‘So I told him just what I thought of him. He had been playing well, I grant you, but that is not the point, is it father? It is teamwork that counts. Individual brilliance is all very well in its place, of course –’
‘Quite right my boy.’ Uncle George lays down his knife and fork and looks round the table. Prominent, naked-seeming blue eyes. Same code on the sports-field as it is in life, the lessons you learn on the sports-field are invaluable in later life. Strong similarity between father and sons. Only the eyes different; in Uncle George pale and prominent and staring, in them deeper set, serious and dark. They ignored me, for the most part.
I was glad enough, most of the time, to be left alone. I think I had already realized then, that I would not be returning home. Not, at any rate, to the home I had known. Home was like a territory that had suddenly become inaccessible, as if by obliteration of every possible path and landmark. I was haunted all the summer by this sense of no return, a feeling of broken continuity, which conferred a sort of precariousness, a provisional quality, even on the present, on my immediate surroundings. Having no retreat denies substance to what is immediate, though one would not think so. That is a lesson I learned then, I think, during that summer. There was nevertheless, paradoxically perhaps, a vivid particularity about everything around me, all the events and impressions of my stay there. The sense of loss heightened my awareness, as love is said to do. My senses clenched things, the grain and feel and detail of things with a tenacity like that of one who fears drowning, or falling off. A butterfly in the garden, the fresh white lines on the tennis-courts, the loud voices of Henry and Frederick and Uncle George swooping down on a name or a date. The attention I paid to everything was the measure I suppose of my desolation, my loneliness. At the beginning anyway … Later I think it was because of meeting Miranda. Mooncranker did not join in their arguments. He nodded and smiled in a non-committal way. High-shouldered, thin hands bunched in jacket pockets. There was a sort of jauntiness about him, a sort of indifference. He used to come in the afternoons mostly, when Uncle George was at work. I would see him in different parts of the garden, on his own usually. Sometimes I saw him talking to Miranda. She laughed a lot when he talked to her. I didn’t like his manner at those times, he lounged and leaned forward. He spoke quietly to her, in a low voice, leaning down towards her. She looked away from him and laughed. I never liked seeing them together. Whenever he was anywhere near she was different, not herself. He was standing there, waiting for us, when we came crawling out of the bushes, standing there, one hip thrust slightly out as if about to turn away, but no, he had been intently waiting there, for how long? In white, a white suit, and his narrow-brimmed straw hat, beyond him the burning blue sky, when we looked up. I saw her face change, when she saw him there, her eyes seemed to darken …
All that summer it hardly seemed to rain at all. Week after week. Matthews had to water the garden quite frequently. He had his own way of doing this, taking the water straight from the cistern behind the house and distributing it about the garden by a complex system of shallow channels. The earth in among the shrubbery was baked hard, cinnamon coloured. The tennis-nets stiff and motionless. Miranda and I played at tracking. Her idea, it was her idea, to go crawling into the bushes. You could hear quite clearly from the shrubbery voices and sounds from the courts. The curious sound of racquet on ball, soft and ringing at the same time, like a bursting from within. The hasty voices of Henry or Frederick or one of their friends, calling out ‘Hard luck’ or something of that kind, insincerely. Mooncranker announcing the scores with a voice of considerable carrying power. Perhaps even then, in that summer, through those months of drought and whiteness you were debilitating yourself secretly, sir, dehydrating yourself in the privacy of your own apartments. Somewhat analogous to my own private activities at that time … There is a plasma in the blood and this plasma, if this plasma … Though judging by your fidelity to the scores, the fluctuating fortunes of the game, you were not in that era hitting the bottle. That day, in any case, the day I am thinking of, you were not umpiring, you couldn’t have been, because you were waiting for us when we emerged from the bushes …
The air in the shrubbery was so still, the leaves so motionless, it seemed that one heard minute things, the track of an insect, a butterfly bending a stamen, the contractions of the earth. In the intervals of tennis, we played a game of tracking sometimes, pretending to be hunters, freezing into immobility from time to time. A harmless game really. Be your age, Uncle George would have said. Though that is what we were being, really, myself thirteen, she fifteen, at once mocking the game and taking it seriously; acknowledging dimly that such a physical convention, involving agreed responses to the other’s body, was necessary to our knowledge of each other …
Straight from the tennis-courts, in our white clothes. Rhino! I arrest my body suddenly in a dramatic pose and she follows suit, her sun-flushed face simulating wariness. Then move slowly forward to get up wind of it, treading on the baked dusty earth as if there might be twigs to snap underfoot, animals really to startle. Legs pale gold, slender white-socked ankles, rounded calves flexing slightly with her steps as each took briefly the main weight of the wary trunk. Her idea.
