‘I bet I know what it is.’
‘I bet you don’t.’
He hardly dared look at her. She stood facing him innocently, eyeing him with game-playing slyness, supporting the sponge up under her chin with both palms as if it were a boulder.
‘Give me a clue.’
‘It begins with S.’
‘Scotch!’
‘Wait and see.’
He nodded at her, unwilling to go but faintly disturbed by a pulse-rate tick that kept alive a memory of desperation.
‘Laura,’ he said for the saying of it, and turning on his good heel he went back into the bedroom.
The belt was now rusted with blood. He put his sock on over it and squeezed his foot back into the shoe, and limped downstairs with his heel stinging and the ball of his other foot sore where the old cut had stiffened.
The hall was empty and so quiet that he felt no one had entered it for days. Moon took his overcoat off the hat-stand and opened the front door. A thin cold rain was falling. The newspaper seller had made himself a hat out of an Evening Standard. It made him look oddly festive except that instead of having Kiss me quick on it he had WORLD MOURNS. The roadsweeper had stopped sweeping and was now an unconvincing bystander with a brush. The spider man had moved up to the corner. The fourth man was not visible. Moon stopped to put on his coat, swinging the weight of the loaded pocket around him, and hurried out into Birdcage Walk.
By the standards of congestion which for him were the norm, St James’s Park was deserted. There were one or two people sheltering under the trees near the entrance and as he went along the path towards the bridge he saw another man ahead standing motionless back under the trees, and another beyond by the water, standing inside the curtain of a weeping elm. As the path turned gently he noticed that the men were so placed that just as he left the sight of one he entered the sight of another, and in a wild moment it occurred to him that a detachment of faceless men in mackintoshes had been detailed to keep him under constant surveillance. I’m afraid you’ll have to give up your Saturday, Pike, Garnett, Ragley, Mordlett, Lake, Flecker, O’Shaughnessy, Smith, Codrington and the rest of you. Now here is a photograph of the man Moon … He crossed the bridge over water ringed with rain. No one followed him.
When he reached the Mall he hesitated and then, remembering, he turned left and started to run through the rain, grateful for having at least an immediate objective to be going on with. He ran uncomfortably, jerking and wobbling to keep his weight off his wounds, his bound calf aching from the tourniquet. On his right, St James’s Palace, isolated by rain from the new buildings behind, threw off its antiquity, hauling Moon back centuries as he staggered under its walls. The tourniquet worked itself loose and slipped round his ankle.
He slowed down to a limp, breathless, and turned right into Queen’s Walk. Pike, by the look of him, was standing under one of the trees that bordered the path. O’Shaughnessy and Codrington were sheltering in the bandstand off to his left. Moon’s body jerked into a paraplegic trot. One of his feet was cold, the other warm. He realised that his left shoe was filling with blood.
Approaching Piccadilly again he became afraid that perhaps someone – a one-legged lady, size 6 – had got there before him. But the shoe was where he had tossed it. Thrilled by his chivalry and the prospect of bearing his prize to his lady he put the shoe in his pocket. He was sure she hadn’t guessed.
Piccadilly was even emptier than it had been when he had crossed it earlier. The rain thickened and he hurried into the colonnade of the Ritz. Half a dozen other people were spaced comfortably along its length. Only one (Mordlett?) looked at him. A car hissed by towards the Circus. There was very little traffic. But looking up the road he saw a cowboy walking his horse towards him.
‘Mr Jones!’
The cowboy looked across to him but it wasn’t Mr Jones, or Slaughter, or anyone he had ever seen before.
Moon looked around hopelessly, his hands in his overcoat pockets, one holding the shoe, the other the bomb. The un-realness of his quandary amazed him. He could remember a time when the point and necessity of a bomb was to him self-evident, raising no questions except the matter of timing, but now when the timing had been resolved the bomb in one pocket had no more meaning than the shoe in the other; not as much.
