Moon Tiger (27 page)

‘Laszlo was as ever. He has always been consistent, that you must admit.’

Lisa inclines her head, noncommittal.

‘I’m sorry, you know,’ says Claudia.

‘Sorry about what?’ enquires Lisa, cautiously.

‘Sorry I was such an inadequate mother.’

‘Oh.’ Lisa searches for a response. ‘Well… I wouldn’t exactly say… You were… Well, you were who you were.’

‘We’re all that,’ says Claudia. ‘It’s something one has to overcome. By conventional standards I made a bad job of being a mother. So I apologise. Not that that’s much use now. I just wanted to put it on record.’

‘Thank you,’ says Lisa at last. She has no idea, she realises, what she means by this. She wishes Claudia had not said what she has; now it will always be there, complicating things.

I never expected to see Lisa grow up. For years, when she was a child, I waited for the Bomb to drop. As the world lurched from Korea to Laos to Cuba to Vietnam I was simply sitting it out. And Lisa’s existence sharpened the horror. What might happen to the whole of humanity became concentrated on Lisa’s small limbs, her unknowing eyes, her blithe aspirations. I may have been an inadequate mother, but I was still a mother; through Lisa, I raged and feared. I would never have admitted to those dark nights of the soul. Publicly, I behaved like a rational responsible being – I argued the pros and cons of unilateralism, I wrote my column, I marched and demonstrated when I felt it appropriate. I kept to myself that curdling of the stomach I felt during the nine days of Cuba, and at a dozen other times over those years. On some days I could not turn on the radio or pick up the newspaper, as though ignorance might insulate me from reality.

Lisa has grown up. Her sons are growing up. From time to
time my stomach still curdles, but not as it used to; I no longer shrink from the newspapers. Now why should this be? The world is no safer than it was twenty years ago. But we are still here; the monster has been contained, so far – with every year that passes the hope grows that it might continue to be contained, somehow; daily expectation of calamity is too exhausting to sustain. The monks at Lindisfarne must have whistled while they worked when they stopped looking out to sea; people made love in cities under siege.

We expect Armageddon; the Bible has trained us well. We assume either annihilation or salvation, perhaps both. Millennarian beliefs are as old as time; the apocalypse has always been at hand. People have lain quaking in their beds waiting for the year one thousand, have cowered at the passage of comets, have prayed their way through eclipses. Our particular anxieties would seem on the face of things more rational, but they have an inescapable ancestry. The notion that things go on for ever is recent, and evidently too recent to attract much of a following. The world being what it is, it has always been tempting to assume that something would be done about it, sooner or later. When I went to Jerusalem in 1941 I stayed in a small
pension
run by American Seventh Day Adventists, elderly people who had sold up in Iowa or Nebraska in the ’twenties and taken themselves off to the Holy Land with all their savings to be on the spot for the Second Coming, due in 1933. The Second Coming never came; the savings ran out; there they still were, sensibly making the best of it by managing a hotel. It was a delightful place with a shady courtyard in which tortoises ambled among rosemary bushes and pots of geraniums.

Gordon and I, over the years, have argued about disarmament more than about anything else. When I was a member of CND he was not; his pragmatism has always been an antidote to my pessimism; he has always been able to produce arguments and figures when I have brandished emotions and struck attitudes. I can say this now. The last time we were together, in a taxi in London, two days before he died, he looked down at
the headlines of the evening paper on his knee and said, ‘One resents being axed from the narrative, apart from anything else. I’d have liked to know the outcome.’

Gordon, of course, has been one of those who have a share in outcomes. He has made things happen, from time to time. It is given unto economists to interfere with the narrative, in their small way; peasants in Zambia, small shopkeepers in Bogota, factory workers in Huddersfield have been, at one time or another, affected by Gordon’s professional activities.

Gordon, a week before he died, gave evidence before a Royal Commission on Broadcasting whose report he knew he would never see. Sylvia and I took him there in a taxi, Sylvia squeaking and clucking, her eyes pink-rimmed, shreds of damp Kleenex all over her clothes; Gordon was ill-tempered, impatient, pumped full of drugs and slung around with plastic tubing. The doctors said, ‘If he wants to, he should do it’; I agreed. He gave his evidence, staggered back into another taxi and sat there talking about the forthcoming election. He set out to provoke and I took the bait, knowing that I must not do otherwise. We argued. Sylvia burst into tears.

