Mooncranker's Gift Page 6

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That is your name, isn’t it? Farnaby of Oaklands?’

  ‘Yes’.

  ‘I must have some vitamin B.’

  ‘Vitamin B?’

  ‘I need vitamin B, Farnaby, as a restorative.’

  ‘I doubt if you’ll get any without a prescription.’

  ‘On similar occasions, my secretary –’

  ‘Yes, I know she managed it, but I haven’t got her powers of persuasion, probably. I don’t think there’s much point in wandering about looking for vitamin B, actually, besides we’ve already tried it once, haven’t we? No, the only thing I can think of is the hospital.’

  Mooncranker remained silent at this, looking at Farnaby blankly.

  ‘The French hospital at Harbiye,’ Farnaby said firmly.

  ‘They will have facilities there … I’ll go with you, if you like.’ He looked at Mooncranker who was plucking at his tassels again fussily. Suddenly and with a sensation of pure amazement, he perceived that he had arrived at a position of power over Mooncranker. It had never occurred to him as possible that power could flow that way.

  Mooncranker raised his head. His lips were bloodless. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it would be wise.’

  ‘No time like the present,’ Farnaby said, infusing this with a sort of cheerful briskness he was far from feeling.

  ‘If I am entering the portals of a hospital,’ Mooncranker said, ‘I suppose I’d better have a shower.’

  ‘By all means.’ Farnaby spoke as one granting permission.

  After a short time, Mooncranker reappeared, dressed now in a dark grey suit. He looked dispirited, meek and sick, damp hair combed back over his ears, shoulders high and disconsolate.

  ‘It was impossible,’ he said, ‘to obtain any hot water.’

  Farnaby smiled sympathetically, trying not to think of Mooncranker having a cold shower, the fine spray playing over Mooncranker’s long, thin shrinking whiteness, veined nerveless arms clutching suffering torso, wretched genitals purpling and pimpling at the onset of the chill. It was the sort of vision, the sort of knowledge of Mooncranker he had been resisting ever since his arrival: the apprehension of the other as forked animal, idiosyncratic and frail, stripped of his insignia of straw hats, flannels, vestments of authority, mantle of Uncle George’s approval; simply the creature, naked and fearful, writhing beneath the cold mist of the shower, behaving unstoically. This was not the person who had handed him the gift that distant summer day. That person was dressed in white, in command of himself. He leaned forward, courteously, his face under the straw hat smiling. A civilized twitch at the corners of the mouth.

  ‘Let’s go, shall we,’ Farnaby said.

  Part Two

  1

  Tall iron gates set open; a locked and deserted lodge at the side; the great white building before them faintly incandescent, with an irregular pattern of lighted windows; hushed forecourt. They were required to wait for some time in a corner of the marble-appointed entrance-hall, dimly lit in this quiet time of evening by small lamps bracketed against the white walls. The floor was covered with squares of some rubbery material, beige in colour. Farnaby remained standing while Mooncranker, who looked completely exhausted, sat on the marble bench that ran along the whole length of the wall and, after a moment or two, closed his eyes. A very faint humming sound, like the sound of distant bees, emerged from his closed lips. Farnaby glanced at his watch: not quite eleven. Four hours ago Mooncranker and I were distinct and separate persons. Now, though he is sitting and I am standing, try as I may to resist, I am implicated in the chill that will be striking from the cold marble through the thin cloth on to those meagre, flattened buttocks.

  This entrance-hall had an extraordinary acoustical resonance, perhaps due to the marble, the absence of furniture in it. That quiet humming seemed to fill the whole space from floor to ceiling. From time to time steps sounded along the corridors beyond the hall, and on two occasions pairs of nursing sisters in white robes and stiff white head-dresses passed through the hall; each of them, as though especially sensitive by nature or training to distress, looking only at the seated man. A slow deliberate movement of the head-dress. A long regard. A slither of steps on the floor, a rustle of skirts, they were gone.

  A doctor appeared at last; a slender, youngish man with an alert carriage of the head. He approached them soundlessly on white plimsolls. His white coat was somewhat too large – it descended towards his ankles and had been rolled up neatly at the sleeves. Farnaby explained the situation in low tones.

  ‘There are withdrawal symptoms?’ the doctor said, in careful English.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ Farnaby said. Calm brown eyes surveyed him lingeringly. ‘I have not noticed anything of that kind,’ he said again, defensively, as if some negligence were being imputed.

  Mooncranker had stopped humming as soon as he heard voices, but his eyes were still closed.

