All this groaning and abuse was clearly audible to Herr and Frau Gruenther who after a frugal supper, were standing in the pool just outside the girl’s cabin.
‘Disgusting,’ Herr Gruenther said. ‘Is it not, my dear?’ ‘Ich werd mich bei den Verantwort lichen beklagen,’he said loudly, glaring angrily at the closed door of the cabin.
‘You horrible parvenu, you cockroach,’ said the girl in the cabin, gulping and snapping.
‘Mmaagh’ said Lusk for all reply. His mouth was still full of bosom, which he did not dare as yet relinquish, being terrified of the girl’s spasming and the fury of her eyes.
‘Let us walk farther off,’ Herr Gruenther said. ‘They have no shame. Words of love are not for public ears.’
They walked a little way along the pool. ‘There is also the music of the young American,’ Herr Gruenther said. ‘I will include that eternal transistor in my complaint of the morning. The manager must take action. Are we to have the fruits of a shallow civilization always in our ears?’ He snorted with indignation.
‘Feel me here, darling. No here,’ Frau Gruenther said. She guided his hand to the inside of her thigh. ‘Kannst Du einen Unterschief sehen?’
‘A great difference,’ her husband said loyally. ‘A kilo at least has gone.’
Frau Gruenther’s head, encased in its white rubber bathing cap, was almost completely spherical. She was short in stature, had been known in her youth as petite in fact; now the ramifications of her chin rested on the water, whereas he was only immersed to his chest. In the folds and accretions of her face, eyes, nose and mouth were tiny, curiously rudimentary, features dabbed in without regard to scale.
‘It is all a question of the massage,’ she said. ‘All the time I am in the water I am rubbing myself, according to the instructions. That is the secret of it.’
Herr Gruenther tried now to extricate his hand, but his wife had brought her thighs close together in the meanwhile, and he found himself trapped, his hand enveloped in warm spongy flesh.
‘I think we should stay here some days longer,’ she said. She must have forgotten it was there. This indifference to his own flesh recalled with a pang to Herr Gruenther nights of their early marriage when he had stalked her slim form across wide snowy sheets. He lowered himself in the water and looked up at the starry sky, sensing from his wife’s movements that she had recommenced her massage. Without doubt she had forgotten completely that his hand was there. Could it be that such contacts, because of her bulk, the distance between centre and periphery, were only intermittently signalled to Hilde? He entertained for some moments with a sort of bemused pity, this notion of Hilde’s flesh progressively losing touch with her brain. Or perhaps things would come through finally, but grotesquely delayed, so that Hilde would be continuously responding at inappropriate moments to vanished stimuli. Supposing for example hours or days from now, talking to someone, having tea, or at the hairdresser’s, she were suddenly to become aware of someone’s hand high up between her thighs …
‘You beastly fucking little bastard. You beastly fucking little shit,’ intoned the girl loudly. ‘Oh you snotty twerp and piss-pot.’ She uttered a hollow joyless groan.
Into Lusk’s mind, as he lay there, still feebly licking the nipple, came a total sense of the girl’s strangeness, the contempt with which she had treated him right from the beginning, and her eagerness for it, avid, she was avid, squirming even now to get under him, all this struck him suddenly as sick, and a question occurred to him, one that would show her he was no novice, not a person to be taken lightly. A man of the world in fact.
He raised his head and said, ‘Excuse me but are you a nympho?’
‘What did you say?’ Her body was suddenly still.
He saw the white face and large-irised blue eyes some six inches from his own. They narrowed as he looked, and the mouth drew together in a thin line.
‘Are you –’ he was beginning again, laboriously and with a sense of foreboding, when the girl’s face drew back sharply and her right arm, which had been under the sheet, rose into the air and came swiftly across her body in a kind of looping, chopping blow. Her clenched fist, wielded sideways, not in a punch but a sort of hammer blow, caught Lusk squarely on his right eye, causing him for some moments intense pain. He placed a hand over his injured eye and sat up in bed. The girl pushed him violently in the chest.
‘Get out of my cabin,’ she said loudly. ‘Take your beastly person out of my cabin.’
‘I asked you a civil question,’ Lusk said, still holding his hand over his blinded eye.