He crossed Arlington Street, trying to arrange his immediate history into a pattern that might predictate his next move. On the next corner he looked down St James’s Street and saw half way down on the left hand side a pink coach parked with its back to him.
Moon hurried towards it, passing between the Devonshire Club and Whites, between Brooks and Boodles, and saw then that the ninth earl had not after all called at his club; it was not Lord Malquist’s coach. It was another pink coach altogether.
The coach was outside a dead house of offices. Its two shafts rested on the ground on either side of a pile of dung; deserted it looked like an elaborate clue to some hypothetical Case of the Missing Horses. Moon walked round the coach and peeped inside. The coach was empty except for a roll of pink toilet paper lying on the seat to defy the master-detective.
Moon sat down on the coach-step and took off his left shoe. The inside was wet with blood and rain. He took the sock off, squeezed it pinkly of its moisture.
To sum up: Muffins with Malquist, into coach, knock down woman, horses bolt, see Laura drunk outside Ritz, one shoe off, as it turns out, and Rollo, arrive home, cowboy rubbing wife’s bottom, another cowboy, shooting, Risen Christ enters, cowboys leave, row in bedroom, fall in bath, General comes, Jane and Malquist leave, Marie dead, hit General, bomb ticking
bomb ticking.
He put his sock and shoe on.
To sum up, from the beginning now: One day, walking home through the Park, what should I see but a man on a horse with a lion, yes it was like magic, a fairy tale, a beautifully dressed man on a horse that gleamed like coal, and he had a hawk on his wrist, and his black cloak fell back from his shoulder showing pale blue silk, his horse arched and troting in the soft wet between trees shined black after the rain and a great lion-coloured cat loping—
Please – just the essentials.
An old man watched him from a chair drawn up to the window of the Carlton Club. Moon went on down and turned left into Pall Mall.
To sum up (backwards): Walking with cut feet and hands and face, cut in one way or another, after leaving Lord Malquist’s house after making love to, tupping, having carnal knowledge of, committing misconduct with and otherwise knowing, having, doing Lady (Laura) Malquist, after arriving there, after leaving home after writing journal, after Jane left with Lord (the ninth earl) Malquist after the General arrived after Marie died after the cowboys left after I returned home in the coach after a ride – during which were encountered the Risen Christ, Laura (Lady) Malquist (drunk in park, shoe-losing), and Rollo and woman in Pall Mall – after having muffins with ninth earl after one day walking home through Park, seeing man on horse with lion. And when did the bomb begin to tick?
Moon hobbled along past the Army and Navy Club, the Oxford and Cambridge, the Royal Automobile, the Junior Carlton, the Reform, the Travellers and the Anthenaeum into Waterloo Place between the Crimea Monument and the statue of Napier who captured Sind and sent back the message Peccavi, and as Moon examined his history again in an attempt to reassemble the conditions and symptoms that had made a bomb a natural part of his existence, he could recall only a memory of irrational fears and trivial complexes, all groundless now.
It was as if he were the victim of a breathtaking conspiracy instituted at his birth, leading him from one planned encounter to another with the ultimate purpose of bringing into his possession a home-made bomb – and infiltrating his peace of mind meanwhile with poisoned splinters from a mad corrupted society breaking up at the speed of procreation without end, coaxing him into a state of paranoia where his bomb became a private recourse that would call the halt; it was a hoax whose perverse triumph lay in pushing him over the edge and th
en retracting all the pressures that had brought him there, leaving him sane and appalled, a man hurrying through the rain on one good heel and one good sole with a bomb in his pocket ticking away its last minutes without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.
Or to put it another way I am lumbered and clearly the thing to do now is to chuck it into the river from the middle of the Hungerford Foot Bridge, which if memory serves lies straight ahead across Trafalgar Square and down Northumberland Avenue.
