Mooncranker's Gift Read online

  Mooncranker, who had not himself sat down, returned the smile, but with what seemed a private sense of significance. ‘Umpired,’ he said, and then repeated the word with his habit of apparently ironical stress. Umpired? He placed thin hands rather gropingly on the back of a chair. His nausea returned as he struggled to reconcile the spent but optimistic feelings of convalescence with the more strenuous associations of umpiring. Distrust of his visitor came creeping back. ‘You say you telephoned,’ he said. ‘Your name is an evocative one, suggesting to my mind military manoeuvres and daffodils.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Farnaby said, from the depths of his armchair. He was resolved not to betray by his manner any sense that the interview was going oddly. It was as though by entering Mooncranker’s room he had stirred up some sort of muddy deposit or sediment in the other’s mind. The only thing to do was wait for it to settle, affecting in the meantime to notice nothing. This was difficult, however, not only because of Mooncranker’s failure to utter any even faintly appropriate sentiments, but because he felt himself dislocated somehow by having acknowledged the true ghastliness of that summer, by his inability to keep up a sporting tone when referring to it. A determined jollity about the past had always been Uncle George’s essential idiom, almost his distinguishing feature. And if Mooncranker had taken this tone, Farnaby would have adapted himself with his usual alacrity to it. But he did not know what was expected of him now. He had never really known, but had always striven to muffle his impact on other people until they gave him the needed clues; an innate deference expressed also in his appearance, with which he took considerable trouble: hair long rather than short but not too long; jacket and trousers of traditional design. His aim was to be appropriate rather than elegant.

  Mooncranker however furnished no clues; and Farnaby was drifting now, relaxing the alert, respectful manner he had deemed suitable for an old friend of Uncle George, a notable radio and television interviewer and chairman, adopting to some extent the dreamy deliberateness of Mooncranker himself. He leaned back in his armchair, shaping in his mind questions. Why these sudden changes of tone, Mooncranker. Why are you treating me with such reserve. Do you know me now for the boy you gave the Christ to. Thirty seconds it probably took, that whole transaction, wouldn’t you agree, handing it over, and then a few words. Thirty seconds the extent of our real acquaintance before this evening, or would you say less. But what was the reason. Why did you make me such a gift, a Christ whose body you must have known would rot, fashioned as it was in sausage meat. And why did you involve her in it, the girl, what did she have to do with it, what seas, what shores? A thirteen-year-old boy. And what is this smell, occasionally emitted to me from your person or perhaps some other quarter of the room. A resinous, gluey odour, not petrolly as I formerly thought. Certainly not the smell of Christ’s decay. Reminding me of privacy, solitude …

  ‘No,’ Mooncranker said. ‘I merely inquired, you see, about the possibility of getting tickets. I did not, repeat not, ask the hotel to obtain them for me. So it is no good at all your coming to me now and producing tickets and so forth, least of all now, when my secretary has left me. I was intending to take her to the theatre, Rhinoceros in Turkish, very stimulating, yes, but would you say it was relevant? Farnaby? She has left me, my secretary, Miss Bolsover, has left me in the lurch.’

  His sensation of nausea increased. He wanted a drink very badly indeed, but the long habit of secrecy prevented him from drinking before his visitor. Besides he did not believe in Farnaby, felt that the other was waiting to pounce. Impossible to tell, though, what he would regard as a false move. Better to risk nothing. Moreover, his vision had again been affected and he seemed to catch glimpses of other visitors sitting about the room in the shadowy corners just beyond his range of vision: officials of some sort, formally dressed, with a sort of sharply angled structure about the neck suggesting old fashioned wing collars, they were listening carefully to the conversation, leaning forward stiffly from the waist. He knew that these figures were illusory, but they troubled and distracted him. He felt convinced now too that Oaklands was not a sanatorium at all, but something much more sinister. The shape of the gin bottle was present to his mind and its blue label. Nausea and thirst slaked together …

  ‘It is a name,’ he said with no alteration of manner, ‘that links Hampshire to the North Riding. As for this talk of umpiring,’ he added, ‘I should have thought they could provide you with a better story than that.’

