Mooncranker's Gift

by Barry Unsworth

  ‘Are you awake, sir?’ Farnaby said, in low tones.

  ‘I fear so.’ Mooncranker had awakened to physical pain and vague anguish of spirit. The inside of his mouth hurt him considerably and his head ached. In spite of his sleep he felt exhausted. He gazed up at the bleak ceiling, grey in the dawn.

  ‘Listen, Farnaby,’ he said. ‘Are you listening? I must have her back.’ He moved his tongue slowly over the sore roof of his mouth. ‘I would go myself,’ he said, ‘but I don’t feel quite up to it.’

  A silence followed. Mooncranker grew frightened. ‘I will pay all expenses, of course,’ he said. ‘Plus a sum for the inconvenience. Whatever you think reasonable.’ He did not know why it had become so important that Farnaby should go. No one else, of course, that he could ask; but there was another reason for insisting, both vaguer and more imperative; an obscure yet urgent sense of fitness.

  ‘Just tell me one thing.’ Farnaby said, but before he could proceed, Mooncranker started speaking again, in haste to forestall the question that he felt to be coming.

  ‘It is not far from the ancient city of Laodicea. The pool, I mean. It is itself on the site of the city of Hierapolis, about which less is known, though I myself believe it is of even more venerable date. I talked to her a lot about it. About the pool, I mean. Water constantly at about blood heat, reputed to have miraculous healing properties …’

  ‘No, but tell me one thing,’ Farnaby said. He was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling. ‘Why did you give me that little effigy of Christ on the Cross, made of sausage-meat and all wrapped up in white bandage? Your giving that to a thirteen-year-old boy I cannot understand. I mean the motive behind it.’

  His heart was beating with excitement, now that he had at last put the question so fully and clearly.

  After a moment or two Mooncranker said, ‘Your parents wrote that you were going through a religious phase.’

  Then there was a prolonged silence, through which Farnaby waited patiently, thinking that something more must be added.

  Finally, however, he said, ‘Are you saying that they suggested it to you?’

  He had not spoken of it to them, nor indeed to anyone; returning after that summer holiday to the same house but now his mother only, to pursuits and preoccupations in which Christ figured scarcely at all, except as a sort of repugnance, a memory to make him wince. Shame had prevented any explanations. That and the sense that there was no solace anywhere for it, since the adult world itself had dealt him this blow. And, perhaps most of all, the peculiar horror of the circumstances …

  It came to him again now in a heavy wave of recollection, how summer had conspired to shut out the world, thickening the clumps at the base of the lime trees, weaving grass among the shrubs, hanging everything with flowers. Scents too hemmed him in. The space inside the branches almost swooningly private and screened. The white crucified figure above him on the seamed trunk as he knelt. But kneeling was ambiguous accompanied by anticipation of pleasure that quickened his heart, not at all the calm resolve of confession with which one knelt in prayer. It was this, this impure excitement, that grew stronger as his solitude and impunity came home to him, affirmed as always by the white flowers, that rank sweetness, the helmeted and softly aureoled figure on his cross on the tree; corrupted by the former occasions on which in this enclosed space he had extracted from his flesh lonely pangs, always before, however, or at least so he thought, always with some reluctance, some residual sense of offending Christ, until this day when an ingenuity rose in him, element in his excitement, a sort of cruelty directed at the suffering figure on the tree. Kneeling still, steadily braving the image, only in the last moments, in the very throes of his ecstasy ceasing to gaze at it, raising his face to the remote formations of cirrus in the sky above him … For a moment he was tempted to say something of all this to Mooncranker, in an effort to make him understand. How he had afterwards approached the effigy, to see a stirring amidst the strands of white bandage, an activity that might have been caused by a breeze, though there was none; and as if this perception had sharpened his other senses, he had smelt for the first time the putrid odour, no longer a strand merely in the complicated rope of summer, but sharp and single, odour of Christ’s decay, and had seen, while nausea climbed in his throat, the folds of the bandage stirred by peeping white maggots, from which he could not – culminating horror – immediately escape, his stumbling retreat to light and air cut off by gasping track-suited Uncle George pounding round the lawn …

  Mooncranker said, ‘The hot springs rise on the hillside among the ruins of the city and they are channelled southwards, gather into pools farther down. I have read a good deal about it, everything I could find. There are fallen columns and fragments of antique masonry in the pool itself, you can see them through the clear water, marvellous sight. The pool is deep enough to swim in. The temperature of course is constant, in all seasons, and there is a sort of –’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t accept that,’ Farnaby interrupted, but gently, looking again with a feeling of wonder at Mooncranker’s exhausted, bird-like profile.

