Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon: A Novel (5 page)

‘Uncle Jackson was cuckoo.’

That’s true, actually.

‘But he knew about bombs.’

‘And so are you,’ added Jane.

That doesn’t follow.

‘And you know perfectly well,’ she said, ‘that you’ll never do anything with it, so stop being such a bore with it.’

Moon smiled secretly like an anarchist waiting for the procession to come by.

For some reason Jane’s lips appeared to have been painted pink. He wondered whether the illusion was optical or transcendental. Then he noticed that her eyes were edged with green lines that shaded away into the recesses of her lids. He felt that everything which was disturbing his sense of order must be reduced to a single explanatory factor.

‘Is he taking you to a fancy-dress ball?’

‘That would be lovely. Is there one on?’

‘I don’t know,’ Moon said.

‘He promised to take me for a ride anyway.’

‘What, on his horse?’

‘No, silly, in his coach.’

Moon withdrew to re-align his attack.

‘You’ve painted your lips pink,’ he challenged.

‘Well what colour do you expect me to paint them?’

Again he felt like the victim of a sensational ripose by a barrister who was making up his own law as he went along. But then, almost in the same instant, the prism which held him, shattered; he looked at her face and it was the same face, pink-lipped, green-eyed, only now quite unexceptional. Its familiarity ambushed him: lipstick and eye-shadow. Once more the commonplace had duped him into seeing absurdity, just as absurdity kept tricking him into accepting it as commonplace.
He fell back on the bed and closed his eyes.

I shall buy a redundant sea-lion from the circus and its musical nose shall press simple tunes from my lady’s bosom. Paarp-pippip-paarp-paarp. A little flat but no reflection on you, Mrs Moon.

A gunshot cracked out in the street. Oddly the smash of glass in the drawing-room seemed not to follow it but to occur simultaneously.

‘What is it
now
?’ asked Jane petulantly.

Moon got up and went downstairs. In the drawing-room Jasper Jones was sitting on the ottoman with his denims pulled up to the knee and blood on his calf. Lord Malquist knelt by him, ministering. Marie was not in view but a moaning sob betrayed her hiding place under the chesterfield.

‘Dear boy,’ said the ninth earl. ‘Has the season opened?’

‘It’s that Slaughter,’ said Jasper Jones, rolling down his denim-leg. ‘Ornery critter.’

‘Are you hurt?’ asked Moon.

‘Jes’ a scratch – ain’t got used to my new spurs yet.’

Moon went to the window. The bullet had cut through one of the lead mullions destroying the pane on either side. Another cowboy was riding past the house at a stately pace, replacing his gun in his holster. Moon felt weary and resentful. He wanted to disengage himself from what he felt was a situation imposed upon him. He would lock himself into a turret room and devote the rest of his life to lexicography, or perhaps he would crawl under the chesterfield and blindfold himself in Marie’s hair, plug her gaspings with his tongue. Glass snapped under his shoes. He stood on one foot and ineffectively swept with the other.

Jasper Jones stood in the middle of the room, smiling grimly, twisting tobacco into a liquorice-brown cigarette paper. He stamped himself lower into his block-heeled boots (winced when the spur nicked him). He put the ruined tobacco-leaking tube into his mouth – the grim smile accommodated
it without adjustment – and tugged down on his gun-belt. Having got that right he tipped his hat carefully over his eyes using his left hand, playing stiff-fingered arpeggios on the Colt with his right. Shreds of tobacco fell from his cigarette.

Slaughter’s voice, unexpectedly conversational, could be heard in the street: ‘Whoa, boy, stop you stupid critter,’ and then rising again: ‘Come on out, I’m waitin’ for you, Jasper.’

Jasper began slapping himself around the body. Lord Malquist stood up and obligingly held a match to Jasper’s cigarette which blazed up like a taper before dropping the ember and the rest of the tobacco onto the carpet where it sent up tiny smoke signals of distress.

Moon walked past them into the hall. From upstairs came Jane’s brave proud call: ‘Marie! tell him I am not at home!’

He opened the front door. O’Hara still sat up aloft on the coach smoking a short pipe. Beside the two greys was Jasper’s chestnut and then the mouse-coloured donkey. Crouching behind the donkey was its erstwhile rider with his right fist in his left armpit, warily looking on as the cowboy was being carried slowly by the house on a tight rein.

‘Whoa, boy,’ said Slaughter as the mare ambled by. ‘Is Fertility Jane in there?’ he asked Moon.

