Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon: A Novel Read online

  The kitchen window had been sealed flush against the bricks by a large rectangle of plyboard. A label showed white against it and Moon by putting his face close could just make it out. It said, Petfinch Court, the South Garden, and Panachrome Murals give you a New Outlook.

  Moon was intensely grateful. Perhaps there was an explanation for everything. When he went back into the kitchen the Risen Christ stood there appalled.

  ‘It’s night,’ said the Risen Christ. ‘You could have knocked me heels over skull with a goose feather.’

  Moon turned to the window and considered the view. It was not quite so effective now that the kitchen light was on but by squinting through his own reflection he finally got the perspective right. The distant hills bulked grey in their twilight.

  One day all this will be yours, my son. There has always been a Moon at Petfinch and I know that you will carry on our name with honour. Ride hard and take your fences like a man. You will find Eton a new experience after Miss Blenkinshaw’s Academy but take your knocks as I did and play the game, play the game. And I want you to promise me, old fellow, that come what may you will take care of your mother.

  The Risen Christ touched his arm.

  ‘Mr Boswell?’

  ‘Moon,’ said Moon. ‘Boswell is the company.’

  ‘Ah. And what business would it be that you’re in?’

  ‘Posterity,’ said Moon. ‘I’m in the posterity business.’

  ‘Posterity?’

  ‘Just a sideline. I’m a historian.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yes it bloody well is right,’ said Moon curtly and walked passed the Risen Christ, who followed, and went back into the drawing-room, which was now empty.

  There was a lamp on the writing desk. He turned it on and rolled back the desk-top, revealing untidy piles of paper neatly stacked, with one pile much bigger than the others and not so neat. All the top sheets were irregularly filled with notes in small handwriting.

  ‘That’s a lot of stuff you’ve got there, yer honour.’

  ‘It’s for a book,’ Moon said. ‘It’s a book I’m writing.’

  He picked up a loose sheet and read the four words on it:

  THE GREEKS

  The Greeks

  Another sheet read: History is the progress of Man in the World, and the beginning of history is the beginning of Man. Therefore

  Moon crumpled up both sheets and threw them into the wastepaper basket. He rummaged about in a drawer until he found a small box almost full of white cards. He gave one to the Risen Christ and replaced the box and closed up the desk. The Risen Christ held the card close to his face and frowned at it.

  BOSWELL INC.

  If you wake up feeling witty, if

  you are ready to impart your wisdom

  to the world, don’t count on

  word of mouth, don’t lose the credit.

  Send for Our Man Boswell,

  chronicler of the time, to dog

  your footsteps, record your word.

  Posterity assured. Copyright

  respected. Publication arranged.

  Two transcripts supplied.

  ‘I am nearly dead and no one knows

  I was ever alive’—Anon.

  Ten guineas per day. Weekly terms.

  ‘What’s this then?’

  ‘What it says,’ said Moon. ‘What I’m offering is a kind of life after death. We’re in the same racket.’

  ‘It’s you then, is it?’

  That’s my name on the back. And the address. That’s here, you see. It’s my business.’

  ‘Holy Mother, I owe you an apology, yer honour.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Pon my soul I thought it were a brothel.’

  ‘Why did you think that?’

  The Risen Christ reflected.

  ‘Faith, I don’t know.’

  Moon couldn’t think of anything to say. He felt trapped in the room, without a cue or a plausible motive for any speech or action. He moved casually towards the door, trailing a finger over pieces of furniture in an attempt to dispel the feeling of acting out a move, and escaped into the hall. He felt stranded there too. After some hesitation he went upstairs and knocked on the bedroom door.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Me,’ said Moon.

  ‘Come in then.’

  Jane and the ninth earl were sitting on the bed. She was naked to the waist and Lord Malquist was holding her right breast pressing it here and there with an air of interested detachment as though he might be trying to get a sound out of it. Jane’s dress lay flat and dead on the carpet, a peacock run over by a bus. Neither of them looked at Moon. Jane was absently playing with Lord Malquist’s hair.

