Mooncranker's Gift by Barry Unsworth

Author:Barry Unsworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

3

Farnaby stood quite still at the edge of the pool, immersed to the top of his breast-bone. Vague forms moved before and around him ruffling the water, sending it lapping very softly against him, eddying against his breast in a way that seemed at first like a series of signals, attempts to communicate; an impression curiously reinforced by the fugitive patterns of light that glanced across the surface, various enough to be a code, sudden running glitters and dilations, coils, bobbins, tremulous moons that sidled and broke. He experienced during these first moments in the pool, a painful sense of expectancy, almost of dread, which he did not at first understand, though later he supposed it due to the movements of all the bodies in the water, movements more or less continuous, setting up a kind of prolonged, soft rustling, in its gentleness strangely difficult to endure, as if constantly presaging some greater violence which never in fact arrived.

It was characteristic of Farnaby to seek to allay uneasiness at unaccustomed sensations or indeed to dilute any too vivid experience by some sort of moralizing or descriptive process. He indulged in this out of self-defence and at the same time discounted it in advance so that he was held in a slight tension, a sort of controlled retreat from the senses. Now he began, in an experimental way, to question the randomness of all this movement and these changing effects of the light.

He stood for some time, looking about him. He was in a rather deep part of the pool – it got deeper, he had discovered, in both directions as the loops widened. The narrow part, the waist of the pool, was the shallowest, and consequently the most crowded.

Farnaby moved his arms in a sort of experimental swimming motion, cleaving the water below the surface and close to his sides, without moving any other part of his body, glancing at the same time up at the sky which was thickly scattered with stars. The night air was cold and he felt pleasure at this contrast, air of the spacious night on his face, body sealed and private in the warm water. The smell of the water rose to him, faintly sweet and brackish, not unpleasant. Like the distant smell of decomposing grass. Piled grass, rotting from within, from the warm damp core, in summer … A sort of generalized excitement stirred in Farnaby, for the moment without an object or discernible source. He took a deep breath and crouched farther down in the water, lowering his head vertically and with care. The water rose over his chin and tightly closed mouth. When it was lapping over the bridge of his nose he saw fifteen-year-old Miranda in her white tennis dress glimmering on the water, hair falling round a face full of suppressed laughter, her long legs refracted and dangling as if they were below the surface. He held this vision until his heart hammered against his ribs and roaring filled his ears.

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