Moon Tiger (24 page)

James Caxton ponders. He thinks not. Not absolutely sure. Possibly. One has been to so many places.

But one could hardly have failed to notice such things, Claudia thinks. Never mind. She persists for a while, talking of pre-Columban sculpture. The poor man is monumentally
bored but he is, way back, despite Hollywood and Pinewood Studios and Cinecittà, an English gentleman and he knows how to behave to a lady; he arranges his famous face into an expression of interest and allows her to finish. Then he counters with a long story about when they were shooting his Napoleon film in Egypt (Claudia can see the train of association, though pyramids and temples in fact do not feature in the story). He has done his Napoleon, and his Francis Drake, and his Mark Antony, and his Byron. They are all, in his head, jumbled into a mosaic of disassociated personalities who have nothing to do with anything except an isolated dramatic sequence. Napoleon is mixed up with Josephine, and supervises battles. Drake has a prickly relationship with Elizabeth, and must be played with a Devon accent. In fact it becomes apparent that his grasp of chronology is extremely weak. He can hitch Napoleon to the nineteenth century, but is vague as to which end. Dates mean nothing to him, since he cannot relate them to each other. Here is a man, Claudia gleefully realises, who is adrift in time – a historical innocent. How did he achieve this purity? Cunningly, she probes (not difficult, since she is inviting him to talk about his favourite subject – himself); he was privately educated, it emerges, or rather, barely educated at all, because considered delicate as a boy. No wonder directors find him so pliable; a man without conditioning is without preconceptions.

He glances at his watch. ‘Mike’ll be having kittens. We’re shooting the banquet scene this afternoon. Step on it a bit, can you, Charlie.’ The chauffeur nods; the landscape flows by a little faster. They have been lunching in a town some distance from the location site because James Caxton was not needed in the morning and is fed up with canteen meals. Claudia is his companion because he does not hit it off with Montezuma (appropriately enough), his leading lady has a migraine and other members of the cast are required for a run-through. The meal was lavish and lengthy; the conversation laboured. At least so far as Claudia was concerned it was barely classifiable as conversation. For Caxton, she realised, it might have seemed
quite adequate. He is totally incurious. In three days she has rarely heard him ask a single personal question of anyone. This insularity seems to be not so much egotism as a deficiency induced by years of having other people intensely interested in his every word or action.

He approves, evidently, of Claudia. He has been affable, positively gracious, since first she arrived. He is impressed by her status as patron intellectual; she lends
cachet
. But she is also not the sort of woman to whom he is accustomed. Over lunch, he became almost inquisitive.

‘What took you into the stuff you do – the sort of books you write?’

‘Ignorance. Immodesty.
Hubris
. And fate, of course. I was a war correspondent during the war. That rather put me off reporting on the present.’

Caxton nods. ‘I was in the Far East. ENSA. Not exactly the front line, but things were a bit dodgy once or twice. Convoy we were on was torpedoed off Singapore. I was bloody glad to get home.’

‘All the same, we neither of us appear to have suffered unduly.’

This does not go down very well. He says stiffly, ‘Well, possibly… In any case, I’ve always believed in taking the rough with the smooth.’ His incomparable voice invests the words with distinction, for a moment.

‘Very wise,’ says Claudia.

‘Don’t you?’

‘Not really. Probably more a matter of temperament than belief.’

‘Women,’ says Caxton, ‘are always less philosophical about the ups and downs of life. My wife…’

‘They also deal them out, of course.’

He stares at her. ‘What?’

‘The Fates,’ says Claudia, ‘are traditionally represented in Greek mythology as women. Three of them. Spinning.’

‘As I was saying, my wife…’

‘The Furies too. Remorseless atavistic maternal punishment.
But also the Muses. In fact we have all the best parts. I’m sorry – your wife?’

‘I’ve forgotten what I was going to say about her. You’re a very peculiar person, Claudia. You don’t mind my saying that?’

‘It’s been said before.’

‘Unusual, perhaps, is what I mean.’

‘Peculiar will do.’

The focus has switched to Claudia. Both recognise that this is unacceptable. ‘Greece,’ says Caxton, conditioned to take up a cue, ‘is a wonderful country. One of my favourite stamping grounds. Do you know Hydra?’

Claudia does not, which enables him to tell her at length about this tedious piece of rock on which he considers buying a villa. She thinks about the Fates, cackling over their looms or, presumably nowadays, if they move with the times, over their self-operating machinery – cackling, anyway, as they set in train wars, famines, disasters and a million random unimportant conjunctions such as that between herself and this unexceptional but celebrated man.

And so, eventually, the meal had ended and they had emerged from the restaurant into the hot and dusty afternoon and stepped into the limousine to be driven back over the mountains to the location valley. Claudia sits sunk into the squashy upholstery of the back seat, alongside Caxton, snuffing the leather and some esoteric after-shave of his. Talking. Listening. Observing from time to time the well-behaved landscape that slides past, this way and that, as the chauffeur negotiates the twists and turns of the road. And Caxton notices the time and asks the man to hurry, which he does so that the tyres screech now at the next corner, and at the next they are flung against each other and Caxton says ‘Watch it!’ but with a laugh so that the driver continues thus, swirling them down the mountainside.

