Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon

  When he had beaten them all back into their inanimate forms he turned off all the taps except the hot water running into the bath and sat content on the covered lavatory bowl.

  Fifth Gospeller and no mistake. Moon, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John went to bed with their bedsocks on. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Moon went to bed in the afternoon. Moon, John, Matthew, Luke and Mark went to bed when it got dark. (Chorus of Sunday-chanting children invoking the mnemonics that will keep my name alive in big bare schoolrooms with watercolour daubs pinned to the walls.) Matthew, Moon, John, Mark, Luke went to bed with the grand old duke (sunbeams defined by chalk-dust, cannonade of desklids, and home to lunch and the assumption of a guiding hand on the wheel of the world.) If you eat bread-and-butter and drink your tea at the same time, you taste your childhood. You remember how safe it was to be a child.

  The toilet paper had fallen onto the floor and unrolled itself across the room in a flat ribbon. Moon closed his eyes against it but the limbless winter-coated heap came alive in his mind and started to crawl across the street like the last of the insects. The cigarette butt burned his fingers and fell on the floor.

  There was a sharp splintering noise and the ninth earl stood disconcerted in the doorway.

  ‘Ahk! Dear boy, I do apologise.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Moon. ‘I’m just running her bath.’

  ‘So you are, dear fellow, so you are. For a moment I thought you were evacuating yourself, whatever that may be – I understand that it was something that was done to people during the war but for my part I claim total ignorance of such matters. You probably know that the Malquists in common with other families of equal style and breeding excrete and procreate by a cerebral process the secret of which is passed down in the blood.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know,’ Moon said.

  ‘We don’t bandy it about, naturally. You forgot to put the plug in.’

  Lord Malquist leaned into the tub. The water-sounds changed pitch. Moon got up from his seat with no purpose in mind. Lord Malquist took his place.

  ‘Thank you, dear boy. You’ve cut your face.’

  Moon looked at himself in the mirror over the basin. He turned on the hot tap but there was no water to be had while the bath was running. He washed the blood away with cold water and dabbed at it with Lord Malquist’s handkerchief. The cut didn’t look so serious after that, but the perfume stung him.

  ‘Your wife tells me you are writing a book.’

  ‘Yes, well I’m working on one,’ Moon said.

  ‘Very glad to hear it. I am writing one too, a little monograph on Hamlet as a source of book titles, a subject which does not interest me in the slightest, but I would like to leave behind me one slim and useless volume bound in calf and marked with a ribbon. I toyed with the idea of writing about Shakespeare as a source of book-titles but that would be an immense undertaking, and result in a fat cumbersome object … I would rather my book were unread than ungraceful, don’t you know? Do you find writing easy?’

  ‘Well, not yet,’ said Moon. ‘I haven’t got my material together yet.’

  ‘I find it an awful chore. My problem is that I am not frightfully interested in anything, except myself. And of all forms of fiction autobiography is the most gratuitous. I am far happier putting my Life in your hands.’

  ‘Why are you writing it?’ asked Moon.

  ‘I told you, dear boy. It is the duty of an artist to leave the world decorated by some trifling and quite useless ornament. I wouldn’t like it to be said of me that I was just an elegant idler. Why are you writing a book?’

  ‘I like getting things down,’ said Moon after some thought.

  ‘Yes but why a history of the world?’

  Moon thought. He had not meant to write a history of the world at all, at the beginning, merely to examine his own history and the causes that determined it. The rest of the world intruded itself in a cause-and-effect chain reaction that left him appalled at its endlessness; he experienced a vision of the billion connecting moments that lay behind and led to his simplest action, a vision of himself straightening his tie as the culminating act of a sequence that fled back into pre-history and began with the shift of a glacier.

  ‘Personally,’ said the ninth earl, ‘I think you’re on the wrong track.’

  Moon watched himself in the mirror wiping blood off his forehead.

  ‘After all, what’s the point of such labour?’ asked the ninth earl.

