The moon shall not be idle, Cronin thought. The moon shall be agog to see. The moon shall clear the sky of clouds that the stars may ponder on the pillows full of blood.
‘Mr Dankers, sir, why is this place called the Idle Moon?’
Dankers laughed. ‘A foible of my good wife’s. She liked the sound of it. Quite telling, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, sir.’ The moon shall like the sound of her. A shriek in a severed throat, a howl of pain.
‘See to it, Cronin, eh?’
‘Yes, sir.’
So Cronin kept to his room, descending the back stairs only for his food and Lady Marston’s. The weeks passed, and more and more he sat entranced with the duty he had set himself. Sometimes, as though drunk with it, he found himself a little uncertain as to its exactitudes. That was when he felt tired; when he dropped off into a doze as he sat by his small window, staring at the sky and listening to the faraway hum from the house below.
Then one morning Cronin discovered that Lady Marston had died in her sleep. They carried her off, and he put away the pack of cards.
‘It’s a sad day for us all,’ Dankers said, and in the distance Cronin could hear Mrs Dankers giving some brisk order to a servant. He returned to his room and for a moment there was an oddness in his mind and he imagined that it was Sir Giles who had said that the day was sad. Then he remembered that Sir Giles was dead too and that he was the only one left.
In the months that followed he spoke to no one but himself, for he was concentrating on the details of his plan. They kept slipping away, and increasingly he had a struggle to keep them straight.
When the razor was there the faces on the pillows were vague and empty, and he could not remember whose he had planned they should be. There was the pattern of moonlight, and the red stain on the bed-clothes, but Cronin could not often now see what any of it meant. It made him tired, thinking the trouble out. And when, in the end, the shreds of his plan came floating back to him he smiled in some astonishment, seeing only how absurd it had been that late in his life he should have imagined himself a match for the world and its conquerors.
Eleanor lay awake, thinking in advance about the day. The face of Miss Whitehead came into her mind, the rather pointed nose, eyes set wide apart, a mouth that turned up at the corners and gave the impression that Miss Whitehead was constantly smiling, although it was a widely held view among the girls whom she taught that Miss Whitehead had little to smile over, having missed out. The face of Liz Jones came into Eleanor’s mind also, a pretty, wild face with eyes that were almost black, and black hair hanging prettily down on either side of it, and full lips. Liz Jones claimed to have gypsy blood in her, and another girl, Mavis Temple, had once remarked to Eleanor that she thought Liz Jones’s lips were negroid. ‘A touch of the tar brush,’ Mavis Temple had said. ‘A seaman done her mum.’ She’d said it three years ago, when the girls had all been eleven, in Miss Homber’s class. Everything had been different then.
In the early morning gloom Eleanor considered the difference, regretting, as always, that it had come about. It had been nice in Miss Homber’s class, the girls’ first year at Springfield Comprehensive: they’d all had a crush on Miss Homber because Miss Homber, who’d since become Mrs George Spaxton and a mother, had been truly beautiful and intelligent. Miss Homber told them it was important to wash all the parts of the body once per day, including you knew where. Four girls brought letters of complaint after that and Miss Homber read them out to the class, commenting on the grammar and the spelling errors and causing the girls to become less carefree about what they repeated to their mums. ‘Remember, you can give birth at thirteen,’ Miss Homber warned, and she added that if a boy ever said he was too embarrassed to go into a chemist’s for preventatives he could always get them in a slot machine that was situated in the Gents at the filling station on the Portsmouth Road, which was something her own boyfriend had told her.
It had been nice in those days because Eleanor didn’t believe that any boy would try stuff like that on when she was thirteen, and the girls of the first year all agreed that it sounded disgusting, a boy putting his thing up you. Even Liz Jones did, although she was constantly hanging about the boys of the estate and twice had had her knickers taken down in the middle of the estate playground. There were no boys at Springfield Comprehensive, which was just as well, Eleanor had always considered, because boys roughened up a school so.
But in spite of their physical absence boys had somehow penetrated, and increasingly, as Eleanor passed up through the school, references to them infiltrated all conversation. At thirteen, in Miss Croft’s class, Liz Jones confessed that a boy called Gareth Swayles had done her in the corner of the estate playground, at eleven o’clock one night. She’d been done standing up, she reported, leaning against the paling that surrounded the playground. She said it was fantastic.
Lying in bed, Eleanor remembered Liz Jones saying that and saying a few months later that a boy called Rogo Pollini was twice as good as Gareth Swayles, and later that a boy called Tich Ayling made Rogo Pollini seem totally laughable. Another girl, Susie Crumm, said that Rogo Pollini had told her that he’d never enjoyed it with Liz Jones because Liz Jones put him off with all her wriggling and pinching. Susie Crumm, at the time, had just been done by Rogo Pollini.
By the time they reached Class 2 it had become the fashion to have been done and most of the girls, even quiet Mavis Temple, had succumbed to it. Many had not cared for the experience and had not repeated it, but Liz Jones said that this was because they had got it from someone like Gareth Swayles, who was no better on the job than a dead horse. Eleanor hadn’t ever been done nor did she wish to be, by Gareth Swayles or anyone else. Some of the girls said it had hurt them: she knew it would hurt her. And she’d heard that even if Gareth Swayles, or whoever it was, went to the slot machine in the filling station it sometimes happened that the preventative came asunder, a disaster that would be followed by weeks of worry. That, she knew, would be her fate too.
‘Eleanor’s prissy,’ Liz Jones said every day now. ‘Eleanor’s prissy like poor prissy Whitehead.’ Liz Jones went on about it all the time, hating Eleanor because she still had everything in store for her. Liz Jones had made everyone else think that Eleanor would grow into a Miss Whitehead, who was terrified of men, so Liz Jones said. Miss Whitehead had hairs on her chin and her upper lip that she didn’t bother to do anything about. Quite often her breath wasn’t fresh, which was unpleasant if she was leaning over you, explaining something.
Eleanor, who lived on the estate with her parents, hated being identified with Miss Whitehead and yet she felt, especially when she lay awake in the early morning, that there was something in Liz Jones’s taunting. ‘Eleanor’s waiting for Mr Right,’ Liz Jones would say. ‘Whitehead waited forever.’ Miss Whitehead, Liz Jones said, never had a fellow for long because she wouldn’t give herself wholly and in this day and age a girl had to be sensible and natural over a matter like that. Everyone agreed that this was probably so, because there was no doubt about it that in her time Miss Whitehead had been pretty. ‘It happens to you,’ Liz Jones said, ‘left solitary like that: you grow hairs on your face; you get stomach trouble that makes your breath bad. Nervous frustration, see.’
Eleanor gazed across her small bedroom, moving her eyes from the pink of the wall to her school uniform,
