Dreams of Leaving (53 page)

‘Oh,
Midget,
' everybody yelled. ‘Come on,
Midget
.'

Mary interrupted him. ‘Why Midget?'

‘Because my initials are MG.' He winced. ‘You know, in some ways, I think I hated that name even more than Foreskin.'

‘That's because it's true,' Mary said. ‘In some ways you
are
very small.' And when she saw the look on his face she added, ‘I'm sorry, but I mean it.'

Moses went on with the story.

Because these matches featured spastics they always took place in the most remote corners of the school grounds. On this particular afternoon they were playing right up against the boundary fence. Beyond the fence lay an ordinary field. A field with no white lines on it. A field where footballs were meaningless and the Welshman's whistle had no power. A sensible field, in other words. At some point during the second half Midget got fed up with searching for insects in the long grass. He ached with cold and the inside of his thigh stung where the ball had struck it while he wasn't looking (he was convinced that Puddle had done it on purpose). He wandered casually to the edge of the pitch and crossed the touchline. Sacrilege. Heresy. Taboo. He half-expected alarms to sound, dogs to start barking, search-lights to track him down in the gloom of that November afternoon, but, strangely enough, nobody seemed to notice.

He leaned on the metal fence. There was a tree in the middle of the field. Two or three horses stood in the shadow of its branches.

‘Hello, horses,' he said affectionately.

It seemed like the first time he had spoken in ages.

They were old and tired, these horses. They had obviously had hard lives and had been put out to grass. One of them, a roan with shaggy hooves and a bulging sack of a stomach, lifted its head and shambled over.

He moved his hand out slowly, stroked the soft puffing nose.

‘What's it like in there then?' he said.

Then he heard the whistle screech and saw a blur of royal-blue in the corner of his eye. The horse's eyes rolled back. It shied away from the sudden rush of colour, thudded off into the sanity of its field.

‘Goodbye, horses,' he said.

‘What the blazes are you doing, Highness?' Davies shouted, jogging on the spot. His voice was going up and down too.

‘Talking to the horses.'

‘Talking to the horses,
sir.'

‘Talking to the horses,
sir.'
Feeling like a parrot, sir.

‘And why, when you're supposed to be playing football, are you talking to horses, Highness?'

‘They're more interesting. Sir.'

His reply was greeted by a burst of applause. Davies froze in stupefaction, one knee in the air, until he realised that it was the crowd three pitches away (who had just seen Darling SGB of the First XV go over for a try to put the school ahead of its local rivals).

‘Davies never forgave me for that,' Moses said. ‘You know what he wrote on my report? He wrote:
Highness seems totally uninterested in any form of physical exertion whatsoever.'

‘Nicely put,' Mary said, ‘but no longer entirely true, I suspect.'

Moses laughed.

He had never been to Kenwood House before, but it seemed appropriate to be seeing it at eight o'clock on a Monday morning, as if that specific time and place had been reserved long in advance. He had the feeling that, although everything was unusual, everything was as it should be.

Mist dressed the trees in grey uniforms, confined the world to little more than the footpath they were walking along. They reached a ditch. He jumped over. Mary stooped to examine a dam of twigs and leaves. She almost lost her footing on the bank. She was no athlete either, he saw. She would probably have talked to horses too. He held a hand out to her and helped her across.

They sat down on the grass beside the lake, the house a suggestion of white in the mist behind them. Mary leaned back against him, her head resting on his stomach. It was strange, her lying against him like that. In a flashback he saw Gloria in the same position, that Sunday morning on the beach. That kind of duplication worried him; it was as if, sooner or later, all human contact fell into the same tired easy patterns. He wanted to establish a difference between the two. He bent over and kissed Mary's mouth. It was cool, closed; it didn't move under his.

