Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

  Bobs had confirmed at least that the wife, Mile, existed and that she was reclusive or at any rate never asked Bobs to the house but there was nothing weird about her, she was just a hard-working teacher without much of a sense of humour, never laughed at his jokes or Moonman’s. Of course not asking Bobs to your house didn’t make you a recluse. Yet the evidence suggested he might be right all the same. By now Moonman had made so many enemies in every known walk of life that going out to any social occasion would be perilous. Victims might be too badly winged to confront Moonman himself but would not hesitate to denounce him to his wife. And as for the jokes, if he was anything like the same at home as he was in the office, a certain glazed indifference might be the best survival tactic.

  ‘Momma, yew didn’t tell me you had a gentleman caller. Yew know Ah don’t like you to entertain gentlemen.’

  The voice, while remaining somewhere in the deep South, slid from a squeaky eight-year-old to a middle-aged retard frustrated in love.

  ‘Mile rang when you were out.’

  ‘What did she want? I told her to get the lawyers to talk.’

  ‘She said they needed to turn the water off, something to do with a leak.’

  ‘She knows about that sort of thing, I don’t.’

  His own ordinary voice was rather mellow even when, as now, it had a petulant edge to it.

  ‘Well, she said to ring.’

  ‘She can fucking well get Current Affairs to sort it out. He’s supposed to be good with his hands. Oh, Trevor, I do love the way you touch me.’

  ‘Is he really called Trevor?’

  ‘Current Affairs doesn’t have a name. He’s just a telly person.’

  ‘So you’re not going to ring her. Is that what you want me to say?’

  He seemed not displeased at the sharpness in Helen’s tone and replied mildly:

  ‘You want me to have to listen to what a shit I am and how nobody in their right mind would have put up with me all this time and how Current Affairs at least talks to her and even listens?’

  ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t.’

  ‘Because I’ve heard it about fifteen million times already, my dear Helen, and because if you’ve wasted twenty years living with the most boring, stupid bitch in North London, you don’t want to waste another precious second listening to her silly whining voice. Is that clear, men? We scramble at 0600 hours. Good hunting.’

  He half-turned as if to go with a little half-salute, more Hitler than Douglas Bader, but Helen persisted, seeming not to notice.

  ‘She’s obviously right, isn’t she?’

  ‘Is she? Right about what exactly?’

  ‘About you not listening, and not talking to people. I mean, you do talk, but you talk at them not to them.’

  ‘Why thank you, ma’am, I do appreciate those kind words, you sure know how to make a feller feel mighty proud of himself.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry, is that all you can say, when I’ve given you the best years of my life? I married you when you were nobody, my mother said I’d regret it, no good ever came from marrying out of your class’ – I could not quite identify the voice even when it rose to a shrilling sob, some 1940s movie, I suppose, might have been Greer Garson.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ he said suddenly, quietening. ‘It’s such a fucking mess.’

  And this time he was gone, stumbling over the books and half-bumping into the edge of the door as he went.

  ‘Where’s he –’

  ‘Oh upstairs, I expect one of the attics. I’d have shown you if he hadn’t come in. He’s making a doll’s house for Beryl, you know, with all those old tools. No, he’s gone out,’ she added as the door slammed. ‘Wait five minutes and I’ll show you. He’s like that when he’s in a state.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The funny voices.’

  ‘I’ve heard him do them before.’

  ‘Not all together like that, in a flood as if he couldn’t control them.’

  ‘Like the gift of tongues at Pentecost, but you wouldn’t –’

  ‘I know what Pentecost is.’

  She led me up the stairs. At the half-landings, the sun shone through the long window upon her golden hair, and I had a sudden blissful illusion that she was taking me upstairs to – but no of course she wasn’t and as soon as I realised this, which was in the same instant, my head ached as though I had hit it glancingly on a low doorway.

  ‘Oh you’re there,’ she said.

