Mooncranker's Gift

by Barry Unsworth

  ‘We are having a discussion,’ the bald man said. ‘This is Henry Samson and I am Alexis Petsalis.’

  ‘How do you do?’ Farnaby said. ‘My name is James Farnaby.’

  ‘Mr Samson is a painter,’ Petsalis said and would have continued if Farnaby, grown more adroit since being cornered earlier by Plopl the photographer, had not excused himself on the grounds that a friend was waiting for him. In order to make this convincing he was obliged to move away. He took several steps outward towards the centre of the pool, then moved in again at an angle of about ninety degrees, calculating that this would bring him once again within hearing distance. To his dismay, however, he saw that Mrs Pritchett and the girl were no longer there. He went right up to the wall, but there was no sign of them. Suddenly he saw Spumantini again, but the Levantine turned at once and began moving away along the poolside. Farnaby stood still and the former irresolution returned to him. He looked across the pool in an effort to make out individual faces and forms. Snatches of conversation came to him without his registering them as sense.

  A man loomed suddenly out of the mist wading steadily chest high in the direction of the bridge. When he drew level Farnaby saw with irrepressible aversion that he had a large goitre at the side of his neck, a livid bulge like a fungus. The man passed without turning his head, and Farnaby looked after him, in the grip of a sort of dread, as if there had been something relevant to himself, some threat or warning, in the sudden appearance of this unfortunate, bemonstered man, who now rapidly receded into the mist. Peering after him, Farnaby made out two forms, standing close together, one tall one short, whom he took to be Samson and Petsalis, still engaged presumably in their discussion about the nature of art; and beyond them he thought he saw a white glimmering spherical object like a ball or a bathing cap. Then Petsalis extended an arm and light struck through the vapour and elicited from his raised hand glitters and splinters of brightness, not the soft gleam of wet flesh that his eyes had grown accustomed to since entering the pool – it was as though the man’s hand had been endowed with magical properties. Farnaby thought that all the people in the pool must be looking towards this radiance and wondering about it. Miranda too would be watching. Then Petsalis took his other hand to it, eclipsing its light, and by some characteristic series of gestures it became all at once evident to Farnaby that it was simply after all a cigarette case: the Greek was offering his friend a cigarette. This restoration of the commonplace reassured him, quickened his purpose. I must find Miranda without delay, he told himself. He began to move slowly and cautiously along the side of the pool, keeping a watchful eye ahead.

  ‘Well, their proud boast is unfounded,’ the girl said, in cold rather sarcastic tones, ‘but completely, because I have a friend who has actually lived in Athens and she told me that the things they get up to in those Athens trolleybuses in the rush hour have to be seen to be believed.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’ Lusk said, disconcerted by the unfaltering speech of the girl, the clear current of scorn in her voice, above all the absence of laughter, even of smiling – he could not see her face very clearly because they were in a dark part of the pool, but it was completely serious as far as he could make out, a heart-shaped, level-browed face. It was the third time that evening he had tried out his topic. The other two had been laughing and friendly but had somehow drifted away. Third time lucky, he told himself.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I had it on good authority –’

  ‘Yes,’ the girl said, ‘they jam them in so tightly in those trolleybuses, there is no limit to the number of people standing, I suppose you know that, you can’t move, you don’t even know who is groping you.’

  ‘My God, is that a fact?’ Lusk said.

  ‘It’s not only hands, either,’ the girl said. ‘My friend had a new summer dress completely ruined. No, it’s the same in Athens as anywhere else, all men are the same, all they want to do is get into your knickers. I expect you’re the same too, aren’t you?’

  ‘I guess so,’ Lusk said, laughing nervously. He could hardly believe it, she was as good as inviting him. The boys back in Izmir had been absolutely right. He tried to feel jubilant but could not. The girl’s frankness intimidated him. He would have preferred some dissimulation. He had an odd feeling that the girl was using the topic on him.

  The pause was threatening to become ignominious. Lusk sensed the beginnings of a new disdain in the girl. He splashed his arms a little, bending his legs in order to lower his slightly chilly upper half into the water. From this position he spoke. ‘You’d think,’ he said, ‘it would get cold after a while. Kind of like being in a hot bath. But it never does.’

