‘But you intended to go back again.’
‘I suppose so, yes.’
‘Or at least,’ Farnaby said, ‘you made sure he knew where you had gone. So that he could come after you.’
She looked at him for a few moments without replying, frowning slightly as if in doubt, yet somehow watchful too, and he suddenly saw how her face had changed from his recollection of it, how all faces change probably: it had become tentative, used to responding to the expectations of others, used to dissembling too. All that vivid autonomy of childhood had gone from it. In the faint lines, that would deepen with age, there was an aquiescence full of sadness, and Farnaby felt a constriction of the heart at this discrepancy, this failure of the memory to tally, a failure in which, however, he obscurely sensed a source of tenderness between them, as if both views of her would in the end be mutually reinforcing, the sorrows of her face now lending poignancy to the independent flame and vehemence of her life then, that summer.
‘I really don’t know,’ she said, ‘what I intended to do. I suppose I didn’t really mean to break with him completely. I wasn’t going to anything, you see. I mean, it was all related to him.’
‘Well,’ Farnaby said, with conscious duplicity, ‘when you love somebody …’ He continued to look away from her, out across the pool.
‘I don’t think it’s that so much. One gets involved. I admired him. I was only nineteen when he took me on as his secretary, and he was something of a celebrity. A lot of people had heard of him, you know, and they said, Oh are you his secretary, that kind of thing. It seemed glamorous at the time. Apart from that he always seemed to care what I thought. Even before that, when I was still at school, well, that summer when you came, you remember, he used to talk to me a lot, and he always listened to what I said. He took me seriously.’
Farnaby turned to look at her again and saw that her air of perplexity had deepened. She was moving her head very slightly from side to side, as if seeking a more satisfactory explanation of her involvement with Mooncranker.
‘But surely,’ he said, ‘that was only because he found you attractive. I mean, any man, in those circumstances …’ He had spoken gently, but with a stirring of excitement not far removed from violence, a quickening of the heart at the thought that he was now at last going into action, assuming the offensive, subverting Mooncranker’s position, and that this had been his intention all along.
‘No,’ she said, ‘that’s not it. It’s partly true of course. No, he had a sort of reality about him. It is difficult to explain. He was capable of taking you into that reality, gathering you up into his life, somehow, and I needed that.’
‘But do you always want to be … absorbed in other people’s lives like that?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. There was a longish pause between them, then she said, ‘He got me on his side, you see. And then, when they sacked him –’
‘I didn’t know he had been sacked.’
‘Well, his contract was not renewed, it amounts to the same thing. Of course, he was often slightly drunk, but it began to get worse, people began to notice it. Viewers wrote in to complain.’
‘I see.’
‘That’s really why we’re on this lecture tour. He’s been going around talking about his experiences in radio and television. It’s the same lecture he gives everywhere.’
‘Yes,’ Farnaby said. ‘I’ve heard bits of it.’
‘I sometimes think he’s just a pretext,’ she said, rather obscurely.
Farnaby nodded sympathetically. He had, however, been listening with divided attention, lost in the strangeness of her speaking face and the insidious thoughts of Mooncranker making free with the body he divined under her clothes. Imagination is not kind enough to do justice to the loves of others; remembering those frequent references to vitamin B, Farnaby thought of the girl as nurse, or masseuse, someone providing Mooncranker with an essential nutrient or service rather than as a partner in a mutually pleasurable act.
‘I think you are dramatizing things,’ he said, and with these words he felt excitement again, a renewal of the impulse to damage Mooncranker, oust him. ‘You don’t leave any vital tissues in his grasp,’ he said.
He saw in her face an expression difficult to define, almost complacent, or placated at least, as if she were glad to be under discussion. Not only that, but as if she were responding to his words with gratitude or relief. Simultaneously with this perception there came to him the sweeping, almost mystical certitude of power that he had first begun to feel when advising Mooncranker to prepare himself for hospital, but this time far less cautious and reluctant, based as it now was, not only on Mooncranker’s helplessness, but on what he sensed in the girl as an extreme, almost neurotic suggestibility.