  ‘When did he stop drinking?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘About two hours ago.’

  ‘I have a colleague here on duty who has specialized in such disorders.’ The doctor gave Mooncranker a swift, impersonal regard. ‘She has studied in America,’ he added. ‘I am going now to inform her.’

  This time the wait was briefer. The lady doctor walked quickly across the hall towards them. Her open white coat billowed out somehow expectantly behind her. She was young, about thirty, with long, very dark hair and lustrous quick-glancing eyes and a square-shouldered, stocky figure. The unbuttoned coat showed mohair beneath, a bosom of impressive proportions rigorously confined.

  ‘Is this the man?’ she said, and Mooncranker hearing no doubt the note of authority in the question, opened his eyes and got to his feet. He assumed a dejected penitent air. In the grip now of clinicians, he essayed no extravagances of speech or manner.

  ‘You are an alcoholic,’ the doctor said, in the tone of a statement.

  ‘Yes,’ Mooncranker said, looking fixedly at her.

  ‘Whisky, gin, raki?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, which? I mean which?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mooncranker said. He swallowed painfully. He looked extremely ill. ‘Gin,’ he said.

  ‘Ah,’ said the doctor. She looked significantly at Farnaby, as if to make sure that the import of these questions was not escaping him. ‘You stopped when? The last drink, how many hours ago?’

  ‘About two hours ago.’

  The doctor’s manner seemed to become more intense, more portentous. ‘How much did you drink in the last twenty-four hours?’

  ‘I don’t know, actually,’ Mooncranker said.

  ‘Two bottles, three?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Large bottles,’ the doctor said to Farnaby, with a kind of triumph. She nodded her head at him, narrowed her brilliant eyes, in some private appraisal. Farnaby had an uneasy sense that he was being somehow mingled with Mooncranker in the doctor’s mind, involved medically, as if he were one of Mooncranker’s more easily recognizable symptoms. ‘I thought I’d better bring him along,’ he said.

  ‘How do you feel now?’ the doctor said, and her question fell between them.

  ‘Not very well.’ It was Mooncranker who answered, in his slow, deep-toned voice. ‘I have been vomiting frequently since mid-morning, I cannot eat anything without vomiting almost immediately afterwards. To be quite frank with you, I am afraid of becoming dehydrated.’

  ‘Dehydrated,’ the doctor echoed, in the tone of one wholeheartedly concurring. It seemed to Farnaby that her bosom heaved. She held up pale, short-fingered hands, palms outward. ‘Put your finger tips against my palms,’ she said, and Mooncranker obeyed. While this contact endured she looked shrewdly at Farnaby.

  ‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘Yes, yes. You have got the shakes, haven’t you?’ And indeed contact with Mooncranker had caused her two hands visibly to vibrate as at the communication of some dynamic force or current. She looked into Mooncranker’s face as if seeking to el
icit some vivid personal statement or demonstration in keeping with her own sense of the seriousness of his condition; but Mooncranker maintained the same dejected air he had worn ever since being obliged to take a cold shower. He stood there shaking, meeting her brilliant, highly charged, almost beseeching regard with a white blank face. She switched her gaze suddenly to Farnaby, who had been allowing his thoughts to dwell with too great a particularity on her full-breasted, thick-waisted, possibly slightly deformed body, and who was consequently rather disconcerted by the sudden transference of her attention to him.

  She said, ‘He cannot be admitted for treatment – and he needs treatment badly, at once, he is very ill – unless there are with him two strong boys.’

  ‘Two strong boys?’

  ‘Yourself say, and a friend, remaining with him throughout the night.’

  ‘Surely that isn’t necessary,’ Farnaby said in gentle tones – pleased to be thought of by the doctor as a strong boy.

  ‘Absolutely essential you do not leave his side throughout the night.’

  ‘No, I mean about needing two. My friend is very calm, as you can see.’

  ‘Ah, yes, perhaps so, to the outside appearance. But when the withdrawal pains are on him, it is a different story. In that madness two strong boys will find it difficult, even two of you, to nail him down. He will struggle.’ A shade of doubt, however, appeared to cross her face as she looked again at Mooncranker’s features and bearing, of such a conspicuous mildness and dejection were they. ‘We could not manage it without two strong boys,’ she said.

  Mooncranker endured this scrutiny dumbly. He had broken out in a sweat again.

  ‘They shout loudly,’ the doctor said. ‘They writhe, and enter into convulsions.’ Something, however, some element of confidence, had disappeared from her manner.