She does not know at first what it is that has happened. One moment the car is smoothly gliding round a bend, Caxton is saying something about bull-fighting – and an instant later the
landscape is no longer well-behaved but spins sickeningly around them, uncontrollable trees and mountains swinging and lurching; she is thrown forward and back, there is a thump, a bang and at last nothing at all.

She fights her way out of some deep buzzing sea. She is back in the car which is slewed right off the road into a bank. The chauffeur is hanging forward over the wheel; the windscreen is shattered; the engine is still running. Into Claudia’s head comes the single thought that she must turn it off – something to do with fire and petrol. She has forgotten James Caxton, and where she is or why. She heaves herself up and leans forward over the seat, groping round the chauffeur’s arm. She finds the ignition key. And now there is silence. She opens the door and staggers out on to the verge. She sits down. All is wonderfully peaceful; cicadas rasp and a bush rustles in the wind. She has no feelings or thoughts; there is a pain in her side but it does not seem important. She is in a state of suspension, and sits thus on a rocky platform staring at a little plant with tiny jewel-like flowers. She looks up; just above her head a bird floats against the deep blue backdrop of the sky. It hangs there, she can see the sheen of its wings; and then the sky becomes grey, the outline of the bird turns fuzzy, and just before she passes out she sees it slide away sideways and down into the valley.

The chauffeur died. James Caxton fractured his skull, broke a collar-bone and an arm, and cost the insurers some million dollars in lost time. I had concussion and two broken ribs; the Fates were taking only a mild interest in me. The
Evening Standard
carried a headline – JAMES CAXTON IN CAR CRASH WITH WOMAN COMPANION. Jasper, with whom I was still living off and on, said various things on the telephone, not all of them sympathetic. I lay for a week in a Madrid hospital; on the fifth day Gordon walked into my room and I burst into tears.

‘If I’d known I’d have this effect,’ he says, ‘I wouldn’t have
come.’ He takes out a handkerchief and wipes her eyes carefully. ‘Now blow…’

‘Oh, shut up,’ says Claudia. She pushes his hand away, reaches violently towards the bedside table, yelps. ‘Christ…’

‘Then don’t thrash around so. Keep still. You don’t look too bad, anyway.’

‘Why are you here? You’re in Australia.’

‘Sylvia reported. I switched planes. For God’s sake stop
crying
, Claudia. I haven’t seen you cry since you were about six. What’s the matter with you?’

‘It’s called delayed shock. It’s what happens to people when they realise they’re not dead. Perfectly rational, if you think about it.’

‘Don’t talk like that,’ says Gordon. He sits down by the bed. He reaches out suddenly and takes her hand. Holds it. Looks at her. She feels the warmth of his hand, sees his eyes and what is in them until she cannot take it any longer and looks away. He has not touched her for years, except inadvertently. They do not kiss when they meet.

He gets up and walks over to the window. ‘Not the most distinctive of views. But presumably that won’t have bothered you.’

Claudia lies looking at him. He is more inaccessible than anyone in the world, she thinks; more intensely known and more inaccessible.

She is sitting up in bed with a bruise on her forehead and no make-up on. She looks not like dauntless quarrelsome unquenchable Claudia but some pale unstable ghost of herself. And when he sees that she is crying the old proximity is there, it is years ago again, the time when there were only the two of them, before they noticed the rest of the world. He looks at her for a moment with the eyes of then, and she looks back. Neither wishes to return there; both celebrate, in silence, what will never be lost. Gordon stands up. He goes to the window and sees a boulevard with oleander trees, a crowd of people piling into a gaudy yellow bus, posters advertising cigars and
washing powders. It occurs to him that Claudia is both closer to and further from him than anyone else, and that he wishes it were otherwise.

14

My body records certain events; an autopsy would show that I have had a child, broken some ribs, lost my appendix. Other physical assaults have left no trace; measles, mumps, malaria, suppurations and infections, coughs and colds, upheavals of the digestive system. When I was young I carried on my knee for many years a patch of delicately puckered pink skin preserving the time Gordon pushed me down a cliff at Lyme Regis (or, he would claim, did not); I can no longer find it – the body obliterates, also. A pathologist would learn little more than an archaeologist contemplating ancient bones. I once read an excavation report that described, in the precise and uncommitted language of such documents, the skeleton of an Anglo-Saxon woman found face down in a shallow grave with a heavy rock resting upon the spine; the contorted position of the body and the placing of the rock suggested that she had been buried alive. From far away, beyond bare descriptive words and the silence of bone and stone, comes the roar of pain and violence. On a lesser scale, my pathologist, if given to fancy, might spare a passing thought for the groans of that birth, or speculate about those ribs.

My body records also a more impersonal history; it remembers Java Man and Australopithecus and the first mammals and strange creatures that flapped and crawled and swam. Its ancestries account, perhaps, for my passion for climbing trees
when I was ten and my predilection for floating in warm seas. It has memories I share but cannot apprehend. It links me to the earthworm, to the lobster, to dogs and horses and lemurs and gibbons and the chimpanzee; there, but for the grace of God, went I. Being the raging agnostic that I am, of course, I consider that God had nothing to do with it.

My body has conditioned things, to some extent. The life of an attractive woman is different from that of a plain one. My hair, my eyes, the shape of my mouth, the contours of breast and thigh have all contributed. The brain may be independent, but personality is not; when I was eight years old I realised that people considered me pretty – from that moment onwards a course was set. Intelligence made me one kind of being; intelligence allied to good looks made me another. This is self-assessment, not complacency.