  The point is that if five travellers on the road between Lima and Cuzco happen to be crossing the Bridge of San Luis Rey when it breaks, and if you want to discover whether we live and die by accident or design, and if you decide therefore to inquire into the lives of those five travellers to find out why it happened to them rather than anyone else – then you must be prepared to go back to Babylon; because everything connects back, to the beginning of the history of the world.

  But what he said was: ‘I like to write about something that has edges where it stops and doesn’t go on and become something else;’ which was also true.

  ‘I fear you will come to some harm, dear boy, you have a wild look in your eye. You must learn from me that taking it all in all, there is nothing to be done. I feel an homily coming on – have you got your notebook?’

  Moon remembered.

  ‘Is O’Hara a Negro?’

  ‘I suppose so, something of the kind.’

  ‘What kind of Negro?’

  ‘Well, dear boy, a Negro is a Negro, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘No,’ Moon said.

  ‘Well, I don’t believe in fine distinctions except where they touch one subjectively. O’Hara’s kind of Negro is nothing to me. Let us say that he is a coachman kind of Negro.’ He leaned towards Moon confidentially. ‘To be frank with you I had set my heart on a pale ivory-coloured one because I saw him in midnight-blue and I thought that would be rather dramatic, don’t you know, but the one I had in mind – pale as a lily he was, and a sweet tempered boy – was frightened of heights. He started to cry and had a nosebleed as soon as he got up there, which wasn’t the effect I was after at all – it would have been like being driven around the town by a lachrymose Red Indian. And then it occurred to me that a black one would look quite well in a sort of mustard colour, so I elevated O’Hara to his present eminence and really he would have worked out all right if only the horses had tried to understand him a little more. He’ll have to go, of course … I don’t quite know where to turn next. You don’t think that a sort of Chinaman would look too jaundiced in black and silver?’

  ‘But O’Hara – I mean, what do you make of him, the way he talks, for instance? – it’s all getting out of hand, you see, I’m trying to grasp… Is he really a Catholic, or a Jew or what?’

  ‘Now there you go again with your fine distinctions—’

  ‘And no one really talks like that – so inconsistent.’

  ‘Well of course, he’s a Negro, isn’t he?’

  ‘Is he an African Negro?’

  ‘No, no, he’s an Irish Negro,’ said the ninth earl. ‘My father won him in Dublin during the Horse Show of oh-seven.’

  ‘Won him?’

  ‘At backgammon, off the notorious Earl of Sillegnagh. Of course he was little more than a youth at the time.’

  ‘How old is he now?’

  ‘He’s dead now.’

  ‘O’Hara?’ cried Moon already mourning.

  ‘No, no, the notorious Earl of Sillegnagh. He’d only just come into the title then, but he was notorious from the age of twelve.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Backgammon mainly. You’d better be writing all this down as I say it. Nothing sounds more studied than a repeated spontaneity.’

  ‘But O’Hara,’ Moon persisted. ‘You said he was a Cockney.’

  ‘Cockney? Good lord no, there’s nothing Cockney about O’Hara, except his wit of course.’

  Moon watched the ninth earl through the rising steam but could detect no undertone of tease o
r whimsicality. He wanted to believe that the perversities that confused him were deliberate but they kept coming at him flat, casualadjustable only to a reality which for some reason had eluded him again. He found his pen and his place in his notebook but when he began to write on the wet shine the diluted ink spread palely into an eighteenth-century blot.

  ‘How many pages have we covered?’

  Moon indicated half of his notebook.

  ‘Dear me, have I talked so much for so little? Never mind, what is a little more waste after forty years of unrecorded aphorism? By the way,’ he said, ‘the Risen Christ tells me he has asked for your services.’

  ‘I told him I was already fully engaged.’

  ‘Quite so, but it occurs to me that it might be as well if I occasionally conversed with someone, as opposed to making endless and quite arbitrary observations on art and life-it is not as if you yourself were argumentative and I respect your professional self-effacement – so you might bring him along tomorrow. He can entertain us with his family history until his invention flags. At any rate it will relieve me and, I hope, refine my own contributions – I feel that my pensées have been a little discursive where they should have been discriminating, don’t you agree?’

