The drip goes down the tube like a flexing of light into Mooncranker’s sleeping arm. No dreams appear to be troubling him. How did he know I was vulnerable to Christ? I was on holiday after all, a sort of holiday, no, you cannot call it by this name when your parents are getting divorced, and find it more convenient not to have you at home. No, but at any rate a stranger there, I had told no one of my obsessions. Let me try to remember. Somewhere, in some mind or place or piece of behaviour there must be the essential clue to it. Let me try to remember …
I see him come round the side of the house. Where am I standing? He comes round the side of the house, dressed in white, wearing a straw hat with a black band. I am in the shrubbery of course, but how does he know I am here? Is that why he stops on the way, to find out where I am? He does stop, that is certain. Someone must have told him. Who is he talking to there?Someone hidden from me, someone I never saw. Or perhaps he has seen me from an upper window. The gift is there, in somebody’s room up there perhaps. Somewhere. Ready to be bestowed on me. The sausage-meat has been bought, at the butcher’s in the high-street, conveyed home, moulded while still moist and malleable into shape, bound in clean white folds of bandage, tied (not pinned) to its cross of lathe. Giver and gift in readiness, recipient located. The work of a moment to take it up, walk through the shrubbery preparing his smile. The stop on the way, is that premeditated? There is something in his posture, while he stands there conversing, some quality of deliberate elegance, that I have noted in him before. I do not know, however, if this is an impression stemming from that moment or something I thought later. Impossible now to be sure.
It could not have been Henry or Frederick, the two sons of Uncle George, aspiring gynaecologists, they were playing tennis. Standing at the baseline driving at the ball with all their strength. Playing a good hard game, they would doubtless have called it, no quarter given or asked. No subtlety. Daily delving now perhaps into afflicted females. Gropian in the fallopian. On the bonny banks of Clyde. Uncle George’s job is vague in my mind. He was in some way responsible for sanitation, over a wide area. He went off every day in a green Rover. He was a rugger blue. All that family argued about facts all the time, in loud hectoring voices. Things that could have been verified. Which is the longest river in the world? What was the date of issue of the very first postage-stamp? Uncle George, however, the ultimate acknowledged authority in all questions relating to names, dates, maps, time-tables, things actually taking place in the external world. Un homme pour qui le monde visible existe.The latest A.A. touring book was always on his shelves; he referred to the maps at the back with clean fingers. He moved among works of reference with confidence. No possibility, ever, of his failing to find an answer. Authority in every lineament. Even in the act of urinating, Uncle George maintained complete control. When was it? Very distant morning, cold and pearly, thin white ice in furrows. A party for a morning walk. As so often before and since I was separated from the brisk, loud-voiced group, in among the bushes, the bramble and bryony leaves gushing in bare hedges, thrushes’ nests forlornly full of snow and crouching among all this and there was Uncle George, overcoat unbuttoned, feet planted apart, strange sharp-looking instrument spraying a precise arc. His urine glittered palely. Face severe, abstracted. He shook it up and down, before buttoning up. Strange, fearsome, this tapering white root of Uncle George’s being. But he handled it, he managed the whole manoeuvre, with the confidence, the surety, with which he would have flicked through an index, a distance chart. Such casual adult efficiency. I do not think I should have been surprised to see him dismantle his member piece by piece, unscrewing first the sharp nozzle, what a contrast to my own absorbed, half terrified fumblings, stirrings, swellings, pulsations …
Aunt Jane perhaps provoked such reactions in him, though that is difficult to believe. Aunt Jane died. That was years later. She had a seizure while pruning the roses at the front of the house, and had to be carried indoors. That was years later. She met me at the station, that summer I came to stay, that summer I played with Miranda as my partner in the tennis-tournament, and Mooncranker gave me the gift. She met me at the station.
2
Aunt Jane met him at the station. She picked him out from all the other emerging passengers with a ‘there you are’ and a kiss and he was surprised in a way that she didn’t need to hesitate more over it. He would have had to. He remembered her of course, the thinness, grey hair, eyes still as blue as when she was a young girl, as he had heard his mother say. Lines of control about the mouth, as if Aunt Jane were combating convulsions all the time.
‘My, how you’ve grown,’ she said.
‘You haven’t changed at all, Aunt Jane,’ he said, smiling at her but not too beamingly. A broad smile would not have been seemly in one like himself with the smack of bereavement about him. No one had died, but his patients were going through a bad patch, as he had heard it described. They had decided to separate for a bit and see how that worked out.
‘Well, come on,’ she said. ‘I expect you’re ready for something to eat, aren’t you?’
He refused to let her carry his case. They walked across to the station car-park where Aunt Jane had left her car, a grey Morris Minor. She drove with visible nervousness at first, sitting bolt upright, narrowing her eyes over the steering-wheel. When they had left the city-centre, however, and got into the suburbs where traffic was thinner, she grew more confident and began pointing out to him some of the changes that had taken place – new houses, a big green roundabout. But his last visit had been five years previously, when he was only eight; such changes of detail were lost on him, everything was unfamiliar. It was new territory to him and the fact that Aunt Jane didn’t see this made him realize that in the stress of driving and talking at the same time she was forgetting who he was.
