Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon: A Novel (22 page)

goLd will not BrinG back a life or BUy your Life FilThY inHuman SCUm AnnacRoniSM must perish TO make way For THE new ERA no moRe Under the yolk of oPpresser i want yoU TO KNOW WHY you diE

The impersonal effect of this communication was offset by the signature ‘W. Cuttle’ – presumably added in a last-minute mood of defiance.

‘Cuttle?’ said the ninth earl. ‘Cuttle?’

(‘Please, darling, I can’t undo myself—’)

‘Cuttle?’

‘We knocked down his wife,’ Moon said. ‘He’s an anarchist.’

‘What?’

‘Yesterday. It’s in the newspaper – about Mrs Cuttle being knocked down by a runaway coach.’

The ninth earl brooded on this.

‘Not a runaway malquist?’

‘No, my lord, I don’t think so.’

‘I despair, Mr Moon, I despair.’

He moved away towards the bathroom, remarking to Jane, ‘Please do not struggle, dear lady, it is against the ideals of Buddhist detachment.’

The bathroom door closed. Jane began to cry. Moon stared out of the window.

O’Hara sat on the coach in the rain. The horses stood resigned, accepting the rain on their backs.

Suddenly Moon saw the newspaper seller and the roadsweeper in a panic flight past the house and, behind them, Rollo trotting up the road, obviously tired out and glad to be coming home. The spider man had already climbed a
lamp-post but as his colleagues neared him he changed his strategy and dropped down, landing badly and staggering into their path. The three collided in a mêlée of newspapers, hats, spiders and limbs. The broom flew into the air. Rollo, his interest alerted by the confusion, broke into a run that was really a playful lollup but the three men suspected his motives. They picked themselves up and charged hysterically up the street with Rollo bounding at their heels. O’Hara had not moved.

‘I think you’re an absolute beast.’

Moon turned back into the room. He sat on the divan beside Jane and looked her over.

‘Can’t you undo yourself?’

‘No. I don’t like yoghourt.’

‘You mean judo,’ said Moon. ‘Yoga, I mean yoga.’

‘Please darling.’

He felt mean.

‘Gaius Caligula,’ he said, ‘used to threaten to torture his wife to find out why she was so devoted to him.’

‘I’ll be nice to you. I’ll let you.’

‘You locked me in the shed once,’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Don’t you remember the shed? In the country when we were little?’ He looked at her. ‘That shed where you took your knickers off that time.’

‘Don’t be disgusting.’

‘It wasn’t. It was all blushy and giggly.’ He touched her thigh. ‘You’ve got a bruise. What have you been doing?’

‘I fell in the bathroom – promise I did. Please.’

Yes. Passing cowboy aids with rub. Passing cowboy bursts inside out. Happens every day—

He touched her, as coldly as a dealer in virgins.

‘You’re filthy!’ She rolled away weeping.

‘We should never have got married,’ Moon said. ‘We’d played too long together. It’s not your fault.’ He looked contritely
at her party panties, so brave, so jolly and brazen, so sad.

‘Don’t cry then.’

Moon tried to get her left foot back over her head but she squealed and when he transferred the pressure to her head she rolled over forwards and balanced on her feet and neck. Lord Malquist was calling him from the bathroom.

She sobbed, ‘Stop, you’re hurting me.’

(‘Dear boy!’)

The Chinese position is irreversible.

‘Hold on, I’ll come back.’

Moon went into the bathroom. It was all black shine, clouded and sweating. When he closed the door he felt he was sealing himself in. The ninth earl lay under a shroud of suds, his face showing pale and smooth-lidded as a death-mask.

‘To the Editor of
The Times,’
he sleeptalked. ‘Ah, dear boy. As I was saying earlier, your wife was telling me about your problem. If you take my advice you will look on it as a boon. Impotence is a saving grace. Where was I? To the Editor of
The Times.
Sir. While I was driving down Pall Mall yesterday evening, a lady who was not of my acquaintance flung herself under the wheels of my coach with the cry “You are Mr San, the Toilet Tissue Man, and I claim the five pounds.” Might I infringe upon the hospitality of your columns to disclaim responsibility for this incident and to let it be known to any of your readers who witnessed it that the lady was under a misapprehension. Yours etc., Malquist.’ He lowered his chin until it rested on the foam. ‘I have just been thinking about death, Mr Moon. There is a way to die and a way not to die. That is very important. Hence my admiration for George the Fifth who-on his deathbed, in reply to his physician who told him that in a few weeks he would be recuperating at Bognor Regis – said: Bugger Bognor, and died … Bugger Bognor. Ah, would that I might die with a phrase half so sublime on my lips! There you have a
man who at the moment of death manages to put life into perspective.’ He paused. ‘Well, I might as well hear your journal anyway.’

