Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon: A Novel (13 page)

Lord Malquist and I went inside and I was privileged to introduce my wife Jane to him. She was entertaining a friend, Mr Jones, and not long afterwards another gentleman called, also riding a horse. He was acquainted with Mr Jones. Both he and Mr Jones rode off on their horses. Meanwhile a man on a donkey had also stopped outside my house and we welcomed him in to join us.

Lord Malquist got on famously with Jane and it was decided on the instant that dinner at the club could wait until another day.

Tomorrow I hope to do better justice to Lord Malquist’s conversation – I did in fact make some notes today but unfortunately my notebook was destroyed in a small fire later on.

Spectator as Hero

IT TOOK MOON
a long time to write his journal of the day. He sat in the kitchen typing. Jane did not come home.

He had to keep stopping, sometimes for many minutes between sentences, trying to reassemble forgotten conversations but able only to trace an outline of events in which he hardly believed any more. Lord Malquist had instructed him that the journal should conceal its commercial inspiration and be ostensibly a private diary in which the ninth earl’s part was coincidental, if dominant. But Moon decided not to mention his bomb or Marie’s death or the General. He supposed that the General was dead too. The bomb sat by his elbow as he typed, watch-ticked contentedly, the metal key recessed into its flat bottom turning slowly as an hour-hand towards oblivion. Moon had not noted the exact time when he pressed the plunger but he calculated that he had until ten or half past in the morning. There was no hurry.

*     *     *

When the flames of his notebook had guttered out, Moon had stared in disbelief at the three bodies on the carpet (the Risen Christ was the only one to show any sign of life: a sudden gabble of obscure protestation) and had gone to sit half way up the stairs in the cubic centre of the house, hugging his bomb to him, and he had sat quite still until the water from the overflowing bath blotted its way down the stair-carpet and reached him over an hour later.

The damp seeped into his trance and woke him. He was cold. He got up and felt the cold on the soles of his feet. Water was pressed out of the carpet and soothed his stiffening wound. On the upstairs landing he had to paddle. When he
turned off the taps he experienced again the illusion of silence being broken by stillness.

In the bedroom he dressed himself very consciously as though dressing someone else who was himself. His grey suit (his best one, put on to go calling on the aristocracy) was a wet heap on the floor. He chose at random one of the three pairs of trousers and one of the two jackets hanging in the wardrobe. Dressed, he limped downstairs holding his bomb. The cuts on his hand and face had dried into crusts. His foot was still tender but he had managed to squeeze it into its shoe without unwrapping the handkerchief and the ears of the knot flapped against his bare ankle. He was hungry.

In the kitchen the tap-water splashed into the sink but there was no overflow. Gas jets flared and the geyser roared softly. Moon put his bomb on the table and quietened the kitchen down. The bomb ticked quietly with flat flannelled softness. Moon tried to imitate it making small man-to-horse sounds with his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

There was an untidy heap of tins on the table-pork ‘n’ beans. Moon opened two tins and emptied them into the frying pan to which were stuck some old cold greasy beans from another time. He lit the stove and went over to the window and inhaled the country air that rolled down from the far hills up the long grey lawn towards him.

When he had finished eating Moon went back to the drawing-room. The Risen Christ was still drunkenly asleep, snoring now. The General lay against a chair with his hair blood-coloured and spiky. Moon hardly gave him a glance but looked down at Marie for a few seconds. All her top-clothes seemed to have been gathered into a bunched belt below her ribs. Her bare belly looked smooth and alive, about to be sucked into the vortex of her navel. Moon stared at it. (
You are calm and sweet and young and dear and I see a long happy life if you don’t get shot through the hollow of
your little breasts
.) He bent to rearrange her dress, drew the skirt down to her knees.

From his writing desk he took out a sheaf of clean paper and, after searching, a much-used carbon. He balanced the pile on the portable typewriter and carried it all into the kitchen and put the typewriter down next to the bomb. At a particular moment calculable within a micro-second he died from the terror of a recollection, and was brought back to life by his fear. He looked back into the hall and crept along to the bottom of the stairs. He looked up but saw no one. At the door of the drawing-room he paused again and jumped into the room looking wildly behind the door. There was no one there. Moon went over to the Risen Christ and kicked him in the back.

‘Get up,’ said Moon. ‘You’re awake.’

The Risen Christ lay still.

‘You’re faking – I know you are. You’ve been up-you turned off the music.’

The Risen Christ slept on with his mouth open.

Moon shouted, ‘Who turned off the music?’

He looked around. The radio dial glowed green. The button-light on the record-player stared red. He remembered that the arm of the record-player came back to rest automatically. When he turned the tuner on the radio, voices and music overtook each other. He turned the needle back to where it had been and caught the faint crackle of a station gone off the air.

Moon went back to the kitchen and started to type his journal.

January 29. Awoke late as is my custom …

He typed badly, and when it came to framing sentences he found that he had no natural style and that it was all coming out stilted. He supposed that this would be appropriate enough for his purposes. But the loss of his notebook made it all very difficult. There were things he could not remember – a
short oration by Lord Malquist outside the house of the dying hero; the colour of his smoking jacket; conversation about his book, his wife, his muffins. Moon had forgotten them all and he was conscientious enough to feel guilt. He thought that the results of his first day’s work would not please the ninth earl. Jane came home naked and weeping. He seduced her standing up, pressing her to the wall.

