Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon Read online

  ‘It depends on the occasion, dear lady. I have a great many clothes.’

  Moon turned away. He took his bomb upstairs into the bedroom and sat down exhausted. He put the bomb on his lap and hunched himself around the plump flat-bottomed pomegranate-shell. He was suddenly depressed. He knew that he had come badly out of the interview. He had tried to pin the image of an emotion against the wall but he did not have the words to transfix it. His own self-assurance was untouched – at bottom the pieces still fitted – but he knew that he had definitely come out cranky, because he did not have the words to translate a certain fear about something as real as a coffeepot, only not a coffee-pot and he did not even have the words to formulate that. He could pick over the pullulating growth and isolate a part of it and bring it out into the light, but it became immediately frivolous. No doubt, Mr Moon, the streets tend to be rather crowded at certain times of day but I don’t see that there is any cause for alarm, even if you do think that the Church of Rome is putting too great a reliance on the rhythm method… (It’s not that, it’s not exactly that – it’s all expanding – and I don’t know a single person who is completely honest, or even half honest, and they don’t know it because dishonesty is now a matter of degree, and sincerity is something to be marketed and hunger is a statistic and expediency is god and the white rhino is being wiped out for the racket in bogus aphrodisiacs!) But my dear chap, we can’t all go around throwing bombs because we’re afraid that there is less and less control over more and more people, and the world is ransomed to movements of money which your mind cannot grasp, or any other neurosis of which you seem to have- (But what can I do?-write a letter to The Times?) Well, why not? Your words would be read by people of influence. You might well start a correspondence, leading to an editorial, questions in the House and the eventual return to a system of barter, if that’s what you want.

  (That is not it at all,

  that is not what I meant at all.

  But when I’ve got it in a formulated phrase, when I’ve got it formulated, sprawling on a pin, when it is pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how should I begin …?)

  And how should you presume?

  (He’s got me there, cold. How should I presume?)

  All the same Moon knew that there was something rotten. He held the vapours in his cupped hands but they would not crystalize. He did not have the words. But whatever it was, it was real, and even if it was in him, he had a bomb and the bomb promised purgation. He would be presumptuous.

  TWO

  A Couple of Deaths and Exits

  I

  AFTER A WHILE he heard someone come up the stairs and Marie swung her skirt demurely past the open door without looking in. Moon waited until she had gone into her room down the corridor, and then, putting his bomb down on the bed he took off his overcoat and went out and stood at the top of the stairs. He could hear Jane shreiking gaily against wild Russian music and rodeo yells from Jasper Jones. He turned back and knocked on Marie’s door.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It’s me,’ said Moon. In the pause he pictured her alerted frail and fearful as a mouse. He heard the stealthy rattle of the safety-chain and the door opened to a four-inch gap with the chain tugged taut between their faces.

  ‘Oui, M’sieur?’- cautious creature-eyes above the chain.

  ‘Marie,’ Moon said.

  She waited quietly for him and Moon collapsed inside at the rabbit-boned gravity of her face.

  ‘How old are you? I mean – I saw you go by, and—’

  She looked at him gravely.

  ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘M’sieur?’

  ‘Oh, you’re so nice, Marie. Does Mrs Moon look after you nicely?’

  Marie nodded carefully.

  ‘You’re so quiet and sweet.’ Moon floundered in his compassion for her and found it inexpressible. ‘You must be so lovely to look after – please, you must tell me if there’s anything I can—.’ The banality of it infuriated him. He leaned forward and took the chain between his teeth. The corners of her mouth twitched minutely but did not quite smile. Moon let the chain go.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asked gently. ‘Paris?’

  ‘M’sieur?’

  ‘Where did you come from?’

  ‘The agency they sent me.’

  ‘Do you like it here?’

  ‘Oui, merci bien, monsieur. Thank-you, very nice.’

  ‘All I mean is,’ Moon said, ‘that I’m glad you’re living in my house because you are so – simple.’ In a minute he would have to eat her. ‘I mean, you’re breasts are so little and—’ That is not what I meant at all. ‘You’re so young, so quiet and calm and sweet and quiet and young-will I be able to come and see you sometimes? Will you talk with me?’

