Mooncranker's Gift Read online

  His delay with the beggar had lost him some ground. When he emerged on the main street he thought he had lost Mooncranker again, then saw him on the other side, still walking rapidly and surprisingly steadily in a direction away from the hotel. He followed circumspectly. He had no plan, no idea of what to do or say when he came up to Mooncranker again. But he felt it to be terribly important to keep the other in sight. With something like fifty yards between them they traversed a number of streets unfamiliar to Farnaby, finally emerging at Tunel, the terminus of the underground train. He thought for a moment that Mooncranker intended to enter and get a ticket but he turned left up Istiklal Caddesi. The pavements here were crowded. Bars, cinemas and restaurants were brightly lit. Mooncranker was halted at a junction, waiting for a gap in traffic that would allow him to cross. Farnaby saw him turn and say something to two young men standing waiting beside him, saw one of them shake his head in perplexity, saw Mooncranker courteously smiling. He put on speed and came up to them. ‘Can I help you, sir?’ he offered.

  ‘Oh, you speak English?’ Mooncranker said. ‘I wonder if you could tell me the address of a doctor in the vicinity? You see, I am looking for a doctor. I am a stranger in this city. Though I have been here before. I was here before the war, you know, several times. And again in 1956.’

  ‘I know of one near the British Embassy,’ Farnaby said, ‘not very far from here. I’ll go with you if you like.’ He was not sure whether Mooncranker genuinely did not recognize him or was merely affecting not to do so.

  ‘That is really extraordinarily kind of you.’

  ‘We can go down this way,’ Farnaby said. They turned into a narrow, less frequented street. Walking side by side with Mooncranker meant a series of small collisions of shoulders and arms, since he was swaying very slightly as he walked.

  ‘It is pleasant,’ Mooncranker said, ‘to meet with a fellow countryman in a foreign city. To tell you the truth, what I need is vitamin B.’

  ‘Vitamin B?’

  ‘I must have some.’

  ‘But why?’ Farnaby was bewildered. It was as if Mooncranker had suddenly asked for some bauble or delicacy.

  ‘I fear I am becoming dehydrated,’ Mooncranker said shyly. ‘I have not been able to keep anything down for some days. That is a regrettable phrase. If I don’t get some vitamin B quickly, I’m afraid I shall be gravely ill, gravely ill.’ He said this in an almost facetious way, as if he too felt that it was an absurd thing to be suddenly asking for.

  ‘But how are we going to get vitamin B?’ Farnaby said. ‘We could not get any without a prescription.’ He felt offended with Mooncranker for this assumption that one can just walk up and get things without going through the proper procedure.

  ‘Is that the doctor’s house?’ Mooncranker said, stopping and peering upwards. ‘There is a plate on the wall.’

  ‘No,’ said Farnaby, after a moment’s scrutiny. ‘That is a circumciser, not a doctor.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have any vitamin B, I suppose?’

  ‘Highly unlikely,’ Farnaby said. ‘No, it’s farther down. How do you propose to get some?’

  ‘I thought we might simply ask for some, dear boy.’

  ‘He would insist on examining you.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ Mooncranker felt himself beginning to tremble and strove to conceal this by hunching up his shoulders and thrusting his hands into the pocket of his overcoat. ‘Not necessarily,’ he repeated. ‘Some time ago, in Athens, a person was able to obtain some for me. My secretary as a matter of fact. She is not available at the moment, unfortunately. Well, I will be frank with you, she has decamped. Ask for it in tablet form.’

  ‘She must have a way with her,’ Farnaby said. He was impressed by this resourcefulness of the secretary’s. It had happened before then, similar binges, culminating in vitamin B deficiencies. It was not now too fanciful to think that in those Oaklands days, that long white summer of his Umpiring, there had been times when a similar charge of nourishment had been needed …

  ‘I have a wife too,’ Mooncranker said. ‘But we are estranged.’

  ‘This is the doctor’s,’ Farnaby said.

