It was a warm afternoon, rather sultry, with banks of cloud, pale-slate coloured, low in the sky, and a sort of pewterish, soft, polished effect of sunshine striking through. The square lawn behind the house needed cutting, there were puffs of flowering clover in it. Matthews again, he thought. It had rained not much earlier and his footsteps cut dark swathes in the grass and stirred the scent of the clover. There were wet webs in the flower borders, slung to delphiniums and lupins. The garden was oddly shaped, quite narrow at first, easily kept whole in the mind between its hawthorn hedges, but afterwards much broader, thicker in vegetation so that one soon lost a sense of physical limit or confine. This process of enlargement was unexpected, unremembered from his previous visit – the garden had seemed formless to his seven-year-old eyes, formless, immense, embrasive as the sea, immersing him in sensation – and it was in this way he had thought of it ever since. Now, with the added perspective of the last five years, he was able to note where the lawn and borders ended, the exact extent of the shrubbery beyond, with its paved walks amid rhododendrons, azaleas, dwarf magnolia trees. Once through this, however, and something of those former feelings began to return; the sense of bearings slipping away, safe confines receding, the sense almost that a swimmer might have, who can disport himself with a freedom unimaginable on land yet is in continual danger of engulfment.
He began to negotiate this area, which he sensed to be roughly rectangular, making his way circumspectly through a clump of birch trees, skirting the triangular pool with lily-pads floating on it and a half-submerged raft of planks. Beyond this, he knew, there was a small orchard of apple trees, with the two tennis-courts adjoining. He did not go this way, however, but moved outwards into the central parts of the garden. Here it was completely untended, an area of gigantic bramble bushes, cow-parsley and willow-herb, interspersed with japonica and laurel and various of those glossy-leaved bushes that never seem to flower; everything growing apparently quite unchecked. His passage disturbed and sent up on wavering flight clouds of little brown thick-bodied butterflies that had been feeding on the bramble flowers. Dingy Skippers he informed himself, faintly contemptuous of them for being so easily identifiable. A few faint, softly metallic gleams of sunshine fell across the garden, silvering the leaves of the birch trees. The house was not visible from here, nor was there any sound of other people. Blackbirds, perhaps with young near, detected his presence and set up a minatory fluting. He stood among the bushes and felt the throb of life in the garden, like a sort of pulse that had leapt with alarm at his approach, now slowly settle round him. Enveloped thus, screened and secret, he muttered rhetorically to himself the opening of what was currently his favourite poem. ‘At the mid hour of night, when stars are weeping, I fly to the lone vale we loved when life shone warm in thine eyes.’ The lack of congruity between the night-time feel of the lines and his own immediate surroundings did not bother him, nor did the fact that there was no person he could have spoken to like that. The melancholy of it was absolutely right and appropriate. The sense of bereavement and abandonment that lay more or less constantly below the surface of his consciousness mingled now with unlocalized feelings of sweetness and excitement: he felt as he had felt several times of late that some revelation was imminent, something that it was intolerable for him not to know. This ebbed slowly and he looked up in bewilderment at a darkening sky.
The sunshine had gone now and the leaves around him rustled in a sudden breeze. Moved by an impulse of haste, almost of alarm, he made his way quickly out of the shrubbery; but he was obliged by the thickness of the bushes to make a detour which at first took him farther from the house into a more open area of sprawling blackcurrent bushes bordered by a tall hawthorn hedge. This hedge he took to be the farthest limit of the garden. He moved along it with the intention of returning to the house by a circular route, passed once more through the birch trees and found himself amid the reedy fringes of the pond. Green scum sidled on the surface as if something had very recently taken a header in there. He had a sense of tenacious cannibal life in the depths. A bright-emerald dragon-fly darted across the surface, hovered, settled on the stem of a kingcup. At rest it lost iridescence immediately as if it had drained its colour into the vegetation. The hush of the place seemed to him curiously temporary like a sort of lull – prelude to some violent resumption.
