‘Oh really,’ Farnaby said. He was somewhat bothered by the fixity of McSpavine’s regard. Nothing shifty about this chap, he told himself, by way of reassurance. There was a strange, sweetish odour about him too. ‘Are you waiting for someone?’ he asked, curious to know why McSpavine was sitting here in the middle of the night.
The Scot sat forward, looking at Farnaby intently. ‘My Flora has just passed away,’ he said. He groped under his coat and brought out a silver-plated pocket watch, to which he briefly referred. ‘Thirty-seven minutes ago,’ he said. ‘I’m just sitting here trying to think it all out. The pree-cise significance.’
‘I am terribly sorry to hear that,’ said Farnaby, who had been taken completely by surprise. He looked away in embarrassment.
‘Ay,’ MacSpavine said. He had taken out a yellow oilskin tobacco pouch and a short cherry-wood pipe. ‘I hae sailed the seven seas,’ he said, shaking his head slowly. He began filling the pipe. ‘It was me that got things going,’ he said. ‘Trying to keep the old tub going. Nothing but the wee scoundrelly lascars to rely on. Mulattoes an’ quadroons. Persons o’ doubtful loyalty.’
‘You are a ship’s engineer then?’ Farnaby said, uneasy at this loquacity, and the abrupt change of subject after the reference to Flora’s death.
‘Was,’ McSpavine said. He sniffed again.
Farnaby watched the fingers, which were not as blunt and capable as he would have wished, were in fact thin and distinctly tremulous, stuffing dark shreds into the cherry wood. Good strong sailor’s shag, no doubt. McSpavine had a myriad little lines at the corners of his strangely unblinking eyes. Laughter lines, Farnaby told himself. A genial seafaring man. His uneasiness was growing.
‘Was, laddie,’ McSpavine said. ‘I gave it up when I married Flora. Started up a newsagent’s business, in Welwyn Garden City.’
‘Welwyn Garden City,’ Farnaby repeated politely.
‘It was my Flora’s native habitat,’ McSpavine looked gravely at Farnaby. ‘I sit here,’ he said, ‘trying to work it out. I should never hae brought my Flora out to foreign parts. We had a nice wee house in Welwyn Garden City. Terrace house. But she grew restless, it wasn’t enough for her. We had no children, d’ye see, and as she grew older she felt that life was passing her by. She listened to my stories of the seagoing days. She was always on at me to take her for a trip and in the end I did.’
There was a pause while McSpavine finished filling his pipe and put it in his mouth. Farnaby immeditely grew alarmed in case McSpavine intended actually to smoke the pipe on hospital premises.
‘I took her wi’ me,’ McSpavine said, muttering indistinctly round the stem of his pipe. ‘Marseilles, Venice, Izmir. She loved it all, laddie, every minute of it, it was more multifarious than she was accustomed to. The life, the teeming life. The piquant contrasts, rich and poor, the grand boulevards with wee beggar men hoppin’ about on their stumps, donkeys in the streets, oranges on the trees. Then we got to this city, and she died.’ He consulted his pocket watch again. ‘Fifty-two minutes ago.’
Farnaby said, ‘You shouldn’t blame yourself, it would have happened anyway.’
‘Ay,’ McSpavine said, ‘but maybe she’d have had longer if I had left her there in Welwyn Garden City, leadin’ her peaceful existence. The piquant contrasts and all the picturesqueness she was exclaiming about might have stimulated the growth of the disease. That is a thought that is heavy to me.’
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ Farnaby said. He was growing concerned about leaving Mooncranker for so long unattended.
‘She lay for eight days gettin’ weaker. Smilin’, smilin’ all the time. The very faintest o’ smiles. So there was no difference, d’ye see, between life and death, no difference whatsoever. I was watching her face, and I didna know myself exactly the moment that she died. She looked the same before and after.’ McSpavine’s voice had changed: it had become slower, taken on a droning, obsessive note. The Scottish accent too, seemed to be less in evidence. His eyes had narrowed, as though he found difficulty in focusing, and this brought out the innumerable wrinkles, the network of lines round them – lines of laughter in the salt spray and horizon-scanning, Farnaby tried to remind himself, in an attempt to preserve his earlier feeling of the Scot’s reliability and hearty good sense. This, however, he realized, was now almost all dissipated, dissolved as it were in McSpavine’s loquacity.