  Finally the ninth earl straightened up.

  ‘Heart seems all right,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not my heart,’ said Jane, ‘it’s my breast.’ She sounded very serious.

  ‘I couldn’t feel a thing.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh yes, you mustn’t run away with these ideas you know. There’s too much indiscriminate reading nowadays, that’s what I put it down to.’

  Jane stood up, swung her bra round her like a belt and hitched it together back-to-front. Moon once more studied the vertical effect of her nape-length hair, her shoulder blades, her blue and white-flowered breasts, her bottom, legs and heels. The breasts slithered round the side of her body into position.

  Jane was on the edge of tears.

  ‘I’ve got cancer of the breast,’ she said to Moon.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘This one. I felt a lump.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said the ninth earl.

  ‘I’ll have to have it off,’ she wept.

  ‘One off, both off,’ said the ninth earl. ‘An asymetrical body is vulgar both as body and as art.’

  Jane laughed merrily – ‘Oh Falcon, you’re awful!’

  I don’t care, I simply don’t care.

  Jane picked up her dress and ducked her head into it.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the Risen Christ.

  Jane shrieked and pulled the dress down over her.

  ‘Sorry,’ said the Risen Christ, retiring.

  ‘Who was that little man in the nightshirt?’

  Lord Malquist opened the door and brought the Risen Christ back into the room.

  ‘Do not take his name in vain,’ he said. ‘This is no little man in a nightshirt. This is our Saviour returned. In a nightshirt.’

  ‘Really?’ She looked at him uncomprehending. ‘He seems to have had hard times.’

  ‘Some of the hardest,’ said the ninth earl.

  The Risen Christ said to Moon, ‘Find it in your heart to forgive for I say unto you there will be a great reckoning, aye and a great cataloguing of sin and a great paying-off beyond understanding in this worldly vale.’

  Moon stood shaking in his own blood. He hit the Risen Christ in the mouth. The Risen Christ fell on the bed and bounced across it onto the floor.

  ‘How long have you been a voyeur?’ Moon screamed at him. ‘When did you last wash under your arms? Why do you follow me around – who do you think you are!’

  ‘My name is Jesus,’ said the Risen Christ. ‘You may scourge me if you wish …’

  ‘May I! I’m not having any perverts in here! What is the meaning of this imposture? how long have you been a masochist? what made you impotent? Who asked you here in the first place?’

  ‘I’m the Risen Christ,’ said the Risen Christ.

  Moon jumped on to the bed and leapt across it with his hands grasping for the Risen Christ’s neck. His weight sent them smashing against the wall. The Risen Christ made no sound at all as Moon shook him by the throat, shouting, ‘Fake! Fake! Do you expect me to count on you – a man of my experience?’

  ‘Don’t you listen to him, Jesus darling,’ said Jane. ‘He’s had no experience at all, take my word for it.’

  Moon let him go but crowded him against the wall with his body
, and whispered, ‘I am betrayed at every turn. I do not believe in Man, and you expect me to believe in God.’

  When Moon stepped away from him the Risen Christ slid down the wall with blood coming from his nose.

  ‘My poor fellow,’ said Lord Malquist handing Moon his scented handkerchief, ‘come now, dry your eyes and stop taking it all upon yourself. We all have the right to a refuge and you must not begrudge him his.’

  Moon stuffed the lace into his mouth, bit into it and ground it between his teeth, releasing its sharp musk. The fumes choked him and he snorted them out through his nose, sneezed attar of rose leaves.

  ‘Bless you!’ congratulated Jane. ‘Now I must ask you all to go so that I can get dressed into my punting outfit – unless you promise not to look.’

  ‘My honour would forbid me to promise any such thing,’ said Lord Malquist. ‘Get up, Your Highness, stop indulging yourself in your hopes of martyrdom.’

  ‘He’s not really a Highness, is he?’

  ‘Better safe than sorry.’

