Mooncranker's Gift Read online

  Other works by Barry Unsworth available from Norton

  The Hide

  The Rage of the Vulture

  Sacred Hunger

  Stone Virgin

  BARRY UNSWORTH

  Mooncranker’s Gift

  W · W · Norton & Company

  New York · London

  For Valerie, and for

  Madeleine, Tania and Thomasina,

  who were dragged along.

  With love.

  Part One

  1

  The street that led to the hotel was crowded, the narrow pavement cluttered with stalls and people striving to sell things; small articles of daily use. In his delicately clumsy, wavering fashion Farnaby very nearly trod on a fellow human at one point, a legless man softly soliciting alms at the kerb. Too many people too close nearly always caused a feeling of tension in his throat, impaired his coordination, making him step short sometimes as if about to embark on a leap. Though taller than most he didn’t see the beggar until the last minute because the man was truncated and therefore well below eye-level.

  ‘Affedersiniz,’ Farnaby said, but the beggar was busy with his plaint and seemed not to hear. The naked livid stumps of his thighs were displayed for casual pity. Farnaby stepped round the murmurous, diminutive form, unable to see the face because of a cap.

  The incident, his own ineptness, agitated him, increased in some way his worry at the prospect of meeting Mooncranker again. He walked thereafter on the inside of the pavement, acquainting himself with the photographs that flanked many of the doorways, photographs of wrestlers and strippers mainly: the wrestlers bullet headed, oleaginous, impressively bulging as to genitals; the strippers plump and shameless, nothing but a scattering of spangles or sequins, something of that sort, over their key convexities. Body hair non-existent he noted, not a hint of fuzz or floss, razed to pristine smoothness. Or is razored the mot juste there? Of course, it is enjoined upon Moslem women, whether public performers or no, he reminded himself with an attempt at dispassion: Farnaby the travelled man, making a Mental Note. His mouth had filled slowly with saliva. A public performance. Promising opening for a eunuch barber. Had Mooncranker, in gaining his hotel, scanned these pictures? He would have arrived by taxi. It was a strange region in which to be encountering Mooncranker again after all these years. But any region would have seemed so, probably. Perhaps a foreign city like this was in fact best, a place alien to both of them. There was no congruity in the meeting anyway, except possibly in the mind of Uncle George, who had brought it about, whose letter reposed at present in his inside pocket. Nephew of my old schoolfellow and team mate. Whom you will remember well from the ‘Oaklands’ days.

  Farther down the street two girls at a first floor balcony sat close together, gesturing in a way that seemed rehearsed, almost ritualistic. They leaned towards each other, faces intent, pale hands languidly, studiously gesturing; both with long black hair, both half turned away from the street, presenting to each other faces which at this distance and in profile were so alike that they might have been emblematic: Graces or Hours or the loves of a god.

  Perhaps they are whores. I wish I could bring Mooncranker’s face to mind. He was the umpire. He was dressed in white. Trying to visualize that face is like getting a picture just out of focus, before he can be brought into clear view, he starts leaking away, every time the same thing. The white leaks over the outlines, Mooncranker dissolves himself. Always a brilliant scholar and of late years a celebrity too. A name to conjure with. Only Uncle George used phrases like that. Farnaby could picture his relish, penning the letter, getting everything just right. How fortunate that you should be there in Istanbul and in a position to.

  But I am not in a position to. He slowed his steps, anxiety in his throat increasing, stepping affrightedly amidst the crowd, addressing a mental remonstrance to Uncle George, all those miles away in Surrey. I am not in a position to at all, not at all, I only remember him as an umpire, dressed in white and the other time when he handed me the little figure. Quite faceless, yes. I was only thirteen at the time. During the summer that my parents got divorced and I came to stay at ‘Oaklands’, a large house with a rambling garden and two hard tennis-courts behind. Undeniable that he was a frequent visitor, but not to me. He only sought me out that once …

  The wrestlers continued to alternate with the strippers, festooning the portals on his right. Formerly the homes of Venetian merchants whose ships rode at anchor in the Golden Horn below. The wrestlers all frontal, faces set on victory; the girls on the other hand variously posed, appearing to be inviting penetration from every angle. They knelt, reclined, straddled, squared plump shoulders at the camera, dimpled their bottoms cunningly at Farnaby, displayed capacious, intricately whorled navels, beautiful globular breasts, nipples dead centre like bullseyes. Turkish breasts,that is the breasts of Turkish women, have a configuration somewhat different from those of their European counterparts, being rounder, fuller, lower slung. Is that really true? Strive now for purposes of comparison to visualize a pair, but whose, whose? He used to umpire for you in your tennis tournaments. How fortunate that. Strange, how much of the letter he remembered.

