Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

  ‘It’s lovely at this time of the year, the orchard, is it not?’ he said to nobody in particular.

  ‘How did you know he’d be all right?’

  ‘It’s just hardening of the arteries. He gets these little black-outs. Nothing to worry about or rather nothing to be done about it.’

  Gerald Moonman resumed his beatific upward gaze.

  ‘It is curious,’ his father said, ‘do you not think, that when people lose their faith they usually take up sexual intercourse instead. Or perhaps it is the other way around?’

  ‘Dad, I should rest if I were you,’ Bobs said, ‘you’ve had a little turn, you know. You ought to go upstairs and lie down.’

  ‘I don’t think I will. I don’t want to miss the fun.’

  The brothers brought some more rickety upright wooden chairs out of the back room and placed them in two groups at either side of the garden with their father by himself under the tree in the middle. It was a strange arrangement which they came to quite naturally without any bickering. Bobs and Gerald sat down together, and Bobs gave a skittish little wave at the rest of us. We might have been waiting for some ritual to begin or some spell to be lifted which would release us from our positions. Sue and Helen started talking about a case conference.

  ‘If they’re not going to prosecute, I don’t see why we have to wait.’

  ‘Apparently the police told Jackie they were only not prosecuting on condition we had all their notes because otherwise he’d just pull the wool over our eyes again.’

  ‘The mother still says he never laid a finger on the child.’

  ‘It’s amazing how they go on saying that when you can see the bruises.’

  They were speaking in a low professional tone. I let my drowsy gaze wander past the stray fair fronds of Helen’s hair to the tangled cow-parsley and the Reverend James Moonman sitting on his chair under the unkempt apple tree, or rather not sitting in it any more, because he had slowly slid off it, so slowly that at first I thought he might be bending over to pick a flower. But there he was on the ground, his black cassock twisted around and the chair tumbled away from him and this time he didn’t move and it wasn’t hard to see that Beryl’s had been his last baptism.

  ‘Suddenly in the orchard,’ Gerald said.

  ‘Is that a quote?’ Bobs asked.

  ‘Who cares whether it’s a quote,’ Helen said furiously, ‘can’t you try his chest, Sue?’

  Sue obediently hunkered down over the figure in the twisted cassock and pumped away with the flat of her hands. Bobs fussed around his father’s head, smoothing away the pale stalks of cow-parsley and buttercup and then smoothing down the lank white hair. Our running towards the fallen figure had woken Beryl and she began to whimper and Helen took her away, rocking her as she went. Moonman stood motionless and very close so that Sue’s sleeve brushed against him as she went up and down. He might have already been standing at his father’s funeral.

  Eventually Sue admitted defeat and stood up again brushing the white cow-parsley blossom from her bright blue skirt. The brothers knelt down side by side and Moonman slid his hands under his father’s knees and Bobs did the same under his shoulders. Awkwardly they staggered to their feet and carried him indoors. I had seen dead people before – my father in the hospital, a French peasant lying in the road – but I had never before seen a dead person being carried and that shook me more than the sight of him lying in the grass.

  They put him upstairs in the bedroom. The rest of us waited in the room with the sandwiches in it.

  ‘They’ll only go to waste.’

  ‘I don’t quite –’

  ‘You would at a funeral.’

  ‘All right.’

  We sat munching lettuce-and-marmite wedges until Bobs came in with a suitcase.

  ‘No-o, I don’t think anything in here,’ he said with a questing gaze, ‘I’ve rung the undertaker, he’ll be round in two shakes, he said.’

  ‘What are you doing with that suitcase?’

  ‘You have to move quickly before the vultures descend.’

  ‘Vultures?’

  ‘Empty house bound to be burgled. Stuff’s much safer at Padders.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Well, the candlesticks, my mother’s vanity set, some of the cutlery’s worth a bit. Gerald’s happy, so –’

  ‘But isn’t it –’

  ‘Then there’s probate. Probate’s a bugger. Must put it all in the boot before the undertaker arrives. Some of these chaps are in league with the Revenue, you know.’

  And he strutted out like a man about to catch a train.