  They stood together at the foot of the steps and Farnaby noticed that Mooncranker’s whole body was shaking. He brought the events of the evening together in rapid review, remembered Mooncranker’s abrupt changes of manner and mood, his vomiting, the way his drunkenness had seemed to fluctuate. He sensed too that the other, though striving to keep up a certain suavity, was really quite badly frightened at the prospect of dehydration. ‘We can but try, I suppose,’ he said, and experienced, as he turned to mount the steps, an appalling insight into Mooncranker’s real condition. This person was capable of self-destruction, was one of that select and terrifying band capable of this, not by snapping the thread in some violent gesture of despair, but by a prolonged course of self-outrage, weakening himself, hurting himself repeatedly to the point of death. The first exponent of this uniquely human art that he had met.

  He got to the top of the steps, selected the doctor’s bell, and pushed it. He had not been waiting long, however, when he realized something was wrong. Mooncranker had not followed him up the steps. He felt himself to be alone, standing there. He turned and looked behind him, but Mooncranker was nowhere to be seen. The pavement at the foot of the steps was empty. He looked rapidly up the street towards the thoroughfare they had left: no time for him to have got that far. He must have taken the other way, farther down the dim street. Farnaby had heard nothing; but then, he had been concentrating on the manner to adopt when the door was opened, he had not been alert for sounds behind him. He began to descend the steps. At this point, however, the door was opened by a stout woman in a white overall and he lost some moments trying to explain things to this person who stood motionless above him irradiated by light from within the house. She made no reply to his stammered apologies, merely stared at him silently. He made an awkward gesture of farewell and set off along the pavement at a brisk pace. There was no sign of Mooncranker in front of him.

  Perhaps he crossed over and went down this side street. Yes that was it, he must have crossed immediately or I should have been bound to see him. Moreover it was the sort of thing he would do, having lost his nerve at the last minute, he would seek, like any creature in extremity, darkness and a narrow space.

  Entering the sidestreet, Farnaby acknowledged himself unambiguously now the hunter, felt the other as a quarry, already wounded, he was stalking through the streets of the city, but whether to heal or destroy he was not sure. He thought of the beggar at the fountain. Vitamins for Mooncranker: for that noseless, legless creature a handful of coppers. Palliatives both. A pity there is no absolute remedy for all the misery sitting or lying or walking about in the dark. But of course there is one …

  Nobody passed him in this narrow street. Far away, in the night beyond the city, a ship’s siren sounded. He heard from time to time the rattle of trams from the busy street that ran parallel to this one. It occurred to him suddenly that there existed, after all, hospitals – with rooms kept lighted all through the night – waiting to receive people like Mooncranker. Perhaps he could persuade Mooncranker to become a patient at such a place. He had no doubt that he would find Mooncranker again …

  The street curved, joined at a very acute angle another wider one, with a small mosque at the junction, the courtyard of which abutted on the pavement. An alley ran along the side of the mosque, which meant that there were three ways Mooncranker could have gone. Farnaby paused at the corner, not knowing which way to take. Opposite him, light and a low babble of voices came from beyond a narrow door with an upper part of frosted glass. He walked slowly across the street, opened the door and looked in. As usual with city bars of the cheaper sort, the long narrow room was almost unfurnished, brightly lit by the harsh white light from the fluorescent strips overhead. A handful of men stood at the bar, among whom he saw Mooncranker immediately, at the far end with his back to the white wall. He enter
ed the room and went up to Mooncranker, who at once drained his glass, as if Farnaby’s purpose in approaching him had been to appropriate it.

  ‘Ah,’ Mooncranker said. ‘So this is one of your haunts. This is where you get to. This is Farnaby,’ he said, leaning over the counter and addressing the barman, a thickset man with small ears who reminded Farnaby very strongly of the wrestlers he had seen earlier. ‘This is Farnaby,’ Mooncranker repeated. ‘I was just telling you about him. My friend from the Oaklands days.’ The barman, several of whose teeth were missing, grinned and nodded. He seemed to find Mooncranker in some way comical.

