Moon Tiger (25 page)

I came back from that Madrid hospital with bruises, a healthier bank account than I had ever had and a wonderfully concentrated mind. The world astonished me. I looked at the green water of the Channel, at the seagulls hanging above the ferry, at the rust of a railing and the curve of a deck-chair and these things had the intensity of great art. In Cairo in 1942 I raged at the continuing universe; I walked, on that appalling day, beside the Nile and the whole beautiful place was an offence – the life, the colour, the smells and sounds, the palms, the feluccas, the kites endlessly circling in the hard blue sky. Now that it was merely myself who was still alive, I forgave the universe its indifference. Magnanimous of me. Expedient also, you may say.

Back in London, I sent for Lisa, who was at Sotleigh with her grandmother. I wanted to compensate for being the kind of mother I was; I also wanted to see her.

Claudia, Jasper and Lisa walk along one of the wide avenues of London Zoo. It is Lisa’s eighth birthday. The Zoo is Lisa’s choice; she has been offered the whole of the city – the Tower, Madame Tussaud’s, Battersea Fun Fair, a boat trip to Greenwich – and has opted for the Zoo, partly because she observed
Jasper flinch at the suggestion. Power does not often come Lisa’s way. So here they are; one family amid many. And who would know? thinks Claudia. She looks at other groups, other superficial conformities of man, woman and child; she wonders what other histories are concealed beneath appearances.

Lisa wants to see the bears and the lions and the monkeys. They spend a long time in the Lion House; it is full of shrieking children, all of them, Claudia sees, indulging atavistic terrors. The big cats pace up and down or lounge impassively. The smell is appalling. ‘Now I know what it was like underneath the Coliseum,’ says Claudia. ‘Please, darling, have you had enough lion?’ And Lisa allows herself to be persuaded onwards, to the bear enclosures, where Claudia is silent.

‘Don’t you like polar bears?’

‘Quite,’ says Claudia. ‘Not specially.’

‘Well, I like polar bears,’ says Lisa. She hangs on the railing, staring at the bear which neurotically swings its head, to and fro, slapping its way from one end of its concrete ledge to the other, like an old man in carpet slippers.

Jasper yawns. ‘What about lunch, sweetie?’

‘I don’t want any lunch yet,’ says Lisa. ‘I want to find the monkeys now.’

So they find the monkeys, a whole tribe of brown monkeys in an outside enclosure, leading lives of careless abandon.

‘What’s that one doing?’ says Lisa. She looks at Jasper.

‘Mm…’ says Jasper. ‘I’m not quite sure.’

‘Really!’ explodes Claudia. She gives him a look of contempt. ‘It’s a male monkey, and it’s making the female monkey have a baby.’

‘How?’ enquires Lisa.

‘Yes, how?’ asks Jasper, with equal interest.

Claudia glares at him. ‘It puts the thing you can see sticking out underneath it inside the female monkey and sends a seed into her. The seed grows into the baby monkey.’

Jasper turns aside, apparently choking.

Lisa contemplates the monkeys for a while. ‘Does the mother monkey mind him getting on top of her like that?’

‘She doesn’t seem to,’ says Claudia. Furiously, she kicks Jasper, who composes himself.

‘I saw Rex do that once with the dog at the farm. Granny Branscombe was cross with him.’

‘Poor old Rex,’ says Jasper.

Claudia takes a breath. She says, ‘That’s how people make babies too, you know. The same way.’

Lisa turns and stares at her. ‘Like that?’

‘Yes,’ says Claudia determinedly. ‘Just like that.’

Lisa looks from one to the other of them. ‘How perfectly disgusting,’ she says.

‘Shut up,’ says Claudia. ‘She’ll see you. It’s not
that
funny.’

Jasper wipes his eyes. Lisa is several yards away now, absorbed by gang warfare in the monkey kindergarten. ‘She is becoming most amusing. I should see more of her.’

‘Because she’s amusing?’ says Claudia.

Claudia is looking very fine today. There is still the faint smudge of a bruise on her forehead, but her face is glowing, her hair bright, her body trim; she turns heads, as always, she is a woman one is satisfied to be seen with. Pity, Jasper thinks, that the child has turned out so unlike. Unlike himself either, come to that.

He takes Claudia’s arm. ‘Anyway, thank God you’re here safe and sound.’

‘Jasper, there’s something I’m going to tell you.’

‘You’re pregnant again?’