  This was such an extraordinary thing to say that Farnaby did not register it at first, replying merely that his name was quite a common one. Then he said quickly, ‘What do you mean?’

  But Mooncranker had lowered his face again and was looking at the carpet. His hair, trained back in two sweeps over his ears, seemed in some inexplicable way to have become disarrayed since Farnaby’s arrival, and this, combined with the high-shouldered posture of the body, gave him the look of some slightly dishevelled or perhaps sick or injured bird. He stood thus for some time in silence, resting his hands on the back of the chair, among the other objects in the room, oval mirrors in gilt frames, a worn silk screen patterned with peacocks all facing the same way, a mahogany cabinet with massive paws, numbers of low square tables, on the wall a copy of Bellini’s portrait of Fatih Mehmet, conqueror of Byzantium. Beyond Mooncranker a half-open door led into what appeared to be a smallish bedroom. The chandelier from time to time shivered and tinkled, so perhaps a draught was coming from there. He could not feel a draught himself, but seemed to sense a displacement of air in the room, heavy air stirring as though at the action of a fan. I know what the smell reminds me of, model aeroplanes, a bench in the garden shed, home-made fan churning on hot evenings after school, windows permanently jammed and cobwebbed and the swathes of air, heavy and spirituous with odours of newly cut balsa wood and glue and silver paint, and the Spitfires and Messerschmits dangling on threads from the ceiling; smell of safety, parents safe and quiet too in the house, not quarrelling then; calls of children from the street the only sound; and brief outcries of blackbirds in the garden. Nothing however to connect Mooncranker with all this. Not on the face of it.

  ‘Let me give you a word of advice, Farnaby,’ Mooncranker said, but a sudden wave of nausea prevented him from going on. He looked down again at the carpet. Through the mists that assailed him a piercing recollection came, white figures curling and uncurling in a shaft of light, the tennis games, and this was the nephew of Jane and George Wilson and Oaklands was not a sunny convalescent home at all. He had vaguely known this all along, but kept the knowledge at bay out of wilfulness, and a fear of too much radiance, too much play of light on the past.

  ‘My mother lived nearby at one time,’ he said, raising his head. ‘I have not been back to that town since she died.’ How did George Wilson know I was coming here? There has been no communication between us for years. From the papers perhaps. He was always the sort of man that followed things up. ‘Fine man, George Wilson,’ he said. ‘Salt of the earth.’ George Wilson’s face flickered at him before he could resist it, the blue-eyed fullness of regard, almost brutal in its assurance; bald, freckled temples. ‘Yes indeed,’ he said. ‘So you are George Wilson’s nephew.’ He noticed that his visitor was leaning forward attentively, but could not think why. His back had started aching again. He swivelled his eyes sideways in an attempt to catch the seated officials napping, but they drew back offended. ‘I don’t think there is any advice I can give you,’ he said after a pause. ‘I’m terribly sorry.’

  ‘That’s quite all right, sir,’ Farnaby said.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Well I haven’t seen him for some years. Not since Aunt Jane died.

  ‘Quite so,’ Mooncranker said instantly, as if Aunt Jane’s death had made her husband difficult to get at. ‘Sad business, that,’ he added. What he had been in a way fearing was happening now, consecutive memories like rings or hoops settling over him, the white gate with the name on it in metal letters, Oaklands,
a drive flanked with thick-bladed leaves, the squarish red-brick front of the house with its single clumsy gable. Lawn and shrubbery. Tennis-courts at the back, white figures leaping and flexing in a permanent pool of light. Miranda. I offered my services as umpire in order to watch fifteen-year-old Miranda in her pleated white tennis dress. Partnered by this Farnaby whose terrible cunning on the courts I remember, she kissed him when they won. His shy smile, long-fingered scratched hand, taking it from me, that gift. Perhaps that is why you alarmed me so, standing under the lamp, charged with brightness from moment to moment, bright with vengeance. Even though no lights had been switched on. I was associating you with the violent and unpredictable motions often required in tennis.

  ‘Can I help you at all with your lecture?’ Farnaby asked.