The sun pressed through the mist, brought out a fluorescence in the grass, a pallor in her skin, then it withdrew again, turned back into an area of brightness in the sky. The pressure of her head on his body spread, ran through his blood until he was alive to every part of her: the veins on her hand, the gleam in her hair, the curve of her nearest breast whose shape he still didn't know. It was like being injected with some kind of slow drug that convinced him once again just how extraordinary she was – an injection she could quite reasonably deny all knowledge of, and would, knowing her.

It
was
a game, whatever she said. And, as in any game, there were rules. She laid down two rules that morning on the heath. The first after several minutes of silence. She levelled her chin at him suddenly, reminding him of a general, her profile in relief against a battalion of trees. ‘Nothing is to be destroyed,' she said.

He said nothing.

You, me, him, us, them, he thought. A tall order, that. Like a tray stacked high with crockery. A cup slides towards one edge. You tilt the tray to try and save it. A plate falls off the other end. Crash. Nothing is to be destroyed, he repeated to himself. He looked at her and saw what they had together as a circus-act.

And the second?

‘You must never let me fuck you,' she said. ‘Never.' And when she saw him smiling, ‘No, I'm perfectly serious, Moses. Even if I ask you to, you must never let me. Promise me that.'

Even then he had a presentiment of how erotic a rule like that could be. Was that the reason for it, though? He never knew with Mary. She experimented with herself. ‘I put myself through things,' she had told him once, and he remembered thinking of lions and hoops of fire. Still smiling, he nodded. He promised.

‘You see,' she said, ‘I've never done this before,' and her eyes dilated, somewhere between triumph and fear.

‘I don't understand. Never done what before?'

‘I've only been with Alan. That's it. That's all I know.'

He found this almost impossible to believe. She had led him, he felt, to believe the opposite. And he had never kissed anyone who kissed so well. But then there was a certain innocence about her kiss that made him think: Well, perhaps she
is
telling the truth. An innocence that her experience, such as it was, had done nothing to corrupt or transform.

So they were agreed: their relationship was to continue as it had started – orally.

One question wouldn't go away, however. Mary had made the rules –
but was she going to stick to them? After all, everybody knows what rules are for. And Mary was perverse enough to do exactly that.

*

‘That looks forbidden,' Mary said. ‘Let's try it.'

She backed the Volvo on to the grass verge and switched off the engine.

It was October now. Leaves the colour of tobacco. Air you could smoke like a cigarette. One of those days you remember years later. You don't always remember the date or the place, sometimes you don't even remember who you were with, but you remember the way your mind emptied out like a sigh, you remember the ease of your body's moving, the feel of the air on your skin, the shape of a cloud, you remember a casual phrase, something somebody said without thinking, something that takes on significance purely through being remembered:
That looks forbidden. Let's try it.

A path curved away ahead of them. On the left, beyond the metal cattle-fence, a meadow sloped up to a ridge whose cutting edge had been blunted by a row of trees. To the right a high brick wall allowed them teasing glimpses of a mansion set in the middle of a private park. Once Moses saw a deer glide through the smoky distance. They followed the path for about twenty minutes until it narrowed, ducked into a wood.

Mary stood still, inhaled. ‘That's so erotic.'

All that mulch and mould, she meant. All that humus, bark and fungus. Matured, ripened, sweetened in the dark container of that wood. He remembered her smiling up at him, her face between his thighs. ‘My God, how
good
that smells.' And so crestfallen when he told her that he had just washed his sheets for the first time in almost four weeks. ‘Four weeks,' she had groaned. ‘What a terrible waste. How could you do something like that, Moses? How could you throw it all away?' In mourning, almost. He had looked puzzled and amused. He had never thought of dirt like that before.

Now she was standing next to him, her eyes flecked with silver, saying, ‘Jesus, you know what this is like? This is like having my face in your pants.'

They lay down on the noisy leaves, each sensing the other's body stirring under all the layers of clothing. One hand eventually discovering the warm pale flesh of her stomach made her gasp. She curled round, took him in her mouth so softly, so gradually, that he didn't have to will his orgasm; it rushed him from a distance, threw him backwards, shook him like a fit. She drank him, spilling nothing.

