by Tom Stoppard
‘My husband told me you were positively heroic the other day when his beastly lion got loose.’
‘Did he?’
‘And retrieving his hawk for him.’
‘Really I didn’t do anything. I just stood and watched.’
‘He thinks that’s a heroic attitude, I suppose. Did you say something about a drink?’
‘Oh-yes.’
He had forgotten to bring a glass.
‘I’m sorry, I—’
‘Never mind, I’ll open my mouth. Will you pour or shall I?’
‘I think perhaps …’
He gave her the bottle. Lady Malquist uncorked it, put it to her mouth and swigged.
‘Mmmm. Wheww! In the nick of time. Have some?’
‘No thank you, my lady, I don’t drink.’
‘Nor do I really. I occasionally have a bottle before luncheon.’
She took another swig, her eyes switched white to watch him, challenging him to disapprove. But Moon was enchanted. When she walked across to her dressing-table (it was actually a marble shelf set against a gilt-framed mirror on the wall) he followed her with an undefined sense of expectation.
‘Have you ever been in jail, Bosie?’
‘No, my lady.’
‘Not even overnight?’
‘I’m afraid not.’ (but I would do life for you, and you can call me Puss in Boots for all I care.)
‘I’ve been in jail four times,’ she said impressively. ‘Police cells anyway,’ and drank again, white-eyed but merry. ‘God, that’s better. No booze in jail, you know, Bosie. They put me in a temperance prison. Without bars. Witty?’
Her wide happy smile glanced off the mirror, transfixed him. She sat astride the rectangle of the dressing-stool, and put down the bottle, misjudging the distance so that it banged on the marble top.
‘Think how awful if one got a month inside, quite insane. Fortunately the Sergeant is always very sweet about things and lets me telephone Sir Mortimer. So here I am again.’
‘I’m very pleased,’ said Moon with unnecessary fervour.
‘Sir Mortimer was furious. He said I compromised him. He’s very correct, Sir Mortimer.’ She mused. ‘Until you get to know him.’
‘Who is he?’ asked Moon suspiciously.
‘Oh, he’s a chairman of things, you know, companies and commissions and committees and things.’ She picked up the bottle and this time sipped from it quite delicately. ‘Sit down a minute, won’t you? Tell me how you like Boswelling.’
There was a straight-backed chair against the wall beside the dressing-mirror. Moon sat down and hooked his feet round its cabriole legs and put his hands on his lap.
‘Do you think Malquist is worth a Life?’
He didn’t understand.
‘A life?’
‘Moon’s Malquist. It has a classic ring to it. Being the Peripatetic Peregrinations of the Ninth Earl. Hits off the tone of the Doctor, do you think?’
‘The doctor?’ enquired Moon, dazed but willing.
‘Have you read him?’
‘No,’ Moon hazarded.
She laughed at him with sudden delight and he smiled to get a share of it.
‘Bosie!’
He smiled.
‘Have you Boswelled much?’
He smiled.
‘Mmm?’
‘What? Oh—’
‘I said have you Boswelled much? For anyone else.’
‘Well,’ Moon said, ‘not exactly … There was my wife’s uncle, you see-well he gave me the idea. He had cards printed for me, I’ve got cards. And a brass plate. But we never really started properly because he – his family had him put in a nursing home, you know … He took things very seriously, but he was very nice really.’
‘Potty, was he?’
‘He was very nice.’
‘Uncle Samuel, was he?’
‘Jackson. Uncle Jackson.’ He remembered Uncle Jackson. ‘He was a scientist.’
He wondered uneasily what time it was.
Lady Malquist took a thoughtful swig from the bottle, and caught his eye and hugged herself.
‘What would you like to do more than anything else?’ she asked with a grave interest which he recognised from children’s games of what’s-your-favourite-food.
‘Well,’ he responded – it was a game he liked – ‘I think I’d like to go back to live in the country where I lived when I was small.’
‘Catch beetles.’
‘Press wild flowers.’
