Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon: A Novel (3 page)

She sighed deeply, with her elbows on her knees and her chin cupped in her hands. A painter would have delighted in
her pensive beauty, in the enigmatic trace of sadness in those wide brown eyes which had captivated so many swains, in the peeping blush of her firm young breasts where the thin silk of her gown fell loose about her… ‘Ah me,’ she sighed, ‘What a silly I am!’ for she was not given to feeling sorry for herself as a rule. But even as she laughed her laughter rang false.

Just at that moment her ears caught the soft fall of distant hoofbeats, and her heart fluttered within her. She raised her head to listen, one soft golden lock brushing her exquisite cheek. The hooves came closer. Her heart began to beat, but she dare not let herself believe it could be him.

‘Impossible,’ she breathed-and yet! The horse clattered to a halt outside the house and she heard the rider’s boots on the step.

She called sharply, ‘Marie! Marie! See who has come!’

‘Oui, Madame,’ answered Marie from outside the door. ‘I go.’

It seemed an eternity before she heard Marie’s voice once more – ‘It is Monsieur Jones, Madame!’

Jane caught her breath. She raised her head proudly.

‘Tell him I am not at home!’

‘Oui, Madame,’ called Marie from the hall.

She sat quite still. Her young face, too young for such cares, wept bitter tears that ran down her ivory-sculptured neck and left their salty traces on her ripening breasts. Her thin shoulders shook as she buried her face in her hands.

She heard Marie’s voice – insisting – ‘Madame is not at home, Monsieur!’ and then
his
voice calling, ‘Jane! Jane!’ And suddenly he was hammering at the door behind which she sat.

But she was still proud.

‘I will not see you again! Go away and leave me now, I beg you. I have suffered too much!’

‘But I want you, Jane, I want you!’

She caught her breath once more. She heard him put his weight against the door.

‘I cannot stay away from you, Jane!’ he cried.

‘Stand back – I swear I will shoot the lock!’

The next moment his pistol roared and with a splintering of wood the door burst open. She looked at him coldly as he stood disconcerted in the doorway.

‘I beg your pardon, Ma’am, I thought—’

He started to back out, but Jane could contain herself no longer. She jumped up with a cry wrung out of her heart, tears of joy streaming down her face, and started to run towards his strong brown arms, forgetting that her knickers were round her ankles. She fell heavily on the bathmat, and the tight roll of paper she had been holding on her lap spun away, unwinding itself across the floor.

*     *     *

So you carry this bomb about with you expressly for the purpose of throwing it at someone?

Well, yes. I suppose there’s no getting away from that. Or
leaving
it – I mean it’s got this time-fuse. I could leave it, but I don’t think I will when it comes to it, I mainly think of throwing it.

At whom?

I don’t know. I’ve got a list.

Now why exactly—

I don’t know. Exactly.

It’s all right, we’ll just take it slowly. Would you have a messianic complex about sin, for example?

No, it’s not that, not really, except it is something to do with no one being
good
any more, but that’s part of the other thing, of things all getting out of control, too big. I mean I’m not a crank fixated on an individual – it’s not vengeance, it’s salvation.

From what?

It’s all got huge, disproportionate to the human scale, it’s all gone rotten because life – I feel it about to burst at the seams because the sheer volume and numbers of the things we’re filling it up with, and people, it’s all multiplying madly and no one is controlling it because it’s all got too
big.

But how do you apply—

It needs an explosion to shock people into calling a halt and catch up, stop and recognise,
realise
– everyone takes it all for granted. When an oil well catches fire, or a gas well, in the desert, there’s this column of fire blasting out of the sand high into the sky, day and night, week in and week out, a fantastic godlike pillar of fire, and the only way you can put it out is to have an explosion, make one, a great big bang that snuffs it out, and then the people can take over again.

Would you describe yourself as a psychotic?

No. I am just wide-open to things, certain things…

Some kind of hysteric?

I’m hysterical with secret knowledge, I—

But throwing a bomb—

I want nothing to do with it all-it’s self-defence, and if I can’t disengage myself by an act of will then perhaps an act of violence—

That’s where I got these braces….

Mmm?

