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

my material together yet.’
    ‘I find it an awful chore. My problem is that I am not frightfully interested in anything, except myself. And of all forms of fiction autobiography is the most gratuitous. I am far happier putting my
Life
in your hands.’
    ‘Why are you writing it?’ asked Moon.
    ‘I told you, dear boy. It is the duty of an artist to leave the world decorated by some trifling and quite useless ornament. I wouldn’t like it to be said of me that I was just an elegant idler. Why are
you
writing a book?’
    ‘I like getting things down,’ said Moon after some thought.
    ‘Yes but why a history of the world?’
    Moon thought. He had not meant to write a history of the world at all, at the beginning, merely to examine his own history and the causes that determined it. The rest of the world intruded itself in a cause-and-effect chain reaction that left him appalled at its endlessness; he experienced a vision of the billion connecting moments that lay behind and led to his simplest action, a vision of himself straightening his tie as the culminating act of a sequence that fled back into pre-history and began with the shift of a glacier.
    ‘Personally,’ said the ninth earl, ‘I think you’re on the wrong track.’
    Moon watched himself in the mirror wiping blood off his forehead.
    ‘After all, what’s the point of such labour?’ asked the ninth earl.
    The point is that if five travellers on the road between
Lima and Cuzco happen to be crossing the Bridge of San Luis Rey when it breaks, and if you want to discover whether we live and die by accident or design, and if you decide therefore to inquire into the lives of those five travellers to find out why it happened to them rather than anyone else – then you must be prepared to go back to Babylon; because everything connects back, to the beginning of the history of the world.
    But what he said was: ‘I like to write about something that has edges where it stops and doesn’t go on and become something else;’ which was also true.
    ‘I fear you will come to some harm, dear boy, you have a wild look in your eye. You must learn from me that taking it all in all, there is nothing to be done. I feel an homily coming on – have you got your notebook?’
    Moon remembered.
    ‘Is O’Hara a Negro?’
    ‘I suppose so, something of the kind.’
    ‘What kind of Negro?’
    ‘Well, dear boy, a Negro is a Negro, wouldn’t you say?’
    ‘No,’ Moon said.
    ‘Well, I don’t believe in fine distinctions except where they touch one subjectively. O’Hara’s kind of Negro is nothing to me. Let us say that he is a coachman kind of Negro.’ He leaned towards Moon confidentially. ‘To be frank with you I had set my heart on a pale ivory-coloured one because I saw him in midnight-blue and I thought that would be rather dramatic, don’t you know, but the one I had in mind – pale as a lily he was, and a sweet tempered boy – was frightened of heights. He started to cry and had a nosebleed as soon as he got up there, which wasn’t the effect I was after at all – it would have been like being driven around the town by a lachrymose Red Indian. And then it occurred to me that a
black
one would look quite well in a sort of mustard colour, so I elevated O’Hara to his present eminence and really hewould have worked out all right if only the horses had tried to understand him a little more. He’ll have to go, of course … I don’t quite know where to turn next. You don’t think that a sort of
Chinaman
would look too jaundiced in black and silver?’
    ‘But O’Hara – I mean, what do you make of him, the way he talks, for instance? – it’s all getting out of hand, you see, I’m trying to grasp… Is he really a Catholic, or a Jew or what?’
    ‘Now there you go again with your fine distinctions—’
    ‘And no one
really
talks like that – so inconsistent.’
    ‘Well of course, he’s a Negro, isn’t he?’
    ‘Is he an African Negro?’
    ‘No, no,