‘You’ll get one of your own, Slaughter. I’ve got a message from her and I’m deliverin’ it through a forty-five. So draw.’
Long John licked his lips again.
‘Listen, don’t be like that. She doesn’t care for you anyway.’
Jasper Jones grated, ‘You yeller coyote – draw.’ His eyes were hard as the Rocky Mountains.
‘No, I don’t want to,’ said Long John. ‘I’m finished with all that.’
‘Then you’ve got five till I shoot you down like a dawg,’ drawled Jasper Jones. He stood easy, his right hand loose by his hip.
‘You must be off your rocker.’
‘One.’
‘Jasper?’
‘Two.’
Long John licked his lips. The wall was behind him.
‘Three.’
‘It’s not fair!’ He started to cry. ‘It jest ain’t fair, I’m tired of all this, I’m tired of ridin’ an ‘shootin’ and runnin’ – you cain’t run away from yerself, my pappy tol’ me that! – I’m tired, I wanna hang up my guns!’
‘Four.’
Slaughter wept. ‘Wanna settle down, git me a woman, few kids, bit o’ land to plough—’
‘Five.’
With a sob Slaughter went for his gun. It fell on the ground and bounced and there was a roar from a .45 as Jasper out drew him and shot himself in the leg. Jasper cursed and sat down. Fast as a rattlesnake Long John scooped up his gun and shot Jasper in the stomach and started to run across the Square past Jasper who was dying on his knees. A mountain lion with a flamingo in its mouth streaked across in front of him and seemed to leap over the backs of the crowd; and beyond, a pink coach was rattling down the Mall towards him. Slaughter ran towards it shouting, ‘Jane! Jane!’ and he had reached the edge of the pavement when Jasper Jones, rolling onto his stomach with his gun held in both hands, took careful aim at the middle of Slaughter’s back and shot him through the head.
* * *
The excitement of the chase brought a rosy flush to Jane’s cheek. Her eyes danced merrily as she smiled at the handsome aristocrat at her side.
‘Ah, my dear Jane,’ he said, his eyes twinkling, ‘you seem to be enjoying yourself.’
It was true. Yet she could but sigh. A shadow passed over her exquisite features and her soft ripe bosom heaved.
‘Too late, too late!’ a voice cried within her. ‘Ah, would that we had met when we were free!’
For him she would have gladly turned her back on Society and escaped with him to some perfect spot away from all this, but she knew deep down in her heart that this would not bring them happiness. They were duty bound to live out their roles in this hollow masquerade even as they recoiled from the hypocritical conventions that kept them apart. No, all they could do was to snatch a few precious moments together.
It was a dull rainy morning but her heart sang as the horses galloped along. The coach rocked violently and she laid her hand on her companion’s arm. He smiled roguishly down at her.
She leaned forward in excitement as the coach burst into the Square, thrilled to see the crowds around her. It was as if all the common people of the town had gathered there. She smiled and waved at them – and suddenly she gasped.
‘Look!’ she cried and pointed to where a man came running towards the coach with a pistol in his hand. She knew him at once, and seized her companion’s arm with a soft cry. She closed her eyes and heard a shot ring out.
When she opened her eyes the man was falling headlong into the road as the coach swept up the side of the Square.
Jane leaned back and felt her knee being patted calmingly. She could but admire his insouciance. She smiled bravely and glanced up at him roguishly and was pressed to him as the coach turned the corner.
The horses had slowed down and now moved quite gently down the slope between the people. Looking up, Jane saw a sight the like of which she had never encountered. She stared and involuntarily clutched Lord Malquist’s hand as all the blood drained from her cheeks.
‘Falcon,’ she breathed, ‘what is it?’
At that moment the door was flung open and her hand flew to her mouth.
‘My husband!’ she cried.
II
The drums beat against the tread of the funeral march. The Dead March swirled into the cold air and the minute-guns saluted with their regular detonations. The procession came breasted by the dark blue of the mounted police and stretched back until it was lost to sight.