  I peered over her shoulder through the open door to the long attic room with a ceiling so low you couldn’t stand up in it. Moonman was on his knees by the window, planing the edges from a triangular piece of wood. He had taken off his long black shirt and had only a white singlet on his top. The whiteness was shocking and so was the menacing swell and dip of his biceps as he moved the plane up and down. His heavy black clothes usually discouraged any thought of his body and this display of rippling physique in the low stuffy room was disconcerting. He turned to look at us and gave a maniacal laugh: ‘So thee’ve come to spy on poor old blind Moonman, hast thee, well fine folks may do as they please, but thee shan’t have her, she’s mine, I tell’ee, she’s mine.’

  He rose to a hunchback’s crouch and began limping towards the window cradling the piece of wood in his bare arms.

  ‘Sorry, we thought you’d gone out.’

  ‘Out, out? Where should old Moonman go on a night like this, this bain’t no night for lost souls to go a-walkin in.’

  Behind him, you could see the bare rudiments of the doll’s house, the outer walls already stuck together with the roofbeams in place. The edges were heavily stained as though they had taken a good deal of gluing to hold together. Wood-shavings and discarded pieces of wood were scattered about the floor, also suggesting that work had not gone smoothly.

  ‘I didn’t know you actually used your old tools,’ I said.

  ‘Bless you sir, old Moonman be using his old tool this many a long year. He ain’t much of a hand at book-learning, but he can tell one end of a chisel from the other right enough.’

  He let his jaw go slack in a village idiot’s grin. That effect was rather wolfish and menacing.

  ‘Do you want supper, Moonman?’ Helen asked.

  ‘That would be nice, very nice,’ he said, in his ordinary mellow voice.

  I looked out of the window at the untidy fruit trees and the ground falling away and beyond the houses a sprawling wooded hillside which must be the Heath.

  ‘Great view,’ I said.

  ‘Do you like attics?’ he asked in a severe tone as though I had failed to complete some necessary formalities before venturing this opinion.

  ‘Yes,’ I said unable to think of anything better to say. It wasn’t a subject I had an opinion on, or even thought there were opinions to be had on.

  ‘I like attics very much, they are my favourite room.’

  The force of personality which resonated through this pronouncement seemed itself to fill the room, so that there was no space left in it. When he said things like this, it was usually to break a silence he had himself imposed upon the company and there was often an awkwardness about his phrasing, as though he was out of practice at talking or perhaps not even a native English speaker.

  Helen stepped over the tangle of wood and tools and gluepot to stand by me looking out of the window. As she passed Moonman, still in his forced crouch, he put up a hand to caress her hair, spreading his fingers into a slow combing motion.

  ‘Ah missee, that be angels’ hair. No good never came of such hair for we poor mortals.’

  ‘Oh shove off Moonman,’ she said, removing his hand, quite gently, and shaking her head with a shivery flounce, as though to erase the memory of his touch, but again gently.

  I had an overwhelming desire to get downstairs and out of the house.

  But somehow this became difficult. Helen began to ask me about my work which for the first time interested her because in the puckish fashion of
the Civil Service I had now been transferred from industrial policy, which I had almost begun to learn something about, to the Social Services Inspectorate which, being new, apparently required handpicked ignoramuses to get it up and running.

  Then Moonman asked me what I knew about Stoyt-Smith. He was seated cross-legged now like a craftsman in an Oriental bazaar, still planing the triangular piece of wood in a jerky fashion which looked uncomfortable.

  ‘Stoyt-Smith?’

  ‘Beyond what there’s already been in the public prints.’

  ‘I’m afraid I missed it.’

  ‘Come off it, Gus, he was mentioned in court last week.’

  ‘Is he the one who was a Tory MP, or wants to be one?’

  Moonman sighed.

  ‘He was official visitor to a boys’ home.’

  ‘You see, even Helen knows.’

  ‘Well, it’s sort of my subject now,’ she said.