‘That is,’ he said, ‘if you really want to get away. I don’t know much about it, of course, and perhaps it is presumptuous of me …’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t mind.’
‘Well, quite frankly, I think the whole thing is unsuitable. It is too sordid for someone like you to be mixed up in.’
As soon as he had said this he sensed that it had been a mistake, too forthright.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I suppose it must seem like that to you.’ She smiled again, the mouth thinning and curving upward into that almost helplessly joyous expression that he thought now he remembered, an expression quite involuntary, accidental, because she had been hurt by his words. He suddenly felt a hot indignation at Mooncranker’s rhetorical profile, his debilitated form under the sheets, his cunning exploitation of the girl’s self-esteem as well as her generosity. Drip – drip – drip, he had fed on her. Well, he would feed no more.
She said, ‘When I walked out on him this time, I felt I was destroying him.’
He could not tell if she was exaggerating, dramatizing things, seeking to rebut his accusation of sordidness, or speaking the plain truth.
‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said. ‘Mooncranker is a survivor.’ But she was not yet ready to hear this. She even looked slightly offended, and in his compunction at this he allowed too great a silence to develop between them. Helplessly he watched the small signs of preparation she was making, straightening herself on the chair, pushing the coffee cup forward some inches.
‘Well,’ she said at last, looking rather oddly at him. ‘I’d better be thinking of packing, I suppose.’
‘Please,’ Farnaby said, as one breaking from a spell. ‘Don’t go yet. A few hours isn’t going to make any difference. Mooncranker is installed there in the hospital. He’s not coming to any harm is he? He won’t expect us back yet. Let’s spend today together. Look, it’s a sunny morning.’
She looked, obedient to his gesture.
‘There won’t be many more days like this,’ Farnaby said, basing his arguments with instinctive cunning on the weather, rather than his own desires.
There was a weakness in her face that he had not noticed before and perhaps only noticed now or only designated now as weakness because he knew how she had allowed herself to be prevailed upon by Mooncranker, was possibly going to allow herself to be prevailed upon by him. The face lost balance at the chin which though well-formed was too small; and this, together with the rather long and burdened seeming neck, gave her an appearance of fragility and a vulnerability half dreamy, half anguished. All of which conflicted strangely with his memories of her robust, confident girlhood, as though something had been tapped and taken from her. He watched with a wildly beating heart while she contemplated the weather, the promise of the morning.
‘We couldn’t spend the whole day together,’ she said. ‘I have promised to go for a walk with Mrs Pritchett this morning. I mean, if I stayed, I would have to do that.’
‘Well, after that,’ he said. ‘The rest of the day.’
After a further pause, which seemed endless to Farnaby, she said quietly, ‘All right, yes,’ and turned to him an unsmiling face. He knew then, with triumph and misgivings, that this decision w
as for more than an outing.
He was walking slowly along the terrace back to his cabin, thinking about Miranda, when one of the nearer cabin doors opened and Lusk took a step out and stood somewhat irresolutely for a moment there. Seeing Farnaby he hesitated, then beckoned in a slack-armed way.
He stood aside for Farnaby to enter. The room smelled strongly of hair oil and bourbon and it was very hot – Lusk must have turned his oil stove up.
‘How’s it going?’ Lusk said. He was wearing a white T-shirt with a rather babyish round neck. He sat on the bed, where he had obviously previously been lying. Somewhere out of sight the transistor was playing faintly. Farnaby took the little hardbacked chair. ‘Not so badly,’ he said, noncommittally. He had noticed at once that the left side of Lusk’s face was bruised along the cheek bone and that the area round the eye was darkly discoloured.
‘Have you had an accident?’ he said.
Lusk’s Adam’s apple jumped at this question, and he began to glance in a nervous bolting way round the room. ‘Accident?’ he said. ‘Jesus.’ He began speaking rapidly to Farnaby who however missed the first part of what was said because he had begun thinking about Miranda again, with an almost incredulous wonder at her physical existence, the shape of her shoulders, the composure of her face, the terrifying and exciting malleability he sensed in her …
‘… didn’t need the Topic at all.’ He became aware once again of Lusk’s pale beseeching regard. ‘We would have got there without it. She was crying out for it. We went to her cabin.’ He fell silent for some moments. Then he said, ‘Have some bourbon. I’m having some.’