  ‘I assure you it is all quite true,’ Mooncranker said.

  ‘No, I don’t mean about the pool, I mean what you said before, about my parents. I don’t believe they had anything to do with it. I wish you would think back to those days, sir. There must have been some reason behind it.’

  Resigning himself with a sort of obedience, in response at any rate to Farnaby’s evident eagerness, Mooncranker sought in his mind for a steady view of those summer days, but Miranda took up all the foreground, the peach tan of her arms and legs, her darkly blushing face, the faint grass stains on the white skirt of her tennis dress, her eagerness, listening to him. Farnaby’s hand he thought he remembered again, the scratched, long-fingered, thin-wristed hand. No doubt, no denying that the thing had been given to the boy, and by him. But to find the feeling again after these years and especially now, deserted and frightened as he was … Desire he could remember, and jealousy too: things related to possession; but the malignity that had inspired the gift, the distant spurt of malevolence, impossible now to rediscover. Into his groping mind there came the memory of heat and stillness, boy and girl crawled laughing out of the glassy laurels, while he stood there above them. The laughing children faded, themselves merging into that white opaque stillness, which was all around him now, he was alone in it, nothing remained, memory and senses were sealed off, there was no possible answer to Farnaby’s question. Gradually, into this glazed stillness where his being lay, there crept a desire that his life could end, here and now, or soon.

  Farnaby said, in self-deprecating tones, ‘I thought my actions had been responsible for it, for Christ decaying.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Mooncranker said.

  ‘Did Uncle George know about it?’

  ‘I’m sorry dear boy, I can’t talk about it now, I simply can’t. Will you go?’

  ‘No,’ Farnaby said. He paused. Anger against Mooncranker rose in him, anger at this selfishness, as he thought it, this refusal to explain. ‘No, I won’t go,’ he said.

  Desperately, Mooncranker sought in his mind for an acceptable formula. The ability to find formulas had been one of his greatest assets as a chairman of discussion groups.

  ‘It was a theory of outrage,’ he said. ‘In those days I believed in moral progress. Just as material progress depends on checks and obstacles in order to breed ingenuity as it were, so I believed that outrage, the violation of traditional pieties, could extend man’s moral range, give him energy to embrace contradictions, apparent contradictions ...’

  He fell silent, exhausted by this effort. All he wanted now, was to be rid of Farnaby.

  ‘Do you mean you foresaw it?’ Farnaby said, in wondering tones. ‘You foresaw what would happen and the shock it would give me?’

  ‘I wanted you to reconcile the divinity and the decay,’ Mooncranker said. ‘Will you go?’

  ‘She may not have
gone there at all. And in any case, how should I recognize her?’

  ‘Recognize her?’ Mooncranker turned his head slowly to regard him. ‘Recognize her? But you know her, dear boy. It is Miranda, the girl you used to play tennis with.’

  For a moment Farnaby thought Mooncranker must be lying. Then immediately he knew it was the truth. And he knew in that moment that he would go. Automatically he glanced at his watch: almost six o’clock. Soon they would be bringing breakfast …

  ‘Very well,’ he said. He closed his eyes, waiting for the day.

