Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

that who your appointment was with?’
    ‘Yes,’ Moon said. ‘You didn’t believe I had an appointment, did you?’
    ‘Will you be working for him every day?’
    ‘Most days. It’s more or less a permanent commission.’
    ‘Who would have thought it?’ said Jane. She put on a stocking, passing her hands smoothly up her leg which changed colour to caramel at her magician’s touch. ‘I bet you’d given up hope as a Boswell.’
    Moon said nothing to that.
    ‘And he’s paying you?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Well, that’s more than Uncle Jackson ever did.’
    Jackson-schmackson,
thought Moon who sometimes wanted to be a Jew but had only the most superficial understanding of how to go about it.
    ‘It will save me some of my hard-earned money anyway.’
    ‘It’s not yours,’ Moon said. ‘You didn’t earn it any more than me.’
    ‘Only teasing, darling.’
    She started opening and closing drawers in a hunt for something which Moon presumed from her appearance to be a brassière.
    ‘My daddy earned it more than your daddy earned it, anyway.’
    This was irrefutable.
    ‘What about your book, and your research and all that?’
    ‘I’ll have to work on it in my spare time,’ he reminded himself.
    Jane slammed shut a final drawer and reclaimed a bra from the laundry basket.
    ‘Have you written much, darling?’
    ‘No … I’ve got to prepare my material, you see.’
    It was all a question of preparing one’s material. There was no point in beginning to write before one’s material had been prepared. Moon, who had experimented on a number of variations of a first sentence, felt this quite strongly. He found the vastness of his chosen field reassuring rather than daunting but it did cramp his style; he could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one. There was no end to that, and Moon fearfully glimpsed himself as a pure writer who after a lifetime of absolutely no output whatever, would prepare on his deathbed the single sentence that was the distillation of everything he had saved up, and die before he was able to utter it.
    ‘Perhaps you’ll be famous when you write your book.’
    ‘If someone doesn’t do it first.’ That was another thing. ‘It often happens with historians.’
    ‘My goodness, does it? Well, I should hurry up and do yours.’
    ‘Yes,’ Moon said, and settled down to watch her in earnest.
    The way she put on her brassière always made him bemused and affectionate. In films and photographs he had seen women standing around with their arms twisted behind their backs in a full-nelson, hooking and unhooking with frowning concentration as though it were some kind of aptitude test for paraplegics. He had never questioned this behaviour, but the first time he had seen Jane swing her bra back-to-front across her stomach, cups hanging Dada-like on her back, join the ends in front of her, swivel the wholething round her body and draw it up snapping the cups into position, he had marvelled at the inventive innocence which ten thousand years before might have produced the wheel.
    Snap-snap.
    Jane turned, in a pale-blue bra with white lace flowers, matching suspender belt and creamy caramel stockings; frowning prettily, index finger denting her cheek, posing for the
Tatler
photographer:
‘Mrs Jane Moon wonders where she left her knickers.’
    ‘Are you sure you’re not sitting on them?’
    ‘Yes. Perhaps Jasper Jones is sitting on them.’
    I don’t care, I simply don’t care.
    The bomb sat on his lap cozy as a plum pudding. Moon patted it. He had just noticed that he was alone again when Jane came back into the room, knickers in hand.
    She patted him on the head.
    ‘Clever boy. How did you know?’
    Moon sat on the bed ticking like a bomb.
    I don’t care. I just really don’t care.
    He was trying to frame a question that would take in all the questions, and elicit an