‘No thanks,’ Farnaby said. ‘I’ve just had breakfast. What happened then?’
Lusk drank and grimaced in a way he had perhaps seen tough guys do. Much of his behaviour had this derivative quality, as if Lusk had carefully watched other people and remembered their gestures and expressions.
‘She abused me,’ he said, looking with sudden intensity at Farnaby. ‘She called me all the names she could think of.’ In what was perhaps an effort at self-protection, in the event of Farnaby’s finding all this comical, Lusk now contrived the appearance of a debonair smile. ‘She just lay there,’ he said, ‘calling me every low-down thing she could think of. All in this British voice.’
‘What kind of things did she call you?’
‘Twerp, turd, sewer-rat,’ Lusk said, still valiantly smiling. ‘Stuff like that.’ He took a drink of bourbon. ‘She said her uncle would personally horsewhip me,’ he said. ‘Oh, I was going to ask you. She told me her uncle had been in the Black Watch. Am I right in thinking that is some kind of secret society?’
‘No, it’s the name of an infantry regiment,’ Farnaby said. ‘What happened then?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t tell this to just anybody,’ Lusk said, ‘and I’d sure appreciate it if you will keep it sub rosa,but I was immobilized.’
‘Immobilized?’
‘I just could not proceed.’ Seeing that Farnaby had remained grave, Lusk now abandoned the attempt to keep up his smile. ‘My attitude to sex,’ he said, ‘has always been basically a romantic one.’ He rose and went towards the bottle of bourbon. ‘When this girl spoke to me like that,’ he said, ‘I just could not manage to maintain my erection. And I am not ashamed to admit it, because in my opinion only an extremely insensitive human being could have maintained his erection in the face of abuse like that.’
‘Quite so,’ Farnaby said.
‘Could you have maintained yours?’ demanded Lusk.
‘I very much doubt it,’ Farnaby said.
‘It began to seem very strange to me. The whole thing. I mean, she really was wanting it to start with, and then all this, you know, calling names, it didn’t add up. There was something, you know, abnormal about it. Something sick. Now if there’s one thing I can’t stand,’ Lusk said virtuously, ‘it is anything sick like that. Anything kinky. A sound mind in a sound body has always been my motto. Well, it came into my mind that she might be a nympho. I read about this kind of woman but I never actually met one. So I asked her. You know, like with perfect courtesy. I can be very urbane. “Get on with it, nosepicker,” she was saying, real crude abuse like that, and she was sort of groaning, so I raised myself up on my elbows and I said, “Excuse me lady, but are you by any chance a little old nymphomaniac?”’
Lusk uttered this question in a Southern drawl, attempting at the same time, though without much success, to assume a sort of dandified head-wobble. ‘You got to admit,’ he said, ‘that it was a good question.’
‘Yes,’ Farnaby said. ‘But did you ask it in a spirit of inquiry or merely out of pique?’
‘Both. To be quite frank with you, both.’
‘Well,’ Farnaby said. ‘Did she admit to being one?’
The look of old-world urbanity vanished from Lusk’s face. ‘She never answered my question. She evaded it,’ he said. He drank some more from his glass. It seemed to Farnaby that the whisky was beginning to take effect on him. He had lost his bolting nervousness, was more deliberate in manner, yet seemed in some way bewildered.
‘She punched me in the eye,’ he said. In slow, dreamlike motion, he imitated the hammer blow. ‘Then she told me to get out or she would report me.’
‘Well,’ Farnaby said, attempting some sort of consolation. ‘She would not have reacted with such ferocity if your question had not come near the mark.’
Lusk, who had been touching his face tenderly, appeared to brighten a little. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘That’s right. I got her on a raw spot there. Good job I got quick reflexes. I was always known for my quick reflexes. If it hadn’t been for that, she would have got me with the other hand too. It is not very disfiguring, is it?’
‘No, hardly noticeable at all,’ Farnaby said.