‘Moon’s the name,’ said Moon coming down the steps. ‘Perhaps I can be of some assistance.’

He noticed that other people up and down the street were staring from doorsteps and through windows. He included them all in a nod.

Slaughter heaved back on the reins, shouting, ‘Fertility! Here ah aym!’ The mare had her head pulled high and back, almost vertical, but strolled on unnervingly serene, as though contemplating a sonnet on the sky at dusk. ‘Stand still god-damit, what are you playing at?’

‘Ah, tis a fine lookin’ mare ye have there t’be sure,’ said the donkeyman placatingly. ‘I charge thee go in peace, boyo.’

Slaughter looked down at him.

‘A mare?’

‘Ah, that’d be a great strappin’ she-horse an’ no mistake at all, yer honour.’

‘Whoa then, girl,’ said Slaughter somewhat repentant. The mare however was lost in her thoughts. She did not even give the donkey a glance as she brushed by. Slaughter turned in the saddle to get another question in: ‘Is Jones in there with Fertility Jane?’

‘Ah now that I wouldn’ be knowin’ at all, sir.’

O’Hara had followed this exchange with furious bewilderment. His face was screwed up around his pipe. When he removed it his face unwound itself, allowing him to speak.

‘A Yid,’ he accused the little bearded man.

‘Not at all, begorrah.’

‘I should mistake a Yid?’

‘Whoa, you bitch!’ commanded Slaughter but he and the mare, like clock figures forever bound to the striking of the hours, passed on and out of sight.

Moon thought of following them but finally could think of no specific reason why he should. It was just that the encounter felt incomplete, in the way that his brain signalled incompletion when he left half-eaten sandwich lying around.

‘I am reminded,’ said the ninth earl from the top of the steps, ‘of a certain critic who struggled throughout his career to commit himself to one unqualified judgment on the arts, and who after a lifetime in the cause of ambivalence, steeled himself to the assertion that in his opinion Sarah Bernhardt was the greatest one-legged female Hamlet of the age.’ He puffed delicately on Turkish tobacco papered in a heliotrope cylinder, and blew a perfumed wreath for the fading light. ‘I am reminded of him because subsequently he was reprimanded
for this rash prejudice by Frank Harris who had witnessed a performance of Hamlet by a surpassingly gifted lady-uniped in Denver, Colorado.’ He tapped the ash off his cigarette onto the donkey’s head. ‘The unfortunate man had to be carried on a Utter to an asylum for the cruelly disappointed, where he died without uttering another word … Now, who are you my little man?’

‘I’m the Risen Christ, b’jasus an’ no mistake.’

‘How do you know?’ asked the ninth earl.

The question gratified the Risen Christ – he was not used to the intellectual response-but aggrieved him by its impracticality.

‘Holy Mother, is it me papers ye’re after, yer honour?’

O’Hara jeered from his box: ‘Papers-schmapers! A mile off I can smell a Yid!’

‘O’Hara,’ reproved the ninth earl, ‘enough of this Papist bigotry.’

‘A Roman, are you?’ asked the Risen Christ.

‘I’m a Holy Catholic already!’ shouted O’Hara. ‘I should tell a lie?’

‘I am alpha and omega,’ said the Risen Christ. ‘So look to your waggin’ tongue.’

Jasper Jones appeared in the hall behind Lord Malquist. He walked straight-shouldered to the doorway with his right hand hanging deceptively relaxed at butt-level.

‘All right, Slaughter,’ he called. ‘I’m comin’ out.’

Moon had been standing quietly, holding himself in with his eyes closed. He turned to go back into the house. Lord Malquist let him pass by and said to Jasper Jones: ‘Too late! he cried, the villain’s fled.’

‘Yellow,’ said Jasper Jones, and turned to follow Moon.

Lord Malquist paused only to address the world severely from the top step: ‘There is no more empty debate than two apostles of a discredited faith matching their credulity. Religion has no meaning except as a refuge and no reality except
when it aspires to art; and nor indeed has anything else. Good day to you.’

Jane came into view at the bend of the stairs wearing a dress of peacock colours, gold-frogged round the neck and down one side as far as the slit which began at her stocking-top. She flung out her bare arms with a cry of
‘Darlings!’
and stopped the movie of her descent for a few frames in order to experience it. Her three dancing partners, ill-paid and respectful at the bottom of the stairs, waited to throw her artistically around the stage. Moon put out his right foot and right arm to help along the image. The violins swelled and rolled like dolphins, Jane came smiling down the stairs with her left arm hung out for Moon’s attendance, and as their fingers touched he thought maliciously,
And then I woke up.