  Now that he was getting nearer he did not think they were whores at all, those gestures were not for delicate reference to erotic zones, they were talking about clothes he suddenly realized, fitting and cut and so on, that was the reason for such intimate yet hieratic behaviour. He had not identified with certainty any whores in Istanbul except for one monstrously fat woman who had wobbled up to him one evening in the street and petrified him with a throaty chéri.

  It had been strong though, the sense of ritual they had conveyed, and it persisted in him as he drew nearer to the hotel, blending somehow with his anxiety, now that the meeting was imminent. He did me an injury, he reminded himself. Mooncranker did me an injury in those Oaklands days. He clung to this as a reason for being there, for walking down this street where maimed people begged, girls gestured overhead, crowds jostled, various persons strove to interest him in combs, leather belts, packets of almonds, Mooncranker is of that tiny number who have modified me. Strange that I cannot recollect his face. Not even at the moment when he handed over the little white figure on the cross, not even at that moment surely quintessential, Mooncranker smiling, inclining himself forward a little as one does when making gifts, especially to someone shorter in stature, handing over the little swaddled figure. Some words he must have uttered surely, some formula. But nothing remained.

  Nothing but a sort of effigy. In a straw hat tilted forward over his eyes he had umpired with a certain effect of querulousness, sometimes jerking his shoulders forward as an accompaniment to announcing the score. What was the face like, under the straw hat? What did he look like, when he was standing, walking? No context existed but that stooping smiling moment; and then the tennis games, with Mooncranker a foreshortened, occasionally jerking figure in the canvas chair, crying out in a voice whose tone and pitch had also vanished beyond recall, the scores, loves and deuces and double faults.

  Farnaby paused on the pavement, waiting to cross. He was not sorry to be quitting the photographs: those inviting postures, interspersed with the virile wrestlers, had been making him feel inadequate. Put them all in together and buy a ringside seat.

  His nervousness increased as he entered the hotel and stood at the reception desk, waiting for the attention of the clerk. He was aware of the high-ceilinged lobby, columns of veined marble ringed at intervals with thin bands of gilt, little bamboo tables and large-leaved glossy plants in pots. Would Mooncranker at all remember him? He had been polite but noncommittal on the telephone when Farnaby had called him some two hours previously. Mooncranker was to give a lecture that evening at the
British Council and Farnaby had thought he might need some assistance, of a practical sort. If I can be of any assistance, he had said, and heard the deep, totally unfamiliar voice repeating his name with an effect if not an intention of irony, Farnaby, Farnaby?

  ‘Mooncranker,’ he said to the clerk. ‘Mooncranker.’

  ‘Effendim,’ the clerk said. He had started to scan a list, but not it seemed in a spirit of optimism.

  ‘He is an Englishman,’ Farnaby said. He looked past the bamboo and ferns through open doors into a dining-room which had chandeliers and enormous baroque mirrors and a ceiling painted with mythological ravishments. ‘Ingiliz dir.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the clerk, brightening. ‘It is room sixty-eight. I will telephone to him?’

  ‘No, thank you. He is expecting me.’

  He straightened his tie in the antiquated lift, regarded for some moments his long rather equine face. The frame of the glass was ornate and gilded, fat putti swam or flew at the corners as though struggling to reach some haven beyond the frame. Farnaby had positively to struggle against a suspension of identity, stepping softly out of the lift on to faded plum-coloured carpeting.

  He had to ring three times, a delicate tingling silence between each ring, before the door was opened and a person stood there wearing a smile that rapidly faded. Mooncranker in the flesh. Or so he was obliged to assume. A high-shouldered elderly man in a black velvet jacket. He held the door open, looking at Farnaby in bemused inquiry.