‘Climb trees.’
‘Make dens.’
‘But it wasn’t always summer.’
‘No.’
I used to walk through woods in summer with all the leaves in place, which was very nice, and in the autumn too, shushing through beds of leaves, but once I was lying on my back under a tree looking at a leaf and just as I was looking at it, it slipped off the tree, without a sound or any warning, it just came away and dropped down on me. Yellow. A chestnut leaf. I like things like that, catching the instant between the continuing things, because when you actually see a leaf come away like that then you know about summer and autumn, properly.
He felt her hand smoothing his hair off his forehead.
‘What’s that, Bosie?’
‘The Reverend Godolphus Fenner.’ He giggled. ‘Cut myself.’
‘And your foot.’
He looked down and was embarrassed by his bare ankle and the handkerchief-ends.
‘It’s all right.’
She looked at him with concern. ‘I bet you don’t look after yourself, Bosie.’ She sipped from the bottle. ‘Do you make lots of money Boswelling?’
‘No, I haven’t really yet.’
‘What else do you do?’
‘I’m writing a book,’ said Moon.
‘Why, Bosie, you’re a writer.’
‘Yes.’
‘What kind of book is it?’
‘It’s a kind of history.’
‘What of?’
‘The world.’
‘A history of the world?’
‘Yes,’ said Moon.
‘Gracious, Bosie. How far have you got?’
‘I’m making notes at the moment,’ Moon said. ‘Preparing my material. I go to the library every day. That is, I have been doing, but – you know.’
‘You’re very interested in history?’
Am I? – I suppose I must be.
‘Well, it’s not exactly the history, it’s the patterns of it, getting at them, you see. I’m trying to collect all the things which have made things turn out the way they have today, to find out if there is a pattern. I’m taking one race at a time -the Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, Saxons, Celts, Orientals – everyone – tracing them all down from the beginning to now. It’s all been done by other historians, you see, it’s just research as far as I’m concerned, but I’m organising it.’
‘Organising?’
‘Into sequences, and categories… science, wars, law, commerce …’
‘But isn’t it all mixed up, Bosie?’
‘Yes, that’s it-when I’ve got everything I can put it all down in the form of a big chart, all over a wall, with different races and so on, so you can see where things cross and where they join up, so you can relate all the things to each other, and this great map will be a kind of skeleton key to my book – like a diagram of everything that counts, so it might be possible to discover the grand design, find out if there is one, or if it’s all random – if there’s anything to it.’
She looked at him carefully.
‘Why?’
‘I just want to know.’
‘I mean, does it matter?’
‘Yes.’ Doesn’t it? ‘I mean, whether it’s all random or inevitable.’
‘But what difference does it make?’
‘What?’
‘Whether it’s all random or inevitable.’
Moon wished he had not exposed himself to examination. He floundered – ‘Well, you want to know that there is somethi
ng going on besides a lot of accidents.’
‘But that’s all there is going on.’
He almost accepted it but rallied.
‘But if it’s all random then what’s the point?’
‘What’s the point if it’s all inevitable?’
She’s got me there.
‘There doesn’t have to be a point at all, Bosie.’ She picked up the bottle and looked into it. ‘No point at all. You have to provide your own. Enter God. For instance.’ She drank from the bottle, then put it down and picked up an empty cut-glass perfume atomiser. She unscrewed the top with its rubber bulb and poured the rest of the whisky into the flask. She threw the empty bottle under the bed where it cannonaded against other bottles until one of them broke.
‘Emergency rations,’ she explained, and holding up the flask she squeezed the bulb, spraying whisky into her throat, and turned to Moon and grinned at him. But at once the bubble of her gaiety burst in front of him and she turned back to the mirror ambushed by memory.
‘The last thing I remember is feeling very very unhappy, yes, in the Ritz, a good pub into which I sometimes… I was with some people and they left me.’
Moon got up and stood behind her, racked with love.
‘We saw you.’
‘In the Ritz?’
‘Outside… You came out and fell down in the park. Rollo was there.’