‘You got to keep on,’ Lusk said. He seemed to be cheering up considerably now. ‘I saw a very pretty girl this morning,’ he said. ‘Early. Before breakfast. She had been in the pool. I watched her walk along the terrace to her cabin. Very good figure.’
‘What number cabin?’ Farnaby asked.
‘Number twenty-three.’
‘Was she wearing a dark red bathing-suit?’
‘That’s right. Do you know her?’
‘Well,’ Farnaby said cautiously, ‘I know who you mean. She has made friends with an older woman here, who looks a bit of a dragon. I should watch out for her, if I were you.’
‘I can take care of myself,’ Lusk said, moving his shoulders in an uneasy swagger. As if to prove this, he turned up the transistor, and a euphoric man’s voice filled the room singing, ‘Love is everywhere, in the magic mystery of moonlight, in the haunted splendour of a June night.’
When, some moments later, Farnaby left, Lusk was swaying to the music, helping himself to more whisky. Farnaby went back to his own cabin and lay down on the bed, the better to think about Miranda. He thought about her in the dark red bathing-dress, standing in the water. How tenderly, with what a gentle pressure at every point the water, the warm, bitter, mineral-thick water, had held her, borne her body up in tender, molecular chains. The water, more palpable than air and therefore perhaps more sentient, more knowing, aroused his envy. He remembered, with a clarity almost hallucinatory, how drops of water had adhered to her, bold droplets in the hollows of her body; from this loving lodgement he surmised more intimate invasions of her person by the ubiquitous water, labyrinths of her ears, pale pink of ducts, subaqueous frondage of more hidden places, pores, follicles, the minutiae of tissue … He thought with a sort of romantic yearning how marvellous it would be to take Miranda to some place, some kingdom for ever secure from invasion. Some lines of poetry came into his mind, deeply familiar and evocative:
At the mid hour of night when stars are weeping, I fly To the lone vale we loved when life shone warm in
thine eye …
Suddenly, he heard a light tapping at the door. He sat up and swung his legs down to the floor. ‘Come in,’ he called running a hand
through his hair. He had for some moments the wild hope that it might be Miranda, changing her mind about the walk, or perhaps simply with some remark to add to their earlier conversation. But the head that peered round his door was surmounted by a Tyrolean-style hat fashioned in thick, green, rather fibrous-looking material with a jaunty jay-blue feather in the band and the face beneath, pale, broad, flabby, without detectable bone, was that of Plopl, the photographer. He had not remembered to start smiling before entering, so his face when Farnaby first saw it was glum and also, it seemed, rather uneasy; however, he smiled broadly on seeing Farnaby’s look of inquiry, and said in his soft, painstaking, incredibly good-natured voice, ‘Ah my good fellow, you are here after all. I do not disturb you, do I?’
‘No, not at all,’ Farnaby said.
Plopl pulled from an inside pocket a fairly large manilla envelope, but did not for the moment do anything more with it, merely held it in his hand while he looked round the room.
‘Your room is just the same,’ he said.
‘The same?’ Farnaby echoed, thinking for a moment that he meant things in the room had not changed.
‘The same as all the others.’
‘Oh, yes. They are all built on the same pattern, I believe.’
‘I like that,’ Plopl said. ‘It is proper, it is correct, that they should all be the same exactly.’ He had put his hat on in a hurry, Farnaby thought: bits of his pale brown hair had escaped confinement, hung out below the band in rather unsightly wisps.
‘I believe,’ Plopl said, ‘that in our civilization many things should be standard that are at present …’
‘Diverse?’ suggested Farnaby.
‘Exactly.’ Plopl smiled, obviously thinking that Farnaby’s readiness in supplying the word indicated complete assent. ‘Not for reasons of equality or getting rid of the privilege,’ he said. ‘But for the aesthetic.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Farnaby said, rather blankly. He looked at the envelope in Plopl’s hand.
‘When I walk down the street, it is the same,’ Plopl said, waving the envelope gently back and forth. ‘Unless the houses have all the same appearance I do not feel comfortable. Things that are fixed, the background of life, should be all the same. Movable things, paintings, decorative objects, above all photographs, these things must be … diverse. I have got something here that might interest you.’
Mooncranker's Gift Page 21