  Part Three

  1

  Getting out of the taxi, extruding and finally extricating his long-legged angular body, in his not completely coordinated way, hasty and wavering and somehow graceful too; counting out into the driver’s palm Turkish coins of small denomination, several of which were dropped in the process; bidding the driver farewell – ‘depart rejoicing’ as the Turks say: all the while he was aware of an unsought, unwished for enlargement, he had a sense of space and distance, the sky immense above him, the breeze smelling of snow. He had not looked out much on his way up from the town. Rehearsing his lines of inquiry, for one thing; and then the taxi itself had not afforded much of a view, being of ancient American manufacture with very narrow windows like gun embrasures. So he had not noticed how high they were getting. Now, deposited before tall gates on a level circular forecourt, he felt the breeze at his ankles, raised reluctant eyes to distant, snow-capped peaks.

  ‘God be with you,’ the taxi-driver said, smiling broadly, and once again as politeness demanded he told the driver to depart rejoicing, noticing that in fact the broad smile was persisting as the man drove away. A genial soul, or perhaps he overcharged me. Mooncranker’s money anyway.

  Tall gates of wrought iron standing open, flanked by high brick walls. Nothing inscribed or emblazoned upon them either in admonition or blandishment. Some yards of tarmac driveway then a building with swing-doors. Swing-doors the world over admit you to where the action is and sure enough he saw on his left a counter and a man behind it of large build and behind the man a row of keys hanging. He knew himself then to be in the region of order, due form and procedure, things were beginning to turn out a little as he had envisaged, this was a reception area to which new arrivals addressed themselves, with a person on duty trained to answer inquiries courteously.

  He approached this person now, with his own blend of diffidence and hauteur, slightly splay-footed, suggesting a sort of crippled grace as he hesitated at the counter. The man did not smile or even change expression, which was disconcerting. Farnaby said, ‘Good morning,’ setting down his suitcase, remembering with some further loss of confidence that it was in fact mid-afternoon, but in any case there was no reply.

  ‘Can you tell me,’ he said, ‘if there is a Miss Bolsover staying here? Miss Miranda Bolsover. Buda kaliormi?’

  The name sounded improbable in these surroundings, tentatively proffered to this sombre Turk, and Farnaby himself could not quite believe in it: it seemed like a code or password that the other by some unfortunate chance had not been informed about when coming on duty. ‘Ingiliz kiz, ismin Bolsover,’ he added, rather hopelessly. The man behind the counter raised his hand as if enjoining patience, then turned abruptly and disappeared into some recess beyond.

  Minutes passed. There was a silence over the place. Perhaps they were all taking their siestas, he thought. Looking inwards, beyond the counter, he saw a sunlit section of terrace, a table and chairs painted pale blue, part of a red beach umbrella, paraphernalia remote and bright and empty like someone else’s private idea or dream of leisure. Wisps of vapour rose from beyond the paving of the terrace and he surmised the pool lay there, though some sort of superstition prevented him for the moment from actually going to see. He still felt slightly uneasy at being so high above sea level, having assumed that hot springs would be a phenomenon of the plains, nearer earth’s burning core; these glimpses of intestinal steam were oddly disquieting.

  At the side of the counter there was a glass-fronted structure, presumably a show-case of some kind. Empty now, however, completely bare of everything except for one large and living moth, a beautifully marked black and yellow moth which must somehow have managed to get itself imprisoned there. Farnaby watched the creature crawl slowly across the glass, something it had doubtless done quite often. Its wings were frayed and ragged: freedom now, even if it could be achieved, would come too late. Nevertheless he cast his eyes over the front of the case for possible means of freeing the creature. He was relieved not to find any. Better off where it was, with its wings now useless, under the glass where it was warm. Or one last heroic effort to fly and the cold air quickly killing it? Crucial choice.

  He picked up a travel folder that was lying on the counter and finding it was in English began to read it. He was disappointed to find it was not about the pool, but some resort he had never heard of, in the far south of Turkey.

  All comers will find something here to their taste, with green hills rolling down to bathe in the warm sea and the promenades lined with majestical dishevelled palm trees.

  What other attractions there were he never discovered. Looking up vaguely, mind at grips with sportive hills and palms like duchesses in disarray, he saw before him a man of short stature with a brilliant smile.

  ‘Good day sir. How do you do? I am the manager,’ this man said.

  ‘I was just asking the clerk – ’ Farnaby began.