He skirted the pond, feeling the soft ground give a little under his feet, and reached the small orchard of apple trees with a sense of release. The ground here was still scattered with dried, curled petals. He was about to turn back towards the paved walks and clipped yew of the central area and the glimpsed house beyond, when he caught sight through the maimed branches of a figure on the nearer tennis-court, a person in shirt-sleeves bending low to the ground. Immediately, there came to him the conviction that this person, though apparently absorbed in some task, knew everything that was happening in the garden, had been aware all the time of his aimless movements about it. He advanced through the trees, across the cleared space adjoining them. The figure straightened, bent again, not seeming to have heard his approach. He stood at the edge of the court, looking through the tall wire-mesh fence that surrounded it at an old rheumatic man with bushy ginger sideburns and a bald tanned head. He was renewing with fresh white paint the boundaries of the court. For some moments the boy said nothing, watching the careful charging of the brush, the meticulous application of it, the laborious, stertorous shifts in position this activity involved. Then he said, in what he hoped was a conversational tone, ‘That’s quite a job you’ve got, isn’t it?’ This must be Matthews, he thought.
The man straightened and turned, presenting an old round face with a whitish stubble along the jaws and a mumbling habit of the mouth as if he did a good deal of self-communing.
‘Once a year it needs doing,’ he said. He stood with head stretched forward in a tentative reptilian way, and the boy observed the seamed lines of his neck, and thought that they might have been caused by innumerable alarmed retractions. Like a tortoise. ‘And who might you be?’ the old man said.
‘I’m staying here.’
‘They’ll be here soon, clumping about.’
‘Who do you mean?’
‘Clumping about the place. I keep out of their way, I do.’
‘You are Mr Matthews aren’t you?’
‘That’s right. I seen service in three wars.’
‘Have you really. Do you mean Henry and Frederick clumping about?’
‘Then there’s him. Puffing and panting round, ah, I keep out of his way as well. He’ll have a seizure. Round and round he goes, grunting and groaning. He slipped yesterday and fell flat on his face. Flat – on – his – face. He’ll have a seizure, one of these days. She’s the only one I talk to.’
‘Aunt Jane?’
But Matthews had turned away now and laboriously bent once more over his task. The clean white paint glistened. He only had the baseline to do on this court. The boy stood some moments longer, wondering whether Matthews, by resuming work like this, had meant to indicate that the conversation was at an end. But while he was trying to decide about this, large drops of rain began to fall, speckling the court. At the first touch of wet, Matthews took up brush and paint-pot and began to move slowly off across the court. He did not look back at the boy. The rain increased. The boy after some hesitation made his way back to the house.
3
That was the last rain for two whole months. Next day began cloudy, but in the middle of the afternoon the wind changed direction; the clouds dispersed. The sky showed through, soft blue, a milky haze in it at first, as if the clouds retreating had left a stain, but deepening in the days that followed to a burning cobalt that pained the eyes when you glanced up, not just in that part where the sun was, but throughout the whole extent of it as if the sun were diffused; the whole sky charged with brilliance, meshed with brilliance. It was meshes that you saw if after looking up you closed your eyes; a myriad overlapping meshes of light. The boy did t
his frequently; closed dazzled eyes on this depthless burning blue; confronted behind his lids this quivering latticework of light, a fairly rigid armature at first, by degrees dissolving into milky haze …
No, it wasn’t either of them, Henry and Frederick, the damp-haired twins, they were still on the tennis-court. Mooncranker spoke to someone else, before coming to me in the garden and handing me the little bandaged effigy of Christ on the Cross. I was pleased with the gift. I hung it up on the birch tree in the secret place that only I knew about. Even Miranda didn’t know about it. Miranda liked me, though she was two years older. She was my partner in the doubles and we won, we had just won against Henry and Frederick, and she kissed me when we won. Henry and Frederick said I played a sneaking game because I tipped the ball just over, bringing them rushing up to the net, then Miranda would lob over their labouring backs, just inside the line time after time. Mr Mooncranker called the score.