  Mooncranker looked blankly at him a moment. His desire for gin could no longer be denied. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘perhaps you would like to go out on to the balcony. You get an excellent view from there.’

  Farnaby rose obediently and following Mooncranker’s instructions passed through thick brown curtaining material on to a long narrow balcony. He gripped the railing and looked out, momentarily confused after the confinement of the room by the broad spaces before him, the clear air. Unwilling for the moment to cope with all this he looked down at his hands. Hands now clinging to the rail were hands in that remote absorption shaping fuselage and wing section, shifting a sweaty grip from forehand to backhand, eliciting with considerable ingenuity pangs of fearful pleasure from my, ah, principal appendage. The things these hands have done.

  Mooncranker did not follow him, as he had been half expecting. However, he went on talking and Farnaby could tell from the direction of his voice that he had moved to another part of the room. He had the impression that Mooncranker was busying himself with something.

  ‘One of my most cherished memories,’ he heard the slow voice say through the curtain, ‘of those early days. A distinguished philosopher whom it fell to my lot to interview, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. I won’t mention his name.’

  Farnaby realized after a moment that what he was hearing was an excerpt from Mooncranker’s forthcoming lecture, ‘My Life in Radio and Television’, which Uncle George had told him about in the letter.

  ‘No names no packdrill,’ Mooncranker said. He had taken the tumbler full of gin at a draught and immediately felt better. The pain in his back was gone and his vision was clear, except for some few hallucinatory shreds and whisks. However, when he heard Farnaby’s voice through the curtain commenting on the view, he began to feel somehow threatened again, doubts as to the young man’s bona fides again invaded him. He knew it was Farnaby yet doubted it. Could it be some stranger posing for purposes of his own as nephew, tennis-player, provoker of the wickedness of that distant gift? ‘A marvellous man,’ he said, quietly pouring out another tumbler. ‘Bolt upright in his chair, mind like a trap. Lucid, articulate, the soul of courtesy. The only trouble was, he had a bladder ailment. Every few minutes he would have to excuse himself, right in the middle of some marvellously lucid and articulate –’ He strove while he was speaking to recall that summer at Oaklands more exactly. It was like looking down a funnel-shaped perspective at a group of distant yet bright and distinct figures separated from him by years and by a sort of abyss. Memory was like a lens, with adjustments it might sharpen detail but could not make these creatures more comprehensible. Dressed in gleaming white in the crashing silence of his memory they expanded and contracted themselves, made darting movements within white squares. And among them, somehow seeing them from close at hand, my own mind moves, my own eyes and mind are there down the funnel recording the results of those contortions from moment to moment with a sort of compulsive fidelity. He drank a little. ‘The voice of the Farnaby is heard in our land,’ he said. More like a gun-sight now than a funnel. Distance not time that makes those figures small. A touch on the trigger, the gentlest of pressures stills all that activity for ever. Stand aside Miranda. My obedient darling stands on the side lines, holding her racquet, fair hair contained by clean white headband, limbs flushed and roseate from her exertions. She watches with some anguish, which I shall shortly soothe, her companions being mowed down. ‘I hope you don’t mind my taking your name in vain like this,’ he called through the curtain. ‘Not at all,’ Farnaby answered politely. All the same he felt slightly shocked by this levity or rather by the continuing failure of Mooncranker to come up to expectation. Had he, Farnaby, come to offer his services, run errands, bear the brunt of nervous irascibility if necessary, at the behest of Uncle George and therefore on a mission hallowed as it were in advance, and with the virtuous certainty of this reinforced by his own stores of respect for authority and academic distinction and so on, which were considerable – he was one of nature’s acolytes after all, and knew it – only to hear snatches of a lecture and his name used in biblical contexts by a wandering voice through brown curtaining material? What on earth could Mooncranker be doing all this time?

  He looked over the huddle of mean buildings immediately below him, towards Galata and the gleaming water of the Golden Horn and beyond this to the marvellous skyline of the old city, the great mosques along the summit, Valide Hanim just beyond the bridge, then Suleyman, Beyazit, Yavuz Selim, the shapes black and definite against the paling sky as if some advance wave of darkness had entered them and was for the moment contained.