Uncle George must have heard them coming down the drive, because he appeared at the door as they were getting out of the car. Booming, presumably welcoming sounds issued from him, in which however at this distance no words could be distinguished. The boy walked over to the front steps and stood there, in his neat grey flannel suit, strapped suitcase on the ground beside him, stood smiling upward with squared shoulders, speechless, smiling unwaveringly, but still taking care not to seem culpably unconscious of his situation. He had always found Uncle George a fearsome being, bulky, noisy, unpredictable. Now his awe was increased by finding his uncle dressed in a maroon track-suit instead of ordinary clothes.
‘You got him then,’ Uncle George said in a soft blurting roar from the top of the steps, exactly as if the boy were something Aunt Jane had gone out in pursuit of. ‘Jolly good,’ he said. ‘Come in, come in.’ The three white steps leading up made it seem as if Uncle George were on a pedestal. Still smiling, the boy commenced the ascent. The maroon shape above him gave way a little, retreated down the passage. He paused again at the threshold. Aunt Jane took his arm. ‘Come along in,’ she said.
‘How are you keeping, young man?’ Uncle George said. The boy looked up steadily at the square, big-nosed, straight browed face. ‘I am very well, thank you,’ he said. ‘How are you, Uncle George?’
‘I keep going,’ Uncle George said, dropping his voice suddenly.
‘Have you been running, dear?’ Aunt Jane said. She moved from the boy’s side and went farther down the passage.
‘Limbering up, you know,’ Uncle George said. ‘Limbering up.’
‘He thinks nothing,’ Aunt Jane said, ‘of running fifty times round the back lawn, and that is quite a big area. I don’t know if you remember the garden behind the house?’
‘Not very well.’
‘Keeps me in trim,’ Uncle George said.
‘How many times did you go round today, dear?’ Aunt Jane was now standing beside Uncle George about half-way down the passage.
‘Just the statutory fifty,’ Uncle George said loudly. ‘Mens sana in corpore sano,’ he said, looking at his nephew.
Aunt Jane too was looking at him. They stood tog
ether in the middle of the passage, regarding him, Uncle George standing slightly sideways so as not to seem to be blocking the way, Aunt Jane at his side, a little beyond him, coming barely up to his shoulder.
He had expected to be scrutinized. But there was in this conjunction of their faces something that seemed formally composed and after a moment he realized that they were like Joseph and Mary in one of the coloured pictures in his New Testament, standing together on the dusty road to Bethlehem. The similarity was not of course in their garments or general appearance, but simply the two faces at their different levels, and perhaps because of the artist’s incompetence, something strained in their benignity as if they were nervous at becoming the parents of Jesus, daunted at the prospect and drawing together for mutual support. This impression was fleeting, but it distressed him. He was fully prepared to do what was expected of him, as far as he could perceive this, and obviously a manly fortitude was what Uncle George would have found laudable, but the two of them together, mutely looking, drawn up in welcoming order, made him uncertain of his part. Pain tautened his throat, a sense of how pitiable he might seem in their eyes, a sort of evacuee from the danger zone of warring parents.
‘I expect you’re ready for something to eat,’ Aunt Jane said, moving with a sudden bustle farther down the passage, away from them.
Uncle George said, ‘Hungry as a hunter I expect,’ with a blurt of relief at having found a formula, looking at the boy’s tall, shrinking thinness with unintentional derogation. He swung his body farther round against the wall and the boy with a sort of wary decorousness stepped past him down the passage after Aunt Jane. Uncle George made noises of approval behind but did not follow.
In the kitchen he was given tea and buns. The buns had thick white icing on them and he felt sure they had been bought specially for him. He never had such things at home. Their sweetness, dissolving in his mouth, confirmed his alien status. Aunt Jane talked to him, bustling about the kitchen. She had taken off her coat and in her green woollen dress looked amazingly thin and tense. He noticed something about her movements now that he did not remember: a curious rigidity about her upper half as if the legs carried her body along under protest, hasting legs and active hands seemed in their movements to belie and contradict the real tendency of her body, which was to recoil from things, in some sort of abhorrence which he couldn’t understand. And this, in his tranced consuming of the sweet buns, this haplessness and reluctance of Aunt Jane’s upper half, mingled in his mind with visions of Uncle George pounding and panting round and round in his maroon track suit.