‘I – I set fire to my notebook, Lord Malquist.’

‘Out of pique?’

‘No … It got wet and I was drying it.’

‘Oh, dear me. Well, don’t despair, dear fellow. Wasn’t it Mr Gibbon who sent his manuscript of
The Decline and Fall fall of the Roman Empire
to the laundry?’

‘I don’t know, Lord Malquist.’

‘Not many people do. But my great-great-grandfather was present when his publisher received a parcel of dirty linen. Hansom cabs were summoned at once but it was too late, and Gibbon had to begin all over again, wearing a soiled collar, hence the uneasiness detectable in the first chapter. What’s the most implausible things about that sentence?’

‘I …’

‘Gibbon died about fifty years before Joseph Hansom invented his cab. Dear me, you young people know so little about life.
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
were left at a railway station (Reading) and
The French Revolution
was used to light a fire by a maid of wilful disposition but sound critical instincts. Carlyle was impotent too, by the way; a remarkable coincidence. He once sat on that very spot – the plumbing was different then, of course-and after a constipated pause remarked to my great-grandfather who was in sympathetic attendance, “I do not pretend to understand the universe. It is a great deal bigger than I am.” You have dropped something.’

Moon had picked up his jacket to get his journal out and in doing so, dislodged an envelope. He stooped for it. His flesh stewed gently in the steam. His underclothes were trying to crawl into his body.

‘I tried to remember as much as I could, but the actual details—’

‘Technicalities, dear fellow. The secret of biography is to let your imagination flourish in key with your subject’s. In this way you will achieve a poetic truth that is the jewel for which facts are merely the setting. Be poetic, dear boy, be poetic, and take your text from d’Aurevilley –
La verité m’ennuie.’

He closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep but after a few seconds his voice spiralled out, toneless, private. ‘In the thirteenth century Sir John Wallop so smote the French at sea that he gave a verb to the language … But there must be less energetic ways of doing that.’

Moon held the envelope.

‘The cheque bounced,’ he said.

‘What cheque?’

‘Five hundred guineas to Boswell Incorporated.’

‘Your illustrious namesake wasn’t in it for the money. To be seen in such company was enough.’

‘Perhaps you should make a charge,’ said Moon, surprising Lord Malquist and astonishing himself.

‘Why, Mr Moon! Just when I conclude that your air of utter neutrality is the mirror to your soul, you let slip a remark that suggests a turmoil of inner confusion. Very well, tear up the cheque and the journal.’

Moon said nothing. The ninth earl closed his eyes.

‘The unfortunate thing is that I have nowhere to retreat any more. I have withdrawn from a number of positions and made my stand anew with my diminished resources drawn in around me… but now I am at a loss. I had a place in the country, you know, delightful spot, built by the fourth earl, lost in a wager by the fifth, restored to the family after a duel and rebuilt in the Palladian style … with an enclosed park and a lake and a classically landscaped garden with a view of hills…’

‘Petfinch,’ mourned Moon.

‘Poor Petfinch… I suppose it’s a rehabilitation centre for
broken down civil servants now. What an offence, dear boy, against our heritage.’

They stayed respectfully silent for a few moments.

Moon said, ‘Haven’t you got anything else you can sell?’

‘Mr Moon, I am not in trade.’

‘I think I’ll go home now,’ said Moon after another pause.

Lord Malquist appeared not to hear. Moon picked up his overcoat and looked round for his shoes. He remembered that he had taken them into the dressing-room. At the door he hesitated.

‘What are you going to do about that letter?’

‘What letter?’

‘The anarchist.’

‘It is of no importance. I shall make sure I look my best. Perhaps that is the only honour left to me. To be martyred in the cause of hereditary privilege.’

