Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon: A Novel (10 page)

‘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.

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.’

She lay with her eyes closed, breathing gently.

‘Would you do something for me, darling?’

‘Yes,’ breathed Moon. ‘I’d do anything for you, Jane.’

‘Would you rub away the tickle on my nose.’ She screwed up her face into a porcine snout to get at it.

Moon dropped his head onto the edge of the tub and wiped his forehead along it. Jane rubbed her face against his hair and he trembled all over again with love.

‘That’s better!’

When he looked up at her, her face was recomposed, expressionless. Moon stood up.

‘That cowboy, the one in the street.’

Jane said nothing.

‘He called you Fertility.’

She said nothing.

‘Fertility!’ He let out one cracked bitter laugh and got up to go.

‘You’ve forgotten your notebook.’

He looked around the bathroom without seeing it. When he had searched the shelves, the window-sill and the corners he gave up and opened the door.

‘Here.’

Jane’s arm stretched out of the foam holding high the notebook. He took it, held it limp and buckled.

‘You left it in the bath when you fell in.’ She closed her eyes.

Jane and the ninth earl lay like corpses in the billowing shroud. They did not look at him and he stepped out into the cold of the corridor closing the door behind him.

Moon paused again at the top of the stairs. The Risen Christ leaned in the doorway of the drawing-room grinning
like a minstrel. The gin stayed on his face, completely immobile, defying Moon’s stare. The Risen Christ changed the angle of his lean and fell over but managed to keep the glass upright, rolling and twisting underneath it like a trained seal, and rolled back onto his feet with the grin intact.

‘Ah it’s a treat you look,’ he said. ‘We shall go forth loined in fine linen and chuck the pharistines and the philisees out o’ the temple o’ Saint Paul, sure an’ sure.’

He belched, touched his free hand to his lips with ham actor’s gentility, bowed, winked, crossed his legs and fell on his back, his glass clutched upright on his chest.

Moon went down and stepped over his body. The overhead light – a chandelier – had been turned on. He switched it off leaving the lamp glowing on his desk and another on a corner cupboard among variously coloured bottles. He turned on the electric fire and held the notebook against its warmth, trying to unstick the pages. His handwriting was smudged into paling shades of blue. He put the notebook on the flat top of the fire and opened his desk. After some little trouble he found a list of names which he read through thoughtfully. He replaced it and picked up a letter and read that.

Sunday.

Dear Mr Moon,

This is to confirm the arrangement we arrived at in conversation. I intend to engage the services of Boswell Incorporated, namely yourself, on an annual basis and I accept the terms of two thousand guineas per annum, payable quarterly in advance, for no more than twenty and no fewer than twenty-two working days per calendar month; your obligation being to accompany me at my request for no more than six hours per day with an option on a further four, payment to be negotiated; and to record such of my pensées and general observations, travels, etc., fully and fairly, and to provide
me with two transcripts of your daily journal.

As you will have realised when you receive this, I write to you on the day of the death of a national hero. I mention this because I think it makes an appropriate moment for the commencement of our venture. I sense that the extravagant mourning exacted from and imposed upon a sentimental people is the last flourish of an age whose criteria of greatness are no longer applicable. His was an age that saw history as a drama directed by great men; accordingly he was celebrated as a man of action, a leader who raised involvement to the level of sacred duty, and he inspired his people to roll up their sleeves and take a militant part in the affairs of the world. I think perhaps that such a stance is no longer inspiring nor equal to events-its philosophy is questionable and its consequences can no longer be put down to the destiny of an individual. For this reason, his death might well mark a change in the heroic posture-to that of the Stylist, the spectator as hero, the man of inaction who would not dare roll up his sleeves for fear of creasing the cuffs.

For Style is an aesthetic, inbred and disengaged, and in such precarious times these are virtues. We all have an enormous capacity for inflicting harm, and hereto the only moral issue has been the choice of the most deserving recipient. But the battle is discredited and it is time to withdraw from it. I stand aloof, contributing nothing except my example.

I think it would be satisfactory if the fruits of our collaboration were to be published biannually. I have taken steps therefore to arrange publication of the first volume in July. I have every confidence in your recording skills and in my own fascination as the object of them. One of my concerns, incidentally, is to contribute my name to the language (e.g. Lord Cardigan, Sandwich, etc.) and I hope to have your co-operation in this.

If you are agreeable perhaps you would present yourself
at Queen Anne’s Gate at four p.m. on Friday next. After our preliminary discussions I hope you will accompany me to my club for dinner. The food, I’m afraid, will be execrable, but my imagination flourishes in adversity.

Yours faithfully,

Malquist.