  ‘Raki güzel, eh?’ he said.

  Mooncranker raised his glass, which the barman had refilled.

  ‘They don’t stock gin,’ he said to Farnaby. ‘Will you have a drink?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ Farnaby said.

  ‘He has given up the habit,’ Mooncranker said to the barman. ‘He has conquered it.’ His eyes were bright and he seemed steadier, more in control of his movements. There was no way of knowing whether he associated Farnaby at all with the person who had accompanied him on the abortive visit to the doctor’s.

  ‘Happy days,’ Mooncranker said, raising his glass. He did not mind drinking in front of Farnaby here. This was a bar.

  ‘Oaklands for ever!’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know if you remember,’ Farnaby said, drawing nearer to Mooncranker and speaking in low tones. ‘But once you gave me a present. I don’t know if you remember. A small figure of the Crucifixion.’

  ‘No, my secretary must have taken it with her,’ Mooncranker said instantly. ‘She will be back shortly. My secretary has left me in the lurch,’ he said to the barman.

  ‘No, I’m talking about that summer holiday,’ Farnaby said. Relief at finding Mooncranker again had emboldened him. ‘I saw you, you know. Go and get it I mean. And I saw you talk to somebody just before. Yes. I was in the garden. Why did you give me such a thing?’ He looked closely into Mooncranker’s face as he spoke. The eyes seemed to be looking beyond him. ‘Don’t you remember?’ he said. Suddenly Mooncranker’s mouth twitched upwards in that brief grimace which was so familiar.

  ‘He used to umpire for us in our tennis matches,’ Mooncranker said, turning his gaze slowly towards the barman. His eyes were now completely unfocused. ‘George Wilson had two sons, Henry and Frederick,’ he said. ‘Budding gynaecologists. He is the salt of the earth.’ His voice had slurred again.

  ‘Baska?’ the barman said.

  ‘No,’ Farnaby said. ‘Don’t have another one. Let’s go back to the hotel.’

  ‘Very well, dear boy.’

  This compliance surprised Farnaby, gave him his first taste of that half unwilling sense of power which was later to colour so strongly his relations with Mooncranker. It was Mooncranker who led the way now, walking upright and steady out of the bar and some yards along the pavement outside. Suddenly, however, and without warning, he doubled up, clinging helplessly to Farnaby’s arm. Completely inert like this he was a dead weight, and Farnaby had to exert himself considerably to hold him up, prevent him from collapsing on to the pavement. In this way the two of them shuffled along together fifty yards or so, like a single crippled animal with two labouring heads. Then Mooncranker relinquished Farnaby’s arm and clutched at a lamp post, refusing to go farther. Standing above him, heart thumping, Farnaby could see in the lamplight the pathetic paucity of hair at the crown, streaks of pale scalp shining through, the affrighted curling wisps low on the neck. That side of Mooncranker’s face which was visible was damp and livid, slightly contorted.

  ‘It’s my back,’ he muttered, holding on to the lamp-post with both hands.

  Farnaby looked up and down the street. He did not want to attract attention in case it ended up as a police matter. He bent down and spoke solicitously into Mooncranker’s ear. ‘You wait here for a minute or two while I go and get hold of a taxi.’

  There was no response from Mooncranker who remained in a hunched position holding on to the lamp-post. Farnaby set off down the street. He had been hoping to emerge once more on Istiklal Caddesi, but the twistings and turnings of Mooncranker had ended by destroying his own sense of direction and he did not find again the mosque on the corner, which he had been keeping in his mind as a landmark. Instead he came after some minutes to a small square with a kiosk in the centre, a tea-house and a few shuttered shops. There was a tram-station here but nobody was waiting. However, a number of men were sitting gravely in the tea-house and Farnaby was about to go in and ask about taxis when a dolmus entered the square and began to go slowly round it. It stopped at his signal. He got in and pointed out to the completely silent driver the way he wanted to go. They found the street again without any difficulty, but Mooncranker was not there. The lamp-post stood solitary in its pool of light. The street was empty. After a moment of consternation, since he had been quite sure Mooncranker was too ill to move, Farnaby instructed the driver to turn right at the next junction. They negotiated several one-way streets and found themselves back outside the bar again. The driver turned his head and looked inquiringly at Farnaby. ‘Simdi nerede?’