‘Rollo? No.’
‘He found you.’
‘They won’t let Rollo into the Ritz since that awful business about the page boy. Poor page boy …’
‘What happened?’ asked Moon.
‘Oh, nothing in the end. Sir Mortimer waved his chequebook around, you know. Didn’t help the page boy though. Would you rub my neck for me, Bosie?’
She leaned back against him and Moon allowed her neck to excite him through his finger-tips, watching her face in the mirror. When she closed her eyes he leaned forward a little to peep into the rolled V of her robe at cream swelling nudity that brought back tremors of his adolescence, and, reckless now, craned over her shoulder, peering deep into the rosy dark until his desire reached consummation of a kind with a glimpse of a strawberry nipple.
‘He does love me, you know, Bosie, and he’s never unkind, but he won’t – attend, even when it’s all collapsing round him he won’t … It’s all a bit grim, Bosie, the music is going to stop. And I hate Sir Mortimer.’
Her sniff nearly stopped his heart. He wanted to gather her up, stroke her hair, press her face into his shirt-buttons, pat her back (rub his face into the soft shallow of her throat, slide his hand around her, cup—’).
‘And there are no more Malquist’s, literally, anywhere. The ninth and last, the end of the line. Everybody out.’
A tear slid down her cheek and drowned him. She caught it on her finger-nail.
‘Look at that, Bosie. Pure alcohol. I disgust myself.’ She looked at him in the mirror brightly. ‘Have you got any children, Bosie?’
‘Not yet. No.’
‘Is your wife pregnant?’
‘No.’
‘Has she had any miscarriages?’
‘No.’
‘Well, have you got any children anywhere, illegitimate?’
‘No, my lady.’
‘No girl-friends who have had to have abortions?’
‘No.’
‘But you’re not homosexual?’
‘No.’
‘Or impotent?’
‘No.’
‘You might be sterile.’
He didn’t know what to say to that. The creation of life seemed to him to be beyond human aspiration and he did not believe that he could be touched by such divinity; but—
‘I don’t see why I should be any more than anyone else.’
‘No. Nor me, Bosie.’
Her head settled back against his chest. He watched her in the mirror. Her eyes were closed again.
‘So you’ve never got anyone pregnant at all?’
‘No, I… no.’
‘Have you tried very often?’
He said defiantly, ‘I’ve never tried at all.’
She opened her eyes in the mirror.
‘What do you mean, Bosie?’
‘I mean I’ve never.’
‘Bosie, are you a virgin?’
‘Yes,’ Moon said, ashamed.
‘But I thought you – what about your wife?’
‘She’s a virgin too. That’s why I am,’ he said simply.
‘Why, Bosie …’
‘She’s frightened to,’ he said. ‘She only likes to play, you see, she’s got a block about it.’
‘But how long have you been married?’
‘Only since last summer. We were in the Tatler.’
‘Had you known her long?’
‘I grew up with her. We’ve been friends since we were – little. In the country. We used to play together, in the country.’ And once I hung her with daisy chains and kissed—
‘Well, the little bitch.’
‘No,’ said Moon. ‘I mean, she had a terrible childhood, with her family, you know, and-and I didn’t go about it the right way, we never got into a frame of mind where it became natural, we kept pretending to be natural but really we were watching ourselves being natural, and she couldn’t.’ He paused remembering. ‘I don’t think I approached her properly …’
‘Poor Bosie.’ She smiled up at him. ‘Unknown quantity.’ He stood awkward as a schoolboy.
‘Could you turn off my bath?’
‘Yes, my lady.’
The bathroom had two tubs in it, side by side, black on a black floor against black tiles. The basin, the lavatory bowl and the bathmats were pink. The connecting door to Lord Malquist’s dressing-room was ajar. He looked in and it was empty. A set of clothes were carefully laid out on the striped fur divan under the window.