Behind the rank of horses came two Royal Air Force bands with their light blue contingent, then the khaki of the Territorials and the Field Regiments, and the grey tunics of the Guards led by the band of the Foot. The Welsh, the Irish, Scots, Coldstreams and Grenadiers stepped past with pride and precision. Behind them the white helmets of the Royal Marines competed for the people’s admiration with the brass of the Household Brigade.
Two more bands preceded the bearers of the insignia and standards, and then came the front rank of the Royal Naval gun crew pulling the coffin with slow majesty on its iron carriage. The family mourners were in closed carriages drawn by black horses, the men walking behind carrying their top hats. Then came a second detachment of the Household Cavalry leading the bands of the Royal Artillery and the Metropolitan Police. A quarter of a mile behind the head of the procession marched the rearguard drawn from the Police Force, the Fire Brigade and the Civil Defence Corps.
Rather a long way behind them, but holding his own, came a white-robed figure on a donkey monstrously saddled with a carpet roll.
Moon, desperately but pointlessly measuring the ticks of his bomb against the march, squirmed through the crowd into the road with the intention of crossing behind the last line of policemen.
Under the statue of Charles I, the Risen Christ came plodding into his view, disdainful as ever if not quite so modest.
Moon stopped dead. The donkey reached him and he recovered.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Moon furiously.
‘Oh, hello, yer honour.’
‘What are you playing at?’
‘I’m going to preach the Word,’ replied the Risen Christ with dignity.
The end of the procession was disappearing into the Strand, breaking up the crowds as it passed for it would not be returning. Moon looked round and whispered fiercely at the Risen Christ.
‘What about them?’
‘Go in peace.’
‘The bodies!’
The Risen Christ blinked down at him resentfully. ‘Faith, I can’t find a place for them, yer honour,’ he wined.
‘Well, you won’t find it in Trafalgar Square.’
‘I’m going to preach the Word.’
And with this finality the balancing act of the donkey, the carpet roll and the Risen Christ went swaying past him, stepping heavily on his right foot. The pain was so intense that Moon, hearing in the same instant a pistol go off behind him, thought he had been shot.
The crowd picked itself up and blew around the street like a gust of leaves. There was a second shot. Moon turned.
‘Mr Jones!’ he cried, and was knocked down by something alive that went by with a yellow whiff of zoos.
Moon lay with his coat tossed up around his head. Cannon boomed over him and boots panicked around him: he might have fallen on a battlefield. And through the confusion he heard – being played right against his ear with a music-box intimacy as though for his private audience – the National Anthem.
Automatically he started verbalising the tune – gra-ay shusqueen long live ah no-o-o b’lqueen, God save – and scrambled up and saw the donkey sprawled on top of its load with the Risen Christ cradling its head in his arms, outraged, dumb; and Rollo streaking away down Whitehall; and, inexplicably, a dead flamingo lying at his feet.
—send her vic-toor-rious, ha-ppy and gloor—
Incredulous, he pulled the bomb out of his pocket. It sat on his palm tinkling away with lunatic imperturbability, while from its nozzle protruded a red rubbery bubble that beg
an to expand with a sigh of decompressing air. Before his eyes it grew as big as an egg, an apple, a football—
He dropped it and took a few steps back. Long John Slaughter ran past him, his face pulled apart by horror.
‘Mr Slaughter,’ Moon wept.
There was a third shot and he saw the back of Slaughter’s head turn inside out; and beyond, the pair of pigeon-coloured horses rocked the coach through the crowds and across the Square, kicking dun-coloured pigeons into the air over the purple-and-white barricades put up for the great funeral—
—and Moon, grasping at the edges of some recollection, experienced himself passing among people who had lined the streets for him, and a fat lady going under the wheels with her face unbelieving, betrayed—
—and saw Jane staring through the coach window while the ninth earl in elegant profile touched the silver knob of his cane against his hat-brim, and the coach rocked up the side of the square clockwise round the far corner, with O’Hara leaning back on the reins like a jockey taking a jump.
