses had to smile. ‘The broom cupboard. Of course. Next time I’ll look in the broom cupboard. Anyway, listen. I dropped Doreen off for you.’

‘Dawn.’

‘What?’

‘Dawn. Her name was Dawn.’

‘I’m surprised you remember.’

‘I found a bit of paper in my pocket this morning. It had Dawn written on it and a number. I rang the number to find out who she was.’

‘And?’

‘She said she never wanted to see me again.’

‘Incredible.’

Eddie shrugged.

A hand reached down in front of Moses, snatched up his glass, and replaced it seconds later, empty. Before he had time to say ‘Hello Gloria’ or ‘That’s my wine’ or ‘What did you invite him for?’ she was up on stage introducing herself.

‘Good evening, folks,’ she said, hands behind her back. ‘This is Holly again — ’

Whistles. Applause.

‘Second set,’ Eddie said. ‘You see? I told you.’

But Moses was thinking, Who?

‘That’s her stage name,’ Eddie whispered.

How come he knows so much? Moses wondered.

‘ — and this is the band who haven’t got a name yet — ’

More whistles. More applause.

Holly? Why Holly?

‘Her surname’s Wood,’ Eddie told him. ‘Her real surname, I mean.’

‘ — and we’re going to do a few songs for you — not too loud, though, because they’re trying to sleep upstairs — ’

Jeering.

‘ — it’s an old people’s home or something — ’

Laughter.

‘ — anyway, this is the first one — it’s called “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do”-’

Gloria swung away from the microphone and the band launched into the intro. Remote smiles played on their faces. The drummer was using brushes. He looked a bit like Teddy Kennedy. It was a slowed-down slurry version of the song.

‘ — oh and thanks for coming — ’ Gloria was looking directly at Moses — ‘don’t think I hadn’t noticed — ’

Moses settled deeper in his chair, almost blushing. Eddie nudged him in the ribs, half-rose out of his chair, and, looking round as if Moses was somebody famous, clapped loudly.

For Christ’s sake, Moses thought.

They had just finished their second bottle of wine, some French stuff, nineteen seventy-something. Now Eddie was ordering champagne. It wasn’t that he was ostentatious. It was just that if money began to pile up in his bank accounts (and he had at least three) he felt as if he had slipped up somewhere, as if he wasn’t really living. So he spent money like water and the water turned into wine and Moses drank it.

Moses turned back to Gloria. He quickly realised that he wasn’t going to have to lie to her about how good she was. She didn’t let the music dominate her. She used its rhythms, its momentum, and rode on them, always balanced, always in control. She could be as agile as the song demanded. She could wrongfoot you just when you thought you knew where her voice was going, leaping seemingly into a void, landing in places you hadn’t even known were there. What a relief, Moses thought, not to have to lie to her.

He had been thinking about her off and on all day, going over remembered ground — incidents, gestures, fragments of conversation — going over and over them in his mind as waves go over stones, polishing them until they shone, felt smooth against his skin, had value. Something went through him, sideways and upwards, as he watched her performing on stage in her charcoal-grey forties’ suit and her diamante earrings and her diaphanous black scarf that she wore looped loosely about her neck, something made up of so many feelings, half-feelings and fractions of feelings that he felt like a whole audience — generous, expansive, irrepressible. The song finished and he was clapping, using every square millimetre of his massive hands.

Towards the end of ‘Stormy Weather’ Vince showed up. He dropped into the chair next to Moses, his hands wedged into his pockets, his waistcoat slippery with grease and oil and spilt drinks. His face had the dampness, the pallor, of a sponge. Stubble littered his chin. Moses could sense his knees jiggling up and down beneath the table.

Vince scowled. ‘I feel like shit.’

Eddie grinned. ‘I was just going to say. You look like shit, Vince.’

‘How did you get in with that waistcoat on, Vince?’ Moses asked. He poured Vince a glass of wine.

Vince downed it in one and slumped back in his chair. ‘I haven’t slept for three days.’ He stared morosely at his empty glass. ‘Took some smack on Wednesday night. Fucked me up completely.’

Moses and Eddie exchanged looks of resignation. Vince being histrionic again. Nothing unusual about that.

‘I thought you’d stopped that,’ Moses said.

‘How many times do I have to tell you, Vincent?’ said Eddie.

‘Screw you.’ Vince turned to Moses. ‘You got any downers, sleeping-pills, anything like that?’

‘Why would I have anything like that?’ Moses said. ‘I’m in love.’

Vince grimaced.

‘I haven’t seen you for ages,’ Moses said. ‘What’ve you been up to?’

‘Not much,’ Vince said. ‘Staying home, mostly. Getting out of it.’

‘With Debra,’ he added as an afterthought. He held his glass out for a refill. Moses poured.

‘Debra?’ Eddie said, as if the name meant something to him.

‘You don’t know her,’ Vince said. ‘She must be one of the few women you don’t know.’

‘I wouldn’t bet on that.’ Eddie smiled.

‘You don’t know her,’ Vince repeated.

Eddie looked pensive. ‘Did she used to work in that café in Victoria Station?’

‘No, she didn’t.’

‘She hasn’t got blonde hair, has she?’

Vince looked at the ceiling. ‘No, she hasn’t.’

‘Does she come from Hampshire?’

‘No,’ Vince said. ‘Liverpool.’

‘Was she at that — ’

‘Look, fuck off, Eddie,’ Vince said. ‘You don’t know her. OK?’

‘Well,’ Eddie grinned lasciviously, ‘I suppose there’s still time.’

Vince picked up his glass of wine and threw the contents in Eddie’s face. Vince smiled for the first time since he walked in. He was beginning to enjoy himself. Eddie wiped his shirt-front with one hand and smiled back.

‘Why did you do that, Vince?’ he said quietly.

‘I got bored with the shit you were talking.’

‘Was I talking shit?’ Eddie asked, still dabbing at his clothes.

‘Yes.’

The champagne arrived like a change of subject.

‘Seen Alison recently?’ Moses asked Vince.

‘That fucking bitch,’ Vince snarled. ‘I haven’t seen her since she went back home to mummy. I don’t need any of that shit.’

‘She rang me last week,’ Moses said. ‘Asked me to Sunday lunch.’

‘Sunday lunch.’ Vince’s face screwed up in a paroxysm of scorn and disgust. ‘Sunday fucking lunch. I’ve been to a few of those.’

‘What about them?’

‘It’s her mother. She floats around like some kind of fucking wood-nymph. She talks a pile of crap.’

‘What?’ Eddie laughed. ‘Like me?’

‘Yes,’ Vince said. ‘Like you.’

‘I can’t go anyway,’ Moses said. ‘I’ve got something else planned.’

Eddie leaned forwards. ‘With this Gloria of yours, I suppose?’

Vince leered.

‘It’d be a shame,’ Moses said, ‘if any more of this nice champagne got spilled, wouldn’t it?’ and reaching for the bottle helped himself to another glass.

Eddie drew back, swallowed a thoughtful mouthful of champagne, and left the table to get some cigarettes.

‘Sorry about this,’ Gloria was saying over the microphone, ‘but there’ve been some more complaints and apparently we’ve got to stop — ’

Whistles of disapproval. Two or three people stood up in protest. Vince began to pound the table with his fist.