And was woken up by the Risen Christ.

The Risen Christ kept punching Moon on the shoulder, wild and gabbling.

‘Here!’

Moon sat back in his chair. He had fallen asleep across the table. He felt awful, his face drawn and bloodless.

‘Here!
There’s been murder! I’m telling you-there’s corpses all over the shop!’

‘It’s all right,’ Moon said. ‘I know all about it.’

He went over to the sink and splashed water over his face. His foot was stiff and sore.

‘Who done it, then?’

Moon limped past him to the drawing-room. All the colours in the room looked drained out. Marie and the General lay as he had left them. There were pieces of broken bottle and sheepdog scattered about. Moon didn’t know what to do.

There should be a service for this kind of thing. Send a couple of chaps round before my wife gets back. Corpses distress her. They distress me. I don’t want anything to do with it. I’ll be upstairs and it’s all got to be normal when I come down. I’ll put a cheque in the post.

‘It wasn’t me begorrah, I’m not a violent man.’

‘You were drunk,’ said Moon. ‘How do you know?’

The Risen Christ looked at him and blew air out of his cheeks in a long expostulating denial. He shook his head.

‘What would I – listen, I just never seen them before.’

‘Never mind that,’ said Moon. ‘Get rid of them and tidy the place up. My wife will be home sometime.’

‘Get rid of them?’

‘Yes. I’ll be upstairs and I’ll put a cheque – I’ll pay you.’

‘Now wait a minute, yer honour, wait a minute – bodies is not an easy thing to get rid of. Besides it’s not a thing to do with me – I never killed them at all.’

‘I never said you did.’

‘Didn’t you?’ The Risen Christ looked at him hopeful and beseeching.

‘I said if you
did
kill them then you wouldn’t know because you were drunk.’

‘But I didn’t.’

‘That’s all right then. I’ll telephone the police.’

‘The police? Yes, now just one moment sir, I don’t know that I—’

‘They’ll know what to do,’ said Moon. ‘It’s their job.’

He looked out of the window. It was just getting light. The donkey stood asleep by the railings.

The Risen Christ said, ‘Look, I mean I’ve got no experience – I wouldn’t know how to get about a thing like that.’

‘It’s easy enough. Just take them outside and find a place and leave them there.’

The Risen Christ shook his head again.

‘Oh I don’t know about that. You can’t walk around the streets carrying bodies just like that.’

‘I suppose not,’ said Moon. He supposed not. Despite everything. ‘I’ve got to get this place tidied up,’ he said.

Moon pushed all the furniture off the carpet against the walls. He dragged the General round to lie beside Marie and folded the carpet over them. That was better. After much manoeuvring and lifting he managed to get the carpet rolled fairly tightly round the two bodies.

‘Get some rope.’

The Risen Christ looked around trying to divine rope out of the room.

‘Ah. Where would you be keeping the rope, yer honour?’

‘We don’t keep rope,’ said Moon. ‘I don’t know.’

Irritably he went into the kitchen. He had never ever noticed a piece of rope lying around anywhere. He went upstairs and came down with Jane’s dressing-gown cord and a leather belt. He bound the carpet-roll at each end, making a seven-foot Christmas cracker.

‘Right,’ said Moon. ‘Off we go.’

The Risen Christ gave him a terrified look and stuttered,

‘I can’t – I ca’n – you don’t expect—’

‘On the donkey,’ Moon said.

He grasped one end of the carpet and the Risen Christ doubtfully got hold of the other. They came up quite easily but the middle stayed plumped on the floor.

They dropped their ends.

‘Go and bring the donkey,’ Moon said.

‘Bring it? Where?’

‘Here. Bring it in.’

The Risen Christ looked as if he was going to cry. But he went out and Moon sat down on the carpet. He remembered that he was sitting on Marie so he got up and watched the Risen Christ through the window. He was pulling the donkey up the steps by the halter. The donkey entered the room and stood by the fireplace seeming quite at home, as in a children’s story. Moon and the Risen Christ heaved the carpet sideways onto the donkey’s back. It balanced there precariously.

‘You’ll have to sit on top,’ Moon decided. ‘Otherwise they’ll fall off.’

The Risen Christ clutched his arm and pleaded, ‘Look here, yer honour, I wouldn’t know where to take them or anything – I could be stopped any time, any time at all. What’m I goin’ to tell them?’

‘Say you’re a carpet seller. An Armenian. You don’t speak English.’

‘But I’m the Risen Christ! – it looks bad.’

Moon had forgotten.

‘Well tell them that.’

The bulked carpet was high as the Risen Christ’s shoulders.

‘I can’t get up there, sir,’ he complained.

Moon led the donkey alongside a straight-backed chair. The Risen Christ climbed on the chair as if it were his scaffold, and swung his leg over the monstrous saddle.

‘Faith, it’s like being on a bloody camel.’ He looked down tearfully from his great height.

Moon led the donkey into the hall.
The Risen Allah be praised. If anyone wants me I’ll be in the British Museum cataloguing shards while the years roll by. The past is good enough for me.
The front door was open and the space framed Long John Slaughter who stood feet apart, hat straight, left hand easy by his hip. Slaughter was a left-handed gun.

When the Risen Christ saw him he let out a little yelp.

‘Early,’ Slaughter said. He watched carefully as the donkey moved down the hall towards him. ‘Nice.’ He took the halter from Moon and stopped the donkey. ‘Fancy.’