  ‘Good evening,’ Farnaby said, with nervous briskness. ‘I am James Farnaby.’ He thought he recognized now the high-shouldered stance, the prominent beak of a nose. Ash-grey hair long at the sides and swept back in a fashion Farnaby was accustomed to call statesmanlike. Gentle blue blinking eyes. Anticipating an immediate invitation to enter, Farnaby took a step forward and then stopped, not knowing what further to do or say. He looked with smiling shyness at Mooncranker and then beyond him, into the room.

  ‘Ah, Farnaby,’ Mooncranker said in deep tones, giving way at last. He backed a little, holding the door open wider. Farnaby caught a whiff of some strangely familiar petrolly odour as he entered. He came to a halt in the middle of the room with a confused sense of limited space, ornate clutter disposed on low tables around him. Directly overhead was a heavy chandelier, the lower crystals of which, not more than a foot or two above him, had commenced a faint tinkling, in response no doubt to the draught from the door. It was very hot in the room. ‘Well, well, well,’ he heard the slow voice behind him, and he turned in the direction of the sound, smiling.

  Two days of almost continuous gin drinking, Turkish gin at that, had clouded Mooncranker’s mind and impaired his vision, so that during this early phase of the visit it seemed to him that the young man had a sort of radiance about him, he seemed to gather and reflect all the available light, which made it difficult to survey him steadily. The rest of the room by contrast was obscure and impenetrable. His friendly repetition of the other’s name had been merely a social reflex, a sort of host response. He had no idea who his visitor was, but thought he might have come to collect something.

  ‘Would you mind waiting a moment?’ he said, trying to gather himself together. He blinked at the dark corners of the room, and a suspicion grew in him that this might be an employee of the hotel, come to badger him about tickets. ‘Is it about the tickets?’ he said. ‘Because I’ve told you I don’t want them.’

  ‘No, no,’ Farnaby said. ‘I phoned you earlier, if you remember – ’

  ‘I’ve told them repeatedly, I don’t want any tickets, I was merely inquiring.’

  He could actually see the light streaming down from the crystals on to the young man’s smooth fair hair and white shirt-collar and the front of his fawn linen jacket, increasing his effulgence in a frightening way. ‘We have met before, haven’t we?’ he said, doubtfully, and Farnaby answered at once, ‘Yes, at Oaklands.’

  Oaklands. Mooncranker closed his eyes briefly on the word. Behind the lids he still felt threatened. There was an association of strenuous effort about this young man, as if he might at any moment start leaping about, destroying things, blasting them with light. He must be kept still, until he provided some clue to his business. Above all, don’t let him see you are frightened. Like dogs, they are like dogs.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ he said. Oaklands.If only I had not gone to the door. But I thought it might be Miranda, coming back to me. Three times the bell rang. Only someone who felt sure I was there would have rung three times. Miranda would of course, she would have rung as many times as were necessary, anticipating delay on my part. I did not dare not to go in case it was she. But this person, how could he have known? Such persistence indicated special knowledge, and then this dangerous brightness …

  ‘I phoned earlier,’ Farnaby said again. ‘About your lecture this evening.’ Things were not proceeding at all as he had imagined. Mooncranker seemed strangely at a loss. It was true that he looked distinguished, with his high-shouldered stance and statesmanlike hair, but his manner was unexpectedly muffled and inert, and he was repeatedly looking away into corners of the room, or closing his eyes for several seconds at a time, a sort of prolonged blink. It did not inspire confidence. Surely he must be quite different when conducting his interviews and posing questions to his panels on radio and television.

  ‘I thought I might be of assistance to you in some way,’ he said.

  Mooncranker glanced round the room again. ‘Now where did I put them,’ he said. He ran a long-fingered white hand over the top of his head. ‘If you wouldn’t mind waiting a moment,’ he said.

  ‘Of course not.’ Farnaby was conscious of that faint ache of the facial muscles that results from excessive falsity of smiling.

  ‘So long as it’s not about that,’ Mooncranker said.

  ‘About what, sir?’

  ‘The tickets.’ Suddenly a solution came to Mooncranker, a perfectly reasonable social solution: he would get this dangerous youth trapped in a chair. ‘Won’t you have a seat,’ he said, or perhaps did not actually utter the words, merely enjoyed the clarity of the idea, because after several seconds his visitor still had not moved. A wave of nausea caused Mooncranker to lower his face and study the carpet for some moments.