Gloria lifted her arms away from her sides. Nothing she could do. She glanced at the manager of the place. He stood by the bar looking uncomfortable. She asked him whether they couldn’t end with a quiet number. After a moment’s hesitation, he nodded, pressing the air down with one hand. Gloria turned back to her audience.

‘OK, people, one more it is. A quiet one. So quiet that you’ll hardly hear it.’ She smiled to herself. ‘This song was made famous by Billie Holiday. It’s called “Strange Fruit” — ’

Accompanied by the piano and the drummer’s brushes, Gloria sang the song with a chilling stillness, staring straight ahead of her, seeing no one. The stillness spread, filled each member of the audience as if they were empty glasses and the stillness was water. When the song died away she didn’t move. She let the applause rush at her, shake her, bring her back to life. She seemed surprised for a moment to find that she wasn’t alone.

‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘and goodnight.’

And then, peering at the ceiling, ‘Happy dreams up there.’

*

‘You were good,’ Moses said.

Gloria wrinkled her nose, said nothing.

‘I mean it. You were really good.’ He pushed a chair out for her, but she stayed standing.

‘Thank you, Moses,’ she sighed.

‘No, really,’ he said, touching her arm. ‘You sounded like a proper person on a record.’

‘Did I?’ Gloria smiled faintly. ‘Give me a cigarette, would you?’

Moses handed her the packet. She took one, lit it, and inhaled deeply, her hand supporting her elbow. She stared away into the room. Moses had a sudden sense of awkwardness, of not knowing her at all. As if the previous night had happened in another dimension and needed to be re-established in this one.

The ordinary lights had come on. People looked pale, shifty, guilty of small crimes. The door to the street stood open, and a bitter draught ran through the bar.

‘Come on, folks,’ the manager called out, rubbing his hands together. ‘We’re closing now.’ He seemed anxious to put an end to what had obviously been an awkward evening.

Gloria crossed the room to speak to him. She returned a moment later muttering, ‘Fuck that for a laugh.’

They all walked up the stairs and round the corner to an Indian restaurant which, according to Eddie, served drinks until two in the morning. On the street Gloria took Moses’s arm.

‘I’m really glad you came,’ she said. ‘I’m just sorry it wasn’t better.’

‘You were good,’ Moses told her. ‘I meant what I said.’

Gloria shook her head. ‘Anyway, that’s the last time I sing in that place.’

In the restaurant Eddie was preoccupied with Danielle, a friend of Gloria’s. Danielle had muscular tanned arms and eyes so green they made you think of envy. She may or may not have been about to become only the third lesbian ever to sleep with Eddie. Moses was preoccupied with Gloria, who really was a jazz-singer and who would almost certainly be spending the night with him, an event that he might or might not remember, depending on how much more he drank. Vince, who hadn’t slept for three days, was preoccupied with the tablecloth. He hadn’t said a word to anyone for hours. He seemed fascinated by the tablecloth, and touched it carefully with his fingertips at regular intervals. Eventually he spoke.

‘I’ve got to go.’

Everybody else exchanged glances as people always did when Vince emerged from one of his long silences.

‘OK, Vince,’ Moses said.

‘I’m going now.’ Vince didn’t move.

‘OK, Vince,’ Moses said.

‘Goodbye, Vince,’ Eddie said.

Still looking at the tablecloth, Vince rose to his feet, slowly, as if there was more gravity around than usual. His mouth tightened with the effort involved. He moved away across the restaurant like somebody walking on the sea-bed. The door opened and closed. A blast of wind. He was gone.

‘He ought to be in the movies,’ Danielle said.

Eddie agreed. ‘Frankenstein.’

They carried on drinking bottles of wine which Eddie, with typical abandon, was now ordering in pairs. They were the last people in the restaurant. They hardly looked at the tablecloth at all.

Ten or fifteen minutes passed. Then, to everyone’s surprise, somebody sat down in Vince’s vacant seat.

It was Vince.

They all turned to him with questioning looks. Vince’s eyes travelled across the smooth white wastes of the tablecloth. Finally he took a deep breath.

‘I wasn’t drunk enough,’ he said.

*

Moses pulled up outside The Bunker. He cut the engine. Rain scratched at the windscreen.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Can you hear it?’

The music, he meant. Dub tonight. Shuddering across the street. Bass notes that made the surfaces of puddles shake.

‘No noise restrictions here,’ he said.

‘So will you try and arrange it for me?’ Gloria said. ‘You know, sometime.’

‘If we’re still together.’

Gloria smiled. ‘You’re stealing my lines.’

Upstairs, she flung her coat on to the chair by the door.

‘Oh,’ Moses said.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s just that my ghost might be sitting there.’

‘Your ghost?’

‘Yes. She sits there sometimes, I think. It’s her chair.’

‘You’ve got a ghost in here?’

‘Yes. Well, Jackson thinks so, anyway. I’ve never seen her.’ Moses was smiling. He was imagining the ghost sitting on the chair with Gloria’s coat over her head. Will somebody please get this coat off my head? ‘She’s harmless, though,’ he went on. ‘Sometimes I talk to her without even knowing it. I think we get on quite well, really. Jackson would’ve told me if we didn’t.’

Gloria shook her head. ‘I never know what to believe with you. Tell you one thing, though. You’re right about the music. It’s — it’s everywhere.’

She wasn’t exaggerating.

There was music in the floorboards, music in the walls, music in the windows, music in her earrings, music in the black mass of her hair, music in her eyebrows, music in the way Moses was looking at her, music in his voice as he said, ‘Let’s go to bed’, music in her passage across the room towards him, music in the hinges of the bedroom door, music in their first quick kiss, more music in their second slower one, music in their undressing, music in his hands running over her skin, music in hers as they guided him in, music in the opening and closing gaps between their bodies, music in her orgasm, music in his, music as he turned, like the page of a score, away from her, music in their breathing as it slowed down, deepened, music in their sleeping, music in their dreams –

And music in Gloria’s coat, it seemed, as it slid slowly from the chair on to the floor.

*

On the following Saturday morning Moses picked Gloria up from her flat in Victoria. He had cashed the sheet-money and filled his car with petrol. They were going away for the weekend. The weekend he had promised her.

It wasn’t until they were driving up Maida Vale that Gloria happened to glance over her shoulder and see the two suitcases on the back seat.

Why two? she wondered.

She twisted round in her seat. One of the suitcases was compact — the kind of overnight bag that she herself had brought along. The other, though no larger, looked older, sturdier. Two leather straps held it fast, buckling at the front like belts. The locks were shaped like arrowheads, and halfway between them two words had been discreetly embossed in gold: REAL COWHIDE. At one end, where the hinges were, the leather had darkened as if it had been left standing in water. The most surprising thing about it, though, was the fact that it was there at all. They were only going to be away for two nights. Her mouth framed a question, but never asked it. The weekend had been Moses’s idea. He would tell her in his own good time.

She settled back in her seat again and glanced secretly at his profile, what she called his driving face, as it rushed motionless across a landscape of white houses. But surely it couldn’t just be clothes, she found herself thinking. Before her mind could start inventing possible contents, she shut it off. She didn’t want to guess. It would ruin things. It was curiously reassuring, comforting almost, to know that, sometime in the future, the mystery would be explained. That was what knowing people was all about, wasn’t it? In fact, the more she thought about the suitcase (in the abstract, that is), the more at ease she felt. It seemed to epitomise their relationship. Anticipation, excitement, surprises.