The road was filling up with people fed into it from the Haymarket. Before he reached the Square Moon found himself familiarly balked by other pedestrians. This reassured him a little but he was worried by the general air of preoccupation around him and the odd fact that everyone was walking in the same direction. When he got into the Square he saw that the far side was packed to its pavements. A thick cordon reached up the Strand to his left and down Whitehall over to his right, effectively barring his way to the river, and for a mindless second he reeled at the possibility that ten thousand Government men had been asked to give up their Saturday in order to frustrate him. Then a distant cannon saluted with a boom that shook pigeons off the Square, and suddenly he got it.
Enter right – the Funeral of the Year.
FIVE
The Funeral of the Year
I
‘TO SEE LONDON on the morning of a state funeral is to see London at her best,’ said the ninth earl as the coach swung round out of the Serpentine Road into Park Lane, ‘provided one goes nowhere near the proceedings. On our right is the house of the Duke of Wellington, on our left a statue of Achilles, both reminders of the importance of boots. Over there, a statue of Byron, not a badly dressed fellow though often dishevelled. Across there, Londonderry House where the English genius for settling matters of public concern over private luncheons reached its finest flower. How very appropriate that it should be overshadowed by an hotel for Americans, and how significant that that monument to Mammon should have turned out, quite inadvertently, to be ecclesiastical in its effect-a trinity of conjoined towers, the First Church of Christ Tourist. And now this is Curzon Street, so named after the first earl, George Nathaniel Curzon, Marquess of Kedleston, who is revered throughout India to this day as a Viceroy whose concern for his collars was such that he sent his laundry to London—’
‘Falcon, why are you going on so?’
‘Merely defining our context, my dear lady. It is necessary to define one’s context at all times.’
‘A police cell is quite enough context for one day, darling.’
‘Were it not for Sir Mortimer it might have had to suffice for several months.’
‘Who is Sir Mortimer?’
‘He is a merchant prince whom I employ to look after my interests. A useful fellow, though somewhat forward.’
‘Well, he seems to have some influence, bless him. It was horrible – I thought it would be cosy and romantic, being punted about under the willows and the moon and everything … That blanket smelled of horses.’
‘It was a horse blanket. Clarges Street, passing the Ministry of Education (of which there is too much nowadays) over whose portals is carved the legend Thou shalt not pass with less than forty per cent. Oh dear, I wish my man were here.’
‘What man?’
‘Moon. He should be recording me with Boswellian indiscrimination.’
‘My husband.’
‘Why so he is. You shall be re-united in a few moments unless he has already left for my residence.’
‘What do you mean, Falcon? – I don’t want to go home, I want to see the funeral.’
‘What an extraordinary desire. Don’t you want to have a bath and some breakfast and a long lie-in till luncheon? That seems to me the sensible course after a night in the cells.’
‘No, I don’t, Falcon. I want to see the funeral – you said you were invited.’
‘So I was. But I’m sending one of the servants. Funerals depress me so, they distort the meaning of honour.’
The ninth earl raised his stick and beat it against the roof of the coach.
‘O’Hara, turn back!’
He mused sadly. ‘The most honourable death I have ever heard of was that of Colonel Kelly of the Foot Guards who died in an attempt to save his boots from the Customs House fire. Colonel Kelly’s boots were the envy of the town, they shone so. His friends hearing of his death rushed in their grief to buy the services of the valet who had the secret of the inimitable blacking. Now that is a tribute to an officer and a gentleman, much more sincere than all the panoply of a state funeral, for it was a tribute despite itself, inspired by the self-interest … Poor Colonel Kelly.’
‘He sounds like a bit of an idiot to me. I’ve heard of people dying in fires to save their pearls or something.’
‘How vulgar.’
‘Or their relatives.’
‘How suburban.’
‘I don’t think that’s very nice, Falcon.’
‘South Street, home of George Brummell called Beau. When Brummell was living abroad in reduced circumstances he ordered a snuff-box costing more than his annual income. It was he who was the first to reach Colonel Kelly’s bootblack, by the way. You see, he understood that substance is ephemeral but style is eternal… which may not be a solution to the realities of life but it is a workable alternative.’
