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.