‘Jane!’ Moon wept.
The Square had emptied to its edges, its central plaza bare as a stage, on which Jasper Jones lay face down and his horse drank placidly from one of the fountains. The coach slowed as it came round the third corner, coming down quite gently towards its point of entrance, towards the donkey and the Risen Christ and Long John Slaughter, towards Moon who was staring fascinated at his bomb: it sat in the road still tinkling (reign oh va-russ) and steadily filling its balloon which was as big as a bubble-car, a baby elephant, a church dome – translucent pink and approaching transparency as it swelled – with, printed across its girth in black letters which expanded with it, a two-word message – familiar, unequivocal and obscene.
Moon turned and saw that the coach had slowed to a walk, bearing down on the Risen Christ. He ran towards it and with a sob tore open the door.
‘My husband!’ cried Jane, her fingers flying to her lips.
Go-od save – he realised that he had been keeping track of the anthem in his mind. When he got to Queen the balloon burst with an explosion that drove the air out of his body.
Pieces of red rubber flapped down over the Square. A few people, obscurely moved, began to applaud.
SIX
An Honourable Death
I
‘BUT MY DEAR boy,’ said the ninth earl, ‘what a pathetic gesture!’
‘You ought to be ashamed,’ said Jane crossly.
‘T’was a class of a lion,’ said the Risen Christ.
‘I sympathise with your feelings, dear boy, but what did you hope to achieve merely by advertising your disrespect? – you certainly wouldn’t convert anyone, they’ll simply put you down as a cynic – O’Hara! – can’t you go any faster than that?’
‘You made yourself look quite, quite ridiculous,’ said Jane. ‘What were you thinking of?’
I don’t know.
‘Sure an’ it never knew what hit it,’ said the Risen Christ bitterly. ‘Bloody murderin’ pagan brute of a heathen country—’
‘I must ask you to restrain your language, Mr Christ. My credence in your divinity is not what it was.’
‘Ha! An’ where’m I after getting meself a donkey now?’
‘That is not my concern.’
‘Please God an’ Holy Fathers but was it yer lion.’
‘The donkey must have provoked Rollo in some way, possibly by its asinine expression.’
‘And for goodness sake stop crying,’ said Jane. ‘What do you think you look like?’
I don’t know.
‘You see, Mr Moon, you just upset yourself. These gestures of protest are quite without point – an expense of spirit without power to alter anything, least of all the entrenched absurdities of public reputation.’
‘You were just drawing attention to yourself, weren’t you,’ Jane accused him.
‘I share your distrust at the way of the world, it is unequal, inadequate and quite without discrimination. But you must learn that the flaw is not an aberration of society but runs right through the structure. Why, this very street is its monument.’
‘Faith, he was a lovely little moke.’
‘Absolutely childish.’
Water off a duck’s back.
‘… The Admiralty on one side, the War Office on the other, ever-expanding monoliths disposing an ever-diminishing force, at enormous cost and with motives so obscured by time and expedience that the suffering incurred at the further ends can only be ascribed to the tides of history.’
‘I didn’t know where to put myself.’
‘And lo! – Earl Marshal Haig, a man who could have saved countless lives by choosing an alternative career in which to indulge his vanity and incompetence – now horsed in bronze and gazing without a glimmer of self-doubt at a Cenotaph inscribed To the Glorious Dead. On our right, Downing Street and the Foreign Office and the Home Office—’
‘The loveliest little moke I ever—’
‘Filth – written up there for everyone to see—’
‘—making the same discovery over and over again with undiminished surprise, that moral duty and practical necessity run counter to one another, hence an exercise in mass-deception conducted in a spirit of righteous cant.’
‘I just hope it will be a lesson to you – look at your clothes.’
