Scornful Moon

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘Just the usual. How do you like it here, Lily? Settling in?’

  So they chatted, while I listened for false notes and sniffed the homely air for drifting sin. The kettle whistled and Eric said, ‘Turn it off, Lily. Sam and I had better find out what this business is.’

  ‘All right.’ She went to the kitchen, silenced the kettle, came back and settled on the sofa — a woman more dowdy than I remembered, in cardigan, warm stockings, an ordinary dress.

  ‘I suppose you know all about me, Mr Holloway?’

  ‘Well, a little,’ I answered, discomfited again.

  ‘You’ll have seen my name in the paper a while ago and know what business I was in?’

  I nodded, averting my eyes.

  ‘Eric —’ turning to him — ‘I’ve thought a good deal about what I’m going to say, and it’s mainly because you were willing to stand up in court …’ She smiled. ‘I’m glad they didn’t call you. Your reputation would be gone.’

  ‘It’s a heavy weight on my back sometimes,’ he said.

  ‘You wouldn’t be happy without it, dear.’ (I resented ‘dear’ on May’s behalf, although it was more prod than pat.) ‘Anyway, this thing. I’m breaking one of my rules.’ She frowned. ‘It’s like trying to write a letter with my left hand. Mr Holloway —’ she had a way of moving her eyes and catching you — ‘I’m not asking you to do anything. It’s yours and Eric’s — you’ll see why. Another thing — I’m not taking any moral stand. It’s more … dislike.’

  ‘Come on, Lily, spit it out,’ Eric said.

  She smiled at him drily. ‘You might be sorry when I do. Anyway, I keep in touch with one or two girls who worked for me. They have to be giving up the life. I stipulate that for my own protection. Some of them don’t try very hard. Last week, last Friday — so I’ve thought about this —’ she counted on her fingers — ‘six days, that’s how much I have to turn myself the other way.’

  ‘All right, Lily,’ Eric said patiently.

  ‘One of them came on a visit and she told me what I’m going to tell you. I won’t say any names; you can put them in.’

  ‘We’d hardly know hers,’ I protested.

  ‘Or mine, Mr Holloway. I hope you’ll manage to forget it. Because, when you leave this room, I haven’t told you anything that comes back to me. Is that agreed?’

  I was tiring of — I won’t say her palaver, it had too serious a tone, but her backing off and hedging. And I resented her cornering of us, of our response, before she had told us anything. We should be in charge, and questioning her, not she choosing what and how to tell. Yet I had no question except, What are you trying to say? It made a hard lump in my throat.

  ‘This girl of mine thought she was getting married, but she was wrong. The man — well, he’s not the marrying kind. What he is, though, is the sort of fellow who puffs himself up. He likes to drink and he likes to talk. There’s a lot like that. It’s amazing what some men will say. This girl —’

  ‘Give her a name, call her Mary,’ Eric said.

  ‘All right, Mary. She was furious with him, understandably. But she’ll do better. I told her that. There’s a lot of my girls have made good wives, Mr Holloway. But some of them think they’ve got to throw themselves away. This girl wants to get her own back. I’ve told her it’s not a good idea. Just stay away from the man, get as far away as you can, that’s what I said.’

  ‘Are you saying he’s someone we know?’ Eric said.

  ‘I’m not sure. You might have seen him. He used to work for Oliver Joll.’

  ‘And now he works for James Lawrence Tinling, am I right?’

  ‘I’ve said one name but I’m not saying that.’

  ‘Or Ferrabee? There’s nothing he can do.’

  ‘He can give my young girl a hard time. He doesn’t seem to care who he hurts.’

  It’s strange — it’s more, it’s frightening — how the mind works things out while keeping them unknown. What goes on in that territory? There’s a moral failing somewhere. I had knowledge, pre-dated, at Joll’s name, then leapt ahead, and sat for the rest of Mrs Maxey’s story upright in my chair but collapsed inside, shifting, turning dazedly, in a nightmare of comprehension and helplessness. I found no place to be still.

  • • •

  The talk I’ve put down is approximate, and so will the rest of it be, when I put it down; but action and motive cut like knives.

  Ferrabee boasted to ‘Mary’. He came in primed for talk, and drank some more, and had her, I suppose (no, I don’t suppose, I see it just as clearly as the rest), and told her how clever he had been. Look at the boss’s car parked at the gate. He borrowed it whenever he liked. Look at this — a wad of fivers, his pay.