  In near despair Farnaby gestured to the left, another lucky guess – indeed it was to occur to him subsequently how often that evening he had got on to Mooncranker’s track in this accidental way – because immediately on turning the corner he saw Mooncranker half-way down the street, walking in the same direction with his head down, and staggering slightly.

  ‘Arkadasim’, Farnaby said eagerly to the driver, pointing at Mooncranker. ‘He is ill.’

  They drew up alongside and Farnaby got out. ‘Here’s the taxi,’ he said, not making any reference to Mooncranker’s defection from the lamp-post. The other made no demur about getting in. He seemed now to be beyond protesting or indeed reacting at all to anything. Farnaby gave the name of the hotel.

  No one spoke on the way back. Farnaby paid off the driver, tipping him extravagantly, concerned before all else not to let his charge escape again. He supported Mooncranker through the lobby, under the gaze of the reception clerk, into the lift and up to room sixty-eight. Mooncranker made immediately for the bathroom where he remained for the following fifteen minutes or so.

  He wandered back finally, high-shouldered and chalky of face, dressed now in a green dressing-gown with a tasselled cord round the middle. His back did not seem to be troubling him so much, but he appeared to have forgotten again who Farnaby was. He sat on the edge of the divan, plucking at his tassels, talking in a slow patient voice about the extensive use made by the Ottoman Sultans in the belle époque of aphrodisiacs. At one point he wept a little; the tears flowed easily, without checking his discourse. Farnaby found two salami sandwiches – remnant of some former meal – and ate one. Mooncranker was persuaded to have some of the other, but after a couple of mouthfuls he went purposefully off to the bathroom again and the closed door did not completely shut out the sounds he made there. This cannot go on, Farnaby told himself as Mooncranker reappeared and stood groggily before him. But the terrible thing dawning on him was that it could: there seemed no foreseeable end to the suffering Mooncranker could absorb, the metamorphoses he could undergo. Indeed, in the different faces he put on his sickness and pain, the transitions he managed to effect between incompatible moods, the varying control he achieved over his own body and movements, there was something slippery and repugnant to Farnaby; something protean, indecent, even frightening, almost as if it were a physical property of Mooncranker’s to squirm and change. It occurred to him suddenly how strange it was that Mooncranker should not have referred in any way to the strangely accoutred figure who had scratched on their door.

  ‘That groom, you know,’ he said. ‘It was a fumigator really.’

  Mooncranker appeared not to hear this. ‘Let’s face it,’ he said with a rather ghastly attempt at urbanity. ‘That is a horrid phrase, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’

  ‘Employed exclusively
by those aspiring to managerial status.’ His mouth was too slack now for that civilized twitch. ‘You will no doubt recall that phrase about the collarless herd who eat blancmange and never say anything witty? They wear collars now, and they eat frozen scampi, and they say “Let’s face it”. I have never heard such nonsense in my life.’

  ‘I think “Pardon my French” is an absolutely detestable expression, don’t you?’ Farnaby said.

  ‘Nonsense, quite a different kettle of fish, that is a phrase I employ constantly. Without euphemism our civilization would collapse. Some of you may think that the life of a radio and television personality is all beer and skittles but I am going to tell you something now. It is a harsh, keen struggle, it is a fiercely competitive world. There are highlights of course. Moments stand out like …er … radiant peaks. I remember once interviewing a famous philosopher, just as an illustration of what I mean, he had a bladder ailment, yes. Marvellously lucid and articulate, he looked like a remote goat. The snag was that he had to be getting up every few minutes. That was quite some editing job as I daresay you can well imagine. Er …Farnaby.’