  Now they mentioned it, some vague echo of the story had reached me, but only at the furthest edge of consciousness. There had been a trickle of such stories, but this one had been little more than a stray phrase in the course of a report about something else.

  ‘If it’s so important, why hasn’t there been more in the papers?’

  ‘Because all they can print at the moment is that one of the boys has named him in a case against the man who runs the home but only named him as someone who took an interest in him not as one of the people who assaulted him.’

  ‘Well then?’

  ‘The boy’s being leant on not to tell the whole story.’

  I could have told them how little such things interested me, and how I didn’t even feel guilty about this lack of interest because there was nothing to be gained by paddling in that kind of human squalor. But the first priority was to escape from that stuffy attic and its overpowering fishy aroma of glue and things being amiss.

  It had occurred to me at this moment that Moonman might have deliberately slammed the front door shut while staying inside the house, in order to lure us up to the attic so that he could catch us snooping on him.

  But there was never much chance of seeing exactly what he was up to, even if this didn’t stop you trying. In fact, it pricked me on – the silences, the cascade of funny voices, the sudden savagery, the occasional mellow even courteous aside, as though he wanted me to know that he had been hoping to talk to me all along, had several things to say which he thought might interest me but had been distracted. I found myself scrutinising the latest issue of Frag for some clue to his state of mind, but of course there was nothing there – only the usual pastiches of celebrity idiocy and stories of skulduggery in high places. Then one of the Fionas rang up and asked me to one of their lunches – this was quite a long time later, another couple of years at least – and at first I said no, but then this seemed feeble and I called back and said yes after all.

  The old unease came upon me, redoubled this time, as I ducked down the alley off the Tottenham Court Road between the audio and video shops. Clapp’s green shopfront with the flyblown plastic grapes and sacks of pulses had recently undergone a makeover. It now said ‘CLAPP, FROMAGIER’ on the window with a display of huge round ridged cheeses, like a convention of millstones. Upstairs, beyond the clacking typewriters of the Fionas (Frag still stuck to the old technology, to save money, which it already probably didn’t), the old gang were already in session – Moonman, Willie Sturgis the left-wing rabblerouser in his tomato and yellow jersey, Tazzy Smith the Australian monetarist who looked like a marmoset – the whole court in fact with the latest guests waiting like puzzled sheep to be fleeced of their inside information: a beetle-browed Labour MP who kept carrier pigeons, a gossip columnist with cheeks as purple as a bishop’s vest, and an overripe agony aunt covered in clunky gold jewellery. It was only when I sat down that it came to me that for some reason I had hoped to see Helen and that her not being there made the occasion seem lacking, even desolate, not that there had not been desolate moments in this company before. But this time, well, this time was worse.

  ‘Seemed quite a nice bloke, for a Tory, that is,’ the pigeon-fancying Labour MP said.

  ‘Stoyt-Smith a nice bloke!’ Willie Sturgis spluttered gleefully into his hot-pot.

  ‘Straight as a die,’ embroidered Dr Tasman Smith, giving his bow tie a tweak as he tended to when he joined in the fun.

  ‘Sort of chap you could go tiger-shooting with.’

  ‘Ken, I don’t think you’ve met Alan Timmis,’ Moonman was indicating a young man with a green face and a pleasant rabbity look. ‘Alan was in one of the homes which had the honour of being regularly visited by the said Stoyt-Smith.’

  ‘He seemed really friendly to start with, well he was friendly, not stuck-up like he looked, and he’d ask Sears if he could have a little chat with one or two of us, on our own like, so we could tell him how we were getting on without Sears and the others breathing down our neck. So he gave us fags and that and we had a chat and it was really nice and it wasn’t until the third or fourth time . . .’

  The boy’s voice trailed away as he became aware of the whole table waiting. The woman with the chunky jewellery must have thought, like me, that he was on the edge of tears and she patted his arm, but he managed to say quite calmly: ‘No, I don’t think, not at lunch, but you know what I mean.’

