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.