She leaned her head against the back of the seat and watched the trees flick by. Tree after tree after tree lining the main road. All the same make, all identical in age. All their intervening distances measured and exact.

Complete opposite of the suitcase, really.

*

Country and western music on the radio.

Moses often listened to country and western music because he didn’t like it. If you listened to music you liked all the time, he had told Gloria, then pretty soon you didn’t like it any more. That was what had happened with country and western music. Once he had really liked it. But he had listened to it all the time. And now he didn’t like it any more. So he could listen to it all the time without worrying.

Gloria didn’t have strong feelings one way or the other. She sang along, inventing words and making Moses smile. The day warmed up, and a dull haze accompanied their drive north, hanging over the monotonous deserted landscape, denying it greenness. The exit after Leicester, Moses turned off the motorway and it wasn’t long before the road narrowed, acquiring ditches and hedges, and a high stone wall loomed up on the left, dusty and crumbling, the texture of stale cake, with overhanging cedars, their great flat branches reaching out like plates.

‘This is it,’ Moses announced, ‘by the look of it.’

He swung the car into a gravel driveway. Stone dogs sat on the gateposts, their ears pricked, their eyes blind. Gloria peered through the windscreen for a glimpse of the hotel, but the driveway denied her that, winding first through trees — pines planted close together, gloom gathering between their tall red trunks — then through giant clumps of rhododendrons and hydrangeas. Gradually, on the left-hand side, the shrubbery thinned out, and Gloria caught flashes of a green lawn slick with recent rain. Beyond it lay a boating lake. A jetty crouched over the water on dark rotting stilts. A few conifers, almost black, clustered round the edge like mourners.

‘Yes, this is it.’ Moses nodded to himself. ‘I recognise it from the postcard.’

‘What postcard?’ Gloria asked.

‘You’ll see.’

Moses parked in front of the hotel. They both got out.

Standing beside the car with her coat over one arm and her case in her hand, Gloria stared up at the facade. The name — DOGWOOD HALL — in white foot-high letters. Ivy trimmed close to the pale yellow stone. Blank windows. Neat, well-groomed, oppressive. Even the gravel at her feet looked arranged.

She noticed a bare patch where Moses must have skidded when he turned the car round. We’ve messed up their drive, she thought. And then, Why did he bring me here?

‘Are you coming?’ Moses called out from the porch.

Gloria looked up, smiled weakly. ‘Yes,’ she said. But first she covered the bare patch over, using the toe of her shoe.

*

Moses strode towards the reception desk. He felt powerful, executive. A man with a mission. Moses, he said to himself. Moses Highness.

He put his two suitcases down, leaned on the counter, and waited while the receptionist finished shuffling his papers. The receptionist was superbly bald, his head a pale yellow dome of polished marble. It had the allure of a piece of sculpture and, for one awful moment, when the man bent down to pick up a sheet of paper disturbed by the wind from the open door, Moses thought he was going to reach over and stroke it, which was what he always did with sculpture. Fortunately the receptionist straightened again quickly, as if he had had some kind of premonition.

‘Can I help you?’ he enquired.

‘Yes,’ Moses said. ‘I’d like a double room, please.’

‘A double room.’ The receptionist blew a little stale air out of his wrinkled sphincter of a mouth and opened the hotel register. ‘Can I have your name, sir?’

‘Highness. Moses Highness.’

The receptionist’s head began to wobble violently on his narrow shoulders. He stood behind his counter and stared at Moses, his mouth a widening rift in the lower half of his face. It was like watching an earthquake in an art gallery. What if the head toppled? Moses thought. Would his reflexes be quick enough to catch it before it hit the floor and shattered into a thousand pieces? He couldn’t bear the idea of looking down and seeing one baleful eye looking up at him.

At that instant, Gloria appeared in the doorway, clasping her overnight bag in front of her with both hands.

‘And this,’ Moses said, unable to restrain himself, ‘is Mrs Highness.’

‘One moment.’ The receptionist stepped backwards through a red curtain into some inner sanctum.

‘He’s extraordinary,’ Moses whispered to Gloria.

Gloria clutched his arm.

Her grip tightened as the red curtain parted again. During his absence the receptionist had managed to regain absolute control of his head. Whether he had some surgical machine or device behind the curtain or whether he had simply applied a soothing lotion they would never know, but, whatever the remedy, his head was as firm as yours or mine as he asked Moses to sign the register.

‘I hope you don’t mind me asking,’ Moses said, ‘but have you been working here a long time?’

‘Yes,’ the receptionist said, staring at Moses with his lidless eyes. ‘Yes, you could say that.’

‘By a long time, I mean thirty years. Have you been here that long?’

‘Yes, I’ve been here about thirty years.’

Moses leaned closer. ‘I’m only asking because I think my parents stayed here, probably during the fifties, and I was wondering if, by any chance, you remembered them.’

The receptionist tilted his head sideways (Careful! Moses thought) and read the name in the register. ‘No, I don’t think so. I would have remembered a name like that.’ And his upper lip lifted, raising the lid on a keyboard of discoloured teeth. It was a ghastly smile.

Moses drew back, disappointed. ‘Well,’ he sighed. ‘I suppose it was worth a try.’

The receptionist laid the key of room number 5 beside the register. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, sir. How long will you be staying?’

‘We’re just here for the weekend.’

‘It’s not often we have young people here,’ and the receptionist’s head began to wobble again. ‘I hope you enjoy your stay.’

Moses thanked him.

‘Second on the left at the top of the stairs,’ the receptionist said, and disappeared behind his red curtain again.

*

Gloria climbed the stairs ahead of Moses and waited for him at the top. There was a surprising delicacy, even tenderness, about the way he handled the older of the two suitcases. It looked like a child in his grasp, she thought. A child clutching its father’s hand.

‘That man gives me the creeps,’ she said as Moses reached her.

He chuckled. ‘What did his head remind you of?’

Gloria shuddered. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you know what I thought?’

She shook her head.

‘Taj Mahal.’

Gloria had to laugh. His face sometimes.

Moses unlocked the door of their room. It seemed cold inside because everything was green. Counterpane, curtains, carpet, wallpaper, lampshades, telephone. Everything. A few ungainly pieces of furniture stood against the walls. A tallboy. A wardrobe. A sideboard, its marble top veined like Gorgonzola. The bathroom had a chessboard tile floor. A jungle of silver pipes and fittings grew out of the back of the lavatory and up the wall. The taps on the basin said HOT and COLD. The wooden handle on the end of the lavatory chain was the shape of a slim pear. Gloria knocked it with her hand so it swung. Then she leaned over the bath and twisted the hot tap. Scalding water gushed.

‘I’m going to have a bath,’ she called out, ‘then you can tell me all about these mysterious parents of yours.’

Moses smiled at her through the gathering steam, then withdrew into the room. He walked to the window. A lawn lay below, spread like a cloth of alternating pale-green and dark-green stripes, and stapled to the ground by croquet-hoops. Beyond the lawn, maybe a hundred yards away, the tarnished metal of a lake, fenced on its far side by a line of poplars that looked mauve, French somehow, as mist stole in behind them to remove the view.