‘She made no sudden movement,’ McSpavine said, gesturing with his pipe and peering at Farnaby. ‘She went right on smilin, but the doctor said “rigor mortis”, and I knew from the cut of his jib that Flora had gone where the weary are at rest.’
Farnaby, who could not quite believe that his companion had uttered these words, looked for a moment blankly before him then said, ‘It must have been a great shock to you.’
‘Weel,’ McSpavine said cautiously, ‘it isna sae much the shock of Flora’s going, though that might be taken as originatin’ …’
He said no more for some time. Farnaby stood up, seeking in his mind phrases consoling and valedictory. Before he could speak, however, the other said, ‘The moment of death was not detectable. If I could have had a sign, maybe I would never have gone back.’
He looked round the room, as if to interrogate it on this issue. The glazed white walls reflected light evenly. Everything in the room was equally distinct. The vertical lines where the corridor began, set at an angle from them, were white and cruelly sharp. Farnaby was aware as he stood there of the life of the hospital all round him, as a great seething hush in which pain was being suppressed by white-robed attendants, continually denied its proper screeching expression.
‘That’s what I did, I went back,’ McSpavine said, speaking as it seemed not now to Farnaby but to the stark white room. ‘To fix the time of death,’ he said. ‘Since she hadna made any sign herself. I thought it only fitting to know the time, by the clock, the hospital time, of rigor mortis. I didna trust my ain.’ He looked up at Farnaby. ‘There must be a dividing line, laddie,’ he said. ‘There must be a line drawn between the living and the dead. So I went back. Not to Flora’s room. There wasn’t any clock in Flora’s room, but there is a big round clock in all the public wards. I went in the one nearest, just in the doorway to see the clock. It was dark in there, just one light at a table at the far end, the nurse’s table, but I could see the clock on the wall, it was eight minutes past three, laddie. I was checking it against my own, standing there in the door. Everyone was sleeping. Then this young woman, her bed was just under the clock, she sat up and looked at me. Young wi’ long hair. She sat up in bed in the middle of the night and she saw me standin’ there. And she smiled at me, laddie. Such a smile. It is that I’ve been pondering over, in conjunction with my Flora’s passing. Trying to get the pree-cise significance. Because my Flora was smiling too, d’ye see?’
McSpavine smiled himself at this point, or at least the left side of his mouth slipped suddenly downward. Farnaby not knowing whether it was a real smile or merely the semblance of one, compromised in his response by nodding his head. His initial sense of the other’s sturdy probity had now quite gone. McSpavine’s very appearance seemed different. The face that looked up at him now was pale, peering, loose-mouthed.
‘I must be getting along,’ Farnaby said.
‘Twas a smile only inceedentally levelled at me,’ McSpavine said, with an increase of urgency, perhaps evoked by Farnaby’s move to depart. ‘I realize that. But it aroused a wish, an unco’ powerful desire, for carnal knowledge of the wee lassie.’ He took the pipe out of his mouth and gestured with it towards the ceiling. ‘I wanted to creep into the bed with her,’ he said. He looked at Farnaby and an expression of extreme gravity came over his face. ‘Not a minute after,’ he said. ‘Less than fifty seconds after my Flora had been pronounced rigor mortis.’
Farnaby, to whom this confession of inveterate lechery came as a culminating stroke of disillusionment, at once began to move away towards the entrance to the corridor.
‘
Shock of grief,’ he mumbled. ‘Demoralized, quite understandable, very natural in fact.’
Without waiting for more, and without looking behind, he passed through the swing-doors and began to walk away, rapidly at first, then more slowly as he realized that he was coming to Mooncranker’s corridor. He turned left and tried to remember how far down it should be. About one-third of the way, he thought. Number seventy-nine was the one he selected finally as being most likely. Inch by inch, gripping the doorknob tight, he opened the door, approaching his face to the widening crack, tense for any enormity. Light, an empty bed, beyond it another, and Mooncranker’s calm profile, open-eyed. The apparatus of sustenance still in place. With a great surge of relief and homecoming, Farnaby opened the door wide and walked in. Mooncranker did not turn his head. Farnaby stretched out on the bed again.