Afterwards she moved towards his mouth.

‘Taste yourself,' she said.

The air lay cold against their faces, everywhere except their lips which it couldn't reach. The leaves crumbled into dust under their bodies.

He drew back so he could look at her.

‘You don't seem so tall when we're lying down,' she said. ‘Maybe we'll have to lie down more often in the future.'

He smiled.

‘And that taste,' she said. ‘That taste in the daytime. That too.'

He leaned above her watching the light, the white October light, run like acid into all the lines on her face, making them deeper, more pronounced. He traced one that curved through the thin mauve skin beneath her eye.

‘You look older outdoors,' he said, meaning he liked the way she looked.

She lay back, looked up at him. It was her look. It came at you horizontally (vertically, in this case). Shrewd eyes, head cocked, mouth pushed forwards, almost pouting. It was amused, sceptical, challenging, but most of all it was enigmatic since she used it as shorthand and he could never gauge its meaning.

‘I'm forty,' she said. ‘Next year I'll be forty-one.'

He lay back, his head next to hers in the leaves. ‘I was thinking,' he said. ‘Does Alan know anything about this? I mean, if he knew, what would he think?'

Mary sighed. ‘How should,'
I
know? I told you. I've never done this before. I have no idea.'

‘You don't think he suspects?'

‘Why should he? He trusts me. He hasn't
got
any suspicion.'

She saw Moses frown. ‘I'll spell it out for you,' she said. ‘I've been married for nineteen years. I know Alan and he knows me. It's close, you know? Even after all this time. And I would never leave him. Not for you. Not for anyone. And you know that too, if you're honest with yourself. That's why you're in this thing. It's safe.'

He realised that she was angry because she thought he was trying to put her marriage in a box, and nobody could do that to her marriage. He wasn't, though. He only wanted to know what it felt like to be in the middle.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘Sometimes you don't understand what I'm trying to say.'

‘If you can't be clear, that's your problem. I'm not an interpreter.'

Moses sat up, looked away from her.

‘I'm a wife and a mother,' Mary said. ‘Whatever else I am comes third.'

He knew that. At the same time he found that degree of clarity a bit
suspect. ‘How can you be so sure?' he asked her. ‘How can it be so neat?'

‘It's nineteen years of my life, Moses. If I wasn't sure about that, I wouldn't be sure about anything.'

‘Maybe you just described me.'

‘Maybe I did. But there's a big difference. I'm forty. I can't afford to be wrong.'

‘Old woman,' he said. He knelt in front of her and put his hands on her shoulders.

‘Yes,' she said, defiant now, leaves in her hair, ‘I
am
old.'

‘Kiss me,' he said.

She stared at him steadily for a moment, then her face relaxed. She kissed him.

*

The wall seemed to go on for ever. Everything was happening on the left and Mary, brighter now as if they had, between them, cleared the air, pointed, scrutinised, cried out:

‘Look. A weir.'

The water, shaped like a comb, fell sheer into a still pool. She told him a story about a girl she had known when she was at college. The girl had drowned herself just below a weir. When they found her, she was floating, bound in weeds, like Ophelia. She had left a note behind in her room.
I would have done this months ago, but I had to wait for my hair to grow.

Moses shivered.

‘And I remember everybody telling her how much nicer she looked with her hair long,' Mary said.

Later they passed a bonfire.

‘You know what Rebecca used to call those?' she said. ‘Cloud factories.'

Then they saw a sofa overgrown with brambles, a jay (no more than a scribble of blue on the grey paper of the afternoon), and a moon rising above the trees, as see-through as a piece of dead skin. It was one of those days when everything you see has a story attached to it, when everything you see reminds you of something else.

But nothing happened on the right. They glimpsed the house at intervals, from a number of different angles, through gaps where the wall had tumbled down, through cracks in padlocked doors and, once, through the bars of an ornate wrought-iron gateway. There was something pornographic about the way the house revealed itself. It turned them into voyeurs.