The first weekend in June. Somewhere north of Leicester. He wondered why he had come all this way. Those questions he had put to Taj Mahal, had he really expected any answers, any joy? It had been too much to hope for. Still, he clung to the fantasy that his parents might once have stayed at the hotel, might have been happy there. Yes, maybe there was sufficient justification in that. Some kind of logic, at least. His homage to that secret world between the names. A message spirited across the years. Standing in their footprints.

He turned away from the window. He took a book out of his suitcase, tried to read, but found he couldn’t concentrate. He could hear Gloria swirling water around. He walked towards the bathroom door.

‘Hey, Gloria,’ he called out. ‘Any room for me in there?’

She laughed. ‘You must be joking.’

*

After their bath they climbed into bed, their bodies warm and damp between the crisp sheets. They made love quietly, as if someone was listening. When they finally looked away from one another, dusk had inked the windows in, like the o’s in school textbooks. They lay there, not talking.

Gloria felt relaxed, drowsy. Moses had rolled over on his side, his back to her, his breathing soft and regular. She closed her eyes and her mind drifted loose, drawing pictures, spinning riddles. It was one of those dreams you seem to have under control, seem to, but the dream is strong, it strains at the leash, it knows pretty much where it wants to go; you think you’re leading it and it ends up taking you for a walk. It began with a conscious thought or a spoken phrase, she couldn’t tell which. It sounded in her head so clearly that she wasn’t certain whether she had said it out loud or to herself: I know what’s going to happen –

She was standing by the door facing into the room, her arms behind her back, the palms of her hands against the panelled wood as if she was holding it shut. The tall window in front of her was blue-black, a syringe glutted with blood.

What a mess it would make, she was thinking, if I opened it.

And, glancing down at her cotton summer frock, her bare legs, her little girl’s white socks, she shuddered; the feeling was like opening the fridge on a hot day and standing in front of it with nothing on.

Moses was in the room too, she noticed. Over by the bed. There was a suitcase on the floor beside him, and he hunched over it, fumbling with the locks. He turned and looked in her direction several times, but didn’t seem to see her. He acted as if she wasn’t there at all. This was such a strong impression that she thought, Maybe I’m not.

At last he got it open. The inside, she saw, was lined with blue velvet and moulded into holes and slots of differing shapes and sizes, each one snugly filled by a piece of polished black metal.

Moses sat down on the bed facing her and slowly but professionally assembled the gun. This took time. It was a complicated thing. The only sounds in the room for a while were the clicks and squeaks of its interlocking sections and appendages.

She was going to ask Moses a question, but thought better of it. He seemed so removed. An automaton.

Finally he stood up and walked to the window. He opened it. All the blood, she noticed, stayed outside. She looked over his shoulder as he squatted down and, resting the gun on the windowsill, squinted along its gleaming barrel.

She saw herself walking across the tennis court in the garden below, trailing a black headscarf along the grass. (She recognised the scarf; it was the silk one, her favourite.) She was wearing a white summery dress fastened at the waist by a wide mauve ribbon. She didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular. Just walking.

The barrel of the gun tracked across until her head appeared in the centre of that tiny stylised spider’s web. She chose that moment to glance up at the window, her eyes and mouth no more than dark smudges in the flat paleness of her face. Moses’s finger tightened, squeezed the trigger. A thin jet of water spurted from the barrel.

She was standing by the door as before.

‘Look at me,’ she was saying. ‘I’m soaked.’

She glanced down at herself. Her summer dress, her legs, her socks, were drenched. With blood, she noticed, quite casually.

‘I’m sorry,’ Moses said, sitting by the window, cradling the gun in his elbow. ‘It was only a joke.’

He smiled. It was such a distant smile. It was like watching someone smiling on Mars.

Gloria woke convinced that she had been awake the whole time, that it had been a daydream. It was only when she looked at her watch that she realised that she had been asleep for over an hour. Moses was still fast asleep, facing her now, one arm reaching out towards her from under his cheek. She wondered if he realised he was asleep. She thought it was funny that she hadn’t been lying in bed with him in the dream because the room she had dreamt about was the room they were in now. The dream had used such recent, present things. She shivered, remembering the innocent way she had looked at the blood on her dress and her legs; she hadn’t really known what it was. She hadn’t been frightened, though, she remembered, and was surprised by that. And that smile on his face at the end, a slight variation on his usual smile, but not so different, really, now she thought about it. She looked down at him. The smile was on his face now, she saw. She shook her head. He was the only man she had ever known who actually slept with a smile on his face.

Without waking him, she got out of bed, walked into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror. She looked at the mirror rather than at herself. Tiny brown marks round the edge like liver spots. Old mirror. She picked up a glass from the shelf, filled it with cold water, and gulped it down. Then she ran another bath, colder this time. Another bath? she thought. What’s got into me?

She had already decided not to tell Moses about her dream, but one of the first things he said when he shuffled into the bathroom with one red cheek from where it had pressed against his arm was, ‘Do you want to know what I’ve got in my suitcase?’

Gloria studied her feet. They didn’t reach the end of the bath. Nowhere near.

‘Have you been reading my thoughts?’ she said.

‘I never read people’s thoughts. They’re private.’ He grinned, sat down on the toilet seat. ‘You know, I’ve got the feeling you’re going to like what I’ve got in that suitcase.’

So, Gloria thought. Probably not a shotgun kit then.

Moses tilted his head, narrowed his eyes. ‘Is that your second bath in two hours or did I dream we went to bed together?’

‘It wasn’t a dream,’ Gloria said.

*

Still drying herself, Gloria watched from the bathroom as Moses knelt down on the carpet and snapped the locks open. He lifted the real cowhide lid to reveal a mass of noisy tissue-paper. As he removed the layers, Gloria padded into the room on her bare feet, one towel twisted into a turban for her hair, another wrapped round her slender body almost twice. She stood behind him, one hand resting on his shoulder.

‘It’s a dress,’ was all she could, rather obviously, say.

‘Yes, it’s a dress,’ Moses said. ‘I think it must’ve belonged to my mother.’

Gloria was uncertain how to react. Standing behind him, she could only guess at his face. He had told her nothing about his parents, not a single word, but the act of opening the suitcase seemed to have dimmed the lights in the room, lit candles, started something. The dress rustled like a chasuble as he unfolded it, releasing an incense that was fragile with age and storage. He held it up for her to see.

The style was early fifties, she guessed. A tight, shaped bodice, a narrow waist with a white plastic belt, and a layered, frothy skirt, just below knee-length, which, if danced in, would whirl out horizontally, spinning and billowing. The colour was a soft damask pink with white polka-dots. A real dancing dress.

‘I’m not sure, though,’ Moses said, ‘not really.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Gloria said. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s difficult.’

Gloria moved on to the bed. She undid the turban and began to dry her hair. She watched Moses at the same time.

‘I don’t know who my mother is,’ Moses said. ‘Until I saw the photographs, I didn’t even know what she looked like.’

‘What photographs, Moses?’

‘You don’t know anything, do you?’ He laughed to himself. ‘Well, neither do I, really.’

He laid the dress across the foot of the bed. Then he rummaged in among the tissue-paper and pulled out a photograph album.

‘These are the photos,’ he said. Head bowed, the album unopened on his knee, he was wondering where to begin.

‘I haven’t told anyone before,’ he said.

‘Just start,’ Gloria said. She rearranged the pillows on the bed and leaned back.

‘Well,’ he began, ‘I’m an orphan, you see. Parents unknown. I can’t remember them.’

