‘And then, he became a well-known person too. I might have forgotten all about him. He went away at the end of that summer, did you know? He went to London and he didn’t come back much. I didn’t actually see him again, not for, oh, five years, but people mentioned his name you know. Your uncle met me one day in the street and talked to me about him, how well he was doing, and then I saw him on television, interviewing people and being the chairman in discussion groups. He became a well-known figure.’
‘Yes,’ Farnaby said. ‘I can imagine that. I mean, I can imagine Uncle George giving you all the details. I bet he got it all right, didn’t he?’
‘How do mean?’
‘All the details. I bet he got them all right, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, I suppose he did.’
‘He always got things like that right, you know,’ Farnaby said, remembering Uncle George and his maps and timetables.
‘He changed, after your aunt died. Have you seen him lately?’
‘No,’ Farnaby said. ‘I haven’t seen him for years. Do you mean he deteriorated?’
‘You’ll find a big change in him.’
He did not pursue this, wishing to hear more about Mooncranker. In the pause that followed he heard another soft rustling thud like a fruit or chestnut falling.
‘Then I went to secretarial college,’ she said. ‘I was still living at home and I needed a spare-time job, to help out, you know, to be a little independent. Your uncle wrote to me, and said Mr Mooncranker had been asking about me, would I like a job looking after his correspondence.’
Uncle George again, Farnaby thought. Further evidence of Mooncranker’s genius for enlisting accomplices. Mooncranker of the long, tenacious memory, the nursed desire. He had kept his sense intact for five years of Miranda’s malleability, preserved the memory of the impression he had made on her. Farnaby felt a surge of hatred for Mooncranker again, combined now with misery at his own deprivations. For a moment Mooncranker was a compound of all those with quicker speech, readier wits, more assurance, and Farnaby in imagination dashed him to the ground.
‘He had been married,’ she said, ‘in the interval, but he was living apart from his wife. I used to go to his house on a bicycle. He came back to live there after his mother died, you know.’
They moved slowly away from the trees, on to the grassy rectangular area of the temple itself.
‘I remember the road well,’ she said.
Out here in the open, sunshine had achieved a conquest of the mist but in the hollows of the hills around there was a smoky haze, like a lining.
‘I was only nineteen,’ she said, as if offering this fact to Farnaby in mitigation.
Farnaby looked at her without speaking. It seemed to him there was an amazing purity about her face, a purity which depended somehow on the cooperation of the air around it, as though neck and cheek and brow had shaped the arcs of air that lay adjacent, or as though the air itself, warmed and somehow intensified by the contiguity, had melted, moulded round her, like a sort of bright immaterial armour, an effect similar to the edge of air round flame or round a bright leaf on a day of brilliant sunshine; so that for the moment she took on for him the quality of the place itself and the season, achieved, tranquil, heedless of the time and decay which besieged it.
She was conscious of his gaze but did not return it; and this close unresisted scrutiny gave Farnaby a strong sense of impunity and supremacy, he began to feel sexually aroused by what seemed her submissiveness; and now at last the possible import of her tone came to him, the fact that she seemed almost to be excusing herself for her relations with Mooncranker, as if seeking to soften his judgement of her, which could only mean, he thought exultantly, that he had already established a claim in her life …
‘I was unhappy,’ she said. ‘Or thought I was. Cycling towards a sort of refuge if you know what I mean. He used to recommend books for me to read, poetry and so on. He has written a book himself, you know.’
‘No, I didn’t know,’ Farnaby said. ‘What about, humanism?’
‘No, about Henry the Navigator. He gave me a signed copy.’
She paused, and Farnaby saw how much she must have been pleased by that gift. More than by gems, probably … He found that he was clenching his teeth.
‘Then one day,’ she said, ‘he spoke to me kindly, I don’t even remember what he said. I was feeling miserable. I can’t explain why. I often felt very unhappy during that time in my life, well, before that really, I think that summer you and I met I was already having bouts of it, crying for no reason, but then other girls did that too, no, it was later, when I was about eighteen, I began to be, you know, consciously unhappy. I wasn’t badly treated at home or anything. Neither of my parents was very interested in me. They were only interested in each other, or rather, as I look back on it now, my mother was interested only in herself and my father only in her, anyway they didn’t have much time for me, they didn’t care how I got on at school or anything like that. They didn’t really listen when I talked to them.’
‘Good grief,’ Farnaby said. He was shocked to hear of this indifference of her parents. Nothing in his memory of her suggested any such secret unhappiness. Perhaps again perspicacious Mooncranker had seen it. More probably she would have confided it to him. In any case Farnaby could see now how potent and heady for her it must have been to have someone near enough her father’s age taking her seriously like that, discussing ideas with her, broaching the subject of the sausage-meat Christ … ‘Good grief,’ he said again.
‘That happens quite a lot, I think,’ Miranda said. ‘Just as much as the other way, shutting out the husband or wife because of loving the child too much. My mother is very beautiful. You never met her, did you?’
‘No, but she would be, she would be beautiful.’
‘I don’t know –’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you are beautiful.’ He found that his heart was beating heavily with the daring of this speech.