  ‘I’ve got the old bugger where I want him,’ he said.

  He took her for a drive to Oriental Bay and pointed out the house where Owen Moody lived — the man Joll put a bullet through. He knew Moody pretty well, he said. (Ferrabee’s a man who can go either way, Mrs Maxey explained.) As for Joll, he’d had his number right from the start, out at Akatarawa, at the camp. Ferrabee went into town next day, gave him a bit of cheek, got the job. But it didn’t take him long to see where his chances lay. Joll called him to his club one day to pick him up after lunch. Ferrabee saw a man he recognised come out the door — a bloke he hadn’t spotted for nine or ten years, when he was about sixteen. He’d got off the tram that night in Island Bay and walked past a car parked in the dark by the beach. The man inside gave a toot on his horn. He asked him if he’d like to go for a drive.

  (‘That’s impossible,’ I said.

  ‘Keep quiet, Sam. Just sit still,’ Eric said.)

  An easy five bob, Ferrabee said. He never saw the toffee-nose again until he stepped out of the Wellington Club and put on his hat and buttoned his coat and walked away. When Joll came out, Ferrabee described him: ‘Poker up his bum,’ he said (and Mrs Maxey apologised). Joll laughed. ‘Poor old Jimmy Tinling. The man I’m going to beat for Parliament.’

  • • •

  Ferrabee boasts to his girl but hangs on to his secrets while they’ve still got work to do.

  When he called at James’s house the following day, he did not remind him of their meeting by the beach, and James made no sign of recognition. He sat in his chair; he watched and listened. It was like talking to a cobra snake, Ferrabee said.

  ‘I thought so. I wondered,’ James said, when Ferrabee told him Joll was a homosexual. Then he looked at Ferrabee a long time.

  ‘And what do you want for yourself?’

  ‘I’d rather work for you than him,’ Ferrabee said.

  I’m at it again, making up what people say. But I claim the right, and I claim rightness, and I’m not going to stop.

  I don’t know how long it took after that. How did the idea present itself — with a tickling in the mind, a furtive scuttle? And how long did it cling in the shadows on hooked legs before the place it found itself in became its rightful home? As far as I can tell, James accommodated it with no sense of invasion or defeat.

  It was Ferrabee who said, ‘Owen Moody’. It’s possible that James thought of him first. I see him smile minutely when Ferrabee comes out with the name.

  ‘Yes, he might serve.’

  Ferrabee thinks ‘serve’ is a great joke.

  James gives him a job as chauffeur and handyman. He allows him space in the garage for a bed. Later, after Violet’s death, he lets him move into the house. There’s a room off the kitchen. Ferrabee sleeps there. He torments Mrs Hearn into leaving. Then he’s busy, busy, making himself useful, then indispensable. He’s scarce when James wants him scarce and there when when he wants him there. He’s out of sight, and in sight, one step ahead all the way.

  ‘I can read that old bastard like a book. I know what he wants before he wants it,’ Ferrabee says. ‘ “Ferrabee!” ’ He mimics James’s autocratic call. ‘And I’m there. He doesn’t know whether he’s thought of something or it’s me.’

  Violet’s death pushe
s Joll aside. Then, when it’s time, Ferrabee plays the game of not mentioning him. It is James who says, ‘You remember that chap Moody we were talking about … ?’

  That was the hard part. Ferrabee wasn’t sure of Owen Moody. He knew him from one or two encounters in places he went when he needed to earn ten bob. He ran into him and his boyfriend on the night of Eric’s Donovan lecture — thought he might screw some cash out of them some time, except that Moody made him nervous. Ferrabee couldn’t work out what part of his mind the bugger went to some of the time. ‘Like,’ he said to ‘Mary’, ‘he’ll go quiet, he’ll go places you wouldn’t want to be. He doesn’t care except about number one.’

  Ferrabee might have been describing himself.

  ‘Do you know this man, Moody?’ Mrs Maxey asked.

  Eric told her we did.

  ‘And his friend? The boy he lives with? Do you know him?’ I saw that she knew of our relationship. ‘As far as I can tell, from what Mary says, he didn’t know anything about what was going on.’

  I could only think of Freddie, and how having a son made his life supportable.