The girl sat up, frantically with one hand clawing at her hair, with the other heaving the sheet up to her chin. ‘I’ll report you,’ she said. ‘For indecent assault. Get out of here.’ Her whole head was trembling and she gulped several times as if she had swallowed something inadvertently.
‘Okay,’ Lusk said. ‘I’m going.’
‘You’ll hear more of this,’ the girl said. ‘You beastly coward, you deserve to be horsewhipped.’
Lusk got into his cold wet trunks and blundered to the door.
‘Rotten stinker,’ the girl shouted after him.
He walked along the terrace, dazed with the enormity of what had happened to him, a wounded creature between water and sky. In his cabin he bathed the eye in cold water. Then he sat down on the edge of his bed and wept for some minutes.
Farnaby spent a long time wandering about in the water, trying to pick up the traces of the girl he thought was Miranda. When hunger finally obliged him to quit the pool, he found the dining-room almost deserted. Plopl and his girl were sitting at the far end of it with their backs to him. They appeared to have finished their meal, and were sitting silently side by side. They did not see him come in, and he had no wish to draw their attention to his presence. Mrs Pritchett, accompanied by the Levantine Spumantini, passed him on their way out. So Miranda, if it were indeed Miranda, had not dined with her. The only other persons in the dining-room were a girl in a wheel chair, with high deformed shoulders, and opposite her a middle-aged, square-faced woman whom Farnaby thought might be a nurse. They too appeared to have finished eating. Senemoǧlu appeared in his white jacket, he brilliance of his smile in no way impaired by the news he brought Farnaby that owing to the lateness of the hour there was nothing to be had but fish soup. The hours for the evening meal, he told Farnaby, information in fact already posted up on the back of each cabin door, perhaps monsieur had omitted to look, the hours were seven to ten. It was now almost eleven. Farnaby apologized, accepted the fish soup, which turned out to be quite delicious. Senemoǧlu did not reappear and none of the other people in the room paid him any attention. They were still there, sitting in the same positions when he got up and left. However, standing in hesitation just beyond the door, he noticed after a moment or two a white-coated figure hovering at his side. He looked up and caught a smile, brilliant even in the half dark: Senemoǧlu.
‘Did you find her?’ the manager asked. ‘The young lady you were looking for.’
‘Oh,’ Farnaby said. ‘No, not yet.’
‘You will,’ Senemoǧlu said confidently. ‘I am sure that you will find her or some other.’ He was beginning to withdraw.
‘Is it too late for me to get a drink,’ Farnaby said.
‘No, not at all. What would you like?’
‘Vermouth, please. A sweet vermouth. With ice.’
‘Very well, sir.’
‘I’ll have it on the terrace,’ Farnaby said. He began to walk slowly along the terrace towards the nearest table, seeing almost with surprise the soft gleam of water below him – he had been forgetting the nearness of water, and yet it was the reason, was it not, for the presence of all of them there. Or was it? He was troubled by a sense of other reasons, vague but compelling like evidence he had chosen to disregard. He glanced up from the still water to a sky that itself looked liquid, with stars melting in it, softened and enlarged.
Senemoǧlu was there with the drink almost immedi
ately. He placed it on the table and receded bowing into the darkness. Farnaby sipped the vermouth slowly. The night air was cold, but he felt warm enough in the heavy worsted trousers and thick pullover he had put on after emerging from the pool.
Across the vaporous surface of the pool light fell unevenly, erratically. The heads of the creatures inhabiting the pool were darker grains or clots in the mist. Glimpses of pale shoulders, arms, faces turning. Occasionally the grains moved, described arcs or lines, sometimes at speed enough to score a brief, glittering wake. Cast a net down here, you could make quite a catch. Squirming conglomerate mass struggling in the meshes. Perhaps Miranda among them. Delicately, carefully, extricate her slender limbs. Difficult to distinguish, though, as they gulped and threshed together. No characteristic marking, all the same kind of fish really.
He looked with a sudden impatience that was almost disgust away from the pool and its denizens, over the cabins and the invisible hills beyond, at the night sky. Nothing we could come here seeking, he thought, that has not been sought and found before. He thought of the view from the window of his cabin, the ruins scattered over the hillsides. Old, he informed himself sagely. He was beginning to feel drowsy. Immeasurably old …
Suddenly, quite close to him he heard a throat being cleared with a harsh abrasive sound. Then a chairleg scraped on the floor as if someone were shifting position. Peering forward Farnaby made out at the next table a seated figure which he had not noticed before because of the deep shadow cast by the parasol shade – it was apparently the policy of the management to leave these permanently in position. Farnaby had the impression that this person was regarding him, had in fact turned in his chair for this purpose.