‘The most extraordinary things have been happening to me,’ he said.
Mooncranker, who had been awake for the last twenty minutes or so, heard this entry and this preliminary remark without any sense that they affected him, as if he were listening to a distant barking or crowing across a desolate landscape in some inconceivably bleak dawn. He no longer felt sleepy but his sense of externals was muted, his body extended under the sheets did not seem responsive to his will and impulse. It was as if by looking at things he distanced himself from them, made them unreal: the slightly tremulous concentricity of the light reflected on the ceiling above him; the looming contraption of bottles and tubes beyond the bed. Interiorly, however, with a sort of desperate patience, he was attempting to recreate, complete in every detail, the last occasion on which he had seen and talked to Miranda, the time immediately before her departure. Patience was needed because other memories, largely irrelevant, persisted in obtruding, mingling, obscuring the girl’s image. Perhaps it would help to frame it into words.
‘We had breakfast,’ he said, in a remote voice. ‘Yogourt and honey, toast. No, not Turkish coffee, please. She doesn’t like Turkish coffee at breakfast time. She likes café au lait. She always likes abundant things, plentiful things. Can’t you get an English breakfast at this hotel? She’s very young, you know. An excellent shorthand typist, however. Not much good, I said, asking for an English breakfast in a Moslem country. Bacon figures largely in an English breakfast, don’t forget that. Well, she hadn’t forgotten of course, but she is rather wilful at times.
‘I went out to buy a paper. New York Herald Tribune of the day before. After that I decided for some reason or other to have a bath. I think it was while I was in the bath that she made up her mind, instead of going shopping to the Covered Bazaar as he had intended, to go off altogether for a while. I don’t think she intends to leave me for good.’
‘I’m sure she doesn’t,’ Farnaby said, with a vague attempt at consolation.
Mooncranker turned his head on the pillow very slowly, until he was looking directly at Farnaby.
‘That is why I believe she has gone to this thermal pool. She knew it was the place I would think of first. I had been talking to her about it rather a lot.’
For some moments, hazily, he tried to understand the nature of his obsession, the almost numbing hold on his imagination the hot pool had taken right from the first, from his first reading of it.
‘Did you find out anything about that groom?’ he said.
Farnaby, who was beginning to feel drowsy, could not at first think what Mooncranker was talking about. Then he remembered.
‘It seems,’ he said, ‘that the man had nothing to do with grooms or anything of that sort, and it was quite by accident that he turned up when he did.’
‘Accident?’ Mooncranker said. ‘Nonsense. He came for me.’
‘There is no groom,’ Farnaby said patiently.
Looking sideways at Farnaby’s long, pale, earnest face on the pillow, Mooncranker felt a return of the suspicion that this lying fellow was in league with the hotel staff against him, and perhaps also impersonating Farnaby in order to entrap or entangle him in some way. He was attacked by a sense of his utter folly in putting such a person on the scent of Miranda, actually asking him to go after her. In the chagrin of having been so hoodwinked he could not speak, could merely stare silently at the other’s face on the pillow.
‘He came to fumigate the room,’ Farnaby said, in the same patient voice. ‘That was what he was really after. The particular insect foe I could not determine. They didn’t know the word in English. Bugs, I suppose. Though the Armenian person reacted most strongly to termites.’
‘Armenian person? Termites?’ Mooncranker repeated in a surprised and offended voice. ‘Do you really expect me to believe that? It was the groom.’
‘Well, that is what they told me at the desk. He had come to spray the place in order to combat an insect pest. He was an exterminator, sir, not a groom, and that explains his clothing and equipment. I suppose he thought our room was unoccupied. He was probably as startled to see us as we were to see him.’
Farnaby saw that Mooncranker had commenced smiling to himself as if he knew better. He closed his eyes. He felt very sleepy now. He was aware that Mooncranker was talking again, something about bicycles, but he made no attempt to follow. After a while, he slept.