  ‘Look here, I need vitamin B,’ Mooncranker said, or perhaps again it was merely felt, not actually uttered, because neither of the two persons with him looked in his direction. He had not been able to follow their conversation, largely because he was concentrating so hard on maintaining his upright posture. He did not know how this was being achieved, having lost all sense of the weight of his body and its centres of balance, but he knew that there was a certain distance between his head and the floor and that this distance must be kept more or less constant. I need infusions of minerals and vital salts. I need my plasma restoring. The doctor’s white coat hurt his eyes. He saw without being able to believe it completely a person in a white wimple crossing the hall, a pink expressionless face framed in this white headdress looked full at him, turned away, glided past. I need the ministrations of nurses.

  The lady doctor said, ‘One man once, a Turk – it was during my first year here – a man with a similar complaint, escaped from the sisters who were trying to restrain him and threw himself in delirium from an upper window. He was dashed to pieces below.’

  ‘My goodness,’ Farnaby said. They both turned to regard Mooncranker again, as if hoping for some frantic symptoms.

  ‘Their strength is greatly enhanced,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Well actually,’ Farnaby said, ‘I don’t think he’s that sort at all. I don’t think he wants to drink any more. I think he’s frightened and he wants to be cured.’ He had taken this line because of the difficulty of finding another strong boy, but as soon as he began speaking he knew it to be absolutely true. Mooncranker has had interviews of this sort before, he thought. These thoughts and sensations he has had before, in bars, in streets, in lonely rooms. Changing his socks. Examining his tongue. He is interested in the doctor only as representative of a Healing System, an organization within which he seeks selfrepair. She is the drip-feed, the vitamin injection.

  He said, ‘I think I could manage on my own. If I promised to stay with him the whole time …’

  The doctor paused, considering. Then, ‘Very well,’ she said sharply, as if with an access of impatience or frustration.

  ‘But it will be your responsibility. You must not leave his side during the night. Wait here please.’ To Mooncranker she said, ‘This way please, would you follow me.’ He walked after her in the wake of her billowing coat without another glance at Farnaby.

  Farnaby waited there till almost midnight. An old man and a pregnant woman entered the hall during this time and were respectively met and led away by nursing-sisters. Once he thought he heard a distant outcry of voices; twice there was a rattle like the wheels of a trolley from some nearby corridor. Otherwise the place was silent, with a silence that seemed fraught and threatened, like that in a very lonely, enclosed place or a deep forest. Along the white wall, some feet above the bench, were smudges where weary heads had rested. Creatures had waited here, just as he was waiting, till a regard should fall on them. The weight of sickness and succour that he felt in the hospital was oppressive to him. ‘This Christian Enclave in the heart of’ – his mental note collapsed before it could be properly framed. There was a stiff and undistinguished oil-painting of the Holy Family on the opposite wall. He stared at it for some minutes, closed his eyes finally on the dimpled infant, the gravely attentive mother. Many believe that the Mother of God took ship for Asia Minor after her son’s death, and ended her days at Ephesus. I myself have no views about this. Where she died to me is immaterial …

  ‘Bon soir, monsieur.’

  He opened his eyes on a nakedly benign face framed by a white head-dress.

  ‘Bon soir, ma soeur.’

  ‘If you will have the goodness to follow me.’

  Down brightly lit corridors where smells of ether and disinfectant contended. Two turns to the right, one to the left, through another, narrower hall, left again … He ceased to take note of the way they were taking.

  ‘Your friend is in here,’ the nun said and gave him a bright conspiratorial smile, at the same time holding open the door. He saw Mooncranker’s profile against a pillow, turned to thank his guide, but the door was already closing behind him. There were two beds in the room and Mooncranker lay in one of them, bathed in light from a standard lamp near the head of it. He was lying on his back staring calmly up at the ceiling. A white coverlet was drawn up to his neck. His left arm lay outside the coverlet – the institutional white pyjama jacket had been rolled up and something, some attachment, was bound round the forearm. A bottle containing clear liquid was suspended above him and attached to him by thin tubing. He did not turn his head at Farnaby’s entrance. There was absolutely no sound in the room. For a moment Farnaby stood there, gazing. The protean Mooncranker had undergone yet another metamorphosis. He was himself now swaddled, swathed in white. This was so startling that Farnaby found himself for the moment unable to move. He had expected to see Mooncranker in the guise of patient. But to find him resembling that corruptible Christ, to experience this sudden confusion between the giver and the gift, was more than he was for the moment prepared for.