One of the few bits of tracking she actually set under way: a grizzly in the heart of the bushes, in the depths of the cave formed by their ancient ramifications. A lurking, vindictive bear. Their bodies in the passage through the glossy dusty leaves thunderous in the absence of all other sound. Their breathing was loud when they finally reached the heart of the bush, in the cave formed by the outward arch of branches. Here they were able to kneel, regard each other with a laughter trembling into solemnity at this isolation from the world at large which they had contrived for themselves. She was flushed with exertion and the sense of occasion, brown hair sun-bleached falling forward round her face. Her tennis-dress had no sleeves in it. Close-fitting across the breast and at the waist. Having got there, having attained the lair, this created a precedent, established the ease with which whenever they wished they could cut themselves off from the rest of the world; and with this established they would almost certainly have crawled out again immediately, regained the path, but they were prevented by Matthews the gardener who came round the side of the house carrying a spade, and took up a position not a dozen yards away. The presence of someone outside, nearby, someone bound to see them if they emerged, imposed a sort of guilt on them, a feeling of constraint. They watched Matthews through the leaves, watering the garden.
It was not his practice to wander about the extensive garden holding hose-pipe or watering can, administering to each part its share. Early that summer, with a prescience of drought that bordered on the magical, he had dug irrigation canals in a system of his own devising, all over the garden. It was necessary only to open the cistern, to send the water gushing down the main channel and then stand by with a spade, clearing or damming certain key points – it was to this end that Matthews had stationed himself there, obliging them to remain concealed, since it seemed evident to both that they could not come crawling out of the bush in his full view …
Farnaby stirred and sighed. No sounds of any sort reached them in this room. Mooncranker was motionless, his eyes shut. The globules flexed like light down through the tube. Farnaby wondered if he should switch off the lamp near Mooncranker’s bed, but it seemed pointless now to do that. He was conscious of the faint beginnings of a desire to urinate.
‘The reluctance to be spotted by Matthews argues some guilty intention on our part.’ For some reason he had whispered this aloud, watching Mooncranker’s face, and he was distinctly startled, even rather frightened, to see the professor’s eyes open suddenly. He held his breath, wondering if Mooncranker would answer him. But after a few moments of bemused staring at the ceiling, Mooncranker muttered some indistinguishable words, seemingly on a note of interrogation, and closed his eyes again. Odd that he has refrained so far from asking me anything about the groom. He must be curious
to know the outcome. Odd, blurred creature that he is, improbable now as the prime mover of evil, which was for years what I thought him. Eyes closed, motionless profile, he can sleep and feed at once. Strange if he were thinking of that summer too, recreating behind closed lids and in his own darkness some of those scenes and conversations, that time he stopped me for example, that time, stopped me on my way to play tennis, there on the edge of the shrubbery, he was alone there and he stopped me and said, I believe you are interested in religious matters and I said nothing, but smiled in embarrassment. That was a time that the Leader would probably have thought suitable for bearing witness, but all I did was smile, feeling his eyes on me, pale lingering eyes. His tie was tightly knotted, a bright tie in a very small tight knot, and his shirt broad-collared and floppy, so there was a contrast, somehow elegant, somehow characteristic of him … Well, well, well, he said. I think now the idea was already in his mind, then, at that very moment, the intention fully formed, mature, of giving me the sausage-meat Christ …
