Mooncranker sank lower in the water, listening.
‘My friend kept trying to talk to him, you know, about how life would open out for him if he thought of others, and how we are never alone because people care, things like that. She was preachy and earnest, a bit bossy too, probably, I mean I think she took herself too seriously, she was thinking of herself bringing light and hope into your Uncle George’s life, at least that’s how I see it now. At the time I thought she was noble. She was quite good-looking too, though she wasn’t, you know, frivolous about it. There again, she probably took more trouble over her appearance than I suspected at the time. She wore glasses. Anyway, he didn’t seem to know what she was getting at. It was rather awful really. He kept getting up and fetching silver cups, trophies he had amassed from various sports. He kept putting them into our hands. His head had developed a sort of tremble, did you know? Very slight, but continuous. He kept handing us these shining cups. You are never alone, remember that, she’d say, and he would get up close with one of these cups and we both had to keep sort of edging away. Then he started showing us photographs of cricket teams with himself in them, sort of young and smiling in a blazer. He kept pointing himself out to us. Well, this went on for some time, then my friend, she was sitting next to him on the sofa, she jumped up as if she had been stung and she dropped the photographs all over the floor. I remember them on the floor. He had put his hand right up her skirt, you know. It was rather awful. He bent down and gathered up all his photographs and when he got up I saw tears in his eyes …’
Hearing this story had a totally unexpected effect on Mooncranker. He found great difficulty in believing it at first, so much was it at variance with all the assumptions he had been accustomed to make about George Wilson, salt of the earth, sportsman, parent, purveyor of hospitality. Then he realized that of course it was true, it was not even surprising. George Wilson was a man who would react to his own palsy by thrusting a hand up a girl’s skirt … The fact that Miranda had never told him of this incident which she was now telling to Farnaby showed the intimate stage they had reached. But it was not this that took away his will, withered his intention of advancing upon them: it was the nature of the story itself, the useless evidences of prowess, photographs of blazered youth, the desperate little spurt of lasciviousness which Miranda had pitied, probably, at the time – the pity was in her voice still, but for him too now, he was lumped together with Uncle George, spent lechers both. She was pronouncing on him too. It was rather awful really. That is the very tone of epitaphs. Impossible, impossible to speak to them now. As if a corpse should quibble at a funeral oration. And he had not wanted, he suddenly realized, with a pang in which were the beginnings of final peace, he had not wanted to speak to them. It was not for that he had come into the pool …
He turned and walked away from them, moving softly, making no noise, farther into the darkness. He found himself now out of range of the lights, in a place where the walls formed a shallow recess. Here he stopped and stood in the darkness, open-mouthed, slightly breathless, up to his chin in the lapping water, his body held balanced and sealed in the warmth. He thought longingly of his drowned body, beyond pain, an object suspended in water, containing water, no distinction between within and without. The sweetish, brackish smell rose to his nostrils. He closed his eyes, allowed the weariness and loneliness to weight his head. Experimentally he lowered his face into the water, opened his lips for the water to lap over, though keeping his teeth clenched shut for the moment …
‘Why do you think he hasn’t tried to find us?’ Miranda said.
‘Perhaps he is trying now.’
She shook her head. ‘I wonder if he has started drinking again.’
Farnaby looked up at the night, which was deep, starless – he surmised banks of cloud drawn across the sky, eclipsing the stars that last night had been so numerous. Mooncranker’s whereabouts, so long as he was absent, had become a matter of supreme indifference to him now. He did not however wish Miranda herself to perceive this indifference lest she should judge him callous.
‘Don’t worry about him,’ he said. He put his hands on her shoulders, and she at once moved closer to him, set herself within his embrace. He put his arms about her, felt her body in the water, taut against his. Fire ran through him, desire for her mingled with a sort of strategic cruelty, a need to press his advantage while she seemed submissive. ‘You knew about it, didn’t you?’ he said, in a harsh and vehement whisper. ‘You knew he was going to give me that … thing made of sausage-meat, didn’t you?’
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ she said. ‘It happened a long time ago.’
‘Doesn’t matter?’ he echoed, in wonder. What could she mean?
‘Did he ever give any reason,’ he said, ‘any definite reason for doing it?’
Miranda hesitated a long moment. ‘He said it wasn’t healthy,’ she said at last. ‘You know, for a boy of your age to be so – ’
‘Healthy,’ Farnaby repeated. ‘Healthy?’ He raised his face to the sky again. Suddenly a laugh broke from him, paining his tightened throat. The ludicrous word revolved in his mind. ‘Who is healthy?’ he said. ‘Do you know anyone who is?’
Miranda lowered her face, rested her forehead against his chest. He drew her closer to him. Their bodies pressed together in the water. Confusedly there came to Farnaby the knowledge that she was his victim now: there had been a shift, but she was still the victim, she was still where she had been; and he felt an unwilling pity, a sense that something had been done to her, somewhere, remotely, she had been tampered with, damaged. To him, too, something similar had been done, unlocalizable, antecedent to anything he could remember. It was not Mooncranker who had done this, he was an opportunist merely, perhaps an involuntary one at that, profiting from what he found in that summer garden: the girl’s readiness for flattery, for conspiring in evil, the boy’s corruption. All this had been accomplished already, before Mooncranker appeared on the scene, long before …
He sought for the sense of a time when they might both have been free and whole, presenting no opportunity to the despoiler. But there was no such time.
‘I’ll take care of you,’ he said. It sounded oddly like a threat, and Miranda raised her head to look at him, but it was too dark to see the expression on his face.
First published as a Norton paperback 1996
First American Edition 1974
Copyright © 1973 by Barry Unsworth
All rights reserved.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Unsworth, Barry, 1930–
Mooncranker’s gift.
I. Title.
PZ4.U59Mo3 [PR6071.N8] 823’.9’14 73-15944
ISBN: 978-0-393-31478-6 (e-book)
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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Mooncranker's Gift Page 31
