Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

*

He dressed slowly and drove north through the drenched empty streets. It was no longer a decision whether or not to go to Muswell Hill on Sundays. It had become imperative, automatic, like breathing.

Mary opened the front door. She was wearing a faded black dress fastened at the waist with one of Sean’s studded leather belts. She had a scarf round her neck, wispy, cloud-grey, made of something diaphanous like chiffon. Her fairy-tale look. She eyed him suspiciously.

‘I didn’t think we’d see you again,’ she said. ‘Not for a while, anyway.’

He wiped the rain out of his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘Why not?’

‘After last Thursday I thought you’d probably stay away. Lick your wounds. I wouldn’t have blamed you, actually.’ She smiled faintly, and he smiled back, then looked away.

‘You’re not quite over it yet,’ she said, ‘are you?’

He breathed in deeply. ‘No.’

She seemed to approve of this. She took a step backwards and looked at him again, afresh almost. ‘Christ, you’re soaked,’ she laughed. ‘Come on in and get some dry things. We’re getting drunk as usual.’

He followed her straight upstairs. ‘Who knows,’ she joked over her shoulder, ‘maybe I’ll attack you again later on.’

‘There’s nothing left to attack.’

She stopped on the top step, smiled down at him. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that.’

Lunch was spaghetti bolognese, a tossed salad, and bottles of Chianti on the oak table in the kitchen. Moses drank quickly, with exhilaration. The glasses of wine were a series of weights. Suddenly the scales tipped and he was drunk again.

After the meal he washed up unsteadily. Broke a plate. Outside the rain sluiced off the roof, flooded the terrace.

Rebecca, drying, groaned. ‘I wanted to go out.’

They left the saucepans to soak and played the rain game with Alan. The rain game is easy. All you have to do is say what the rain is coming down in.

Alan said, ‘Buckets.’

Moses said, ‘Ten-gallon hats.’

Rebecca said, ‘Swimming-trunks.’

In theory the rain always stopped before you ran out of containers. Not on this particular afternoon. It went on raining using containers they had never even heard of.

It was still raining two hours later when, after a series of twists and turns, the conversation arrived at marriage.

‘You’re lucky,’ Moses was telling Alan. ‘Your marriage is the kind of marriage I’d want if I was married.’ He was entering the third stage of drunkenness now: the earnest stage (the fourth was loss of memory and balance, the fifth was coma). He poured himself another glass of wine. Like the rain, it didn’t look as if it would be running out in the near future.

‘It’s your sense of priorities,’ he went on. ‘I mean, you’re each other’s priority and because you know you’re each other’s priority you can act like you’re not. You can go anywhere, do anything. Maybe sometimes it looks like you’re putting other things first, but that doesn’t matter because deep down you know, you see. If you’re Alan you know that Mary’s always there, and if you’re Mary you know that Alan’s always there — ’

‘And if you’re Moses,’ Mary interrupted from her green chair in the corner, ‘you know that Alan and Mary are always there.’

‘Yes,’ he had to admit, ‘that’s probably true.’

‘And if you’re Alison,’ came Sean’s voice from the scullery, ‘you know that Vince’s always there.’

‘ That is not true,’ Alison cried, though she knew it was.

Mary smiled down into her drink. ‘Vince,’ she murmured.

Moses set that smile against the things that Vince had said about her. And couldn’t help himself. ‘You know what he said about you, Mary?’

‘Who? Vince?’ Mary said. ‘No. Tell me.’

‘He said you act like time’s stood still for twenty years.’

Mary’s face lifted, lit up. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘My God, that’s absolutely right. All this — ’ and Moses took it that she meant this heady Muswell Hill air she breathed, the spirit of the house, her happiness — ‘it hasn’t changed in twenty years. How wonderful!’

He had to laugh because she looked so victorious, so fulfilled, as if she had just won a prize. He knew how much Vince would have hated him for telling Mary what he had said about her. But how much more Vince would have hated the fact that she had taken the insult as a compliment, that she had discovered a new truth in those bitter words. Outmanoeuvred again. Bitch.

And suddenly Moses saw her as some brilliant species of fish. She exploited to the full the privacy and depth and space of the element she moved in. One moment she tilted her scales to catch the light and masqueraded as a piece of reflected sky, or travelled incognito through the darkness of the ocean bed. The next she lay on the surface, all gall and nonchalance and dazzle. And when those crude hooks ploughed or wheedled their way through the water towards her, she slipped past them with infinite grace, infinite delight.

Fishwoman, he thought.

Some day he would tell her that and make her laugh.

In the meantime the rain was still falling, collecting in deep pools on the terrace, the perfect background to his thoughts.

*

Evening had fallen. Moses had fallen too, snapping the back off a kitchen chair (Alan had laughed and said, ‘It’s all right, I like stools’). Now he stretched out on the living-room floor, a tumbler of brandy in his hand. Alison sat crosslegged in front of the TV; there was a crackling as she drew a brush through the forest-fire of her hair. Sean was beating Alan at pool upstairs. Rebecca was in the bath. He wondered where Mary had disappeared to, and the thought lifted him effortlessly to his feet.

Outside the rain had stopped because everybody had forgotten about it. The eaves and drainpipes of the house creaked with the last of the downpour. A few pale clouds overlapped at a great height.

He found her sitting on the low brick wall separating the Shirleys’ front garden from their next-door neighbours’. She wasn’t wearing any shoes.

‘Haven’t you got cold feet?’ he said.

She didn’t react.

He tilted his head back until it was parallel with the sky. It was so dark up there. Giddy and unending. Stars staggered. One tripped and fell a million miles.

‘What did you mean,’ she said finally, ‘by that little monologue about my marriage?’

‘I meant what I said.’

‘It sounded like a challenge.’

‘To do what?’

‘I think you know the answer to that. I also think you’re playing games.’ When he didn’t respond, her eyes turned on him and her voice hardened. ‘Playing games,’ she said, ‘with me.’

‘What about you? Aren’t you playing games?’

‘That’s not my style.’

‘What do you call what you’re doing then?’

‘Fear. Risk. Confusion. Take your pick.’

‘I don’t see what the difference is.’

She reached out, placed a hand on the back of his head and drew his mouth towards hers. She kissed him with closed lips. As the first kiss merged into a second then into a third, her lips gave, parted under his. He tasted wine and through the wine he tasted her.

She leaned back against the wall, stared uphill into the sky. ‘That’s the difference, Moses. I really do it. You don’t.’

He didn’t say anything.

‘You know, sometimes,’ she said, ‘you can hear the motorway from here.’ It might have been a private joke, the way she smiled.

He couldn’t hear the motorway. That breathy silence could have been anything. He was drunk, he was thinking, but not drunk enough. Panic.

Mary’s head, resting on her knees, moved from side to side as if she was denying something. ‘What am I doing?’ she murmured. ‘What am I doing? What are you doing?’