  Marie smiled at him and nodded and wriggled her rabbit nose and Moon smiled back.

  He returned to the bedroom and sat on the bed. Downstairs the music reached a climax and stopped and there was a clatter of four-handed applause which ran down as though operated by clockwork. Marie walked quickly by the bedroom door without looking in, and a moment later Jane entered taking off her dressing-gown, and stood in front of Moon quite naked except for a sapphire ring slotted into her navel.

  ‘Darling! What are you doing sulking in here? We’ve been celebrating the rites of Spring!’

  Moon and the cyclopean belly eyed each other with suspicion.

  Jane dug her fingers into her hair raking coils and strands, a whole spectrum of honey colours, into her grinning mouth, and arched backwards flat-footed, offering the sapphire to Moon with a lascivious ellipse of her pelvis. He leaned forward and closed his teeth over the ring. It came away as she turned smartly about, and he hardly had time to consider the fantasy that offered itself before she skipped away to the mirror, buttock aglint with cold cream.

  ‘Are you sitting on my knickers?’

  So unlike the homelife of our own dear Queen.

  He was not sitting on her knickers.

  She sketched in her lips and eyes carefully as a child making the most of her only two colours (pink and green).

  ‘I think your friend is charming – why didn’t you bring him home before?’

  ‘He’s not my friend. I’m working for him.’

  ‘How lovely, darling. I wish I did.’

  He watched her assemble the various bits of bunting – silks, straps, lace, ribbon and elastics – that made a festival of her nudity.

  ‘Was that who your appointment was with?’

  ‘Yes,’ Moon said. ‘You didn’t believe I had an appointment, did you?’

  ‘Will you be working for him every day?’

  ‘Most days. It’s more or less a permanent commission.’

  ‘Who would have thought it?’ said Jane. She put on a stocking, passing her hands smoothly up her leg which changed colour to caramel at her magician’s touch. ‘I bet you’d given up hope as a Boswell.’

  Moon said nothing to that.

  ‘And he’s paying you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, that’s more than Uncle Jackson ever did.’

  Jackson-schmackson, thought Moon who sometimes wanted to be a Jew but had only the most superficial understanding of how to go about it.

  ‘It will save me some of my hard-earned money anyway.’

  ‘It’s not yours,’ Moon said. ‘You didn’t earn it any more than me.’

  ‘Only teasing, darling.’

  She started opening and closing drawers in a hunt for something which Moon presumed from her appearance to be a brassière.

  ‘My daddy earned it more than your daddy earned it, anyway.’

  This was irrefutable.

  ‘What about your book, and your research and all that?’

  ‘I’ll have to work on it in my spare time,’ he reminded himself.

  Jane slammed shut a final drawer and reclaimed a bra from the laundry basket.

  ‘Have you written much, darling?’

  ‘No … I’ve
got to prepare my material, you see.’

  It was all a question of preparing one’s material. There was no point in beginning to write before one’s material had been prepared. Moon, who had experimented on a number of variations of a first sentence, felt this quite strongly. He found the vastness of his chosen field reassuring rather than daunting but it did cramp his style; he could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one. There was no end to that, and Moon fearfully glimpsed himself as a pure writer who after a lifetime of absolutely no output whatever, would prepare on his deathbed the single sentence that was the distillation of everything he had saved up, and die before he was able to utter it.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll be famous when you write your book.’

  ‘If someone doesn’t do it first.’ That was another thing. ‘It often happens with historians.’

  ‘My goodness, does it? Well, I should hurry up and do yours.’

  ‘Yes,’ Moon said, and settled down to watch her in earnest.

  The way she put on her brassière always made him bemused and affectionate. In films and photographs he had seen women standing around with their arms twisted behind their backs in a full-nelson, hooking and unhooking with frowning concentration as though it were some kind of aptitude test for paraplegics. He had never questioned this behaviour, but the first time he had seen Jane swing her bra back-to-front across her stomach, cups hanging Dada-like on her back, join the ends in front of her, swivel the whole thing round her body and draw it up snapping the cups into position, he had marvelled at the inventive innocence which ten thousand years before might have produced the wheel.