  Moonman may have been happy about Bobs’s precautions, but he was not at all happy about the Will when that later came to light in one of the few drawers Bobs had not been through that afternoon. Sparsely furnished the vicarage might have been but to everyone’s surprise it emerged that it did in fact belong to the deceased. He had bought it off the parish with the money his wife had left him – it seemed she hadn’t lost all her money and he had never intended to go back to Norfolk, thus turning out to be as unreliable in what he said as Bobs – and he now left it to the younger but more beloved of his sons, the one who seemed to get left things.

  ‘And what’s wrong with that?’ Helen said rather sharply as though I was about to contradict her. ‘They never got on at all. Gerald never came to see him at the end, hated God, and thought his father a silly old fart.’

  ‘Well, they used to be very fond of each other, didn’t they, before they quarrelled, and anyway you hate God too.’

  ‘There’s no such person to hate.’

  She looked lovely that summer, really lovely, lovelier in fact than when I had first met her. She was still just a little plumper from having Beryl. A certain tenseness that had been growing on her now melted away. They had moved straight into St Col’s and were both too busy to do much about the house or garden. Later on, there were to be pattern-books from Sandersons and Habitat and John Oliver the paint people lying about the house and a new teak bench from the Highgate Garden Centre under the apple trees but just now there were only the three of them moving about the dingy three-quarters-empty rooms or lying on a moth-eaten old rug flattening the high grasses. Bobs found an old hook under the rotting shelf of the greenhouse and sharpened it with a chunk of carborundum he also found there and began to hack a clearing in the grass. He went brown quickly in the long sunny spell which lasted most of June, so that he was almost good-looking.

  How odd and difficult Helen’s life had been, partly of her own making, mostly not and this little clearing Bobs had made in the long grass where they could sit on the grubby old blanket without the long stalks poking through was something of a clearing in her life too, very nearly an idyll, though how anyone could have an idyll with Bobs still beat me. Yet that was her gift, that she could have an idyll with anyone if he loved her.

  When she was feeding Beryl, Bobs sat gaping for hours, his normal fussing stilled by the sight of Beryl so eagerly going at her swollen milky breast. I, the awkward visitor, the old friend, would turn half-away and chat about other things, but the quiet, insistent sound of the feeding and Helen shifting in her chair to allow the baby to switch to the other side and settling her when Beryl showed signs of flagging – all these things unnerved me so that I would sometimes forget what I had been saying.

  Even when Beryl was finally weaned (later than any other baby she knew, Helen said, because they both enjoyed it so much), Helen still looked different. ‘I think I’ve lost the bloom of childbirth if I ever had it,’ she laughed, but she had not, to my eye anyway, and going up to St Col’s, sometimes just for a drink in the evening after work, was like a dip in some refreshing spring which had a miracle-working legend vaguely attached to it. I should have been jealous of Bobs but somehow I wasn’t. Quite often he wasn’t there, kept late at the office – it was the time when things were beginning to happen in Eastern Europe and Moonman Travel was one of the few ways of getting there if you wanted t
o catch a bit of the action. But one evening towards the end of a drizzly week in May – a year or so later I think – he was there and looking rather pleased with himself.

  ‘You ever been to a Frag lunch?’

  ‘Once, or perhaps twice. Ages ago.’

  ‘It’s amazing isn’t it? You go into that funny old toyshop, well it’s not really a toyshop any more, though he has still got toys at the back.’

  ‘Get on with it, Bobs.’

  ‘And then this pretty girl comes down, Fiona, they call them all Fiona, you know, whatever their real name is, and takes you up to the place where they have lunch and there’s absolutely everyone you can think of, that man who produces the late-night satire, and the MP who everyone says is a spy but Moonman says isn’t really but only pretends to be, and an Australian economist who turned out to be working for Ziegler though Moonman hates Ziegler but he wanted to pump this man, and Bella Barone who used to sing at the Establishment when it first opened. I thought she was great then and she was actually very friendly but she smelled rather peculiar. Oh and Willie Sturgis who was going on about how the government was selling arms to Iran in spite of the embargo. I think it was Iran, there isn’t an embargo on Iraq, is there?’