Gloria nodded.

‘The first thing I can remember,’ he went on, ‘is the sound of water. I’m lying on my back and it’s like there’s a roof over my head but there are holes in the roof and the light’s coming through. I remember that so clearly. That darkness with pinpricks of light in it. That and the sound of running water. After that the next thing I remember is the orphanage — ’

He gave her a picture of his life at Mrs Hood’s establishment. The noise. The smells. The nicknames. He told her how a rumour had spread among the children, a rumour about him having been found by a river. Moses. Found by a river. Very funny. He had been convinced that the whole thing was just another joke about his name — the result, no doubt, of too many hours of Religious Knowledge. He had denied it fiercely. (He had had the only fight of his life about it, with a boy called David. After that, they called him Goliath. He couldn’t win.) Later, though, he felt uneasy. Especially when he put the rumour alongside that primal memory of his. They had the sound of running water in common. Was that merely a coincidence?

Nobody enlightened him — perhaps nobody could — and he had learned to accept the darkness of not knowing. The mystery surrounding his origins had remained and endured.

‘Then, a couple of months ago,’ he said, ‘just before I met you, in fact, it was my twenty-fifth birthday. Uncle Stan and Auntie B — they’re my foster-parents — asked me if I’d like to come up for the weekend. Nothing much was happening in London, so I went. On the Sunday night they brought this suitcase down from their attic. “We’ve been looking after this for years,” they said, “ever since we adopted you, but now you’re twenty-five, it’s legally yours. It’s from your parents — ”’

‘God,’ was all Gloria could say.

‘You see, apparently, when I was abandoned by my parents, this suitcase was left with me. Mrs Hood stored it away until I was adopted. Then my foster-parents looked after it –

‘Anyway, I couldn’t believe it. I mean, imagine. I’d forgotten all about my real parents. I hardly ever thought of them because I’d never known them. I’d learned to live with that. Then suddenly, after all those years, they go and remind me of their existence again.’

Moses shook his head. He picked up the album of photographs, then put it down again. ‘It’s very strange. I’ve looked at these photos, and I’ve tried to remember being there, I’ve tried to recognise the faces, but it’s like trying to remember places you’ve never been, it’s like trying to recognise complete strangers. It’s ridiculous. There are a few pictures of a baby in there, and I suppose it’s meant to be me, but I don’t recognise that either. Christ, I don’t even recognise myself. But I’m staring so hard, you see, I’m trying so hard to remember that sometimes, just sometimes, I fool myself into thinking that I do remember. It’s crazy, but I can’t tell the difference. I don’t know whether the memories are real or not ‘And what about this dress?’ He reached out and touched the hem. ‘When I first opened the suitcase, I thought I remembered it. It was like a flash. A gut-reaction. Very sudden. I remembered my mother, my real mother, bending over me, wearing that dress. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that all I could really see in my memory was the dress. Just the dress bending over me. Nobody inside it.’

He paused.

‘Nobody inside it,’ he repeated softly, almost to himself. ‘So you see, I can’t really remember anything — ’

Silence had filled the green room with water, slowing every sentence, every movement down. When he turned and looked at Gloria he saw that she had been crying. He moved on to the bed and dried her face with his hands.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to go into all that.’

She wiped her eyes with her wrists. ‘That’s all right.’

‘It’s me who should be crying really.’

‘I know.’

*

They suddenly noticed that it was getting late and that if they were going to get drunk that evening (something they had promised themselves on the drive up) they would have to hurry. They opened their suitcases, pulled out clothes, began to dress each other. It was like a sex-scene in reverse and Moses kept wondering, as Gloria buttoned his trousers and his shirt, whether the film would start winding forwards again, towards nakedness. It didn’t, though. Passively, he watched his body disappearing. Then Gloria stood in front of the mirror and aimed a hairdryer at her head while Moses dusted every inch of her slight body with special talcum powder, from the pale shell-like gaps between her toes to the Turkish Delight of her nipples. She passed the hairdryer from one hand to the other so he could slip her arms into the sleeves of her white silk blouse. He fastened buttons with huge fumbling fingers. He held a pair of black knickers at floor-level for her to step into, one foot at a time, then drew them past her knees, up her thighs and over her soft and unusually straight pubic hair (which had been aged dramatically by the powder). He zipped up her skirt, chose shoes, clipped on earrings. In ten minutes they appeared in the doorway, scented, presentable, and separating from a kiss (the film still running backwards, it seemed).

The downstairs bar was a riot of chintz and ormolu. Not a soul in sight. Even the barman was only half there. It took a few seconds of wild gesticulation to alert him to their presence. To make up for lost time they downed six gin fizzes between them in slightly less than half an hour.

‘It’s the crying,’ Moses explained to Gloria. ‘You have to replace the tears, you see.’

Gloria speared a green olive. ‘Something that occurred to me,’ she said. ‘If you don’t know where your parents live, or even who they are, what made you think they came here?’

‘Yes, that was strange,’ Moses said. ‘When I opened the suitcase, there was this postcard lying in the bottom. I think it must’ve fallen out of the album. Anyway, it was a picture of this place, and it had a name on the back of it. Dogwood Hall. I looked it up in the phone book, found out it was a hotel, and here we are.’ He scooped up a handful of peanuts. ‘The album seems to cover a period of about four or five years. Two or three years of courtship and two years of marriage. Since the postcard probably fell out of the album, I thought they must’ve stayed here during that time. Who knows, I might even’ve been conceived here.’

‘It’s a pretty strange story, Moses,’ Gloria said.

His eyes dropped from the wedding-cake ceiling to her face. Now he understood why he had brought Gloria along, why he had told her rather than Jackson, say, or Eddie. They would never have believed him. She did.

Gloria stirred the remains of her third drink with her finger. She was trying to imagine a life without parents. She found it almost impossible. Everything had revolved around her parents — or rather her parents had made everything revolve around her. She had been an only child and she had never doubted that they doted on her. Her every move had been recorded and cherished. She knew when she was born, she knew what her first joke was, she knew who had come to her first birthday party (she even had a movie of it). Her parents had given her everything — a swing in a rose-arbour when she was six, a thoroughbred pony when she was ten, a sports car (now written off) when she was seventeen, and a home throughout, for Christ’s sake, a stable home. She felt unbelievably lucky all of a sudden, lucky and guilty. She remembered a line that she sometimes used at parties. ‘I was a spoilt child.’ Pause. ‘Spoilt but not ruined.’

A waitress appeared in the doorway. ‘Mr and Mrs Highness? Your table’s ready.’

*

It was quarter past eleven when they staggered out of the dining-room. They hardly recognised the hallway. Vases loomed and undulated, portraits leered, walls curved away, carpets suddenly had gradients, and the corridor turned corners far too soon. Somewhere at the end of all this was room number 5.

Gloria, marginally the steadier of the two, played safe and stuck to the banisters. Moses, veering wildly, mowed down a suit of armour which had stepped out in front of him. The helmet crashed to the floor. Taj Mahal, already tucked up in bed with a history of the British Empire, heard the clatter of metal and thought: saucepans.

Back in the hallway, Moses, startled by the suit of armour, lurched sideways, collided with a table, and fell full-length on the carpet. A vase of lilies rocked and toppled over.

‘It’s the first time I’ve ever stayed in a hotel, you see,’ he mumbled. ‘I’m not used to it.’