Farnaby lay on his back staring up at the white ceiling. After a few moments he looked cautiously towards the other bed, but Mooncranker’s eyes were still closed and he made no movement. There was no sound in the room. He glanced at his watch: two o’clock. Once again, deliberately, he set himself to remember …
4
We were walking down the high street which had cobbled verges on either side, very wide ones, there were people who claimed that high street to be the widest in England. I saw fallen behind to look at kittens in a pet-shop window. I saw Henry and Frederick stop and talk to two girls. One of them smiled at me as I came up. White teeth, long lashes. She was as tall as I was. This is our cousin. We shook hands and I heard the name Miranda pronounced by one or other of the twins. Miranda Bolsover. Her hand was warm. There was something in her smile that made us allies …
Later that day, that same day, after meeting Miranda, I prayed in my room. In the coolness of my room I confided in God, but Miranda’s smile of complicity kept returning to me. I said the Lord’s Prayer with eyes tight-closed. I looked at the picture in my New Testament. Christ’s arms, outstretched thus, tautened the skin of his chest, brought into prominence rib-cage and breast-bone. His abdomen and pelvis passed sleekly, vertiginously down into the shelter of the white loincloth, the legs below were slender, shapely, quite hairless. When I looked at this picture, Christ’s desperate situation, poised thus in extremis, made him in some awful reverential way an object, which could be thought about in ways not possible for a completely living and human person. I could look at Christ’s body with complete immunity, but as I looked a sudden sense of wrong and sin took me by the throat, I convicted myself of baseness, and I was bewildered because I did not know the source of this welling of guilt.
Afterwards, on this same day, it is the afternoon of the day I met Miranda in the high street, immediately after my scrutiny of Christ, and infected by this unworthiness, I went to the dressing-table and stood before it to look at myself, and almost at once another feeling, excitement and a kind of pain arose in me and I went quickly and turned the key in the door. Once more in front of the glass I undressed myself, and stood naked there, hands at my sides in a position of attention. I surveyed my form, long-bodied, sallow-skinned, thin. My fairish pubic bush. My exposure excited me in the cool room. Slowly, as I stood there, my penis erected itself, reared up a swollen cowled head. It was the only part of my skin that was not white. I touched myself but I was frightened by the sickness almost, the giddiness of excitement that assailed me. I took my hand from it as from a fire. I dressed again, quickly, carelessly, and hastily left the house.
No, it was not on that occasion that I began doing it, it was not until a week later, I began the day we went along the river. This day, the day I am thinking of now, I dressed quickly and went out into the garden.
Day after day without a hint of rain. Each day identical with the one before: clear cloudless skies, a hot sun, windless mostly, except for sporadic breezes springing up sometimes towards the end of the afternoon. People constantly remarking on the weather, how difficult to recall such a long succession of perfect summer days. In the fields around the house, grain ripening. The garden itself humming, throbbing, germinating. Order and decorum in the areas attended by Matthews, in the rose-garden, the shrubbery, the flower-beds round the lawn – where gladioli full-fleshed consorted with hollyhock and lupin, a regular riot of colour as Uncle George no doubt would have it, conceding that Matthews knew his job all right, though an insolent fellow. Yes, all in order there; but regions existed beyond his scope, there were places he never penetrated, over on the other side, beyond the little lake and straggling orchard, an area roughly square-shaped, perhaps a hundred yards across, a midsummer wilderness now, dense with nettle and dock and tall grasses with silky bluish seed-cases, cow-parsley with flowers bigger than human faces growing among neglected currant-bushes, and great clumps of white elder-flower – all the flowers in that part of the garden, all that I can remember, are white.