‘Don’t be facetious. After Lisa’s gone back to Sotleigh I want us to stay apart.’

He sighs. He allows her to glimpse his Russian soul, what there is of it.

‘Darling… You’re cross with me for some reason. If it’s that Italian girl I assure you it’s over. Finished and done with. She was never anything.’

‘I don’t give a damn about the Italian girl. I just want to be on my own.’

‘On your own with whom?’ He lets go of her arm.

‘On my own with no one.’

Jasper feels himself flame with irritation. He looks down at her; she has turned from handsome entertaining Claudia to maddening intractable Claudia. It does not suit him, just now, to do without her; at another time, it might. He would prefer to make the time-table himself. He says, ‘My dear, for the sake of the child I think we should talk about this in a sensible way at some other point.’ They both look towards Lisa, who is apparently absorbed by the monkeys.

The baby monkeys – the tiniest baby monkeys – have faces like pansies, with bright black eyes. She wants one so badly that she can hardly bear it. She wants to have one for her very own, carry it round with her all the time, have its little hands holding on to her like it holds on to the mother monkey. The baby monkey is the best thing she has ever seen, better than baby chickens, better than puppies, kittens, better than anything ever. But it is no good – they would never let you have a baby monkey. Claudia would say ‘Don’t be silly,’ Granny Branscombe would say no, Helga would say no.

One of the grown-up monkeys is eating a nut. It cracks the nut with its teeth and then picks the shell away with its fingers, just like a person. It drops the nut; one of the big baby monkeys tries to snatch the nut and the grown-up one makes chattering noises at it and chases it away. Then all the big baby monkeys play a chasing game, round and round. The father monkey who was doing that thing to the mother monkey has stopped and is looking for fleas, just like Rex does but with his fingers instead of his nose. Lisa looks at the mother monkey to see if she is having another baby yet, but she does not seem to be; she simply squats on a rock, doing nothing.

Lisa remembers what Claudia said just now, about people. She turns round and looks at them, at Claudia and Jasper. There they are, just as they have always been, Claudia and Jasper whom she does not call Mummy and Daddy because Claudia thinks those are silly names. Once upon a time she came out of Claudia’s tummy; she knows that because Granny
Branscombe told her, in the garden, when she was getting roses for the house, and said it was something you shouldn’t talk about. If Granny Branscombe knew what Claudia had said just now she would be very very shocked and hurt.

Lisa observes Claudia and Jasper. She thinks again about what Claudia said; she stares at them as she stared at the monkeys, but with less sympathy.

When Lisa visits me these days she talks always of mundane things; she is carefully dispassionate. She tells me about the weather, about the boys’ school reports, about a play she went to. She is pretending that what is happening to me is not happening, but she is also avoiding dissension, because you do not quarrel with someone in my condition. I find all this trying, but I can see that there is no alternative. Self-exposure is anathema to Lisa; she is perfectly entitled to feel that way. I love Lisa. I always have, after my fashion; the trouble is that she has never been able to realise this. I don’t blame her; she wanted a different sort of mother. The least I can do is try to behave now in a way that she would consider decent. And decency consists in leaving things unsaid, ignoring the inescapable, applying oneself to inessentials. She has a point, of course. All the same, where did she acquire this circumspection? Not from me. Not from Jasper, either. Nature, nurture. The latter, in Lisa’s case. My mother and Lady Branscombe fashioned her according to their lights. My fault, again.

Yesterday she read bits from the newspaper to me, doing her best to select what would amuse or inform. She left out, though, the best item. I saw it later, when the
Observer
was lying on the bedside table. The remark attributed to Miss World 1985: ‘I think destiny is what you make of it.’

Does she indeed. Discuss. With special reference to the careers of
a
) Hernando Cortez
b
) Joan of Arc
c
) a resident of Budapest in 1956. Use as many sides of the paper as you like.

1956; that year of Lisa’s eighth birthday and of other more sonorous events. The year of the Canal; the year of Hungary.