Gloria was still clutching the banisters. Her stomach ached with laughter. ‘You poor orphan,’ she said.

Water began to drip on to Moses’s neck from the overturned vase.

‘Gloria,’ he said. ‘I think it’s raining.’

He climbed to his feet, then stooped to retrieve the helmet, but kicked it with his size 12 foot before his hand could reach it. The helmet rolled under the table. Still stooping, he peered into the darkness between the legs of the table and began to call the helmet terrible names.

‘Moses. Quick.’ Gloria waved at him from the stairs. Frantic spastic agitations of her left hand. ‘Quick. Before somebody comes.’

She left the safety of the banisters and stood the vase upright. Then she tugged on one of Moses’s arms. He responded, straightened up too fast, overbalanced, and fell backwards against the staircase, taking Gloria with him. The hallway shook. An oil painting slid sideways on the wall.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Poltergeist.’

They sprawled in a heap at the foot of the stairs. Hysterical. Incapable of movement.

Amazingly, nobody came.

*

Some time later they reached the landing. They began the search for their room-key. Moses had had it last, of that they were convinced. An excuse for Gloria to fumble around in various parts of his body. She found it accidentally in his trouser pocket while looking for something else. They missed the lock with it four times each.

‘I’ve had men like this,’ Gloria said.

She succeeded with her fifth attempt and they both fell into the room. They began to undress instinctively. Then Moses froze, one leg in and one leg out of his trousers. He had had a thought that was cold, green, and explosive.

‘Champagne,’ he cried. He toppled sideways, arms flailing, and knocked the lamp off the bedside table. The bulb blew with a soft contemptuous pop.

‘Yes,’ came Gloria’s voice from somewhere.

Moses peered over the bed. She was lying on the floor in her blouse and tights, her head under the table, her legs askew. One of her shoes was in the bathroom, the other was in the waste-paper basket. She looked like a car-accident.

He clambered to his feet, crossed the room, and stood over her, swaying dangerously. ‘Your eyebrows say quarter to two,’ he said. ‘It must be our anniversary.’

‘Already?’ Gloria murmured.

‘I’m going downstairs,’ he said, ‘to find a bottle of champagne.’

Opening the door, he began to look for a way round the outside edge. Gloria crawled towards him, one hand outstretched, pointing.

‘Trousers,’ she said.

‘What?’

She touched his bare thigh. ‘Trousers.’

‘Don’t touch me,’ he screamed. ‘Otherwise something terrible could happen.’ An erection now, he was thinking, would make it much harder to leave the room.

He returned some twenty minutes later covered in mud. The first thing he saw when he opened the door was Gloria wearing the pink dress. She held her arms away from her sides and twirled once, unsteadily. The skirt whirled out into the air. The sound of lightly falling rain.

‘I knew it.’ He leaned back against the door. ‘I fucking knew it.’

‘What?’ Gloria said. She had tried the dress on without thinking, simply because it had been lying there on the bed, but once it was on she had kept it on because it fitted so well that it felt as if it belonged to her.

‘You in that dress,’ he said. ‘It’s perfect for you. You ought to keep it.’

‘I couldn’t possibly. It’s your mother’s.’

‘Keep it.’ Moses waved his arms about for emphasis. ‘What do I want with a dress?’

He smelt almost sober as he kissed her because she had taken his breath away. He reached behind her and began to unfasten the dress. The rasp of the ancient zip was followed by a sharp knock on the door. If you could hear an exclamation mark, he thought, that’s what it would sound like.

‘Come in,’ he called out.

A waitress wheeled in their champagne on a silver trolley. Then she smiled and withdrew.

‘What’s all that mud?’ Gloria asked.

‘I got lost,’ Moses explained. ‘I opened what I thought was the door to the bar and suddenly found myself outside. At first I didn’t believe it. I thought they’d just turned the lights off or something. Then I tripped over a cauliflower. That’s when I realised I wasn’t in the bar — ’

‘Well,’ Gloria was pouring the champagne, ‘you got there in the end.’

‘I always do. It’s just that the middle can sometimes take a very long time.’

‘Which can be a good thing,’ Gloria said, ‘in certain circumstances.’ She slipped her clothes off, slipped into bed.

‘I think I follow you,’ Moses said. And did.

He turned out the one light they hadn’t broken.

Gloria had draped the pink dress over a high-backed chair. In the moonlight the chair disappeared. It looked to Moses as if somebody was wearing the dress, somebody invisible, leaning towards him, bending over him, saying goodnight –

*

Gloria had opened the window. It was late. She leaned on the sill and blew smoke out into the night. It was so quiet after London, so quiet she could hear the blood hissing in her ears. She didn’t feel tired any more, or drunk. If anything, the champagne had straightened her out. No tennis court lay below her, only a lawn, but she shivered as she remembered her dream.

‘Moses? Are you awake?’

‘Yes.’ He sounded comfortable over there in the bed.

‘Moses, I’d like to go rowing. What do you think?’

He sat up. ‘Rowing?’

Gloria faced into the room and made her hands into fists. She held them out in front of her and pulled them towards her chest several times, energetically.

‘Ah,’ Moses said. ‘Rowing.’

‘There’s a boat on the lake,’ Gloria said. ‘I saw it when we arrived this afternoon.’

She could just make out the shape of Moses putting his feet on the floor.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Rowing, is it?’

There was nobody about downstairs. The grandfather-clock in the hallway made them jump and cling to one another as it struck quarter past two. They walked over the blue-grey lawn, their feet soundless on the grass. The lake looked bright and black and waterproof. It could have been a giant tarpaulin spread out on the ground.

They found a boat complete with oars moored to the jetty. Gloria stepped in first, then Moses cast off and jumped on board. They almost capsized. The water made fleshy noises as it slopped against the sides.

‘This is like being drunk,’ Moses said.

Gloria laughed. ‘You are drunk.’

She sat in the stern, hugging her knees, and watched Moses steer away from the jetty, noting the slight frown of concentration as he manipulated the oars, his head moving this way and that, judging distances seriously. Tiny creases appeared in the place that was made for creases in between her eyebrows. They signified emotion of the deepest kind.

‘Moses,’ she said in a voice that rose into the night sky like a full moon, ‘I think, in a curious way, I love you.’

Moses pulled on the oars, and pulled with such vigour that the boat was halfway round the lake (and Gloria was flat on her back in the stern with her legs in the air) before he replied.

‘That,’ he said, ‘is a very exciting thought.’

They were late for breakfast.

The hotel guests stared. Perhaps they had been woken in the night by the crash of falling armour, perhaps they had heard a boat on the lake in their dreams, or perhaps they were just senile, staring but seeing nothing. Most of them seemed to be approaching the end of their meals and would soon be gone. For breakfast read life, Moses thought.

The young couple (as they were probably now being called) sat at their table for ages, talking and smoking and drinking coffee. There was no rush; the sky showed blue at the top of the window and a 22-carat sun gilded the trees with layers of gold leaf. They knew the fine weather was going to last because Jackson had forecast rain. He had advised Moses to take along plenty of waterproof clothing. Foolish well-meaning Jackson.

On their way to the gardens at midday they passed the suit of armour in the hall and noticed that the helmet had been returned to its proper place.

‘Did I really?’ Moses said.

‘You know you did,’ said Gloria.