‘Do you think so?’ she said. She smiled a little, rather shyly he thought, and he was about to reaffirm his words when she began to speak of Mooncranker again.
‘It was something quite ordinary he said, I mean. Something like, “You shouldn’t be unhappy, an attractive girl like you.” Something like that. Anyway I started crying, like a fool, and he got down on his knees beside me and gave me a handkerchief. I was sitting at the typewriter. I couldn’t see and I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t stop crying and I really didn’t know what he was doing, I didn’t feel anything much at all, but there we were, both of us on the floor, I remember feeling very surprised when I heard him sort of cry out and saw his face without his glasses on. Well,’ she added swiftly, seeing something stricken in his face, ‘you asked me how it happened.’
Farnaby said, ‘I’ll bet he’s got that written down in his notebook.’
‘What?’
‘In her moments of acute distress, press home.’
‘Oh no, I probably wanted something like that to happen. I didn’t foresee the rest of course.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, everything it got me into. I didn’t know about the drinking at first, then I thought, you know, I could influence him to stop, but of course that was silly of me. Nothing could stop him.’
‘What he needed you for was to mop up afterwards,’ Farnaby said bitterly. He was still suffering from the thought of Mooncranker having his way with weeping Miranda. It was this that had caused him to speak so directly and even perhaps insultingly to her.
‘No,’ she said, ‘you mustn’t simplify things like that.’ But she spoke gently, sensing the hurt in him. ‘There was much more to it than that,’ she said. ‘Sex wasn’t a great part of it, though.’
Farnaby said nothing, looked steadily at her. She met his eyes at last, with a sort of luminous candour. ‘He hasn’t wanted very much in that way for two years or more,’ she said. Then, as he still said nothing, she sighed and moved her shoulders like someone awaken
ing. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose we’d better be going down.’
These last words with their suggestion of resumed duties and commitments, galvanized Farnaby. He gave a sweeping look over the whole area, glimpsed or sensed as it were in one wheeling composite impression, water and staring flowers and slithering wall and mist and yellow sunshine, marble column and glassy leaf, all caught in this startled moment, arrested in their sadness and decline.
‘No,’ he said loudly. ‘We are behaving as if we were doomed. As if it were clear where our duty lies, and so on.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Autumn,’ he said. ‘A deserted place like this, just breathing resignation. It is half rotten already, everything we’re looking at. That is the beauty of it. Ripeness, acquiescence, they are indistinguishable from decay.’
She looked at him with a sort of wondering doubt on her face. He said, more quietly, ‘So we are supposed just sort of sadly to say goodbye, are we? Why should the loss be ours, mine at least? He just lies there and lets the season work for him.’
‘There is no reason to say goodbye,’ she said. ‘But you can’t suddenly pretend that other people don’t exist.’
‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘We fall into assumptions about duty and obligation and so on. Without any reason. There is no reason for it. Only what is expected somehow by people already corrupted. The authorities, those who exact sacrifices from us, are corrupt. All my life I have been doing it. Falling in with what was expected, with what they call the logic of the situation. Situations have no logic. This bloody Ottoman fiscal policy, for example.’
‘Aren’t you interested in it?’ she said.
He paused, breathing deeply. He looked at her, then looked away, half losing the thread of his argument.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘will you stay a bit longer here? You promised me one day, didn’t you? Well, will you stay longer than that, another day? I have some claim, after everything that has happened. Besides, Mooncranker is safe there in the hospital.’
Seeing the doubt in her face, he went on quickly, striving to forestall an immediate negative, give her time for second thoughts. ‘He is well looked after there,’ he said. ‘He has to stay there several days, in any case. Five days at least,’ he lied. ‘Please will you stay a bit longer?’
‘Why are you asking me to do this?’ she said.
‘Because it is natural and right to do it,’ Farnaby said with sudden passion. ‘Because I feel there is something between us and I don’t want it to be lost by a false sense of obligation. Once before it was lost like that. It’s not going to happen again, if I can help it.’
He had spoken vehemently, and saw now both wonder and fear in Miranda’s face. ‘If I had not come here,’ he said, ‘you would probably have stayed several days, wouldn’t you?’
‘Perhaps, yes. I don’t know. I don’t know.’ Miranda looked suddenly worried and unhappy.
‘Please stay,’ he said, aware that he was irreparably tampering with her life, appalled and delighted at the sense of power that came surging up in him at the sight of her troubled face.
‘He will be lying there worrying,’ she said.
‘I can send him a telegram if it would make you feel better.’
Now that they were discussing practical details, he felt the battle was more than half won. Still, she had not agreed to stay. They had begun to retrace their steps, leaving behind them this doomed enclave among the hills, following the green track downwards. As they went, he continued his attempts to persuade her and she listened, appeared to assent, but made no promises. Then, when they were almost down again, standing together on what was actually the last or lowest crest, point of vantage, before the hill took its final tilt to the level of the pool, standing there together in silence at last, looking down over the vaporous water, the whole expanse of which was clearly visible now, they saw a grey-haired man sitting in the sunshine at the poolside talking to Plopl the photographer, and both recognized him almost at once, though Miranda was fractionally quicker to do so. ‘That is Mooncranker, there,’ she said, quietly but with extreme surprise.