‘On our right, the Ministry of Defence, last bastion against Communism from without, and on our left, New Scotland Yard, last bastion against anarchy from within. Are you ever disturbed by the thought that good and evil are not so neatly divided? – Of course you are! – what a hackneyed profundity—’
‘Where’s the blood coming from?-really, darling, you’re such a fool – Have you got a hanky?’
You can’t touch me, I’m untouchable.
‘Before you, the Three Estates-the Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal and the Commons… Hush! Do I hear a sermon, delivered in organ-music tones to advocate self-denial and humility? Or is that the murmur of a convocation of bishops working out why God does not strike dead the death-watch beetle?’
‘An’ I’m telling you one thing, boyo – that carpet—’
‘The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe – responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages… And the Commons, drab joyless little Socialists activated by malice and envy, and complacent arrogant Tories activated by self-preservation – Oh, Mother of Parliaments! supreme enshrinement of the myth of individual participation. Turn for home, O’Hara!’
‘—you’re not pinnin’ them on me, boyo, I got witnesses—’
‘And Westminster Abbey where monarchs are crowned, thereafter to sit like working models on the nation’s mantelpiece, with flamingos in the garden. Why am I never invited to croquet? Why? Ah dear boy, how I lament the passing of the divine right of kings, for it concentrated the origin of all misfortune into a human compass-how can one grasp its diffusion now?’
‘I told you Uncle Jackson couldn’t make a real bomb, the dirty old man. But you won’t be told, will you?’
That’s quite irrelevant, dear Jane. The point is, even if it had been a real bomb it wouldn’t have been nearly big enough to make any difference. No, Mr Moon, you’ll simply have to change your attitude, disclaim your connection. Idealism is the thin edge of madness – console yourself, dear boy, with the thought that if life is the pursuit of perfection then imperfection is the nature of life.’
Please don’t go on. I am indifferent.
‘You’ve been keeping too much to yourself, that’s what I think.’
‘Faith, what an enormous business.’
‘In other words, Mr Moon, there is nothing to be done, except to survive in whatever comfort one can command… Ah, thank God we’re home at last.’
Let me disappear into a South American jungle and end my days reading Dickens to whomever will listen, perfectly content, renounced.
II
The Risen Christ got down firs
t, followed by the ninth earl who turned and held out a languid hand for Jane. She jumped girlishly into his arms nearly knocking him over, and clung on to him, her skirt dragged up over her thighs. He carried her wriggling to the steps.
Moon found he could not move. His left leg hung without life, sticky in his shoe, and the right was cold and cramped. Taking all his weight on his arms he let himself carefully down into the road. When he let go he fell against the wheel. His left sleeve was torn and blood was running down his arm, drying over the back of his hand. The coach heaved and O’Hara’s legs came into view.
‘Here,’ said O’Hara. ‘Here!’
‘No, it’s all right. I want to sit here for a minute.’
He sat with his back against the wheel. Along the pavement on one side the newspaper seller stared at him. On the other side, the roadsweeper, the seller of clockwork spiders and the man with the long moustache peered from separate doorways. In front of him the door of Lord Malquist’s house was being held open by Birdboot who was now dressed in street clothes and carrying a suitcase.
The ninth earl put Jane down.
‘Birdboot!’
‘Good morning, my lord.’
‘What’s this?’
‘There have been developments, my lord.’
‘Indeed?’
‘I’m afraid so, my lord. Sir Mortimer has secured a moratorium on the estate’s debts, and in the meantime the valuers have arrived.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’d better get Sir Mortimer here.’
‘I understand, my lord, he will be calling for her ladyship immediately after the funeral. Sir Mortimer and a Mr Fitch came to see you yesterday evening. Sir Mortimer left after half an hour but it seems he instructed Mr Fitch to remain until you came home. Mr Fitch is in the library, my lord.’
‘And there let him browse.’
But at that moment Fitch appeared behind Birdboot, rumpled and panting.
Enter Messenger, thought Moon expecting Fitch to kneel down and gasp out some tale of military disaster.