  • • •

  They recruited him. They picked him up in the car and drove to Lyall Bay, where James said, ‘Go for a walk, Lennie. I’ll call you when I need you.’ Ferrabee walked on the beach. It did not bother him not to be in the know. Moody would do what he was hired for, and be gone. Ferrabee had James for longer than that: for as long as it took to milk him dry. Waves exploded, wetting him with spray. He turned his back to the southerly, made a cave of his chest, lit a cigarette — doing as he was told while pleasing himself. No hurry, he thought, I’ve got the rest of my life.

  It took a lot of talking in the car; the two of them sitting in the dark, smoking James’s Turkish cigarettes.

  Moody is clear in my sight; he has no moral atmosphere, he’s like the moon. James eludes me. Motive, yes, decision, yes, but where is self? Surely he destroys ‘James Tinling’. There’s a horrible wailing moment when nothing remains. If I can hear it, why can’t he?

  Moody leans forward and presses the horn. Ferrabee slouches back to his chauffeur seat. Asks no questions. He drives to Oriental Bay, where Moody gets out.

  Events take their course after that. Ferrabee watches them unfold with glee. He planted the idea; the result belongs to him. It doesn’t matter who works the details out, James or Moody. Every day that passes, every movement made, fixes him more firmly in place. Securing James satisfies him more than destroying Joll.

  He meets Moody at the Post Office one Friday morning, gets Joll’s letter and delivers it to James. There’s another thing he knows.

  Then Joll shoots Moody. Ferrabee goes down to the creek, where he can laugh. James had not wanted anyone hurt, or Joll’s ruin so complete. He’s afraid. Ferrabee works to calm him down. He ‘tucks him up, feeds him porridge with a spoon’.

  Ferrabee cements himself in.

  ‘They’ll offer it to you now. Wait and see.’

  When she had finished, Mrs Maxey offered tea. I could not accept this return to normalcy. There was no leaving the place she had pushed us into. Six months have passed and I’m still there.

  Eric questioned her but she had told all she knew. ‘Mary’, Ferrabee, James and Moody — her voice, her demeanour hold them frozen in a dance. That is an effect of memory. On the night of her telling they moved in lurid conjunctions and private frenzies. I’m a most susceptible man. I come too close and feel too hard and draw away before I understand. I turn side on, half bent, cover my face with my hands; use words too freely, before they set themselves. Use them in my head, and here on the page, but nothing gets to the point. I’m not unacquainted with ‘the things of darkness’ (Goethe) — have seen worse things than she told us, in my work, and squared them at the corners, made them firm in their joints. But when it touches me I lose my skills, I can’t look straight.

  What can I do? Simply describe.

  She made tea and we drank it, in her cosy living room. We agreed not to do anything putting ‘Mary’ in danger. She saw us out and stood in the door as we drove away. I was filled with rancour against her. She would close her door, go back to her chair, pour herself another cup of tea, while out in the darkness Eric and I … what must we do?

  Nothing that night. We were held in a kind of stasis. Every step we might take turned into a half step. Rose and May, Freddie, Charlie blocked our way. And nothing would help Oliver Joll. He was in prison for shooting Moody. Entrapment was no excuse. He was past tense — yet has a huge presence, like the actor who fails to come on stage at his cue; and sometimes, when I consider those events, I see Ferrabee and Moody and James frozen in their gestures, waiting for him.

  Eric drove to Oriental Bay and parked by the water. We looked across the harbour at the lights on Wadestown hill, at the distant lights of Petone, and now and then, sideways, at the house where Owen Moody and Taylor Barr lived. Shadows moved back and forth behind a yellow curtain. I wanted to bang on the door and shout at Taylor, unpick him, unknot him, make him safe, but Moody stopped me — like Ferrabee I was not sure where he would go to in his mind, and what violence he might perform.

  ‘We need to think,’ Eric said. His fingers made a hard insistent drumming on the wheel. My thoughts made a similar sort of drumming but could not move beyond the figures in Mrs Maxey’s dance, where Eric and I stood on the margins, although joined. I could only declare, and repeat, We’ve got to get Taylor out of there.

  ‘We can’t do anything tonight,’ Eric said. ‘And listen, Sam. You’d better just let Taylor go.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You can’t change him. He’s that way. Let’s think about what we do with Moody and James.’