  ‘It can’t, you see,’ the girl said, in the same clear, unfaltering tone. ‘It is constantly replenished. You didn’t think it was the same water all the time, did you?’

  ‘No, I didn’t, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘I believe that is what you did think.’

  ‘It certainly is not.’

  ‘It comes from under the earth. It comes from a subterranean spring. Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘Yes, I knew it,’ Lusk said. He was disturbed by the hostility in the girl’s voice. Perhaps she was annoyed with him for not rising to the occasion promptly. Never had he felt less like rising, in any sense of the term. It struck him as unfair, terribly unfair, that he, who spent so much of his time in lustful fantasy, bursting out of his trousers when there was no one around, should feel so cold and shrunken now when his topic had borne fruit, when at last there was a prospect, more than a prospect by God, this girl was crying out for it. He mustn’t let the occasion slip. Tonight’s the night, he told himself. Perhaps a drink would be a good idea.

  ‘How about a drink?’ he said.

  ‘Raki,’ the girl said.

  ‘Okay,’ Lusk raised wet hands out of the water and clapped for Senemoǧlu. God let him not ignore my clapping, he prayed.

  ‘What I couldn’t stand about him,’ Mrs Pritchett said, ‘what in the end proved impossible to suffer, in the sense of live with, come to terms with, was just this complete inability of his to admit experience …’

  By a process gradual, insensible and at the same time partly willed, they had moved along the side of the pool, away from the lights and the voices, into an area where the water was quite deep – rising now to the base of Mrs Pritchett’s collarbone and the tip of the girl’s chin.

  ‘How can I explain it to you?’ Mrs Pritchett said. ‘He was afraid of being swamped.’

  The other listened, occasionally moving her burdened head from side to side as if in restlessness or the stress of not completely understanding.

  ‘When did you say this happened?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, not so very long ago.’ Mrs Pritchett’s strong white teeth were revealed in a momentary smile. ‘I wasn’t a girl, by any means. But I have come to regard it as the central event of my life. Walking out on Mark, I mean. Much more so than anything to do with my marriage. For the first time in I don’t know how many years I found myself free. Free to travel, to come to wonderful historical places like this. Free above all to be myself.’ She moved forward a little, and her instep brushed against the front of the girl’s leg.

  ‘Mark was good to me, in his way,’ she said, after a moment. ‘He just wasn’t right.’ She thought briefly of that kindness, distant now, like the weather in a country one will never revisit. ‘He had a strong character,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I am boring you with all this.’

  ‘Oh no,’ the girl said. ‘Not at all.’

  Though strength, Mrs Pritchett thought, is perhaps not the right word, a soft enveloping obstinacy more like it, he enveloped my clumsiness and violence, my voice too loud, too excitable. Regarding my oddities as outrages on him, slight of course, and salutary, so long as he could contain them.

  ‘It was as though he needed to be outraged,’ she said. ‘So that he could sort of billow out and keep on containing me. Do you understand what I mean?’

  ‘I thi
nk so, yes,’ the girl said.

  ‘Goodness,’ Mrs Pritchett said gaily, ‘we are having a heart to heart, aren’t we?’

  The girl said, ‘I think it is very interesting.’

  ‘Do you really?’ Mrs Pritchett felt a strong impulse to raise her hand and touch the girl’s face. ‘How marvellous it is,’ she said, ‘to find a sympathetic listener. And how rare. Anyway that’s what I hated most, that sort of indulgence and containment going on. He went on struggling to fit me into his scheme of things. In the end I was doing or saying anything, you know, anything that came into my head, to break out of it. Deliberately eccentric things. But he had to go on trying to keep it all in place. As I look back on it now, the only thing to do was walk out.’ As stifling, this helpless, obstinate accommodation of Mark’s to her vagaries, as the physical weight of him in the narrow bed at the doctor’s cottage.