They got angry and wild, driving at us with all their strength; once Frederick drove straight at Miranda and the ball hit her upper arm, she was wearing a sleeveless tennis-dress with pleated skirts. He looked pleased when it happened; he only remembered afterwards to look concerned. Her arm was red where the ball had hit. She smiled at me. She had her hair tied back with a piece of white string; auburn hair. I knew then that we would win. I will always remember her face, broad-browed, widely spaced eyes, a mouth always near to smiling. She had a depth, a sort of flushed duskiness of complexion not usual in English girls. How beautiful I thought her. When we won she kissed me, right there on the court. ‘They are getting rattled,’ she said. ‘Keep it up.’ She was a marvellous player for her age, everybody said so. I was not strong enough in the wrists, but I had a good eye and I was quick on my feet – my faulty coordination didn’t start till later. To make up for my weak wrists I had developed some very cunning sliced shots that dropped just over and bounced short … How they hated being beaten. They began by jeering – a girl and a thirteen-year-old boy opposing them. Good-natured chaff Uncle George would have called it. She put her arms on my shoulders and kissed me on the cheek.
We had just won our game. I had gone for some reason into the house, for a drink perhaps. Henry and Frederick had started a furious singles game and Miranda was looking on. I must have been intending to return to the court, but went first out into the garden, into the shrubbery. From there I saw Mooncranker in colloquy with someone at the back of the house, someone dressed in white. Then he came towards me and he had the Christ in his hand – he knew exactly where to find me. He bowed a little and smiled. I remember the civilized upward twitch at the corners of his mouth and I remember that he uttered some words – although most of my attention was on the thing in his hands that he was offering to me – the blunt-headed, or perhaps helmeted figure, in the ancient posture of suffering, wrapped in folds of clean white bandage. Something he said at the time, something I feel now to have been surprising or unexpected; but I was full of triumph at our victory and wonder at the kiss and then at this effigy and courteous Mooncranker. On this heady occasion something essential was overlooked by me, something I may never find now. Why he did it is probably what I shall never know, how I provoked that malignity. To give me an object calculated to arouse reverence at first, knowing as he did my feelings about Christ (and he could only have known this from Miranda); and afterwards to destroy reverence in disgust. The whole process calculated, buying the meat, moulding it, encasing it, attaching it to the cross, handing it over like a time-bomb, its inevitable putrefaction the fuse within …
Possessed by this mystery, he turned his head on the pillow to regard once more Mooncranker’s sleeping profile. You were gone, I do not remember you as being around, when that gift of yours began to stink badly enough to be identified as the source of stink, when it began to sift through its containing bands. And a peculiar shame held me from taxing any person with the trick that had been played on me. I felt too, I suppose, that everything in some way had been due to my fault, my peculiar sins …
This is what nobody could have known, the use I would make of the gift. Surely nobody could have known. Even Mooncranker in his heyday, fully vitamined and hydrated, could not have had such evil prescience, could not have known how Christ had become my accomplice, before ever that gift was made. Not that I knew this at the time myself, not fully. The sallow, sleek-loined, dying Christ in my New Testament, whom I pained by my repeated sin, I wanted to solace him, with a force equal at least to that of my repentence, wanted to change the nature of his sorrow by provoking commotions similar to mine beneath his loincloth. Failing this, I prayed to him. My voice muttered promises, promises. My eyelids pressed tight shut. Achieving a sort of purity necessary for the full pang of my sin.