  ‘We’ll talk afterwards, Alan,’ Moonman said, seeming not at all disappointed at the young man’s sudden withholding, rather the opposite, in fact, as if the thought of the details yet to come was juicier than the details themselves could hope to be. Round the rest of the table, though, you could hear the tiny gasps of disappointment.

  ‘Little bugger won’t sing for his supper,’ the gossip columnist growled, ‘wonder what he thinks he’s been asked for, certainly not his pretty face.’

  Moonman sat at the end of the table as always, with the window to his right so that the light shone in on him showering him with a dusty radiance, and it was this and his spiritual heavenward gaze that, I fancy, must have inspired the bright spark who had said when asked what a Frag lunch was like, Oh it’s like the Last Supper only with twelve Judases instead of one.

  In the silence that followed, broken only by the clatter and scrape of cutlery on plate, you certainly could feel Moonman’s power. Perhaps I felt it more intensely than I had before, now I knew how firm and muscular he was beneath his dark clothes, as if the physique reinforced the moral authority, although moral authority was a strange phrase to use. But then perhaps that was the only kind of authority that survived, the inquisitor’s power. We all knew so well the shabby methods which propped up the other sorts of power, the PR tricks, the trumpery rhetoric, the adulation which nobody sincerely felt. You had to be very young or very stupid to revere even those few political leaders and film stars who were supposed to possess charisma. The only power that could seriously chill you was the kind that was veiled from the public eye, the gang boss whose name nobody was quite sure of, the éminence grise who fed the politicians their lines, the scientist who was about to crack the secret of the universe (after he had cracked it, he was of no more interest than anyone else, just as the eminence wasn’t as soon as he stood for Parliament). And so Moonman had it, too, had it more than any of them because he was inexhaustible. As long as there were secrets to be teased out into the daylight, he would go on sitting there in the shadows, or rather, not quite in the shadows, because the limelight couldn’t help washing over him now and then, which he wasn’t averse to, so that you were always uncomfortably aware of his presence.

  At two forty-five I went down the stairs and out into the street vowing never to go again.

  Bobs a few weeks later took a different view.

  ‘Went to the Frag lunch again this week. It was fantastic. You’ll never guess who was there, apart from the usual crowd I mean.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Stoyt-Smith. My eyes nearly popped out of my head. He had obviously decided to come and face them down. I rather admir
ed him for that, though he was a bit pompous. Said he would sue anybody who made any allegations of wrongdoing and that includes all of you, my good friends.’

  ‘So what did they all do?’

  ‘Just roared with laughter and told a lot of rude jokes about queers which he joined in with, looking a bit bewildered. But Moonman was bloody funny, I must say. He’s in great shape since he came to St Col’s. Gets on fantastically well with Helen. To my surprise.’

  ‘And what about the anaesthetist?’

  ‘What anaesthetist?’

  ‘Your sister-in-law, or ex-sister-in-law, Mile.’

  ‘She’s not an anaesthetist, she’s a teacher, I told you. She’s OK as far as we know. Moonman doesn’t talk about her.’

  The doll’s house was to be ready for Beryl’s fifth birthday. She had apparently taken part in the later stages of its building, climbing all over Moonman as he lay on the attic floor gluing the tiny banisters to the staircase, and throwing out impulsive instructions while riding on his back only to contradict them the next day, at first demanding a red front door then a blue one, like a spoilt rich bitch in Bishops Avenue, as Helen said. But at last both Beryl and Moonman agreed that it was finished and a formal opening was arranged but it had to be before her friends arrived for the tea party, so as not to make them feel jealous. So there were just Beryl, me and the three Moonmans, as I suppose we must call them, after lunch standing round the huge shape rather untidily wrapped in silver paper – Beryl had insisted on the wrapping. She was jumping up and down on the spot in a high state of excitement, clutching her mother’s hand.