  ‘Sounds very interesting,’ Helen said. It was odd that even having known her so long, I still couldn’t tell how ironic she was being, if at all. ‘Pick up her elephant, could you? I can’t reach. You didn’t tell me you were going. Moonman doesn’t usually ask you.’

  ‘Big Brother only rang me up yesterday, at the office. He didn’t tell me then, you know how he keeps his cards close to his chest, but he wanted to have a chat, a private family sort of thing.’

  ‘Not a very good place for that, was it, a Frag lunch with the spy who wasn’t and smelly Bella and the rest of them.’

  ‘No, no, afterwards. We went into this office, you know that place with all the funny postcards and the dartboard with Nixon’s face on it.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Helen said patiently, ‘I’ve never been there.’

  ‘Anyway he took me up there and told me he was leaving Mile, his wife.’

  ‘I know Mile’s his wife.’

  ‘Yes, but I thought Gus might not.’

  ‘I’m sure he does, get on with it.’

  ‘So he said he’s leaving her and I said why and he gave that weird laugh and said in a funny voice as though it was being read out on the news, “It’s an amicable trial separation, Mr Moonman is currently in intensive care with multiple stab wounds.” So I said, but seriously. And he said, seriously she’s gone off with somebody in the BBC, in Current Affairs, which I thought was quite ironic but Brother didn’t see the joke.’

  ‘I can’t say I blame Mile,’ Helen said, ‘I’m sorry for him, but he is creepy, even though he is your brother. I mean, you’ve more or less said so yourself. I couldn’t live with him.’

  ‘Well, that’s a pity,’ Bobs said, ‘because he’s coming to live with us.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He needs somewhere for a few weeks, because it’s her house really and she wants the Current Affairs man to move in because he’s just come back from, yes, it must be Iran because that’s where – anyway he doesn’t want to stay in the house a moment longer, which you can understand.’

  ‘So you said he could stay here?’

  ‘Well, it is partly his house in a way, I know he and Dad didn’t get on too well towards the end, but he does need somewhere.’

  ‘Without asking me?’

  ‘Well I was rather on the spot. I couldn’t say, yes, it’s all right by me but just hang on a minute while I ring the wife. That wouldn’t have been very fraternal.’

  ‘Your brother is just about the least fraternal person I’ve ever met.’

  ‘What do you reckon, Gus? Would you have Moonman to stay?’

  ‘Well, he’s not my brother.’

  ‘He means no,’ Helen said.

  The next time I went up to St Col’s, there was a bicycle in the hall, a sturdy black battered bicycle, not rusty but giving off, quite aggressively, the feeling of an age when machines were made to last. It had peculiar triangles of black cloth stretched over its mudguards as though the machine was in permanent mourning like Queen Victoria. This was Moonman’s legendary bicycle. I had seen it often before with him on it, but never indoors where it made an even more formidable impression. The bicycle accompanied him in his quest for Anglo-Saxon churches all over England and was the cause of many rows with British Rail staff on trains which were not permitted to carry bikes. Moonman might be an implacable enemy of organised religion, but he hunted down these churches because he had an obsession with the Anglo-Saxon era, believing that democracy, truth and a good many other desirable things had disappeared from England after the Norman blitzkrieg. He covered a lot of ground in London too, in search of old woodworking tools which he would carry home in the bike’s wicker basket, which had a peculiar high rounded shape suggesting that perhaps it had originally been made not as a bike basket but as an eeltrap by some ancient craftsman in the fens who still kept allegiance to Hereward the Wake. I would quite often see him pedalling along the streets of Notting Hill or Highgate with his milky eyes set at the familiar heavenward angle, so that he might well have been a blind cyclist for whom there was no point in keeping his eyes on the road and who managed to navigate by some arcane combination of his other senses.

  ‘He just turned up on his bike?’

  ‘Well, he had Bobs behind him with the van and all his clobber. There’s an awful lot of it.’