‘Little shop back there, sold nothing but braces,’ said the ninth earl. ‘Of course that was years ago, that was the age of the specialist. Nowadays I suppose people buy their braces at the grocer’s along with their beastly gramophone records.’

Struggling with the inexpressible, Moon yet again abandoned his interview and saw that they were climbing St James’s Street at a reckless gallop. He could hear O’Hara screaming from his box. There were cars parked down both sides of the street, and many more nosed each other out of sight towards a mechanical infinity beyond human dominion, all essentially alike as though the product of some monstrous spawn. Moon tried to seal off his mind against his integrality with a vast complex of moving parts all dependant on each other and maintained on the brink of disintegration only by their momentum. He was breathing in spasms. He closed his eyes, and all the motorcars began to breed, spread, press the people to the walls, pinning them by their knees, and there was no end to it and no alternative either, because you couldn’t stop making them just like that because then there’d be hundreds of thousands of people out of work, with children and all, and no money to spend, so the shopkeepers would get caught up in it, grocers and shoeshops and garages and all the people dependent on them, with children and all, and if they couldn’t go on then the factories and the oil refineries would have to stop so there’d be millions of people out of work, with children and all, so—

He felt the shell of human existence ballooning to a thinness that must give way at some point, and his whole nervous system was tensed for the apocalyptic moment. If it did not come soon he would have to anticipate it, in microcosm, for his private release. The bomb bulked in his pocket, heavy
with reassurance, and the coach swung into Piccadilly, turning, unwisely, right.

The oncoming traffic was a wall of blaring indignation spread pavement to pavement, but the terrified horses plunged on against O’Hara’s weight on the reins, and the wall parted for them, streaming and screaming past the windows.

Ahead of them a woman staggered out of the colonnade of the Ritz and swerved through the gate into Green Park, almost falling.

‘Laura!’ shouted the ninth earl. ‘Pull yourself together and go home!’ adding, ‘I can’t stop now,’ and pulled his head back into the coach.

Moon saw the woman fall down a few yards into the park. From behind a bush a long yellow animal like a mountain lion padded towards her and put down its great cat-head to sniff at her hair. Several people were watching the scene. The lion suddenly turned and ran off across the park.

‘Rollo!’ shouted the ninth earl joyfully. He clapped Moon on the knee. ‘Did you see? – she’s found Rollo.’

Up ahead a policeman stepped into the road with his arms out. When the horses were ten feet away he tried to jump to one side and was jerked out of sight.

‘I think we bumped into someone, my lord,’ Moon said. He felt exhilarated.

‘I’m always bumping into people,’ said Lord Malquist. ‘Most of them claim they know me. So tiresome. Dear boy,’ he added, ‘please would you remind me to telephone Sir Mortimer in case there is any nastiness.’

‘What was that woman doing, my lord?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the ninth earl wearily. ‘She gets carried away by the conviviality of her interests. Take my advice, dear fellow, never marry a woman with more than two-introspection and copulation.’

‘Was that your wife?’

’I certainly don’t know anyone else who could be thrown out of the Ritz before eight o’clock without feeling somewhat
passé.’

O’Hara, transferring all his weight to one rein, pulled the coach right into Half Moon Street sending a motor-cyclist through the door of a travel agency, and left into Curzon Street, right again into Park Lane, once more against the traffic while he wept and implored the galloping greys, ‘Enough! Enough already!’

‘I’m beginning to wonder,’ said the ninth earl, ‘if O’Hara is the right man for the job. He seems to have no rapport with animals.’

He shouted something at the coachman but whatever it was disappeared without trace into a general crescendo as two taxis locked horns and catherine-wheeled into a bus. From the ensuing fragmentation of glass and steel there bolted, with a completeness and an air of instant creation that suggested to Moon divine responsibility, a donkey with a white-robed rider sitting on its back.

‘Such utter disregard for the common harmonies of life,’ complained the ninth earl. ‘I look around me and I recoil from such disorder. We live amidst absurdity, so close to it that it escapes our notice. But if the sky were turned into a great mirror and we caught ourselves in it unawares, we should not be able to look each other in the face.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Since we cannot hope for order let us withdraw with style from the chaos.’