Jasper and I parted company, as we had done before and as we would do again. Lisa went back to Sotleigh. I saw her as often as I could. I was writing a column now for Hamilton’s paper, a roving commitment that sent me hither and thither – just what I needed in that curious time of mid-life rebirth. I wrote about whatever I liked, whatever aroused my passions. There was plenty, at that point. As the year unfolded I and those who thought like me listened to Eden’s pronouncements first with incredulity and then with outrage. As those extraordinary weeks hurtled the government from rhetoric into apparent lunacy we felt for the first time what it is like to live in more demanding political climates. People shouted at each other; friends ceased to speak; families were split. I had the power of print but I also, in indignation and anxiety, joined those marches of duffel-coated and college-scarved young, spoke in crowded church halls and common rooms. And then in the middle of that week of cascading events came the cruel cynicism of Hungary; while the world was arguing about oil and waterways the tanks rolled into Budapest. I tore up the piece I had written for the next day’s paper and wrote another. I forget what I said; I remember only that feeling of being the helpless detached spectator of murder. It was as though Hungary were not another place but another time, and therefore inaccessible.

Which of course was not so.

‘I am telephoning you,’ says a faint voice, through a blizzard of atmospherics.

‘I know you’re telephoning me,’ says Claudia.

‘The newspaper is giving me your telephone number.’

Claudia sighs. The newspaper has no business to do any such thing. It knows that. Some stupid girl. And some tiresome nut pestering. ‘Look,’ she begins…

‘From Budapest I am telephoning you.’

Claudia takes a breath. Oh. Oho… Hence the crackling. There is a noise now like a small bonfire somewhere along the line. ‘Hello?’ she says. ‘Hello? Can you talk louder?’

‘I am telephoning you for my son who is in Wimbledon. My son Laszlo.’

‘Wimbledon?’ cries Claudia. ‘Do you mean Wimbledon, London?’

‘My son is in Wimbledon, London for his studies.’

‘Who are you?’ says Claudia. ‘Please tell me your name. Please talk slowly and loudly.’

And through the bonfire and the exploding fireworks and the oceanic gales there comes this voice – from another place but not, oh indeed not, from another time. ‘… I am university professor… my son Laszlo who is eighteen years old… student of art… visiting in your country before these events of which you write in your paper, do you know of what I speak?’ (‘Yes, yes,’ cries Claudia. ‘How did you…? No, never mind, go on, please go on, I can hear you fairly well.’) ‘… I am telling my son he must not come back to his home, I am telling him to stay in your country… I think I am not able to speak to you for long, you understand, I am sorry to ask you this but I have no friend in your country, I think you are a person who is perhaps interested in what happens here… no money… eighteen years old… must not come back to his home… people who perhaps can help my son?’

‘Yes,’ says Claudia. ‘There are people who will help your son.’ The bonfire is roaring now; the gales howl. ‘I can hardly hear you. Please give me the address. The address in Wimbledon. Please give me the address in… at your home. No – no, don’t do that. Will you telephone me again?’

‘I think that will not be possible. I think soon perhaps I shall not have address. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ says Claudia. ‘I’m afraid I do.’

And so here is Laszlo, a child of his time, sitting in Claudia’s Fulham flat on an October afternoon. Outside are the unremarkable London noises of feet on pavements, a throbbing taxi, an aeroplane overhead; Laszlo sits on the edge of the sofa with a small kit-bag at his feet. He has lank black hair, acne and a heavy cold. He owns nothing but the clothes he wears, a
change of shirt and socks, a map of London, a pocket Oxford English dictionary and a handful of postcards from the Tate Gallery. He has also, of course, a passport which nails him for who he is and whence he comes.

‘This is a terrible deciding,’ he says.

‘Decision,’ says Claudia. ‘Not deciding. I’m sorry…’ she adds, ‘… as though it mattered. Damn words.’

‘Words are not damn,’ says Laszlo. ‘English I must speak. Good English.’

There he sits, in his baggy kneed trousers and his too-tight sweater. And Claudia is consumed by a surge of that most stark of all emotions: pity. You poor little sod, she thinks. You poor little wretch, you’re one of those for whom history really pulls out the stops. You are indeed someone who cannot call his life his own. Free will, right now, must have a hollow sound.

‘If you decide to stay I shall do whatever I can for you. You can live here, for a start. I’ll find out about places in art colleges.’

There is a silence. ‘I shall never see again my father,’ says Laszlo. His mother, it appears, died when he was a child.

‘
Never
is perhaps too strong…’ murmurs Claudia.

‘Never. I have also aunt and grandmother and cousins.’

Claudia nods. And what are you offered instead? she thinks. This airy concept called freedom which cannot at the moment seem anything of the kind. All the eighteen year olds I know are worrying about sex and examinations: that is freedom.