  ‘Excuse me. That is not a clerk. That is a gate-keeper. Kapici, yes. It is a husband of a cleaner woman. I place him sometimes here when I am called away.’ The manager’s smile flickered for a few moments, as if someone were tampering with the source of power. ‘To avoid an appearance of emptiness,’ he said. ‘You would like a room perhaps?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ Farnaby said. I ought to have known that, of course, book a room first. Then afterwards you can make casual inquiries. ‘You have rooms vacant I suppose?’ he said.

  ‘Ho, yes. Now is the beginning of the dead season. Moreover, there are vacant rooms, yes.’ He smiled with full brilliance at Farnaby. ‘I will give you the room number twelve,’ he said, with what seemed a burst of enthusiasm or generosity, and Farnaby, who had been taught always to respond to manifestations of good will, uttered his thanks.

  ‘That’s a good room, is it?’ he said.

  ‘All the rooms are the same,’ the manager replied.

  After a short pause, Farnaby said, ‘I think you may have an acquaintance of mine staying here.’

  ‘Yes? You wish for a room near his?’

  ‘It is a woman, a girl rather.’

  ‘So much the better.’

  ‘Her name,’ Farnaby said austerely, ‘is Miss Miranda Bolsover. Perhaps you could check whether she is here or not.’

  ‘But there are a number of girls here. You will see her, if you stay.’

  ‘Yes,’ Farnaby said. ‘That is so of course. But she may not be here.’

  The manager made no reply to this and there was now a silence between them protracted to a point surprising to Farnaby. Looking more closely at the manager’s face he realized by the remoteness of its expression that the man was not thinking about this problem. In fact he appeared to have suspended thought entirely until the need for it should be over.

  Farnaby glanced again at the section of terrace, the red parasol, the faint swirls of vapour beyond. ‘Don’t you keep a register?’ he said. He had been sure that a register would be kept, even in this remote part of Turkey, even at a thermal pool reputed to possess healing properties. Keeping a register was the proper thing to do. ‘After all,’ he said, in his light, rather bleating voice, ‘you do offer accommodation, don’t you?’

  ‘Register?’ The manager was flickering again.

  ‘A list. Don’t you keep a list of guests, don’t you enter their names in a book?’

  ‘Maalesef.’ The manager shrugged, repudiating blame without attaching it elsewhere. ‘Moreover in the dead
season we relax formalities,’ he said. ‘If you could describe your friend …’

  ‘No,’ Farnaby said. ‘I will wait and see for myself.’

  ‘As you wish. Will you see the room now?’

  ‘Very well.’ This man obviously never kept registers, either of the quick or the dead. Miranda might have given a false name anyway, he told himself. Still, he felt a certain sense of outrage.

  The manager snapped his fingers with astonishing loudness, and the gatekeeper appeared, expressionless as ever. There was an exchange of Turkish between them and then the gatekeeper picked up Farnaby’s case and went off with it. Farnaby and the manager followed.

  Emerging at last on to the terrace he felt exposed, vulnerable. It was as if he had left some dark sheltering place to be bombarded and pierced with sensations of light. Sunlight, in the windless enclosure of the pool, was reflected in dazzling coruscations from white and blue tiling, moved on the water itself in rippling gleams, patterned with shifting infusions the wreaths of steam lying above the surface. Farnaby was constitutionally timid, with a developed sense of traps and hazards, and this assault of the light reduced his confidence, reviving certain fears of radiance or brightness, recurrent since his childhood, fears of being gutted by an intensity of light as by fire. There was thus from the start an impression of danger and brightness which both sharpened and distorted everything he saw and hindered him from making cool appraisals; a disability not fully apparent to him until much later, though it affected him now as he walked along the terrace, not permitting more than a confused sense of persons here and there in the pool, immersed to their chests and motionless, as if the water had thickened, and trapped them there. The pool was much larger than he had thought, shaped like an irregular figure of eight, with a white footbridge spanning the narrowest part and white wooden cabins on three sides, joined each to each, numbers painted on them in blue paint. All this he took in with quivering eyelids, head lowered to the suddenly voluble manager, to whose dapper steps he tried to accommodate his own. They passed together over the narrow bridge.