‘To deal with my correspondence,’ Mooncranker said. ‘Three days a week at first. There was a basket sort of thing at the front which invariably contained an apple, a Penguin book and a torch. Brand new, shiny bicycle …
He stopped talking for a moment, absorbed in the radiant image of Miranda that autumn, cycling down the street towards his house, pedalling up and down, up and down, her handlebars gleaming, her face uplifted, glowing with health. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
‘After that, I took her on full time,’ he said. Glancing sideways he was annoyed to find that Farnaby had fallen asleep. Insensitive lout.
She was real to me before that, long before that. On the tennis-court I saw her first, she was wearing a white headband and a sleeveless dress with pleated skirt. Honey-coloured hair and a richness of colouring not usual in English girls, not at all usual. Tanned arms and legs. She was then fifteen or so, a charming young person. This lout on the next bed, completely supernumerary now. Insolently sleeping there. He was somewhat younger than Miranda. Oh, yes, I remember. Don’t imagine that I have forgotten anything, Farnaby. I remember that summer in every detail, summer of my umpiring. You and she played together often. You suited each other’s style. You were complementary and every game cemented that relationship between you, while I watched the bright arms, the bared teeth against the glare, the arching and angling of the lithe body, play of the pleated skirts, gleams of white pants beneath. I suffered, to see how they helped each other on the court, retrieved the fortunes of the game by some coup. Yes, they played so well together, everybody agreed. And in the final of the tournament, when they were up against George’s boys, bigger and older, how I was torn. I wanted Miranda to triumph but not in that company. Once or twice, in umpiring, I gave the points against them that should have been theirs. Several times. But it was of no avail. They won. She kissed him, full on the lips. They went off together, into the shrubbery or so it seemed. I remained for some minutes, though my umpiring now was over. Jane brought a tray with glasses and ice, a great jug of lemonade. Kind anxious face, Jane, something of stoicism in the gentleness of the mouth, out of place completely in that loud hirsute set of males. She stood there with the tray, asking where the others were. And she called, I remember her calling out ‘James, Miranda’, and no answer coming. The winners had disappeared …
When Farnaby awoke faint light was coming through the curtains. Someone had been in and switched off the lamp near Mooncranker’s bed. He turned his head and looked across but could make out nothing but a vague bulk under sheets, a dark shape on the pillow. The suspended bottles on either side of Mooncranker gleamed dully, he could see no darkness of liquid in them. Inside and outside the hospital everything was completely silent. Farnaby began to reconstruct the shopping expediti
on that must have preceded the gift to him of the sausage-meat Christ. Bright summer morning, down the broad high street with its old-fashioned cobbled verges, its market cross in the centre. The green-painted bus-stops. Mooncranker in a spotted bow-tie, wearing an alpaca jacket somewhat sagging as to pockets, the negligent academic, carrying a stick. Up the high street past the warm pharmaceutical smells wafting from Boots, the odours of last night’s slopped beer from the ‘Red Lion’, past the ice-cream parlour and the foyers of both Odeon and Gaumont to the row of shops opposite the Metropole Hotel. Smell of sawdust and wet slabs and freshly minced meat. Mooncranker smiling vaguely in the doorway, waiting perhaps for some lady to buy chops. How much sausage-meat would be needed, not more than four ounces, surely. But can you go into a butcher’s shop and after the usual salutations ask for only a quarter of a pound of sausage-meat? Surely not. Perhaps you incorporated it with other things. Perhaps it was simply an item on your list, slipped in between best steak and neck of mutton. He would think you needed it for seasoning or stuffing, which in a sense of course you did. Then home again, home again. But that is what distresses me, even now, makes my heart beat more violently and my cheeks go hot here on the pillow, that it must have been premeditated, the whole thing. No mere random impulse of malignity, no casual or incidental damage, no. It was thought out, planned in advance. What shall I do to young Farnaby? It involved an expedition probably and certainly you must have taken trouble to get the consistency just right, did you mix it with bread crumbs? That is what it is, sir, the sustained unfaltering cruelty of it, which makes me think I was specially singled out. Children do not realize, sir, that harm done to them is a stray individual matter, they think it is the cosmos. The whole cosmos in your person handed me that object …
Mooncranker stirred and groaned. The light was appreciably stronger now. Farnaby could see that the professor’s eyes were still closed. After a moment or two, however, he groaned again.
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