  ‘They certainly knew where to build, these, er, Osmanli builders,’ Farnaby said, speaking in clear tones so as to carry through the curtain. ‘Don’t you think so, sir?’

  ‘Farnaby, I do.’ Mooncranker emerged at last on to the balcony. He took up a position at the rail three or four yards away from Farnaby. He seemed altogether more self-possessed. However he said nothing for the moment.

  Together they watched the sky softening and hazing towards dusk. A sluice of darkness was already filling the streets. Across the glimmering water, domes and minarets were still firm-edged against the sky, but below this everything had dissolved in the deepening haze so that the mosques appeared now to be rising from some territory between land and sky.

  ‘This is what one likes about Istanbul,’ Farnaby said. ‘This massiveness made almost insubstantial by the light. You never quite know where you are, do you?’ He was worried by Mooncranker’s continuing failure to make any sort of preparation for his lecture – due in less than an hour’s time at the other side of the city. A number of people, perhaps two or three hundred, the intellectual élite of the capital, at this very moment in various districts would be preparing to go and listen to this lecture. Wives would be asking husbands to zip them up and so on, husbands looking for cuff-links. Farnaby found the thought of all this activity, in conjunction with Mooncranker’s inertia, his intensifying inertia if such a thing were possible, very disturbing. He had a deep respect for programmed events, all scheduled activity. This lecture had been publicized and promulgated. Surely Mooncranker could not be proposing simply not to turn up?

  ‘Your lecture is at eight-fifteen, sir, isn’t it’ he said.

  Immediately upon these words Mooncranker began moving in an immensely leisurely manner along the balcony rail towards him, as though drawing nearer to impart some confidence. The expression on his face, however, was cautious and rather sly as it had been when the reference to umpiring had been made. ‘The dome and minaret,’ he said, ‘comprise between them in my opinion everything that can be expressed architecturally or is worth expressing.’ He had experienced, on hearing Farnaby’s reference to the lecture, some return of that malevolence which had caused him to squeeze the trigger and immobilize the leaping tennis players. At the same time the desire to speak to someone about runaway Miranda was becoming imperative. ‘The soaring spire, vulnerable aspiration and on the other hand the shape of containment, the hump, the delectable …’ His vision was clouded again, the figure of the young man had grown indistinct. ‘Do you really think so?’ he said, under the momentary impression that
it was Farnaby who had spoken thus about domes and minarets.

  ‘What?’ Farnaby said.

  Mooncranker laid a hand on the young man’s arm. ‘Listen Farnaby,’ he said. ‘My secretary has left me.’ At once, with the words, tears of desolation came to his eyes. ‘She has gone away and left me,’ he said. Farnaby’s face had blurred, mingled with the first stars of night. ‘I am sorry to hear that,’ Mooncranker added, with a vague sense of anticipating Farnaby’s reaction. ‘She left two days ago.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear that,’ Farnaby said. Now that Mooncranker was so close the smell of model aeroplanes had intensified. Only of course it was not model aeroplanes. How can I have been so obtuse? The old boy has been having a drink or two. Alcohol, ingested some time previously, processed with other fluents in Mooncranker’s system, now exhaled or exuded in a form reminiscent of my industrious boyhood. He looked away in some embarrassment. It occurred to him now to wonder whether or not Mooncranker was married. It was a question of congruity rather than a deductive process. Could any part of that summer’s territory have belonged to a Mrs Mooncranker? Looking out across the darkening city he tried to introduce such a person, physically place her among the grey courts and green nets and fresh white lines, the hush and menace of the adjoining shrubbery. Perhaps she had crouched there, watching the rapidly curling and uncurling figures on the courts, reading the signals they made with their racquets against that sky of burning blue. Or a matronly figure dispensing tea and cakes in the intervals between sets. But no, there had been no intervals, his memory of that summer admitted no intervals, no Mrs Mooncranker. The only female of mature years had been Aunt Jane. She might have been at home, of course. Or dead. Was there any aura of grief, any odour of bereavement about the umpire? Not that I can remember.