Moses paused on the front steps, his spirits lifted by the warmth of the morning and the light breeze that was carrying, as if on a silver tray, the unexpected smell of wild strawberries. Gloria looked stunning, almost edible, in her pink angora cardigan and her flaring yellow skirt and her sunglasses (for her hangover, she said). Moses had dressed all in white. Shirtsleeves rolled back along his forearms and a pair of loose-fitting cricket-flannels. Standing together in front of the hotel, they might have been posing for a photograph.

The path they took reproduced, in miniature, the twists and turns of the nearby river. It led away from the hotel, then doubled back and worked its way round to the old stables and outhouses. Trees arched overhead, meshed in a green ceiling, allowed only random shafts of sunlight through. Gloria walked in front, swinging her bare legs, turning every now and then to say something, patches of light illuminating different parts of her in turn — the hem of her skirt, one half of her face, the back of a knee — as if she had been invested with the memory that he had shared with her the previous night.

After twenty minutes or so they reached a point where the path veered away from the river and the trees thinned out. Gloria lifted a hand and pointed to a green door in an old brick wall.

‘What’s that?’

‘Let’s look.’

The green door wasn’t locked. They pushed it open, the paint flaking away under their fingers, and found themselves in a vegetable garden. There was an inert humid weight to the air as if it had been trapped inside those old brick walls for centuries, but there was a peace too, a lush sense of peace, as if it was content with its imprisonment. Countless passageways ran between head-high rows of sweet-peas, broad-beans and fruit-bushes. It would be the perfect place, Gloria was thinking, to sleep for a hundred years, like in the fairy-tales.

‘Let’s have a look in here,’ she said. She took Moses by the hand and pulled him towards a ramshackle greenhouse. It must have been at least fifty foot long. Four steps of broken brick led down to the door.

Moses shoved the door open, jarring the loose panes of glass. A dense sweet heat enveloped his face.

Tomatoes. Thousands of them.

He led Gloria down the aisle that ran between the raised flower-beds, marvelling at the abundance of tomato-plants, marvelling too at the ancient lead irrigation-pipes and the massive sticky cobwebs slung across the winch-handles for the windows overhead. At the far end, and solid as an altar, was a stone sink. The priest was a rake.

It was sweltering in there. Drawing breath was like lifting a weight inside your body. Gloria removed her cardigan. Her white silk top caught on her nipples, then fell sheer, away from her rib-cage and her smooth flat belly.

‘There is something about the smell of things growing,’ Moses said, running the tip of his tongue up the side of her neck.

Things grew.

Gloria turned hard against him, and there was the taste of salt in their kiss. Moses began to undo his trousers.

‘Moses,’ Gloria whispered, pulling away and swatting his flies with the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘In the greenhouse?’

‘Your idea,’ Moses said.

His hands slid under her skirt and inside her pants, pulling her towards him. He took her buttocks in both hands and lifted her slightly, then he was inside her, Gloria clinging to him, both arms round his neck, her heels locked behind his knees, her pants dangling from her left ankle.

Then:

Moses couldn’t be certain, but he thought he saw the green door move. Yes, it had. Slowly it eased open and a bald man in a brown jacket came into view.

‘Jesus,’ Moses said. ‘Taj Mahal.’

Gloria, thinking this was some new description of bliss, murmured agreement.

‘The man in reception,’ Moses hissed. ‘Look. Over there.’

Gloria opened her eyes. ‘Oh Christ.’

Moses staggered behind a large water-can with Gloria still attached, but this sudden movement, coupled with the shock of Taj Mahal’s appearance, proved too much for him: he came.

‘Oh no,’ he groaned.

Still supporting her, he lowered her down on to her haunches, came out of her, and placed a hand over her cunt. Gloria squeezed her legs together, her eyes liquid.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘It’s all right.’

‘It was that Indian bastard. Where is he now?’

Gloria raised herself a fraction, peeped through the tangle of tomato-plants. ‘He’s over by the cabbages.’

‘I hope he hates tomatoes,’ Moses whispered. ‘I hope he’s allergic.’

They both watched, breath held, fingers crossed, as Taj Mahal scrabbled about in the earth on the far side of the garden. It was stifling now — the sun beating down through the glass roof, the suspense. Moses pushed Gloria’s hair back from her forehead and licked a bead of sweat from between her moist breasts. He kept his hand pressed to her cunt, catching the stuff as it came out of her. He liked the feeling of having the whole of that part of her in one hand.

Five minutes later, to their great relief, Taj Mahal left the garden, a small bunch of root vegetables in his hand. Moses and Gloria looked at each other, their flushed faces, their dishevelment, and started laughing.

‘He would’ve died,’ Gloria said.

*

Back in the room that afternoon, Moses opened the suitcase and took out the album. Its blue cardboard cover had been printed to resemble crocodile skin, and the word Photographs had been engraved across the bottom right-hand corner in an elegant gold script; a blue tasselled cord bound the pages together. Moses sat down next to Gloria on the bed and began to show her the pictures.

The first few were landscapes. They all had titles (written in a white chalk pencil because the pages were black) — titles like Grape Meadow and Hazard Copse. Then came several views of a country village entitled, simply, Our Village: a sunlit street, a row of shops (was that a greengrocer’s?), a policeman on a bicycle.

Gloria frowned. ‘This could be anywhere.’

‘I know,’ Moses said. ‘But look.’ He pointed at a picture of the village church. In the background, in the distance, something had caught the light, showed silver through the dark grey trees. ‘Isn’t that a river?’

‘So?’

‘Well, you remember what I said about the sound of running water?’

‘But Moses,’ Gloria said, ‘that could’ve been anything. It could’ve been your father having a bath.’

‘Maybe.’ Moses didn’t sound convinced.

As they went through the album, Gloria could see a story emerging — a rural setting, a man, a woman, courtship, marriage, a house, a baby — a story that would have struck her as romantic and touching, but perfectly ordinary, had it not been for the air of profound despondency that all the pictures seemed to breathe, release into the room around her. It was nothing she could put her fìnger on, just the sense that something was being held back. She tried to explain this to Moses.

‘Jesus, I think you’re right,’ Moses said. ‘I’d never really seen it that way before, but you’re right. There’s no real joy there, is there?’

Gloria turned back a few pages. ‘Especially your mother,’ she said.

The photographs showed a woman in her twenties. Tall, almost statuesque, yet ill at ease. She seemed always to be shying away from the camera. Her smile looked awkward, unconvincing, as if she had been told to smile when, in reality, she was feeling something else, as if smiling was a skill which she had still to master. Alice, Summer 1953, for example, where she was crouching on a white garden chair, her back curved, a cup in her left hand. A straw hat with a huge floppy brim shielded her eyes from the glare. She shrank back into the shadow it afforded her, surprised — no, more than that: alarmed. Or The Boundary 1949. In this one she wore a white blouse and a floral skirt, but the vivacious clothes clashed with her mood. She stood pressed against a tree, almost pinned to the bark, her hands in front of her, one clasping the other. There was always that sense of straining for effect. There was always that false note.

‘What boundary, I wonder?’ Gloria said.

Moses didn’t know. But her question had made an important point. They could guess, they could speculate, they could fantasise. Further than that they couldn’t go.