  Snap-snap.

  Jane turned, in a pale-blue bra with white lace flowers, matching suspender belt and creamy caramel stockings; frowning prettily, index finger denting her cheek, posing for the Tatler photographer: ‘Mrs Jane Moon wonders where she left her knickers.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re not sitting on them?’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps Jasper Jones is sitting on them.’

  I don’t care, I simply don’t care.

  The bomb sat on his lap cozy as a plum pudding. Moon patted it. He had just noticed that he was alone again when Jane came back into the room, knickers in hand.

  She patted him on the head.

  ‘Clever boy. How did you know?’

  Moon sat on the bed ticking like a bomb.

  I don’t care. I just really don’t care.

  He was trying to frame a question that would take in all the questions, and elicit an answer that would be all the answers, but it kept coming out so simple that he distrusted it.

  ‘You know,’ said Jane, ‘I used to think that the smell of leather and horses and armpits and all that was the most masculine smell, but I must say I find your lord’s aroma of spiced smoky lemon trees just rrravishing … it makes me think of being seduced to the sound of harpsichords. I think that’s a sign of maturity, don’t you? – I mean I used to imagine myself being rrraped across the hump of a galloping camel.’

  She looked at him brightly.

  ‘I can’t play the harpsichord,’ Moon said.

  ‘Perhaps you could hum or something, behind a screen.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked at him unbrightly.

  ‘I’m only teasing, darling.’

  ‘I know,’ Moon said. ‘I know.’

  Jane smiled at him and was reassured.

  ‘Jasper is absolutely furious! I think your lord is perfectly sweet and frightfully good looking, and he’s being very nice to Jasper. Of course he’s got the niceties. He’s helping Jasper with his spurs.’

  Spurs.

  ‘He’s got them on wrong and apparently he hacks himself around the legs every time he takes a step, but he says he prefers them that way. Of course he’s only being difficult.’

  Moon plunged, without faith.

  ‘Who the hell is he and why is he wearing those clothes? – and what was he doing with you – oh Jane, why do you—?’

  Jane bit her lip to keep back the tears that trembled on the edge of memory.

  ‘I had a fall. I hurt myself, very badly. You should have seen it, it was all bruised.’

  ‘You fell off his horse?’

  ‘I tripped, in the bathroom. It was jolly lucky he was there. You weren’t,’ she accused him.

  Well, I wasn’t, was I? Girl falls in bathroom, hurts bottom, husband absent, passing cowboy aids with rub. Happens every day in the old West.

  ‘Were you surprised?’

  ‘Of course I was surprised, I fell. Can you zip me up.’

  ‘Surprised that a cowboy should be riding by just at that moment.’

  ‘He wasn’t riding by, silly, he came to see me.’

  ‘Do many cowboys come to see you?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘That’s not many.’

  ‘Quite enough, darling. Can you pass me one of those sweeties, I feel like a marshmallow.’

  There was a box big enough to hold a hat, transparent, beribboned layered with confectionery in paper nests. Moon took unfair advantage of her reaching out for the sweet, and squeezed her breast.

  ‘You’re right – you do feel like a marshmallow.’

  But it felt quite insensate (it was something to do with the way she disregarded the gesture) and he thought that if he pressed it in a particular way it would make a noise like a klaxon.

  ‘How long have they been coming to see you?’

  ‘A few days. The poor boys, they hate each other.’

  Every response gave Moon the feeling that reality was just outside his perception. If he made a certain move, changed the angle of his existence to the common ground, logic and absurdity would separate. As it was he couldn’t pin them down.

  He put the bomb carefully next to the telephone beside the bed.

  ‘Well, I’ll throw my bomb at him next time,’ Moon said.

  ‘No you won’t,’ said Jane mildly, predicting rather than prohibiting. ‘Anyway you wouldn’t do him any damage unless you hit him on the head or something.’

  ‘That’s all you know.’

  ‘Uncle Jackson couldn’t make a bomb.’

  ‘He made this one.’

  ‘Go on, set it off then. You’ll see.’