When he returned to the bedroom there was a drape of red towelling over the dressing-stool and the four-poster’s curtains had been drawn together round the foot of the bed and up towards the pillows. Lady Malquist’s head showed through the gap, turned his way against a bare shoulder. She bit her lips into a smile.
‘Bosie.’
Moon tried to think of something to say that would give him courage, expiate his guilt, dignify the moment.
‘I think I love you,’ he said.
‘That isn’t necessary, Bosie, or relevant.’
She put one hand behind his head, trapping it against her mouth, and like an ondine beguiling a drowned sailor into her cave she drew him through the curtain folds and laid him down in soft grey light, her fingers sinuous and busy about him, her mouth fish-feeding on his, and turned under him with underwater grace and gripped hard making sea-moans that lingered in the flooded chambers of his mind where all his fears separated into seaweed strands and flowed apart and were gone as he clung with his limbs and his mouth to sanctuary. With enormous gratitude Moon moved against her body which seemed to inflate itself around him, and the last shaking purgation overtook him, left him solved, deaf, weightless. He felt her body release itself and she sank down blowing through her mouth and settled and spread over the bed, unjointed by a sigh, and lay limp under him, the amazing deflatable woman of the fun-fair.
‘And now you’d better call me Laura.’
III
Moon lay still, trying to resist his return to the world. Awareness came back in disconnected pieces, in what seemed an arbitrary order of precedence: the thought that his shoes must be soiling the counterpane, a change in the quality of light, an idle curiosity about the bomb ticking in his overcoat pocket downstairs, the fact that a door had closed somewhere. Toe-to-heel he managed to get his shoes off without unlacing them. He pushed them over the edge of the bed and then tested his peace of mind for flaws. The bomb-tick reasserted itself. He opened his eyes and saw that he was alone in the little room inside the room.
Moon sat up pulling at his clothes, saddened by his town-knees and the clown’s indignity of fallen trousers. Surely th
e ridiculous had no place in that suspension of time and self and all memory? He thought that he might after all get through life if he could periodically (two or three times a day) rendezvous with Lady Malquist for his sexual fix. He allowed himself to slip back into the last few minutes, and caught up on himself sitting on the bed alone, a man of experience.
I’ve had it away he thought, amazed. I have lain with Lady Malquist (how poetical!). Tupped her bragged Moon Jacobean, been intimate with her claimed Moon journalistic, I’ve had sexual relations thought Puritan Moon. I’ve committed misconduct admitted Moon co-respondent, had carnal knowledge swore Moon legalistic, in the biblical sense have I known her—
I’ve had an affair with Laura Malquist (O sophisticated Moon!)
He swung his feet over his side of the bed and stood up on a piece of broken whisky bottle that slashed through his sock into the heel of his only remaining unwounded foot.
Moon sat down again and took his sock off. Blood was leaking from a deep cut. He tried to lick it but couldn’t reach. Standing again he hopped over to the dressing-table hoping to find something he could use as a bandage, and did find a white cotton belt which he wound round his foot, making a new hole for the buckle point. An alarming amount of blood had stained his progress across the carpet, and more blood was soaking through the reddening belt.
He looked round for a tourniquet and then remembered seeing a rail of cravats in the dressing-room. He hobbled in through the connecting door and picked a black cravat and tied it tightly round his calf.
‘What’s the matter, Bosie?’
‘Oh—’ The door to the bathroom was open. Lady Malquist was standing in the bath sponging herself. ‘Oh, sorry.’ Despite carnal knowledge, tupping, intimacy and legal misconduct he felt abashed.
‘You’re hurt.’
‘Cut my foot. ‘It’s all right.’
‘Oh Bosie, wait a minute, I’ll send down for a bandage.’
‘No really, I’ve done it. Actually I’ve got to go now, I have to see to something.’
‘You can’t go like that.’
‘Yes, it’s all right.’
Suddenly he made a connection that had been eluding him.
‘I’m going to get you something,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Something.’
‘Surprise?’
‘Yes.’
She trapped her bottom lip in her teeth and narrowed her eyes at him.