  ‘He hasn’t got ten guineas.’

  ‘Second sons seldom have. But I will see to it.’

  ‘Very good, Lord Malquist.’

  The ninth earl regarded the wall solemnly. After a while he said:

  ‘You know, Mr Moon, I could not bear to outlive my wealth, and since I am spending it more quickly than I am aging, I feel my whole life is a process of suicide … If I am to leave some record of my existence then we have not met a day too soon.’

  Moon said nothing. Lord Malquist turned off the tap and the silence of water-sounds was broken by a deeper stillness which seemed to Moon godlike by comparison, presaging some revelation-a wind, a voice, a flame, some clue that would unify all mystery and resolve it for him. Jane hit him over the head with her sponge bag.

  ‘Don’t mind me, darlings,’ she said closing the door. ‘What are you plotting? Oops, too hot!’

  She turned on the cold tap and from an earthenware flask of Roman pretensions poured scented oil that foamed up at once into pillows of white suds.

  ‘Turn your backs!’

  ‘If my presence embarrasses you, dear lady, pray close your eyes.’

  Nevertheless Lord Malquist turned round. Moon also began to turn but remembering his status he went on turning until he faced her again just as she hoisted her dressing-gown to squat on the bidet, so deciding then that he had been right the first time, he continued until he faced the wall, at which point in sudden fury he revised again his assessment of marital privelege and turned on another hundred-and-eighty degrees and was at once shamed into the concession that certain intimacies were, after all, sacred, so completed the circle, closing his eyes for penance, and felt dizzy and opened his eyes to the realisation that he had turned too far. He closed his eyes, tried to reverse his turn and fell backwards into the bath.

  Spin deaf and blind in soft white warmth. If this is death let it come.

  But he was pulled out all too quickly.

  ‘I got dizzy,’ he explained.

  ‘I should think you did – what were you doing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Moon. ‘I was trying to face one way or the other and I got confused and fell over.’

  Let that be my epitaph.

  He stood up wiping foam from his clothes.

  ‘Really darling, you’re too much.’

  Jane slipped out of her dressing-gown, smiled brightly at Lord Malquist and stepped into the foam with her back straight and her arms outstretched as though she expected to sink in up to her neck. She bent down to scoop a double-handful of soapy fluff and daubed herself with it modestly before turning round, smiling: ‘There! How do you like my bathing suit?’

  ‘Perfect, dear lady. A more artistic ambiguity 1 do not hope to see.’ The ninth earl gathered fresh suds and applied them to her, repairing the damage of bubble-winking evaporations. He stood back to admire her again. ‘I cannot believe that you were born-surely you were created, like Venus Anadyomene rising from the waves! – don’t you agree, Mr Moon?’

  Jane giggled and flicked foam at them. She sat down in the tub and lay back decapitated by froth.

  Moon took one of the big white towels and went out, back into the bedroom. The carpet darkened damp where he walked. Pieces of broken mirror were scattered about. He sat on the bed and took off his shoes and socks. The bed was damp where he sat on it so he stood up. He took off all his clothes and wrapped himself in the towel and stood in front of the mirror with the towel round his body and over his head. He looked at himself.

  I am very fine saint, mygoodness yes. I will not break my fasting I tell you till the British give me back my country, esteemed sir.

  That was a mistake. He shook for forty million potbellied starvlings, and pulled the towel over his face, gagged on laundered freshness, and revived. The telephone rang.

  ‘Hello,’ said Moon.

  ‘Marie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is Marie there?’

  ‘Hold on.’

  Moon walked to the top of the stairs and leaned down them.

  ‘Marie!’

  ‘God save you, yer honour!’

  ‘Not you,’ said Moon.

  ‘There’s nobody else at’all.’

  ‘All right,’ said Moon.