  ‘It was a failure, really, from the start,’ she said. ‘I remember the evening when I left him. I suppose all this had been on my mind, but at the time it seemed like an impulse, there was no planning in it. I just walked away from him along the river bank. It was about eight o’clock, an evening in June. Masses of buttercups everywhere and one of the fields by the river had been planted with beans and they were in flower. Tremendously fragrant, you know. Mark was standing in the middle of the river facing downstream. You have to, you know. The water was silver, flowing past him, and he looked dark against it. He wasn’t moving and the water was, and it struck me at the time as a symbol somehow. He never saw me go and I have never seen him since, though we did exchange letters.’

  ‘You didn’t think, did you, the girl said, ‘that they brought you the raki in glasses?’

  She seemed to be implying that such ignorance indicated a deeper inexpertise or disability on Lusk’s part.

  ‘You seem to know what gives round here,’ Lusk said.

  ‘I keep my eyes open.’

  ‘Do you mean you have never been here before?’

  ‘I don’t mean anything of the sort.’ She refilled her glass with raki from the carafe on the edge of the terrace behind them.

  In the pause that now fell Lusk heard a voice saying ‘Listen Henry, what I am saying can be applied to sexual intercourse. If you love a person your whole being is concentrated on that person, you want to spend yourself on that person, you want to discharge on that person. It is the same when writing a poem or painting a picture.’

  Then the speaker must have changed position for Lusk heard nothing further. He wondered if the girl had heard it too. She gave no sign of having done so.

  ‘The guys in Izmir told me this was a great place,’ Lusk said. ‘They told me to come here. They told me you could meet people here. And I met you, so they were dead right.’

  ‘Who were, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘The guys in Izmir, these friends of mine.’

  The girl drained her glass, set it down on the terrace behind her. She stood very erect, looking at Lusk. ‘Why don’t you stop beating about the bloody bush?’ she said. Lusk stared at her.

  ‘Going on about those turds in Izmir,’ she said. Her shoulders rose in a swift shrug. ‘You’re after the same thing they’re all after,’ she said, with no abatement of that clear confident tone. ‘All right,’ she said, as if yielding at last to a long course of importuning. ‘Shall we go to your cabin or to mine? God, men are such animals.’

  Lusk regarded her dumbly. His shoulders felt chilly.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ the girl said.

  Lusk swallowed some slight blockage in his throat, advanced a stumbling pace and put his arms round the girl. Her back was slippery with wet. She pushed herself against him and he felt her abdomen leap like a fish.

  Mrs Pritchett had the feeling that every word she was saying was a dart, a projectile, as though she were not so much speaking in sequence of words to the girl’s mind as tattooing her tale in a pattern with needles on to the stretched and quivering sensibility. Never, she felt, had she been so listened to. The pale, glimmering oval of the girl’s face seemed to float above the surface detached from the body. And on this patient oval she inflicted her tale. So much was she absorbed in it, and so much did she feel the subjection of her companion, that it came as a shock, almost a violation, when the other in a tone no different from that in which she had with mild queries abetted the story, excused herself and smiling moved away. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ she promised, and Mrs Pritchett surmised she was going to the loo – there were four rather rudimentary brick-built ones in a line at the side farthest from the entrance and another alongside the reception desk, but there was in any case no possibility of seeing in which direction the girl had gone, because in a matter of seconds she had vanished into the milky vapour. Mrs Pritchett followed her mentally, however, visualizing that slender form moving through the water, the taut thighs set one before the other, bearing steady above them the navelled, nippled stalk of the body …

  ‘Aha, Mrs Pritchett,’ said the thick respectful voice of Vittorio Spumantini from close behind her. ‘So here you are?’ This was a disingenuous speech on his part because he had known her whereabouts for quite some time. ‘I was wondering, will you have supper with me,’ he said. ‘Are you feeling peckish?’

  Mrs Pritchett looked through the dimness at the pale expanse of Spumantini’s face, on a level with her own, imagining the expression there would be in his brown, spaniel eyes. Some of the former rage returned, mingled now with resignation – she would not, she knew, find it easy to shake him off the scent again. Noting her hesitation, Spumantini entered into more detail, a habit of his which she particularly disliked. ‘We go in,’he said, ‘we have something to eat, maybe a drink or so. Yes?’