  ‘I am the King of Kings,’ said the Risen Christ without pride. He dragged himself upright. Jane smiled at him and stood close.

  ‘I’ve been dying to ask you,’ she said, ‘what have you got under your nightshirt – I mean, do you go around like that, everywhere, with nothing underneath like a Scotsman?’

  ‘It’s not true about Scotsmen,’ said Lord Malquist. ‘They wear tartan codpieces and several layers of other garments including knee-length waterproof combinations to keep out the mist.’

  ‘That’s an absolute lie, Falcon,’ said Jane with unexpected sharpness – ‘they’re naked. It’s a matter of pride and the proud ones are naked.’ She stood watching the Risen Christ through an eyelash gauze, breathing heavily, her bottom lip caught in her teeth, imprisoned tongue squeezed pink against the white. ‘I know Scotsmen, they don’t let themselves be coddled up. They’re big. They’re big brawny giants with powerful muscles straining taut, striding about in their kilts’ – she had her thighs squeezed together, her eyes closed now, head lolling back, a priestess incantating through the fumes of sacrifice – ‘in their kilts, with their great strong legs rippling hard as knotted cord, burned red-brown by the wind and the sun, hard all the way up, standing astride the hilltop with the wind blowing and their kilts—’ her breath sucked in through her teeth and turned to spray made secret salivating noises in the warm washed oyster-flesh of her mouth. Her hands flat-ironed the peacock shine of her thighs, smoothed upwards tense against her stomach and down dragging splay-fingered across the groin, clawed and dug and furrowed palm-to-palm into the hollow and parted, stretching the silk tight over her bottom and back, gathering it into the soft of her waist and climbed again, moulding her rib-cage, pushed high her breasts and flattened them into the V of her throat as her two index fingers snailed up the spittle trail on her chin, raked through the overhang of her moist Up and forced the tongue-tip back between her teeth – scoured white against their sharpness, buried up to the second knuckle.

  The ninth earl caught her as she fell.

  ‘Jane, are you all right?’

  ‘Lovely, darling, just lovely. Can I have a cigarette?’

  Lord Malquist put her down on the bed. Her hand dipped into his pocket for his gold case. He pressed it open for her and stuck a cigarette vertically into her mouth and lit it. She lay quietly. A quarter of an inch of heliotrope singed away with her first inhalation.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Much, much better, Falcon dear.’

  She blew smoke gaily at the Risen Christ who looked on suspicious and bewildered. ‘You were just lovely, darling. What’s your name?’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘So it is, darling, so it is. Were your parents religious?’

  ‘Not very,’ said the Risen Christ.

  ‘Well, they must have been awful snobs.’ She gave the cigarette to Moon. ‘Would you run my bath, darling?’

  Moon took the handkerchief out of his mouth and offered it back to Lord Malquist.

  ‘Keep it, dear boy. Keep it if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Off you go, darlings, I must get out of these clothes. Who knows how to make creme de menthe cocktails? Falcon, go downstairs and have a cocktail.’

  ‘My dear lady, I am already somewhat uneasy about going punting dressed for the gaming tables. I think to drink creme de menthe in a pale blue cravat would be the abandonment of everything I stand for.’

  ‘What do you stand for?’ asked Moon.

  The ninth earl’s head turned and tilted with such hauteur that Moon’s brain signalled precedent and he realised that it was perhaps the first direct question he had asked him about himself.

  ‘Style, dear boy,’ said the ninth earl. ‘Style. There is nothing else.’

  Jane sat up.

  ‘Oh dear, well what can you drink in a pale blue cravat?’

  ‘Something tawny – yellow perhaps, deep red possibly – but certainly nothing green.’

  ‘Well there’s lots of different colours so go down and mix yourself one you like. And mix me one too. I’ll be wearing my Paisley silk punting suit.’

  ‘Gin, gin and tonic, vodka, vodka and tonic or plain tonic. It is impossible to complement Paisley and vulgar to compete.’

  Style?

