Free Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon: A Novel by Tom Stoppard Page A

you, it was an accident.’
    ‘Right enough, yer honour,’ said the Risen Christ immensely grateful.
    ‘I mean you set me off, accidentally. It wasn’t you at all I was after.’
    ‘Who was it then?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Moon said. ‘I’ve got a list.’
    The Risen Christ nodded.
    ‘It’s no one I know,’ Moon said. ‘Not to speak to.’
    He broke off and went quickly into the bathroom, closing the door. The lock was broken, hanging on splintered wood.
    Safe inside he pulled the lightcord and was immediately transfixed by reflected porcelain. The side of the bath hit him with a slab of light. The bowl, basin and bidet bowed baldheaded with Chinese smiles. Moon laughed at them. He turned on all the taps and flushed the lavatory. Water rushed and swished around him, sprayed out of the shower’s chromium rose.
    When he had beaten them all back into their inanimate forms he turned off all the taps except the hot water running into the bath and sat content on the covered lavatory bowl.
    Fifth Gospeller and no mistake. Moon, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John went to bed with their bedsocks on. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Moon went to bed in the afternoon. Moon, John, Matthew, Luke and Mark went to bed when it got dark. (Chorus of Sunday-chanting children invoking the mnemonics that will keep my name alive in big bare schoolrooms with watercolour daubs pinned to the walls.) Matthew, Moon, John, Mark, Luke went to bed with the grand old duke (sunbeams defined by chalk-dust, cannonade of desklids, and home to lunch and the assumption of a guiding hand on the wheel of the world.) If you eat bread-and-butter and drink your tea at the same time, you taste your childhood. You remember how safe it was to be a child.
    The toilet paper had fallen onto the floor and unrolleditself across the room in a flat ribbon. Moon closed his eyes against it but the limbless winter-coated heap came alive in his mind and started to crawl across the street like the last of the insects. The cigarette butt burned his fingers and fell on the floor.
    There was a sharp splintering noise and the ninth earl stood disconcerted in the doorway.
    ‘Ahk! Dear boy, I do apologise.’
    ‘It’s all right,’ said Moon. ‘I’m just running her bath.’
    ‘So you are, dear fellow, so you are. For a moment I thought you were evacuating yourself, whatever that may be – I understand that it was something that was done to people during the war but for my part I claim total ignorance of such matters. You probably know that the Malquists in common with other families of equal style and breeding excrete and procreate by a cerebral process the secret of which is passed down in the blood.’
    ‘No, I didn’t know,’ Moon said.
    ‘We don’t bandy it about, naturally. You forgot to put the plug in.’
    Lord Malquist leaned into the tub. The water-sounds changed pitch. Moon got up from his seat with no purpose in mind. Lord Malquist took his place.
    ‘Thank you, dear boy. You’ve cut your face.’
    Moon looked at himself in the mirror over the basin. He turned on the hot tap but there was no water to be had while the bath was running. He washed the blood away with cold water and dabbed at it with Lord Malquist’s handkerchief. The cut didn’t look so serious after that, but the perfume stung him.
    ‘Your wife tells me you are writing a book.’
    ‘Yes, well I’m working on one,’ Moon said.
    ‘Very glad to hear it. I am writing one too, a little monograph on
Hamlet
as a source of book titles, a subject which does not interest me in the slightest, but I would like to leavebehind me one slim and useless volume bound in calf and marked with a ribbon. I toyed with the idea of writing about
Shakespeare
as a source of book-titles but that would be an immense undertaking, and result in a fat cumbersome object … I would rather my book were unread than ungraceful, don’t you know? Do you find writing easy?’
    ‘Well, not yet,’ said Moon. ‘I haven’t got