She did not, out of tact, ask him anything about home or his parents. She told him instead how Uncle George had dealt with an impertinent baker’s delivery man. ‘He did not raise his voice above its normal speaking tone,’ she said. She compressed pale lips. The boy tried to imagine Uncle George’s normal speaking tone. ‘We never had any repetition of it,’ Aunt Jane said. She told him about the garden and the desultory attitude towards work of Matthews the gardener, whom the boy vaguely remembered. ‘He’s getting old, of course,’ Aunt Jane said. He wondered how old a gardener could be who seemed old to someone as old as Aunt Jane. ‘Your uncle has to give him a dressing down from time to time,’ she said. She told him that Frederick and Henry would be home soon for the summer holidays. Those fierce twins, whom Aunt Jane had given birth to in her forty-second year. He knew this because he had heard his mother telling someone, in that tone she used for reprehensible actions. He had thought it greedy of Aunt Jane to have twins, so late in life. Yes, after all those years they had almost given up hope. She went and had twin boys. One after the other their damp little heads. She had a bad time but she was conscious when they were born. Even when you are expecting it, it is a shock, Jane said, to see two. It sapped her strength, she was always frail.
This account of the birth of Henry and Frederick had impressed him vividly, especially the dampness, these two ruthless damp-haired babies bursting forth from Aunt Jane and commencing to sap her. He had regarded them ever since as demonic; one of the few things he remembered from his last visit was the black hair that grew plentifully on the backs of Henry and Frederick’s hands. It had seemed to him the very sprouting of their destructive energy.
‘They will be home on holiday soon,’ Aunt Jane said. ‘You will see them,’ she promised him. ‘They will be able to take you around.’ They were both in the sixth form at Dover College, having gone through the school together, evinced a bent for science together and latterly declared an intention of taking up medicine together: a mutuality which the boy found additionally disquieting.
After tea he was taken up to his room, which was on the third floor, just below the roof; an attic room in fact, though it didn’t have a sloping ceiling. The room was roughly square in shape and had pale green walls.
‘You will be wanting a rest, I expect,’ Aunt Jane said. She remained a minute or two, touching various things in the room with a sort of vague haste. ‘If there is anything you need,’ she said, ‘don’t be shy about asking. I want you – your uncle and I want – you – to be happy here.’
When she had gone he began his unpacking. He handled his garments with deliberation, as if the coolness and loneliness of the room, conferred a sort of ritual significance on them. Most of his things were being sent on by rail; he had only brought with him what he would be needing immediately. It seemed unsatisfactory, however, to fill only the two drawers of the chest and leave the others quite empty, two drawers were not enough to qualify him for occupancy. By a process of judicious distribution he contrived to make it impossible to open any of the drawers without finding at least one article belonging to him. Then, from the pockets at each side of the suitcase, he took out the few personal possessions he had chosen to bring with him: magnifying glass, electric torch, swallowtail butterfly in transparent plastic case, and his New Testament, recently awarded him for twenty-five consecutive attendances at the Crusader Class. He stood at the window, looking out, holding the book in his hands. His room overlooked the front garden with its neat terraced lawns, yew hedges, rose-garden and line of silver-birch trees screening off the road beyond. The Morris Minor and a dark green Rover were parked on the circular gravelled area at the front of the house, just below him. He heard no sound from the house or the garden. He looked down at the New Testament, at the dark red morocco and gilt lettering of the cover. He began to leaf through it, pausing briefly at texts which he had underlined in red: ‘Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.’ ‘I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh when no man can work.’
The pages were thin and crisp and smelt of newness, and this unusedness, the pristine unsullied quality of the pages reinforced in his mind the purity of heart they enjoined. Towards the end of the gospel according to St Matthew, there was a picture in colour of Christ on the Cross. Christ’s eyes were closed and his head had declined slightly on to his breast. It had been clear to the boy from the moment of seeing this picture and had constituted its main fascination, that though Christ had not actually died yet, he was in extremis. The artist had avoided giving him a Nordic look. His face was sharp-jawed, shaven and semitic, with a sort of dusky, creamy pallor. The hair was dark and parted in the middle to fall in two smooth sweeps about his ears and the nape of his neck. There was no dewy anguish of torture about him, but a spent, languid quality as if he had been through storms which had exhausted him. He was naked except for the scantiest of loincloths and the whole of his body had the same yellowish pallor as his face.
The boy scrutinized this picture intently for some moments. Then he closed the book, still remaining however at the window. He thought of the ceremony at which he had been presented with the New Testament by the Leader. Afterwards the class had sung, ‘I will make you Fishers of Men’ all together, and he had been in the midst of the singing, borne up by it, full of happiness and pride. He looked out at the
garden again: its quietness seemed inviting now. He thought that if he could make his way to the garden behind the house he was not likely to be noticed. His first instinct was to put the New Testament away in the drawer with his clean handkerchiefs; but he remembered what the Leader had said, that one must bear witness. He did not find it easy to confess Christ directly, but he thought if he left the New Testament on top of the chest of drawers where it could hardly fail to be noticed by anyone entering the room, it could serve as mute witness, and if it were remarked upon, it would give him a natural occasion. So he did this, and afterwards went quietly downstairs and out into the garden behind the house.
Mooncranker's Gift Page 7