I make my way here, today, as on numerous other occasions;it is my favourite part of the garden. I am not thinking now of the day I rushed out from my room, but of a day later on in the summer, when everything was more advanced. Mooncranker had already given me the Christ then, it was fixed to the tree in the secret place that only I knew about. This was after Miranda and I had won the tennis tournament.
I walk through this part, sometimes bending to move aside the thick clumps of elder which grow so close to the ground. Beyond are the hawthorn hedges bounding the garden, they are in white flower too; with wild roses and honeysuckle growing amongst them, also white – everything that emerges, flowers out from the green mass of leafage, is white in colour and characterized by a thickness of odour, a certain rank sweetness. Things originally delicate in scent, like the wild roses, get drawn in, overpowered, add their thin tributary stream to the confluence. At times it is like wading, half-submerged, in a green sea, flecked along its soft crests with the flowers and odours; I feel the whole expanse heave around me as if I am indeed among waves, the whirr and hiss of insects like the sibilance of ocean; the multiple scents too an accompaniment to the sway, as if the very heaving and exertions of the ground released the odours of its existence in degrees of intensity quite unpredictable; alternate clamour and hush through which I wade, bearing my own need, the taut excitement of my intention, because I know what I am making for and what I shall do when I get there, I have done it often before that summer and in that place.
Excitement fills me, indistinguishable from a sort of panic, as if I might be engulfed before I can reach my sanctuary, but I always do reach it and stand within the enclosure of thickly leaved branches, bounded on all sides, the hedge beyond rising to a height of perhaps ten feet and quite impenetrable, an inviolate area into which the frantic life of the garden does not penetrate. Grass beneath my feet, kept low and green by the perpetual shade. Before me, against the seamed silver trunk, the effigy of Christ shines luminously, sunlight falls through the upper branches on to it; on to the lateral folds of bandage, the blind, helmeted head, around which, in this zone of sunlight, I see the gauze and glint of insects’ wings and hear a faint liturgical humming, as I unbutton myself to free the rigid pulsating creature or sometimes undress partially and standing or kneeling in my refuge enact the ritual I have come for in suffocating silence, in full view of the figure on the tree whom I make thus, guilt contending with pleasure, my accomplice, yes, he became my accomplice that summer, the server of my corrupted imagination and the outrage I did to him deepened my final spasms – which I had learned by now to protract … It was not far from the house really, in a material sense at least. Sometimes, in the pensive aftermath of my indulgence, I would hear sounds from there, or from the tennis-courts, if there was a game in progress, you could hear voices, the sharp resonant impact of tennis racquet and ball …
But that was much later in the summer. I was practised then in Solitary Vice. That
was what the Leader called it. ‘I am speaking now,’ he said, ‘to each and every one of you, your body is the temple of God.’ He looked at us one by one. Deighton went red. ‘I too have had to struggle with impurity,’ the Leader said. ‘Pray for strength.’
The first time was not when I undressed that day in my room, though it nearly was. The first time was after we went for the walk along the river. There was a river that ran through the fields in a wide valley not very far from the house. After lunch one day we set off for a walk along it and that was only the second time in my life I spoke to Miranda. There were about ten of us altogether I think, all friends of Henry and Frederick, all older than me – I was always the youngest. I don’t remember them all. The asthmatic boy was there and his sister and Alan. Miranda of course, and two other girls. The girls walked all together at first, in front. Henry had a Webley air pistol. The girls walked together, talking quietly but occasionally breaking into quite loud laughter which made them cling together. Alan’s girl, who I had found out was called Mary, was wearing slacks, but the others were wearing dresses. I watched Miranda walking, the slight rounding of her calves as she set her feet down. I thought she walked beautifully. She was several inches taller than the other girls and she walked very upright. Even when they stopped for their clinging mirth it seemed that she did it on sufferance only, indulging the others. The river wound in slow curves through meadows knee high in grass and clover and buttercups. After the rainless days the water was down, the banks of dried reddish clay sloped on our side to flat verges of shingle.
Mooncranker's Gift Page 9