Jane pressed against him as they wheeled back into Park Lane and headed south.
Lord Malquist brooded on. ‘As an attitude it is no more fallacious than our need to identify all our ills with one man so that we may kill him and all our glory with another so that we may line the streets for him. What a nonsense it all is.’
Jane said, ‘I want to see it anyway.’
‘You’d think the streets would be lined with jeering Indians and miners and war widows … But it’s nothing to do with what he did or didn’t do, when you come down to it. He was a monument and when a monument falls the entire nation is enlisted to augment official grief.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Falcon – I want to see the bands and the soldiers.’
The ninth earl was silent for some while and then remarked: ‘K. J. Key who was captain of Surrey, kept a pair of gold scissors in his waistcoat for cutting his return ticket.’
‘Poor O’Hara,’ said Jane. ‘He must be getting awfully wet.’
The greys jogged handsomely down Park Lane shining with rain, and O’Hara huddled himself in the dripping cloak of mustard yellow, his hat pulled low, his pipe jutting damply between the two.
‘You must give him whisky in hot milk when he gets home,’ said Jane.
‘My grandfather used to horsewhip his servants by day and offer them a drink before he went to bed, in case the revolution occurred during the night.’
‘Poor O’Hara,’ said Jane. ‘I bet he hates you.’
‘One must keep a dialogue of tension between the classes, otherwise how is one to distinguish between them? Socialists treat their servants with respect and then wonder why they vote Conservative. So unintelligent.’
He yawned behind his gloved hand. The coach swung round Hyde Park Corner past the memorials to the Machine Gun Corps and the Artillery, and started to climb Constitution Hill.
Jane squealed.
‘Golly! – what’s that?’
‘Rollo!’
A lion was crouched on the wall of Buckingham Palace Gardens, a pink bird in its mouth. It leapt down into the road in front of the coach and ran up the hill.
‘Chase him, O’Hara!’
O’Hara’s whip cracked and the horses heaved into a gallop.
‘Falcon, what was it?’
‘Rollo – poor thing, he’s been lost for days.’
‘He was eating something.’
‘I know, he has a weakness for flamingos. Her Majesty will not be amused I fear. On the last occasion she was distinctly unamused … Oh dear, this is going to require all Sir Mortimer’s delicacy.’
* * *
He waite
d under the trees until the rain stopped, and then urged the donkey forward again. The donkey sneezed. They were wet and cold but the Risen Christ hardly noticed that. Now that he was alone again he felt a great peace and a conviction that took away his burdens of doubt and fear and choice. The donkey’s burden was not so nebulous but it protected him from the weather to some extent.
When they turned into the road the Risen Christ was gratified but not surprised to see that people were crowded thick on either side. He composed his features into an expression of modest disdain similar to the donkey’s, and they plodded on together.
* * *
Jasper Jones rode into the Square, his eyes as hard as flints. The rain had stopped but wet shined his leather chaps and drops of water fell from the brim of his hat. The horse was dulled dark as boot polish from the rain.
Jasper walked his horse into the Square and did not allow himself to acknowledge to stares of the people who watched him go by. Many of them recognised him and told each other, ‘Look, there he goes, the Hungriest Gun in the West man with the porkiest beans straight out of the can.’
He sneered under his hat, and rode across into the open space where the fountains were and when the horse lowered its head to drink he slipped off its back and looked around and saw Long John Slaughter leaning against the stone pedestal under George IV.
‘Slaughter!’
Long John turned.
‘Hello, Jasper,’ he said.
‘I’ve been looking for you,’ said Jasper Jones.
Everything was suddenly quiet. They stood facing each other across twenty yards of empty ground. Jasper’s eyes were hard as silver dollars. He took a step forward and nicked his calf with the spur.
‘I told you to keep your cotton pickin’ hands off my gal, Slaughter.’
Long John looked around but most of the people were watching the other way. He licked his lips and smiled nervously.
‘Oh, leave off, will you?’ he said. ‘I want to watch the funeral.’