‘Please,’ said Moon with an implication obscure even to himself. He jumped a gap. – ‘I mean, you can’t dismiss it all-the Tibetans and everything, and yourself-you can’t compare everything awful with something bigger, you’ve got to stop somewhere where there’s nothing to compare any more and—’ He lost it. ‘I mean it’s all
people,
isn’t it? That’s what the world
is.’

He stood uncertainly by the door.

Lord Malquist said finally: ‘What an extraordinary idea. People are not the world, they are merely a recent and transitory product of it. The world is ten million years old. If you think of that period condensed into one year beginning on the first of January, then people do not make their appearance in it until the thirty-first of December; or to be more precise, in the last forty seconds of that day.’

‘Forty seconds?’ Moon stared at such revelation.

‘And yet man persists in behaving as though he were the beginning and the end. What a presumption.’

The ninth earl of Malquist lowered himself into the foam
until only the mask of his features floated upon it. Uncannily the mouth spoke: ‘Let it be said of me that I was born appalled, lived disaffected, and died in the height of fashion.’

Moon waited but there was no more. He went back into the dressing-room, and closed the door.

Jane looked at him tearfully from between her legs.

‘I thought you were never coming.’

‘You told him I was impotent,’ Moon said, throwing his coat down.

‘I didn’t.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘Well, I bet you are, so there.’

Moon smiled at her with private relish.

‘Well, it just so happens that I’m not,’ he said. ‘You’re the one that’s incapable.’

‘That’s all you know.’

‘Incapable. Always have been, always will be. Oh, I told him.’

‘You didn’t.’ She started to cry. ‘How could you.’

‘I don’t have to depend on you for it, you know.’

‘Don’t.’

‘I shan’t.’

Still smiling like a stage villain he opened the door of Lady Malquist’s bedroom and went quietly in. He closed the door. He was across the room before he realised that Laura was speaking behind the curtains.

‘Eleven
not counting illegitimate? My dear, what a wonderful man you must be!’

‘Terrible it was, begorrah. Faith now, I only had to turn the bedroom door handle …’

‘But how
immaculate
! You interest me strangely, Mr Christ.’

‘Mind, that was before I saw the Light, if you take my meaning.’

‘But that wasn’t so long ago, was it?’

‘It was the physical similarities, d’ye see? There was this feller, a class of a Russian he was—’

‘Now, I’m going to ask you to do a very Christian thing …’

Moon walked backwards barefoot to the other door and let himself out on to the landing. He hobbled down to the lowest bend in the stairs and sat there facing the front door, watching the rain come down on O’Hara and the horses. For quite a long time nothing happened except the rain coming down. Then Rollo came in through the door, holding a sodden newspaper in his mouth like a clever dog. He shook himself like a dog and flopped down behind the stairs. Moon did not move at all. The rain kept falling. After a while a car hissed slowly into view and stopped opposite beyond the two horses. It was a big black car with a chauffeur. Moon could see a man in the back but no one got out. The car tooted three times. Rollo got up and walked to the door and looked out at the rain, and turned and went back behind the stairs.

Moon heard a door open on the top landing. Laura came down the stairs carrying a red leather vanity case. She was dressed again and she had on her tweed coat.

‘Hello, Bosie. What are you doing?’

‘Nothing,’ Moon said.

They smiled at each other, oddly shy.

Laura tapped her case – ‘My valuables, family treasures.’ She shook it and it rattled. She grinned brightly at him. ‘Drank the rest.’

‘I’m sorry about the shoe,’ Moon said.

‘Look, got them on – you see? It was the most chivalrous present I’ve ever had. Where are
your
shoes?’

‘I left them upstairs.’

‘Oh.’ She pressed her lips together and stretched them and looked at him. ‘Got to go now, Bosie. That’s Mortimer tooting for me.’ She went down two steps. ‘I hope you finish your book.’

‘Good-bye,’ Moon said. He watched her as she hurried
down the stairs and across the hall, and called out, ‘I hope you have a baby!’

Laura turned and grinned and went out with her head ducked against the rain, and got into the back of the car which drove away. Moon listened to it until it became the sound of rain.

With both hands on the banisters he pulled himself upstairs. The door of Laura’s room was wide open. The curtains on the four-poster were drawn back and the Risen Christ sat stupefied in the middle of the bed.

He saw Moon and said shiftily, ‘Top o’ the morning, yer honour.’