  ‘No,’ said Moon. ‘Not now. I don’t want to waste it.’

  ‘You’re an idiot, and Uncle Jackson was an idiot.’

  ‘He was very clever with his hands. He knew about bombs. He was a scientist, wasn’t he?’

  Jane used her hairbrush to signal scorn.

  ‘Set it off then, see if anything happens.’

  ‘Nothing would happen,’ said Moon craftily. ‘I’ve got it on the twelve-hour fuse.’

  ‘I’m sick of it.’

  ‘You would have seen it work if the Germans had come for Uncle Jackson.’

  ‘Uncle Jackson was cuckoo.’

  That’s true, actually.

  ‘But he knew about bombs.’

  ‘And so are you,’ added Jane.

  That doesn’t follow.

  ‘And you know perfectly well,’ she said, ‘that you’ll never do anything with it, so stop being such a bore with it.’

  Moon smiled secretly like an anarchist waiting for the procession to come by.

  For some reason Jane’s lips appeared to have been painted pink. He wondered whether the illusion was optical or transcendental. Then he noticed that her eyes were edged with green lines that shaded away into the recesses of her lids. He felt that everything which was disturbing his sense of order must be reduced to a single explanatory factor.

  ‘Is he taking you to a fancy-dress ball?’

  ‘That would be lovely. Is there one on?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Moon said.

  ‘He promised to take me for a ride anyway.’

  ‘What, on his horse?’

  ‘No, silly, in his coach.’

  Moon wi
thdrew to re-align his attack.

  ‘You’ve painted your lips pink,’ he challenged.

  ‘Well what colour do you expect me to paint them?’

  Again he felt like the victim of a sensational ripose by a barrister who was making up his own law as he went along. But then, almost in the same instant, the prism which held him, shattered; he looked at her face and it was the same face, pink-lipped, green-eyed, only now quite unexceptional. Its familiarity ambushed him: lipstick and eye-shadow. Once more the commonplace had duped him into seeing absurdity, just as absurdity kept tricking him into accepting it as commonplace. He fell back on the bed and closed his eyes.

  I shall buy a redundant sea-lion from the circus and its musical nose shall press simple tunes from my lady’s bosom. Paarp-pippip-paarp-paarp. A little flat but no reflection on you, Mrs Moon.

  A gunshot cracked out in the street. Oddly the smash of glass in the drawing-room seemed not to follow it but to occur simultaneously.

  ‘What is it now?’ asked Jane petulantly.

  Moon got up and went downstairs. In the drawing-room Jasper Jones was sitting on the ottoman with his denims pulled up to the knee and blood on his calf. Lord Malquist knelt by him, ministering. Marie was not in view but a moaning sob betrayed her hiding place under the chesterfield.

  ‘Dear boy,’ said the ninth earl. ‘Has the season opened?’

  ‘It’s that Slaughter,’ said Jasper Jones, rolling down his denim-leg. ‘Ornery critter.’

  ‘Are you hurt?’ asked Moon.

  ‘Jes’ a scratch – ain’t got used to my new spurs yet.’

  Moon went to the window. The bullet had cut through one of the lead mullions destroying the pane on either side. Another cowboy was riding past the house at a stately pace, replacing his gun in his holster. Moon felt weary and resentful. He wanted to disengage himself from what he felt was a situation imposed upon him. He would lock himself into a turret room and devote the rest of his life to lexicography, or perhaps he would crawl under the chesterfield and blindfold himself in Marie’s hair, plug her gaspings with his tongue. Glass snapped under his shoes. He stood on one foot and ineffectively swept with the other.

  Jasper Jones stood in the middle of the room, smiling grimly, twisting tobacco into a liquorice-brown cigarette paper. He stamped himself lower into his block-heeled boots (winced when the spur nicked him). He put the ruined tobacco-leaking tube into his mouth – the grim smile accommodated it without adjustment – and tugged down on his gun-belt. Having got that right he tipped his hat carefully over his eyes using his left hand, playing stiff-fingered arpeggios on the Colt with his right. Shreds of tobacco fell from his cigarette.