Farnaby felt every vestige of colour leave his face. He turned and took Miranda by the arm.
‘Promise me one thing,’ he said, in a voice he could hardly recognize as his own. ‘Promise you won’t simply go off with him.’
She looked at him now, all irresolution gone from her face, which was suddenly the face of the young girl he remembered, strong, reliable, honouring a childhood pact, a friend in a tight corner. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’
4
It was round about four o’clock when Mooncranker got out of the pool. In the business of showering and dressing his feelings lightened somewhat, for this brief interval of time it was like numerous other occasions in his life when he had been preparing himself for some definite event, perhaps even something pleasurable. There was a purpose in it, some sort of social requirement.
This more optimistic feeling persisted as he strolled round the poolside choosing a table, and while he was ordering his lemon tea. But as soon as he felt again his isolation, as soon as he began to look steadily down at the water below him, that slow, meticulous, memorial habit descended on him again, aided this time by the deep, almost slumbrous relaxation of his body after the long immersion, and he began once more to record things – his precise position half-way down the terrace, full in the sunshine; the slightly shivered or refracted look of cornice, capital, fluted drums of the drowned marble pillars below the surface, the marble fresh and gleaming still, no dimming of it by the chemical water, no slightest loss of lustre, and that is amazing, after centuries of immersion, though the ceramic tiling alongside has a deposit on it, a sort of calcareous crust. As if marble were the privileged inmate, less noble substances undergoing gradual befouling …
A very badly crippled man, walking with the aid of two crutches, appears from somewhere on my right, from a cabin, or perhaps the entrance area, I do not see which, and makes his way towards me, swinging his trunk, nearer and nearer by painful degrees. He bows his invalid’s head, which is covered with soft brown hair, and smiles the white smile of those acquainted with pain, and gunaydin, he says, gunaydin effendim and I reply in kind, watching with a sort of obscure anguish as he manoeuvres himself into a chair farther down from me, watching the collapse of his body into the chair. The movements of a cripple are unpredictable, like those of insects, though there is sometimes a sort of beauty in them. There was a slightly crippled grace in young Farnaby’s movements as he walked along the terrace …
‘Excuse me, sir, have you a moment to spare?’ This voice comes from my left, taking me completely by surprise. An afternoon full of encounters. I should perhaps have done better to wait in my cabin. Turning, I see before me a plump serious face, of unhealthy complexion, brows slightly knitted as if from studious habits, hair brushed forward in a thin fringe, small, shiny eyes.
‘Yes, what is it?’
His features work briefly, as if rehearsing speech. ‘I am a photographer,’ he says. ‘I have some pictures here that I think might interest you, as I can see that you are an educated gentleman.’
A foreign voice, vaguely Teutonic, instinct with a sort of blurred kindness. ‘Plopl,’he says now. ‘My name is Plopl.’
‘Mooncranker. Won’t you sit down.’ I utter this invitation somewhat coldly as I have suddenly remembered blank-faced Pamela. This must be the very man. He is evidently delighted however, even by this qualified welcome. His face breaks into a smile.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ he says, and sits. He is holding now in stubby fingers a package or perhaps envelope, yes envelope, which he must have drawn from his person while actually in the process of sitting down. ‘These are some of my photographs,’ he says. His nails are black-rimmed.
‘Let me see them.’ With resignation I extend my hand.
Still he retains the envelope. ‘I thought,’ he says, ‘that a gentleman like you, a cu
ltivated man, would not … It would not be the obvious appeal. I take photographs of many sorts, you understand, and for different purposes. The artist has difficulty to maintain his integrity in the world of today, as you probably know, sir.’
‘Yes, yes.’
His face works. In his earnestness he has come out in a slight sweat along the cheeks. ‘I have to cater sometimes for the depraved taste,’ he says. ‘We must live, after all, is it not?’
‘I see no necessity for that, but I should like to see the photographs.’
‘I will be frank and above boards with you. In certain aspects of my work I can take no real pleasure, no satisfaction. It is for the multitudes. To you I am showing my serious work, my studies in the oneness of all physical existence, the basis of pain in every phenomenon.’
He hands over the envelope. I am about to extract the pictures when Mr Senemoǧlu, the manager, returns with a second glass of tea that I suppose I must have ordered. I offer the photographer tea, but he declines.
‘How is it passing?’ Mr Senemoǧlu asks, setting down the glass. I do not for the moment understand what he means. I become intensely conscious of the hands of all of us, my own nerveless hands holding the envelope; the photographer’s hands, stubby, hairy-backed, seeming as if they might scuttle away at any moment, as if they belonged among foliage; the manager’s thin, instrumental hands. The life in all these hands is horrifying and the manager’s question seems somehow relevant to this horror.
‘It is passing,’ I reply, in a noncommittal tone, and Mr Senemoǧlu smiles, a brilliant smile, but with no warmth or particularity in it.
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