  Moon sat on the bed, bowed, holding the handkerchief in one hand and the cigarette in the other, their scents rising in subtle titillation of his nostrils. His cut hand stung but the blood had dried. He had lost his own handkerchief somewhere, he didn’t know where.

  There is everything else. Substance. I stand for substance.

  That wasn’t true at all, he didn’t even know what it meant. He stood for peace of mind. For tidiness. For control, direction, order; proportion, above all he stood for proportion. Quantities – volume and number-must be related to the constant of the human scale, proportionate. Quantities of power, of space and objects. He contracted his mind, try to refine his subconscious from the abstract to the specific but there was a middle ground which he could not negotiate. He could only jump to one of a score of neuroses – the way the glass in a train window, infinitesimally loose in its frame, would shiver with a tiny chattering noise against the steel while Moon sat next to it for hours, holding himself in, waiting for it to explode around him.

  ‘Do buck up, darling, it’s getting on for nine.’ Moon saw that Lord Malquist and the Risen Christ had gone.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I want to get undressed,’ said Jane.

  ‘Go on then.’

  ’You said you’d run my bath.’

  ‘What’s the matter then?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He said, ‘I’ll undress you.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘With my teeth.’

  ‘What an extraordinary idea.’

  ‘On my honour, hands behind my back.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then undress me with your teeth.’

  ‘What has come over you?’

  ‘I’m ravaged,’ said Moon, ‘by lust.’

  ‘You’re disgusting. Get out.’

  ‘No,’ Moon said. ‘I’ve come to claim my marital rights. I’ve come at last. Prepare yourself.’ He bared his teeth.

  Jane squealed and threw a perfume bottle at him, and then another and then a hairbrush, several smaller bottles, a few shoes and finally an eighteenth-century gilt mirror which exploded around his head, violent as plate glass bursting out of a train window. Moon exhaled as if his body were one big lung. The spring unwound itself, proportion was reestablished. He rocked blind in the great calm, his mouth loose, his legs gone. He knew what it was to solve the world.

  III

  The Risen Christ was waiting for him in the corridor.

  ‘Yer honour.’

  Moon’s left eyebrow felt damp. When he brushed at it the back of his hand came away bloodied from a cut over the eye.

  ‘Yer honour, did I fail you in some way, did I?’
r />   ‘Please don’t blame yourself… My expectations are not realistic.’

  ‘You got the wrong man?’ asked the Risen Christ.

  Moon studied his face for any sign of divination but the rough features peeped innocent in their surround of hair.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  He made to move on but the Risen Christ caught him by the sleeve.

  ‘There’s a bitty cut on your face, sir.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have come upstairs like that.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  ‘You see, I was after offering you employment.’

  ‘Employment?’

  ‘Sure and you’ll be wanting somethin’ fine to chronicle – I have risen and come to the city – now is that a great thing to record for you?’

  ‘I’m fully occupied at the moment.’

  ‘You could be the Fifth Gospeller and no mistake.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Moon said.

  ‘Ah. Right then. There’ll be many that be honoured.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  Moon looked at the smear of blood on the Risen Christ’s beard and felt compassionate.

  ‘I’m sorry I hurt you, it was an accident.’

  ‘Right enough, yer honour,’ said the Risen Christ immensely grateful.

  ‘I mean you set me off, accidentally. It wasn’t you at all I was after.’

  ‘Who was it then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Moon said. ‘I’ve got a list.’

  The Risen Christ nodded.

  ‘It’s no one I know,’ Moon said. ‘Not to speak to.’

  He broke off and went quickly into the bathroom, closing the door. The lock was broken, hanging on splintered wood.

  Safe inside he pulled the lightcord and was immediately transfixed by reflected porcelain. The side of the bath hit him with a slab of light. The bowl, basin and bidet bowed baldheaded with Chinese smiles. Moon laughed at them. He turned on all the taps and flushed the lavatory. Water rushed and swished around him, sprayed out of the shower’s chromium rose.