Moses’s father, on the other hand, appeared confident, resourceful even. Moses turned to his favourite picture, Birdwatching 1955. His father stood in heroic semi-profile, a tall square-shouldered man with unruly black hair and kind eyes, remarkably similar in build, funnily enough, to Uncle Stan. He had dressed with a certain amount of panache: a Paisley scarf folded across his chest and tucked into a high-buttoning check jacket, a triangle of patterned handkerchief showing in his breast pocket, a shooting-stick under one arm, a newspaper (Sporting Life?) under the other. In his right hand he held a pair of binoculars. Hence the caption.

‘Maybe he was just a better actor than your mother,’ Gloria said.

Moses thought she was exaggerating.

Gloria shrugged. ‘OK, what about this one then?’ She was pointing at a picture that was titled Our Ambition 1954. — ‘How do you explain that?’

A country road stretched along the bottom of the picture. Beyond it lay a grass bank and a row of peeling silver birches. Beyond them, a gypsy caravan with big spoked wheels and a chimney that looked like a crooked toadstool growing out of the roof.

Gloria answered her own question. ‘It looks to me as if they just wanted to get away from everything. And I’m not surprised, really. Look at the house. It looks really depressing.’

True, Moses thought. Despite the open windows and the parasol planted at a jaunty angle in the lawn (it must have been summer), the house looked withdrawn, lifeless, blind. The attempts at gaiety had fallen flat. The house where they had (presumably) lived together. The house where he had (presumably) been born.

The mood only lightened towards the end of the album.

‘Oh look,’ Gloria cried. ‘It’s you.’

Moses in woolly boots and mittens, cradled in his mother’s arms (Three Months Old). Moses sitting upright in his pram, one arm in the air (Conducting 1955). Moses wearing his father’s cap (Just Like Dad 1956).

‘Is it really me?’ Moses said. ‘Are you sure?’

‘That’s you all right.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘How can I tell? Look at the size of you!’

‘That’s a normal size for a baby, isn’t it?’

‘That,’ and Gloria tapped one of the pictures of Moses, ‘is not a normal size for a baby. Believe me.’

‘I don’t know,’ Moses said. ‘I don’t really know very much about babies.’

‘Look at that picture of you wearing your dad’s cap.’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, I mean, it fits, for Christ’s sake. And you’re only a few months old.’

Moses laughed. ‘I suppose so.’

Gloria picked the album up and studied the picture still more closely. ‘They loved you, though,’ she said. ‘I can see that.’

‘Why did they get rid of me then?’

That was one question Gloria didn’t have the answer to.

*

‘I’m going down to the snooker-room,’ Moses said. ‘Coming?’

He was wearing nothing except a towel and a pair of socks. It was half past twelve on Sunday night.

‘What?’ Gloria said. ‘Now?’

Moses nodded.

Gloria could see that he had some clearly defined idea in mind, but she couldn’t guess what it was. She slipped her coat on and followed him downstairs.

By the time she reached the snooker-room Moses was beginning to undo his towel. When he was entirely naked he climbed on to the green baize and lay there, full length, on his back.

Smiling, she kicked off her shoes.

The cues lay stiff and silent in their brass racks over by the far wall.

The coloured balls glowed significantly in the woven string sacks under each pocket.

The scoreboard said I–I.

One of the windows was open, and a breeze disturbed the heavy velvet curtains.

It was a warm night in Leicestershire.

*

Ice-cream van? Fire-alarm? Doorbell?

Moses had woken in a sweat, heart thumping, shocked into consciousness by the bright jarring sound.

Telephone.

His arm flailed out in the rough direction of the bedside table. His movements had the slow panic of someone sinking into quicksand. He found the receiver, picked it up, brought it over to where his head was.

‘This is your early morning call,’ came a woman’s voice. ‘It’s six o’clock.’ She sounded as though she had been up for hours.

‘Six o’clock?’ Moses groaned.

‘You asked to be woken at six, Mr Highness.’

He lay there wondering why, then he remembered that Gloria had an audition in London at eleven.

‘Thank you,’ he said, and hung up.

He sat up, ruffled his hair, switched the bedside light on. Gloria was still asleep, he saw, now that his eyes were open (he wished they weren’t; they stung).

Monday morning. The end of the weekend. The window an empty soulless slate-grey. He hated early mornings, especially early Monday mornings. They seemed to marshal all his anxieties, all his reasons for depression — troops of occupation that stamped about, brutalising everything, while he looked on, lost, weak, broken-willed. Looking at Gloria (one shoulder bare, a shield of dark hair, pouting mouth), he had the feeling that their best times together were already over.

He touched her shoulder. ‘Gloria?’

‘Mer.’ The foreign language of dawn.

Without opening her eyes, she did a kind of somersault, fetching up against him, facing him, fitting neatly, like a spoon.

‘Don’t want to,’ she said.

He smiled down at her, the kind of smile she would like to have seen. A sad fond smile. Nor do I, he thought. Nor do I.

They were similar in the mornings: dopey, laconic, functioning on automatic pilot. They washed, dressed, packed. They ate a quick breakfast. While Moses took the cases down, Gloria checked the room for anything they might have forgotten. Moses asked Taj Mahal for their bill and paid by cheque. Gloria handed the key over.

‘Thank you,’ she said. And then, at the door, ‘Goodbye, Taj Mahal.’

The receptionist turned towards her, his head catching the light, and smiled almost pleasantly. Taj Mahal at daybreak. The best time to see it, so they say.

In fifteen minutes they were back on the motorway and settled into their separate silences. Moses became absorbed in the road, its surface the colour of a Siamese cat. Turn-off points for towns he would never see flicked by.

He glanced across at Gloria. She lay in her seat as usual, arms folded, feet in the glove compartment. She was singing snatches of ‘Twenty-Four Hours From Tulsa’.

‘Every car should have one of you installed,’ he said, smiling.

‘Every car should be so lucky.’

He had to agree with that.

‘You know what you did,’ he said moments later, suddenly remembering.

‘No. What?’

‘You called him Taj Mahal. You said, “Goodbye Taj Mahal.”’

‘I didn’t.’ Gloria seemed genuinely surprised.

‘You did. And you know what else? I think he liked it.’

Gloria shook her head, laughed softly to herself. ‘Old Taj Mahal.’

‘Yeah,’ Moses said. ‘He looked at you and smiled.’

The sun was visible now through layers of cloud and mist. It looked like a beautiful woman trying on a négligé.

Cows tugged at the damp glistening turf.

The fields, rumpled at first, gradually began to flatten themselves against the ground, pretending they weren’t there at all.

The sun tried on grey, then white, and finally it walked out of the shop naked. It reminded him of Gloria, also naked, packing the pink dress earlier that morning.

‘Are you sure about this?’ she had asked him.

‘Yes,’ but irritably, ‘yes, I’m sure.’

She hadn’t detected the uncertainty, the resentment, in his voice. It had been like a failure of perception on her part. She had packed the dress.

The road had changed colour. It was black now. The outskirts of London lay like a pile of ashes and clinker on the horizon.

‘Where do you want to be dropped off?’ he asked her.

She looked out of the window at the drab motorway landscape then across at Moses. ‘In London, preferably,’ she said.

‘Sorry,’ and Moses smiled, ‘that came out wrong.’

An hour later he let her out in Victoria and waited long enough to see her swallowed up by the flow of the crowd down into the tube station, then he pulled out into the heavy Monday morning traffic.