  ‘So there you are,’ Mooncranker said, in his customary deep-toned voice.

  ‘Yes. Is there anything I can do for you, sir?’

  ‘Nothing. I would be well enough on my own here.’

  ‘I am obliged to stay with you.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Mooncranker continued to look up at the ceiling, which undulated or heaved, like an oily sea, but very, very slightly. The injection they had given him was taking full effect now. His limbs were leaden and his own voice sounded remote in his ears. ‘They expect me to start frothing and screeching shortly,’ he said. ‘But I am afraid I must disappoint them. I have never gone in for that kind of thing. Many of us don’t, you know. It is only the exhibitionists. Where is the other strong boy?’

  ‘I couldn’t find one,’ Farnaby sat on the edge of the other bed.

  ‘A pity. The pair of you might have put on a show. Weightlifting or something of that sort.’

  ‘Ha, ha, yes,’ Farnaby said. He bent down, unlaced his shoes and slipped them off. His jacket too he took off and laid at the foot of the bed. Then he lay down full length, n
ot getting inside the sheets however.

  ‘Reverting to regrettable phrases,’ Mooncranker said, ‘things that are better not uttered, there are people who actually say: “Hello there!” and others, or perhaps they are the same, who say: “Goodbye now!’” Drowsiness was overcoming him – he resisted it in the blissful knowledge of ultimate defeat. ‘Show business people,’ he added, in a voice that had slurred again.

  ‘What does dehydration actually involve?’ Farnaby asked, regarding his own section of ceiling earnestly.

  ‘You have a thirst for knowledge, I see. Three quarters of the body is water. That is the first fact you have to get into focus, young Farnaby, we are composed very largely of water.’ He paused.

  It was becoming difficult now to understand him because of the way his words ran together. After a few moments he went on, very slowly:

  ‘There is a plasma in the blood, to put the matter simply, to put it at its very simplest, and this plasma in the blood, if this plasma is diminished …’

  After waiting a little while for the sentence to be finished, Farnaby looked across and saw that Mooncranker was apparently sleeping. He watched in some fascination the colourless fluid in the bottle suspended above Mooncranker. The level was steady; but from moment to moment a globule was dispatched down the tube on its vital mission of redressing the plasma deficit in Mooncranker’s veins. Farnaby could trace the run of the bubble all the way down the tube. The bloodless profile had a certain nobility in it, Farnaby thought, a sort of beaky austerity. It brought him in mind of death-masks. Impossible too, seeing the other’s features in such waxlike detail, to go on confusing him with the little effigy bound in bandage, which had had no features at all, merely the shape of a head … It was, however, possible, he reminded himself, by studying the accidental folds of the bandage, to attribute features to that little figure, eyes, a nose and mouth. I thought of him, in a way, as helmeted, perhaps solely because of this lack of forehead or hair. Besides, features were not necessary; they were not necessary to a sense of his humanity, hanging on the cross. Cross of lathe roughly sawn to the right proportion of crosspiece and stake, roughly nailed together. The figure tied, not pinned, to it. How did Mooncranker know that I would venerate the gift? From the previous October my thoughts had been filled with that sacrifice, with the beauty of Christ’s holiness. That October I was thirteen. Just a month before they gave me a New Testament for twenty-five consecutive attendances. A blue cover and gold lettering, the new paper smelled of purity and loneliness. I am the way the truth and the light,no man cometh unto the father but through me. And that winter I prayed among the others, for the first time, all of us kneeling, a silence, and then my voice speaking confidentially to God. ‘I did not realize this,’ the Leader said, ‘I did not fully understand that you had made this decision until I heard your voice raised in prayer.’ The Leader had a luxuriant fair moustache, red lips. He was an accountant and a pacifist. ‘I have often been troubled by impure thoughts,’ he once told us. He told the assembled class about his struggles against the temptations of the flesh. ‘Now I thank God you have made this decision,’ he said to me. ‘You must bear witness, of course, but do not feel that you have to tell your parents at once.’ Leading the chorus with his joyous baritone, I will make you Fishers of Men if you follow me. For a year of my life I thought that I would be a Fisher of Men, netting the sinners, reeling them in from pools of sloth and sin, hauled naked and spasming from the depths, to have their gills adapted. Breathe on me breath of God. I suppose I believed in this mission till that summer afternoon when Christ’s putrefaction was conveyed to my nostrils. Believed in it even though I knew I was sinning all the time, and making him my accomplice in it. No doubt that Christ became my accomplice …