  We argued and I shouted and he hammered on the wheel. It was midnight when he dropped me at my gate. I went to bed, where Rose was sleeping. She had been helping May all afternoon with her work for the Women’s Welfare League — was going up there daily, which I could not prevent. It tired her and refreshed her and turned her, in some concerns, side on to me.

  Now I stood side on to her.

  I had said to Eric, at the end, ‘We’ll put them in prison.’

  He turned away from me. ‘How, Sam? There’s no evidence. And don’t you think James is there already?’

  Chapter Twelve

  Owen Moody opened the door. Perhaps his intuition was sharpened by fear, but after his initial shock, in which he knew our purpose, he smiled and made a mocking half-bow: ‘Gentlemen. Step inside.’ He was wearing slippers, a silk dressing-gown, a cravat — his get-up for writing, I suppose. A typewriter stood on a desk looking over the bay, with an inch-thick pile of paper beside it and a sheet, half written, curling out.

  ‘My novel,’ he said, seeing my glance. ‘I have to thank you for getting me started, Sam. I might have wasted years on poetry.’

  ‘What is it?’ Eric said. ‘A murder story?’

  ‘Detective. I don’t mind telling you, I’m good at it. It’s as easy as my mother knitting socks. The stuff pours out. I’ve already thought of half a dozen more I can write.’

  ‘I suppose you think you’re going to be rich and famous?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I will be. You’re not going to be jealous, Sam? Getting shot gives me inside running, in a way.’

  ‘And telling lies in court,’ I said.

  ‘I was never there. I was in hospital, remember.’

  ‘Your statement —’

  ‘Sam,’ Eric said. We had agreed in the car that he would do the talking.

  ‘Sit down, why don’t you?’ Moody said, and when we would not, said, ‘Well, I’m going to be comfortable.’ He took his seat in one of the two easy chairs in the room. Then he crossed his legs, folded his arms, smiled at us in his down-looking way, although looking up. ‘I’ll tell you now, there’s nothing you can say I want to hear.’

  Eric seemed to relax. It was as if he’d understood the rules of a game. He sat in the other chair and smiled back at Moody. ‘You�
��re quite a fellow.’

  ‘I know where I’m going. It’s a long way from here.’

  ‘You’re going to prison. Where you’ve put Joll,’ I said.

  He gave me a glance, then ignored me. ‘What do you think you know, Professor?’

  Watching them, I thought there was no end to the ways each could turn. Eric’s largeness gave him space, while Moody would invent endlessly, step anywhere, to increase and please himself. I saw, beyond my distaste, that he was a fellow who would impress — a good-looking confident man. I could not see the sexual invert in him, but only masculine ways and looks. There was a little preening, that was all: a smoothing of his hair, a tidying of his dressing gown.

  ‘So?’ he said, inviting Eric.

  ‘We’re really not much concerned with you, Owen. We just thought you might put us straight on one or two things. Like, Ollie Joll’s endorsement on your statement. There’s some curious wording there, don’t you think?’

  ‘How, curious? He admits it’s true.’

  ‘Substantially true, he says. And only so far as it relates “to his own act and deed”. What about yours, Owen? Your act and deed?’

  ‘I wrote down exactly what I did.’

  ‘Did you write down why? I know you were only James Tinling’s tool, but you’d know a fair bit.’

  Moody’s mouth gave an ugly twist at ‘tool’. He reached for his cigarettes and lit one. ‘I could throw you out of here. But I’m curious to know what you think you’re playing at. Has trying to write detective stories made you believe you’re Sherlock Holmes?’ He grinned at me. ‘And Doctor Watson?’

  ‘There’s a man in prison,’ I began.

  ‘For shooting me. The bullet went in here.’ He tapped his chest. ‘Do you want to see the scar? It nicked my lung. Anyone else would be dead.’

  ‘Joll’s as good as dead. You trapped him into it.’

  His brief attention to me turned into contempt. He drew in smoke, then let it out with jutted underlip: ‘Ah, no.’ He cancelled me and smiled at Eric. ‘It happened exactly how I said in my statement. I wish I could write it properly. I was pretty sick. I had to dictate. There’s stuff I left out. Like, how Joll couldn’t stop touching me, getting my wrist —’ demonstrating — ‘and squeezing my shoulder. Filthy devil, trying me out.’ He smiled. ‘But I didn’t want to say all that because of his poor wife.’