The coach, with the donkey following, turned right into South Street and seemed about to distribute itself around the dead end of Farm Lane when it found the opening into a mews. And there, the horses whinnying with relief, the ride ended. The greys pulled up beside a third horse tied to the railings. The donkey, now riderless, stopped also. Moon got up from the floor of the coach and opened the door. All his exhilaration had drained away leaving a swamp of
emotional weight that expressed itself in nausea. He heard Marie shouting, ‘Madame, it is the Monsieur!’ But he was beyond surprise. He climbed down from the coach and nearly fell.

‘Who is that delicious fertile creature?’ enquired the ninth earl.

Moon made no reply. He went unsteadily up the steps, put his hands on Marie’s shoulders and briefly hugged her. When she managed to get free, he walked past her into the house. Lord Malquist followed, pausing to lift Marie’s fingers to his lips.

In the drawing-room Jane was lying on the chesterfield, all but naked despite her silk dressing-gown. A cowboy was kneeling beside her, rubbing cream into her left buttock.

‘Darling!’ she greeted him. ‘What a lovely way to come home! Today’s becoming
so
romantic!’ and to the cowboy, ‘That’s lovely, darling, that will do nicely,’ and stood up as Lord Malquist entered the room.

‘May I present my wife Jane,’ said Moon. ‘Lord Malquist.’

‘Charmed,’ said Jane. ‘I
do
apologise that you should find me in this awfully undone state.’

‘My dear Mrs Moon, if I may say so, we should both be congratulated.’

Jane giggled.

‘And this,’ she said, waving a hand at the cowboy who had got up and was staring resentfully at them, ‘is Mr Jones.’

‘Ah!’ said the ninth earl jauntily, ‘The Duke of Wellington, I believe!’

‘I don’t care what you’re selling, just piss off,’ the cowboy replied.

‘Now Jasper,’ Jane reproved him, ‘don’t be jealous. Lord Malquist always dresses like that, don’t you, your Grace?’

‘It depends on the occasion, dear lady. I have a great many clothes.’

Moon turned away. He took his bomb upstairs into the bedroom and sat down exhausted. He put the bomb on his lap and hunched himself around the plump flat-bottomed pomegranate-shell. He was suddenly depressed. He knew that he had come badly out of the interview. He had tried to pin the image of an emotion against the wall but he did not have the words to transfix it. His own self-assurance was untouched – at bottom the pieces still fitted – but he knew that he had definitely come out cranky, because he did not have the words to translate a certain fear about something as real as a coffeepot, only not a coffee-pot and he did not even have the words to formulate that. He could pick over the pullulating growth and isolate a part of it and bring it out into the light, but it became immediately frivolous.
No doubt, Mr Moon, the streets tend to be rather crowded at certain times of day but I don’t see that there is any cause for alarm, even if you do think that the Church of Rome is putting too great a reliance on the rhythm method
… (It’s not that, it’s not exactly that – it’s
all
expanding – and I don’t know a single person who is completely honest, or even half honest, and they don’t know it because dishonesty is now a matter of degree, and sincerity is something to be marketed and hunger is a statistic and expediency is god and the white rhino is being wiped out for the racket in bogus aphrodisiacs!)
But my dear chap, we can’t all go around throwing bombs because we’re afraid that there is less and less control over more and more people, and the world is ransomed to movements of money which your mind cannot grasp, or any other neurosis of which you seem to have-
(But what can I do?-write a letter to
The Times?) Well, why not? Your words would be read by people of influence. You might well start a correspondence, leading to an editorial, questions in the House and the eventual return to a system of barter, if that’s what you want.

(That is not it at all,

that is not what I meant at all.

But when I’ve got it in a formulated phrase, when I’ve got it formulated, sprawling on a pin, when it is pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how should I begin …?)

And how should you presume?

(He’s got me there, cold. How should I presume?)

All the same Moon knew that there was something rotten. He held the vapours in his cupped hands but they would not crystalize. He did not have the words. But whatever it was, it was real, and even if it was in him, he had a bomb and the bomb promised purgation. He would be presumptuous.