She pouted at them all –
‘Really,
I’m
quite
ashamed of you boys-all this shooting, so
silly.
I think it’s perfectly sweet of you to prove your virility and thrrrusting male thingy and all
that,
but why must you be so
modern
? Ah whither, I ask
you,
Your Eminence, whither has flown Romance!’ and brushed them all aside with the cumulative effect of her smile, her breast and her thigh.

‘Eminent I may be,’ said the ninth earl, ‘But I would be distressed if you took me for a cleric with connections. Feel free, I beg you, to eschew all titles particularly those that would deny me a life of self-indulgence, and honour me, dear lady, with my given name, which is Falcon-Earl of Malquist.’

‘Falcon, Earl of Malquist!’

‘Falcon would be quite sufficient.’

‘Darling Falcon, tell me, whom did you shoot?’

She led him into the drawing-room and shut the door in Jasper’s face. Jasper forgave this inadvertence, re-opened the door and announced, ‘You’re safe now, Jane-that ol’ Slaughter git the hell outa here, he’s chicken-skeered.’

Jane’s voice sailed out, ‘Oh go
away,
Jasper, go away and shoot him or something. You two’re always hanging about scowling at each other but you don’t
do
anything.’

Jasper retired, closing the door. He nodded at Moon who had sat down at the bottom of the stairs, and went through the open door. He was surprised to see there a small dark bearded man in a white robe.

‘Excuse me, yer honour sir, wid ye be after havin’—?’

‘I don’t care what you’re selling,’ said Jasper Jones. ‘Piss off.’ His eyes were hard as dinner plates.

‘Salvation!’ cried the Risen Christ. ‘I’m selling Salvation!’

Jasper went out and the Risen Christ came in. He sat down next to Moon after some friendly hesitation. Neither of them spoke but Moon moved up a little for him. Jasper’s horse lurched around outside the door with Jasper hopping alongside it with one foot in the stirrup. They lurched and hopped out of sight.

Moon smiled at the Risen Christ. The Risen Christ bobbed his head up and down and up and down, grinning into his beard. They sat on the bottom step.

‘Have you always been the Risen Christ?’ asked Moon. ‘Or did you – become him?’

‘Well I must have
been
him afore I knew it meself, you see sir.’

‘And what made you think you
were
him? How did it begin?’

‘Ah well, sir, I always wanted to be him, you see, I always felt I could be him. Of course that was before I knew about the physical similarities, you understand.’

‘Physical similarities?’

‘Oh yes. The pictures of him in the books, it’s all the malarkey. Big strappin’ feller with blue eyes and yeller hair, you’ve seen them. It’s all rubbish.’

‘Well, different races see the Saviour in their own image,’ said Moon. ‘Black sometimes.’

‘Possibly, possibly. But I’ll tell you what – there’s only one man who described him at the time, you know, and that was a class of a Russian of the name of Josephus, and Josephus wrote down what he looked like, and that was a little dark feller five-foot four inches high with a hook nose and eyebrows that met in the middle. How d’you like that?’

Moon examined the Risen Christ, impressed.

‘To the life, am I not?’

‘What do you do?’ asked Moon.

‘The Word, you know, the Word. Preaching, talking to people. I’m preaching tomorrow at St Paul’s.’

‘By invitation?’

‘Sure an’ I’ve been called.’

‘What do you preach?’

The Risen Christ screwed up his eyes.

‘Well, you know-that this world is but a life’s shadow an’ all that, I mean that the world and everything in it is
over-rated,
you see, on account of it being just an incident on the way to the Eternal Life, d’you follow?’

‘That’s quite comforting,’ Moon said. ‘If you can look at it like that.’ He tried to look at it like that, but at once sensed the edge of some old haunting press into his consciousness. To protect himself he changed the train of thought abruptly. ‘If you are the Risen Christ,’ he said, ‘which I have no reason to believe and no reason to doubt, then does that mean you’re someone else who has been given the same responsibility or are you the same man returned? Have you got the stigmata, for instance?’

Moon took the Risen Christ’s right hand and examined the palm. Nothing showed. He pressed his thumb into the middle of the palm. The Risen Christ yakked and snatched away his hand.

‘Of course you may be just one of the thieves,’ said Moon. ‘Or another thief altogether, an unknown. There was thousands crucified, you know. They don’t tell you that, they let you think that crucifixion was something invented specially for the occasion. Then again, it could be fibrositis.’