  ‘No, nothing to do with the tickets,’ Farnaby said clearly. Hardly one’s idea of a distinguished elderly person greeting the nephew of an old friend. Nor did he seem credible as the smiler in white who had handed over the little white Christ on the Cross, with the forward inclination of one freely giving, that distant summer amidst smells of cow-parsley and creosote. And what is this strange, unexpected, yet not unfamiliar odour that lurks in your room?

  ‘I don’t suppose you remember me at all, sir’ he said. ‘It is quite ten years now since the Oaklands days.’

  ‘Oaklands days,’ Mooncranker repeated, with sudden alertness. ‘Oaklands days?’ His mouth, Farnaby noticed, had a habit of suddenly twitching up at the corners, a curious involuntary movement that he suddenly felt he remembered. A slight, civilized grimace.

  ‘Those were great days, sir,’ he said, insincerely.

  ‘Oaklands,’ repeated Mooncranker. The name was one he had heard before, as was the name of his visitor. It sounded like a private sanatorium. Perhaps this was the clue. They had both been on a cure together, writhed on neighbouring beds, suffered sedation in company. But this creature of light ten years ago would have been a mere child, too young surely for such excesses.

  ‘Ah, the delights of convalescence,’ he said, playing for time. ‘Strange they are so little celebrated in our literature. Can any of you recall a single instance? Farnaby?’

  ‘There is a story of Chekhov’s, I remember,’ Farnaby said, feeling it rather odd that Mooncranker should address him as one of a group.

  ‘So there is, so there is,’ Mooncranker said. He thought of the final phase, identity recovered, strength returning, gentle rambles, sunlit lawns and woods. Oaklands … Feelings of nostalgia invaded him, a fil
m of moisture slid over his eyes. ‘How you have grown,’ he said. ‘Quite amazing.’ This was what one said to young people after an absence of years. Juvenile alcoholics were not unknown after all. Ten years ago. Where was I ten years ago. Was that the year I was visiting village colleges in Cambridgeshire lecturing on the relevance of the classics? Did I have a bout in that year? But his mind staggered, all bouts were the same bout.

  ‘And have you succumbed since?’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

  ‘Have you managed to keep off it since?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t …’ Farnaby smiled helplessly. The only possibly deleterious habit of his at that time had been intermittent self-abuse. Surely Mooncranker could not be referring to that?

  ‘Never mind, never mind. A painful subject no doubt. Still you have certainly grown. A very commendable growth. I congratulate you on it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Farnaby said, automatically responding to the words of praise. He was bewildered by these questions, but lacked the assurance needed to follow them up. He noticed with dismay gleams of moisture, either from tears or some sort of condensation, on the sides of the professor’s nose. ‘You used to umpire for us,’ he said. He smiled at Mooncranker who now advanced a little towards him.

  ‘Won’t you have a seat,’ Mooncranker said. ‘That one is very comfortable.’ He pointed to a deep armchair angled in a corner of the room.

  ‘Oh thank you.’ Farnaby thought of adding, ‘And a jolly good umpire you were,’ but the words died on his lips. Such an utterance would have been ridiculously inappropriate to Mooncranker’s present limpness and vagueness. Besides it was not the way he felt about that summer. It was the sort of remark Uncle George would have approved of, suggesting that all was hearty fun, no ill feelings; not corresponding in the least to his private sense of it which, he recognized now in this totally different setting and perhaps for the first time with complete assent, had the pulsing numbness, the involuntary recoil of nightmare. Beginning with the sudden break, the snap in his parents’ torsion of unhappiness which had spun him off to Oaklands and Uncle George and Aunt Jane while his father and mother, wearied with the rancorous years, made final plans for separation. Beginning there, nightmare permeated every aspect of that summer, radiating from its own still centres: stiff hot leaves, the rustling fevers of the shrubbery; the hushed limits of the courts; Mooncranker jerking in his canvas chair or imperishably smiling, handing over the gift; talking to someone just out of sight; stirrings in the white folds of bandage that Jesus was wrapped in. He smiled at Mooncranker, saying nothing.