There was a place in the grounds that no one knew of but me. The shrubbery that covered a large area at the side of the house was quite untended, had been so for years. Large parts of it were trackless. In the summer-time the bushes were interspersed with great clumps of white daisies and goldenrod and enormous hollyhocks; flowers that bravely went on seeding themselves in that wilderness and only by a lunging, straggling disorderliness of the stems, a certain craziness of growth, denoted neglect. Matthews never went near them. A murmuring remote man with a laboriously deliberate habit of body. He never bothered with anything but the herbaceous borders and lawns and the tennis-courts. If you went in under the bushes at one point, there were twenty yards to crawl and you could stand again in a sort of bower roofed by the low branches of three silver-birch trees, walled by a tangle of hawthorn and privet and the summer foliage of a lime-tree, thick around the lower trunk. The shed nearby had been creosoted; the smell of it was sharp when I crouched in my hiding-place. And everything around me in that place was in flower, white flower, the privet and the hawthorn and the briar roses in the hawthorn and the cow-parsley that grew among neglected blackcurrant canes nearby. Sunlight came down in straight shafts through the birch branches, on a still day. Lay in blocks and tablets of light on the trunks. I pinned the Christ on to the trunk of the birch tree about six feet, seven feet, the limit of my reach. Where the sunlight, shafting down in precise rays, dwelt on the figure, caused its mummy bands to gleam, cast a radiance about the blind, helmeted head.
Did he know what I would do with it? In that case others knew of my secret place in the garden, knew of its existence at least. Miranda again? Perhaps Henry and Frederick followed me one day, stalked me through the bushes. Betrayal in any case. The summer is redolent of betrayal and the private anguish of being betrayed, coexistent with life itself. I am tricked and betrayed again each time I think of it; the flowers smell of it; Christ oozes with it. I could ask Mooncranker now, but he is sleeping.
Henry and Frederick would not have bothered to stalk me, would not have cared where I went or what I did. No, Mooncranker was the stalker. Or he had an informant. For all I know he followed me around all the summer. I was always meeting him in places just a little unexpected, where he had no real business to be. One of the memories of that time I have carried away, always seeming to be finding Mooncranker athwart my path, the slight, inevitably disagreeable shock of recognizing that figure … At what stage did I meet him? It must have been quite early, quite soon after my arrival, because the whole of the summer is permeated with him. Impossible now, however, to determine when. Uncle George introduced us, in some suitably jovial form of words no doubt. What would he have said? Our young friend from the north. Something in that vein. Not in his tracksuit that day, or was he? Nephew of an old friend of mine. Mr Mooncranker, or is it doctor? No, no, no academic pretensions whatever, quite the opposite in fact. A lounging, high-shouldered figure, thin face, pale eyes. I see him smiling down at me with a sort of fastidious interest, a weedy dandyism. This high-shouldered, rather ceremonious posture what I chiefly remember now, and the narrow courteous face below the hat-brim. A courtesy delicately denigratory … This was on the terrace at the front of the house. I think about a week after my arrival. At any
rate before Henry and Frederick came home for the summer holidays.
Those first days were spent placidly, watching butterflies in the garden, reading my New Testament, holding further conversations with Matthews. Uncle George went off every morning in his green Rover and I did not see him again till the evening. The three of us had supper together during which meal the conversation was desultory. At night I remember, if I did not close my curtains, I would see white moths hanging motionless on the outside of the pane, as if by stillness they entreated admission. Once during that week I went with Aunt Jane on a green bus into the town. Aunt Jane brought a burgundy-coloured twin-set at a shop called ‘dorothy’s’ –the name was written above the window in flowing script and with a small d.We went to a tea-shop and had tea and cakes.
Then at the weekend Henry and Frederick arrived from Dover College, changing everything by their arrival, as if by some massive injection of energy and noise. They filled the house with footsteps and slamming doors and loud plans. They shouted from one end of it to the other. Even in the coolness and sanctity of my room I heard distant tremors, the whole place seemed to throb with them. When Uncle George came home in the evening there was more hubbub, his blurred booming tones mingling with their lighter, more strident ones; and supper was a livelier meal than usual with both Henry and Frederick recounting some of the exploits of the term. They were almost exactly alike in appearance as in pitch of voice; both tall and strongly built, with black hair and serious straight black brows and narrow inflexible mouths.
Mooncranker's Gift Page 8