‘Merhaba,’ he said. ‘Iyi Aksamlar.’
There was no reply to this, but after a short while the person hawked again, then said, ‘Hae ye a match, laddie?’ As if in a dream, Farnaby found this accent familiar.
‘Yes, I think so,’ he said wonderingly. He got up and walked to the next table with his box of matches in his hand. ‘Here you are,’ he said. He looked down at the meagre form, the thin face. He said, ‘It’s Mr McSpavine isn’t it?’
‘Ay, that’s right.’
‘What a fantastic coincidence,’ Farnaby said. He sat down opposite McSpavine and leaned forward, elbows on the table. McSpavine started lighting his pipe. The flame of the match dipped into the bowl with his breath, sprang up again briefly, casting light over the sharp-jawed face.
‘Why, who are you?’ he said at last, rather mumblingly, the stem between his teeth.
‘Don’t you remember me? Farnaby, James Farnaby. We had a conversation in the French Hospital in Istanbul. When was it now, not long ago ...’ He paused. Time before the pool seemed to have become undifferentiated.
‘Oh, ay,’ McSpavine said after a moment. ‘I remember you, laddie. We talked about my Flora.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I hae sailed the seven seas,’ McSpavine said.
‘Yes,’ Farnaby said. ‘I remember your saying that you had been a ship’s engineer.’
McSpavine turned his head aside and spat delicately into the darkness. ‘Wee fanatical skipper,’ he said. ‘Mutinous crew. Scoundrel lascars. Give her every ounce you’ve got McSpavine. Aye, aye, sir. No coal left, choppin’ up the bulkheads. Hotter’n hell in these engine rooms, sir.’
He fell silent for a while, puffing at his pipe. After a few moments a long fluttering sigh escaped from him. ‘I’m becalmed now, myself,’ he said. ‘In the shallows and miasmas.’
Farnaby again noted that the Scottish accent seemed to come and go like some sort of recurrent impediment in speech.
‘I sit here,’ McSpavine said. ‘Tryin’ to work it all out.’
‘But what made you think of coming here?’
‘By different roads we come to the same place,’ McSpavine said.
‘No, but I mean, it is rather an unusual place to come to … in the circumstances.’
‘You mean with my Flora dying? Ay, weel, I was guided.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I heard a feller talking of it, in the hospital,’ McSpavine said. ‘’Twas after my Flora breathed her last. I went in to see the clock. We must know the difference between the living and the dead, laddie. The pre-ecise moment must be marked. If we canna tell by the face, I mean. My Flora looked the same before and after, the same smile. There was no way of tellin’ she had crossed the great divide.’
‘McSpavine relapsed into silence again. After a few moments Farnaby said diffidently, ‘So you went back to look at the clock.’
The figure opposite him made a sudden movement, as if startled. Then the voice resumed:
‘I saw the lassie in the bed, sitting up. Not more than twenty. She smiled at me. At least,’ McSpavine added cautiously, ‘I got in the way of her smile. And Flora went out of my mind, after forty years of matrimony. And her not cold yet, still smiling. I could think of nothing but climbing into the bed with the wee lassie … I went into a sort of hall and I sat down for a bit. I talked to a young fellow there –’
‘That must have been me,’ Farnaby said.
‘Oh, ay,’ McSpavine said, rather doubtfully. ‘I stayed for a while,’ he said, ‘thinking things out, then I started leaving. But half way down the corridor I felt giddy, I thought I was going to fall, so I leaned against one of the doors, holding on to the handle to keep myself up. And while I was standing there I heard a man talking through the door. A beautiful slow voice. His voice came at me from the cracks in the door and he spoke to me about this pool. I listened, laddie, and I didn’t feel giddy any more, the words he was saying cleared my mind. He was telling me to come here.’
‘But good heavens!’ Farnaby said. ‘That must have been Mr Mooncranker that you heard.’
‘Oh, ay?’ McSpavine said, indifferently.