  The Risen Christ smiled crookedly up at him, holding a tall glass of green ice-refracting liquid. He put his thumb up and winked with his whole face.

  ‘Rare stuff, yer honour.’

  Moon went back to the telephone.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Marie?’

  ‘No. Can I take a message?’

  There was a short pause.

  The voice on the phone said: ‘That’s Marie’s place, is it?’

  ‘She works here,’ said Moon.

  ‘Yes, I see. I’m phoning about her advertisement.’

  ‘Advertisement?’

  ‘I’d like to come round. For the lessons, you know.’

  ‘Lessons?’

  ‘French lessons. Corrective.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Moon said. ‘She’s not available at the moment.’

  ‘Oh. Is there anyone else?’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Another girl?’

  ‘Do you mean Jane?’

  ‘Yes, all right then.’

  ‘She’s my wife.’

  ‘Oh. Well, that’s up to you, isn’t it? I’ll come round.’

  ‘She doesn’t know any French,’ said Moon. ‘Except what she had at school.’

  There was a longer pause.

  ‘At school?’

  ‘Yes. Are you a friend of hers?’

  ‘Not exactly. But I’m all right, don’t you worry. She’s corrective, is she?’

  ‘Corrective?’ asked Moon.

  ‘Strict.’

  ‘Oh. No, not really. She’s more gay.’

  ‘Gay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh. Well look, when will Marie be free?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Moon. ‘I should try tomorrow. But it might be her day off – being Saturday.’

  ‘Look, I’m all right, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you are.’

  ‘I’ll call up again, then.’

  ‘I’ll tell her you phoned,’ said Moon. ‘What name should I say?’

  ‘Eurgbrown.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Brown,’ said the man fiercely.

  ‘Oh – all right. Good-bye then.’

  He put the phone down. The bomb smiled up at him darkly. He palmed it up and considered it, one foot on the bed, elbow on his raised knee. Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come: make her laugh at that … Her lips will be as pink as bones, her eyes as green as ashes.

&nbs
p; He looked down the bomb’s pomegranate-spout and turned it over to examine the recessed time-switch and the key which would unlock its energy without possibility of reprieve. He wondered whether it would tick. Moon pressed his palms against it until his body turned bloodless, and refilled. He wiped himself dry with the towel and wrapped it around him and put the bomb back beside the telephone, and walked back along the damp trail to the bathroom door and knocked.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Me,’ said Moon.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘My notebook. I left my notebook in there.’

  ‘Come in then.’

  The tub billowed with foam. Jane and the ninth earl, only their heads showing, lay facing each other through the steam in a torpor of opiate bliss. Jane raised a sudsy arm in welcome but did not look round. Lord Malquist lay with his eyes closed, his head resting between the taps. His clothes were draped neatly over the towel rail.

  ‘To the Editor of The Times,’ he sleeptalked. ‘Hello dear boy. Your wife was just telling me about your problem. If you take my advice you will look on it as a boon and never give it another thought.’ He blew away a little ridge of foam from in front of his face. ‘To the Editor of The Times. Sir. Might I infringe upon the hospitality of your columns to acquaint your readers with a scientific principle which came to me in my bath. It concerns the measurement in terms of volume of eccentrically shaped objects such as a goblet or a piano or a sewing machine or anything which is not conveniently assessed by its height, width and depth. It occurred to me that if the said object were to be placed in a rectangular or cylindrical container of water, then its volume would be represented by the easily measurable quantity of water displaced by it. Yours etc, Malquist.’ His head sank lower and one of his legs emerged dripping leprous from the foam. ‘I have the feet of a violinist,’ he remarked, and lowering the leg he appeared to fall asleep.

  ‘What problem?’ asked Moon.

  ‘Now darling, don’t make out you haven’t got problems. We all have.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘And you’ve got more than most.’

  Moon knelt on the floor, cocooned in towelling, and leaned limbless against the rim of the bath, putting his mouth close to her ear.

  ‘Jane…’ He spoke very quietly. ‘Let me. Please. I’m alone.’