Enclosure: Five hundred guineas. (Kindly delete all references to money, including this postscript, and file under ‘Stylist as Hero: the Malquist Letters.’)

Moon placed the letter in a cardboard folder and after some consideration wrote on the file:
Malquist Letters.

And thought: I
agree with everything you say but I would attack to the death your right to say it – Voltaire (the Younger
).

Moon smirked.

Schizo.

What?

Would you describe yourself as a schizophrenic?

Oh really! It’s simply that my emotional bias towards the reactionary and my intellectual bias towards the radical do not survive each other, and are each interred by my aesthetic revulsion of their respective adherents…

Wha’?

I mean I’m not bigoted – I can see both sides of a question.

And subscribe to both.

That doesn’t make me schizophrenic.

What about interviewing yourself?

No harm in that, nothing sinister in that at all, merely an attempt at rationalisation.

Rationalise what exactly?

Everything. That I’m not schizophrenic.

What are you?

I’m disabled … by my inability to draw a line somewhere and – make a stand. I’m—

The doorbell.

Moon went out into the hall and opened the front door to an elderly upright man who stood leaning elegantly on his cane, rheumy eyes bright, pink-rimmed and pouched, signalling dismay over his ragdoll face in the streetlight.

‘I say! Did I get you out of the bath, old man?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Moon.

‘I’m most frightfully sorry.’

‘That’s quite all right. What can I do for you?’

‘I say look here, don’t catch cold, old man – can’t we step inside?’

‘Whom did you want?’

‘Marie – is she in?’

‘I don’t think so, no – can I help you at all?’

‘It’s quite above board, old man, it’s not my first time. Look, can we just step into the hall… talking on doorsteps, you know.’ He chuckled.

Moon stepped backwards inside and allowed the man to come in.

‘Thank you so much. Customers having to answer the door, is that it?’

They stood just inside the door, looking at each other for guidance.

Moon said, ‘What exactly …?’

‘The modelling, old man.’

‘Modelling?’

‘Photographic.’ The man pulled aside the lapel of his overcoat to show a camera slung round his neck. ‘I just popped round on spec, don’t you know.’ He looked up over Moon’s shoulder and flapped one hand cheerily. ‘What ho, Mamselle!’

Moon turned and saw Jane, striped by banisters, walking nude along the upstairs hall trailing her dressing-gown behind her.

‘That’s not her,’ Moon said. ‘I haven’t seen Marie since …’

He frowned, shivering inside the towel.

‘Could you wait here a moment.’

Moon padded back into the drawing-room. He crouched down, putting his cheek against the carpet, and stared into the dark under the chesterfield.

‘Marie?’

He got up and pushed the couch backwards and looked down on her and carefully turned her over on to her back. They stared amazed at each other. He went back into the hall.

‘Is she there?’

‘She’s dead,’ Moon said.

‘Dead, old man? What do you mean?’

‘She’s been shot.’

‘Murdered, old man?’

‘Well…’ Moon held himself in, trying to organise time into a comprehensible sequence. ‘Well, there was a cowboy in the street… He shot her through the window.’

‘A cowboy, old man? How very extraordinary.’

‘Yes,’ Moon said. ‘I don’t think he meant to kill her.’

‘Just wing her, so to speak.’

‘Well, there was another cowboy in the room-he was trying to kill
him.’

The old man studied Moon carefully. ‘Why was he?’

His innocent curiosity unnerved Moon. The man stood there, bright-eyed and quizzical like a scrawny long-legged bird.

‘Quarrelling over her?’

‘That was it,’ Moon remembered. ‘They were quarrelling over my wife.’

‘Your wife! My dear chap! I had absolutely no idea, no idea at all! How absolutely ghastly for you.’

‘Yes,’ Moon said. ‘Well,’ and made little ushering gestures towards the street.

‘What are you going to do – call the police?’

Moon grasped at the idea with relief.

‘Yes, that’s it-they can take over, it’s their job, isn’t it?’

‘It most certainly is.’ He paused thoughtfully. They’ll be taking photographs, you know.’

‘What?’ said Moon.

‘Oh yes, they always do. Photographs of the body.’ He mused on this. ‘Where is your poor wife?’

‘Upstairs.’

‘Look, I’m sure you’ll think me absolutely impertinent, but I wonder whether you would mind if I took just one shot of her, at the usual rates of course.’

‘Shot?’

‘Snap.’

‘Snapshot?’

‘Of your wife. Would you mind awfully?’

‘I’m afraid I—’

‘Left her in her room, did you?’

‘Yes,’ said Moon. He followed the man upstairs, his mind working over a problem he was unable to define. When they reached the top Moon said, ‘Perhaps you’d better wait here a minute.’