Alison rubbed at the surface of the table with her fingertips as if she might see a clear beginning there somewhere. ‘It was about two weeks ago. Vince turned up at my flat. I don’t know how he found out where I was living.’ She frowned. ‘Trust him, though.’
Perhaps it was that red hair of hers, glowing like a beacon in the suburbs, Moses thought. He imagined her hair would cause her a lot of anxiety in the future and that, as the years went by, her forehead would become a sanctuary for birds of all descriptions, some settling at the corners of her mouth and eyes, others flying in formation, their wings etched deep in the pale sky of her skin.
‘He was out of his head, of course,’ she was saying. ‘Said he hadn’t slept for five days. Drunk and God knows what else. I didn’t want to know, you know? He told me some story about a girl called Debra.’ That innocent enquiring glance again. ‘She’d left him or something — ’
‘Is that true?’
Alison shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Anyway, it’s beside the point.’
Moses smiled into his cup.
‘Then he started on about me. I should’ve known he was going to do that. I shouldn’t have let him in at all.’
‘He would’ve just broken in.’
But Alison hadn’t heard him. She was hearing Vince’s voice. ‘He said it used to be me and him and what’d happened to the and.’
‘What and?’
‘That’s what I said. “What and?” I kept asking him. “The and between you and me,” he said.’ She was staring straight ahead and smiling as if she could see through the café wall to a peaceful horizon. ‘Sometimes he’s got a way with words.’
Moses waited for her to come back.
‘Anyway,’ and her voice drew nearer again, ‘I said there wasn’t an and any more, I said he might as well forget it, and he got really shitty, he really worked himself up, you know, the way he does, and started calling Mary all kinds of names — ’
‘Mary?’
‘Oh yes, he always blames Mary. I don’t know why. He says she turned me against him, told me he wasn’t good enough, that kind of thing. All a pile of crap, really.’ Though she would never get Vince to believe that. ‘He really hates her, you know.’
‘I know,’ Moses said. ‘He’s told me.’
‘The names he called her. Incredible.’ She shook her head. ‘He said she was spoilt, pretentious, immature — ’ she was ticking the words off on her fingers — ‘jealous, vindictive, and then he said, “I don’t know what Moses sees in her —”’
Moses looked up sharply from his cup.
‘I know,’ Alison said. ‘It had exactly the same effect on me. Vince didn’t actually know anything, you see, but it was the way he said it that made me think. He went on and on about what a bitch she was, but I wasn’t listening any more. All I could think about was you and Mary, all those times you came round to our house as if you were a friend of the family when really — ’
‘I was a friend of the family, Alison. I liked you all. I still do. It wasn’t just — ’
‘I’m not attacking you,’ she cut in. ‘I’m just working it out for myself, that’s all.’
She stared down at her hands. Moses glanced out of the window. The sky had darkened. Lights in the shop windows now, lights in the offices.
‘I thought about you not coming to the funeral,’ Alison began again, ‘about you suddenly not coming to the house any more. And the way Mary won’t talk about you now, like you never existed or something. It puzzled me for ages, until Vince said what he did. Then it all just suddenly fell into place.’
Moses thought of Vince’s jigsaw and smiled.
‘It was obvious, really. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. Too close to it, I suppose. The way she kept going round to visit you. Because she never lied about that, you know. She never pretended she was going shopping or visiting a friend — ’
‘She was visiting a friend.’
‘— and I admire her for that, though I don’t know what Dad — ’ For the first time, her eyes lost their coolness, their clarity. Her lower lip began to tremble.
‘I think he knew,’ Moses said.
‘And then there was that awful weekend. Sorry, but I can’t seem to help talking about it. And you were so close to us — ’ Three tears rolled down her cheek, one after the other, and dropped on to the yellow formica. ‘We were looking for you everywhere. And even then I didn’t realise.’ She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, sniffed twice.
‘The car really did break down, you know.’
Alison nodded. ‘Anyway, I haven’t said anything to Mary,’ she said, her grey eyes clear again (she was one of those people, he realised, who cried invisibly, whose eyes didn’t swell or redden, whose make-up never ran). ‘I don’t think it’s the right time, do you?’
He shook his head, though, quite honestly, he doubted whether it would make any difference to Mary. Alison’s ‘right times’ would never be hers.
As they paid at the counter, he noticed an old woman sitting at the table behind the coat-rack. A plastic mac, hair in a bun, a cup of tea.
Alison heard his startled exclamation. ‘What is it, Moses?’
‘Nothing.’ He turned away. ‘I just thought I saw someone I knew.’
Outside on the pavement they hesitated, drawing out this chance meeting of theirs. Suddenly there seemed to be something final about what would otherwise have been a perfectly casual goodbye. Now he was no longer seeing Mary, now Alison was no longer seeing Vince, they had nothing in common. He couldn’t imagine what would bring them together. Only chance again, perhaps. He watched her staring first at the traffic then at her shoes. As he watched, a single snowflake (predicted by Jackson?) settled on the concrete beside her foot and melted. That sprawl of black cloud he had seen from the train loomed overhead. Everyone was walking faster now. Snow.
Finally she lifted her head. ‘Moses,’ she said, ‘was it serious?’
The albatross beat its great wings on the pale wastes of her forehead and he seemed to hear its cry, very faintly, in the darkening air above. It was the cry of someone waking to a cold and muddled world and not wanting to be awake, wanting to pull the sky over their head like a blanket, wanting to close their eyes, go back to sleep again. He thought of Mary and saw no pictures, only the vaguest of silhouettes, a shadow in the distance, the blackness of her clothes. But he could still remember times when they had laughed until they ached.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
*
He waited for Alison to disappear up the street, then he turned and ran back to the café. He stood in front of Madame Zola. Her black eyes slowly lifted to meet his. He had forgotten how they drew you in until you were all vision and no body.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘You.’
‘You remember?’
‘The past is clear. It’s only the future that isn’t clear.’
Moses smiled. Same old Madame Zola. ‘I’m having trouble with them both at the moment.’ He peered into her cup of tea. Three-quarters full. ‘You must’ve been here a long time.’
She nodded. ‘You remember also.’
‘How could I forget? You started all this.’
She waved a hand in front of her face as if brushing cobwebs aside. ‘I started nothing, but,’ and she gave him a curious look, ‘I have something to tell you. You aren’t leaving now.’