‘Yes,’ Farnaby said. He was surprised at McSpavine not showing more interest in the identity of the person who had directed him here. ‘It is an amazing coincidence,’ he said, ‘because Mr Mooncranker was talking to me at the time, and you must have been overtaken by giddiness just at that very moment …’
McSpavine made no reply. It seemed to Farnaby that if they could not talk about this they could not talk about anything. He looked across the pool. He could not see anybody in the water now, but he thought he could still hear wading sounds from the remoter recesses. He looked at his watch: it was twenty minutes to one. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll turn in now.’ McSpavine muttered something indistinct round the stem of his pipe.
‘Good night then,’ Farnaby said. He made his way along the terrace, treading soundlessly. Past cabin number nine where slept Mehmet, the Gruenthers’ Turkish driver. Past the cabin of the Gruenthers themselves in which they lay lost in the two separate mounds of their existence, her dreams too trivial to cause any commotion in her bulk, he between sleep and waking in the lee of her back groping in memory for the scene of childhood holidays, distant fields, a fuming of marguerites, white horses in sunshine. Past, though he did not know it, the cabin of Miranda, whose mind was full of her new friend and the confidences that friend had made her. Flushed and excited, quite disinclined for sleep, she lay on her back in the darkness. She could see through her window a square of night sky casually presented to her. She gazed wide-eyed, unblinking at the distant spaces. Her body was burning under the sheet. Her mind touched inadvertently on certain points of similarity between Mooncranker and Mrs Pritchett, lingered rather alarmedly on these, sheered away. The whole of her life up to now seemed unsubstantial and somehow preliminary, everything that had happened to her. Her being, as she moved restlessly in the bed, responded to some moan of anguish and excitement being sounded outside in the night, some deep chord of feeling. She wondered if she had a temperature.
Past the cabin of Mrs Pritchett who, as her habit was, read a chapter before composing herself to sleep. Always a factual sort of book and usually something relevant to her immediate sit
uation or experience. She sat propped up against the pillow, face composed, even severe, lips compressed. Poplin pyjamas buttoned to the neck. She read:
Cybele, the chief deity in the religion of the Phrygians and other pre-Greek peoples in Asia Minor. She was an all powerful goddess, the supreme feminine being, the embodiment of Mother Earth. The god of heaven (Papas or father) was subservient to her, and so were the demi-god Attis, her lover, and a band of demonic beings known as the Corybantes …
She looked up from her book. Presumably the Corybantes would be women. She saw them with prepared nails waiting on the orders of their mistress. Marvellous days those, for a woman of character. The only men in close attendance appeared to be the Galli, the eunuch priests of Cybele. Or was Galli just another name for Corybantes? The book did not make this clear. It would have been in such places as this that her cult was established. Perhaps on some level space among these very hills behind them, Attis was yearly mourned. What was the Corybantes’ real purpose? Were they emissaries, devotees, divine accessories of some sort, or simply servants of the Great Mother? The book did not say. Brow slightly furrowed, she read on:
Whatever form the original cult of Cybele took, in historical times it had become a religion of orgiastic rites. There were masked assemblies and processions of the Corybantes and ecstatic dancing accompanied by wild music on flutes and various percussion instruments … The participants scourged themselves until they drew blood and aspirants to the priesthood marked the culmination of their frenzy by emasculating themselves in imitation of Attis …
Farnaby went past all these people and so to bed.
4
He slept fitfully, and dreamed about that riverside scene related by Mrs Pritchett to the girl he thought of now as Miranda. In this dream he had several identities. He was Mark the fisherman, and a person who watched from the bank, and the fish. Mark stood in midstream, bulky and elemental, absolutely motionless, darkly outlined against a silver sky, and the luminous water flowed quickly past him, around him and between his firmly planted legs, and it was Farnaby’s hand, incongruously delicate, holding the rod, managing the ratchet, Farnaby too who waited downstream, facing the current, looking up to the filmy surface where the light broke, looking against the sliding light for dark flecks of food, the barbed fleck that meant death, Farnaby’s hand dashed the fish’s head on a stone and the round eyes flew out, eyes with which seconds before he had seen bubbles and colours, his eyes, his hands, and he watched it all from the bank where the air was heavy with sweet odours …
Mooncranker's Gift Page 19