  ‘I know what the word supper implies, Mr Spumantini,’ Mrs Pritchett said. Spumantini underwent an erotic throb at the severity of the words and the contempt implicit in the absolute correctness of the elocution, the ineffable drawl on the second syllable of ‘supper’, the obstinacy with which she pronounced the first part of his name ‘spew’ – doubly contemptuous this, as he had attempted to correct her once.

  ‘It is a genuine offer,’ he said.

  Mrs Pritchett considered. She did not want to mix Spumantini up with the girl. It would be embarrassing and might put the girl off – she might feel she was intruding, that she was de trop, especially if this creature allowed his admiration to express itself too crudely. And there would, after all, be further opportunities for getting to know the girl better …

  ‘Very well,’ she said coldly. ‘I’ll go and get changed now. I’ll meet you in the dining-room in about twenty minutes.’

  ‘I always looked for affinities before,’ Lusk said uneasily. ‘That has been my trouble.’

  The girl lay on her back under the sheet, with her eyes closed, white-faced and breathing heavily. She was like a patient under anaesthetic. Not so much of a girl either, as Lusk could not help noticing. She must be twenty-six or seven, he told himself, with feelings of awe. The oil lamp at the bed side had been already lit when they entered. She had turned it low but there was enough light in the room for him to see her frail-looking, delicate-boned face, the frictive shine of her eyelids. The mouth was thin, slightly open to emit the noisy breath. Reclining on one elbow Lusk took an alarmed inventory of her features. ‘I guess I’m a romantic, at heart,’ he said.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ she said, without opening her eyes. ‘Get on with it.’

  Despite this urging, because of it rather, he hesitated still. Things had happened so quickly: emerging from the pool, going along the chilly terrace into her cabin, slipping out of his trunks and into the bed. He had had no time to recover from the dread suddenness of the invitation, no time to generate desire. The woman too had seemed to his bemused senses to move with the speed of light, stripping off her bathing suit, rubbing herself down with a powder-blue towel and slipping between the sheets all in a blur almost. She had not smiled or touched him or made any gesture of kindnes
s or tenderness. Now she lay there on her back as if about to undergo an operation. It was not thus that Lusk, dreaming in his lonely room in Izmir, listening on the fringes of others’ conversations, hearing talk of lissom, eager girls, not thus he had envisaged things.

  He shifted a little in the bed and squinting down below the sheet, saw a taut throat, a well-muscled shoulder, sallow vertical creases at the left, the nearest armpit, the arm itself pressed virginally close to the flank; beyond this the left breast, or most of it, softly heaped, as if the flesh had drifted, duned randomly, like snow. Surmounted by a rather chewed-looking nipple –

  ‘What are you waiting for?’

  Looking up, Lusk met blue eyes, furiously hostile. He felt himself beginning to blush. Partly in order to conceal his blushes he ducked his head down and took the nipple in his mouth. The nipple and the flesh round it tasted peculiarly bitter. A world away he heard her voice saying ‘Beastly little opportunist,’ apparently in reference to him. ‘Degrading myself,’ he heard her say. Of course it was simply the pool taste, he decided, the bosom tasted of the pool. He continued to mumble and suck at it, listening to the remote voice somewhere above him, a dull, droning voice, consistent with a prosy sort of fever, saying, ‘If they could see me now.’ It dropped to an indistinguishable mumble for some moments, then rose again:

  ‘After everything they did for me. All the money my father spent on my education. He was a vicar, you bloody twerp, and would have turned his mind away from anything repulsive. Instinctively. I was given piano lessons, you untutored oaf, what are you doing down there? I had a pony of my own. My godfather too, a commissioner of oaths and affidavits …’

  ‘It can’t be like this,’ Lusk told himself. Sucking a bitter breast, while a voice referred to him as twerp and turd. It can’t be like this, he insisted to himself in a small blind frenzy of revolt, not ceasing, however to roll the nipple round under his tongue.

  The girl turned towards him, uttering a sort of groan. ‘You filthy beast,’ she said loudly. ‘I belong in the gutter with this filthy beast.’