  She took me into the back room with the brown walls where we had eaten the sandwiches. This room, then so stark and empty, was now piled high with books, mostly dusty folio-sized volumes stacked on top of each other. Moonman either had no access to cardboard boxes or tea-chests or didn’t hold with them. In among the books were some of the old tools – adzes, chisels, lathes, I don’t know what else. An old-fashioned brass picture rail ran round the room high above our heads and there were now jackets and overcoats dangling unsteadily on coat-hangers from it, all in standard Moonman black. These grim garments shifted in the draught from the window like hanged men at a gibbet complex.

  ‘The obvious thing is to take them up to the attics, but then –’

  ‘They’ll never go.’

  ‘Yes, and nor will he. He’s sleeping there at the moment.’ She pointed to a mattress made up with clean sheets and blankets in the corner of the room protected by a rampart of books which was why I hadn’t noticed it till then.

  ‘And if you make up a proper bedroom for him, he’ll take that as an invitation to become a permanent part of the household.’

  ‘He will.’

  I tried to think of something to cheer her up.

  ‘You used to think he was rather amazing, didn’t you? I mean, you admired Frag and the way he didn’t care who he went for and the jokes.’

  ‘Oh yes, but –’ This only seemed to make her more distressed and she found it hard to answer. ‘I think he’s almost too funny, too funny to have about the house. I mean, I’m not sure you want someone being brilliantly amusing all the time, do you? It’s sort of icky, when people are too clever.’

  ‘You’re all right with Bobs then?’

  ‘Gus, don’t be horrid.’ Suddenly there was something odd, unlike her, about the way she was talking. Not only the words were little-girlish, the voice was little-girlish too. Her level serious tone had deserted her. Perhaps some alien had invaded her body, or perhaps she and the baby had changed places and if I went upstairs I would find Beryl discussing the parameters of case work.

  Helen began piling books into something more like order. I gazed without much interest at the pile next to me, which was a run of some pre-war annual for boys about mechanics, then I looked out through the grimy windows which Bobs had not yet got around to cleaning. There was a bumble bee bobbing against the window-pane in a low-key way.

  ‘Who’s been peeking in mah bedroom? Did
n’t Ah tell you, Momma, nobody was to go in mah room without mah permission?’

  There had been no sound of Moonman coming into the room. All the Frag crowd did funny voices, but they sounded different, disembodied almost, coming from Moonman because he was silent so much of the time. And when he did a Baby Doll or a Harold Wilson, it appeared to come from nowhere, not because he didn’t move his lips, though he scarcely did, but because you weren’t expecting him to say anything. His silences were legendary, almost as legendary as the bike, and nervous guests would sometimes stumble out of a Frag lunch reflecting with wonder that he had not said a single word except to complain that there was no custard with the apple pie.

  This didn’t mean he didn’t like talking. Sometimes I had heard him discourse for a quarter of an hour or more, fending off attempted interruptions – even if the interrupter only wanted to say how much he agreed – repeating himself, sliding off at a tangent, making a joke that one of the others had already made as if his making it created a fresh occasion for laughing, which it sometimes did and when it didn’t people still laughed again because they had laughed the first time and anyway it was his lunch. Besides, his long pauses often infected others at the table, so that they too were cowed into silence and were happy in a nervous way to hear noise of any sort resume, because they had expected the lunch to be an uproarious affair, which it could be when they were all talking at once, complaining that Clapp, the Caliban who served them and kept a sort of toyshop downstairs, had undercooked the cabbage or failed to provide any gravy in some doomed attempt to raise the standard of cuisine against their wishes.

  Until the break-up with Mile none of us, even those who had known him for years, had much idea about Moonman’s home life. He was known to live in North London, with a wife who never went out, either because she was a hopeless drunk or because she was an anaesthetist or a gynaecologist whose hours were too unsocial. Some people, mostly men, doubted whether Mile even existed, and preferred to attribute to Moonman deviant sexual habits or no habits at all. Women either found him attractive in a way they didn’t normally find men attractive, or unattractive though they suspected that under the Lytton Strachey beard he was probably rather handsome. Perhaps these two views amounted to the same thing. Anyway women all agreed that there could be no question of his being gay. By now we were creeping into the 1980s and I suppose Moonman must have been well into his forties, being so much older than Bobs, but he was ageless – or rather, had been so precociously aged that he had nowhere to go but younger.