She sits beside Gordon and Claudia sits opposite, on the jump-seat. He shouldn’t have come, those wretched doctors should never have let him come, none of them should be here at such a time bumping through horrid December London in a taxi. Gordon’s breath rasps and he has these tube-things strapped to his leg at which she cannot bear to look, they make her feel so woozy. And he is talking talking which cannot be good for him, getting worked up about the stupid election when who in the middle of all this cares about the election? Gordon will not be… By the time the election comes Gordon will have…

Sylvia stares out of the window, biting her lip.

She is going to be terribly brave about it. She is not going to break down. When it happens. She is going to be brave and sensible and see to all the things that will have to be seen to and keep calm and dignified.

And as she thinks this there stream through her head other thoughts that ought not to be there she knows but that she cannot keep out… thoughts about afterwards and selling the house, she’s never really liked north Oxford anyway, one could move to somewhere more countryish, not right in the country which could be a problem but a nice little market town with the sort of people one would get on with, and one need never ever go to the States again, one might even find a little job, voluntary work maybe, an Oxfam shop or something like that, just to have an interest…

‘Rubbish!’ says Claudia. ‘Absolute rubbish!’ And Sylvia jumps, staunches the flow of thought, turns to here and now. In which Gordon and Claudia are arguing. To and fro, just like the old days: but listen you don’t really mean to tell me… you only say that because you know nothing about… let me finish what I’m saying… you’re simply
wrong
there Claudia.

How
can
Claudia! Coming back at him like that when he’s so ill. Interrupting. Raising her voice. Typical Claudia. It’s appalling. When he’s… when he’s going to
die
.

And the tears come welling up, spilling over, so that she has to turn to the window again and rummage for her hankie, and she sees her own face in the glass, superimposed on shop fronts and pavements, a round pink
old
face with puffy eyes and streaked cheeks.

‘Rubbish!’ says Claudia. It sounds vehement enough; it sounds almost as though she means it. Her eyes meet Gordon’s, and she sees that he is not fooled, but he goes on talking and she goes on talking and interrupting and beneath what is said they tell each other something entirely different.

I love you, she thinks. Always have. More than I’ve loved anyone, bar one. That word is overstretched; it cannot be made to do service for so many different things – love of children, love of friends, love of God, carnal love and cupidity and saintliness. I do not need to tell you, any more than you need to tell me. I have seldom even thought it. You have been my
alter
ego
, and I have been yours. And soon there will only be me, and I shall not know what to do.

Sylvia, she sees, is weeping again. Not quite silently enough. If you don’t stop that, thinks Claudia, I may simply push you out of this taxi.

It is a grey winter afternoon, glittering with car lights, street lights, gold, red, emerald, the black rainy pavements gleaming, the shop windows glowing Wagnerian caverns. Gordon, talking, sees and takes note of all this. He talks of events that have not yet come about and sees light and texture, the kaleidoscope of fruit outside a greengrocer, the mist of rain on a girl’s cheek. A newspaper kiosk is a portrait gallery of pop stars and royalty; the traffic glides like shoals of shining fish. And all this will go on, he thinks. And on, and on. What do I feel about it? What do I care?

His eyes meet Claudia’s. ‘Rubbish,’ she says. ‘I’ve always given theory its due. It’s just that I have preferred to write about action.’ ‘Mad opportunists,’ says Gordon. ‘Tito. Napoleon. That’s not real history. History is grey stuff. Products. Systems of government. Climates of opinion. It moves slowly. That’s why you get impatient with it. You look for spectacle.’ ‘There is spectacle,’ says Claudia. ‘All too much of it.’ ‘Indeed yes,’ says Gordon, shifting on the seat, wincing. ‘Of course there’s spectacle. But the spectacle may mislead. What’s really happening may be going on elsewhere.’ ‘Oh come on,’ cries Claudia. ‘You’d tell the prisoner on the guillotine that the action is really somewhere else?’ And as she speaks he hears and sees a hundred other Claudias, going back and back, woman and girl and child. You, he thinks. You. There has always been you. And soon no longer will be.

He feels, beside him, Sylvia’s turned head, her shuddering shoulders. He reaches out and puts a hand on hers. It is the least he can do. And the most.

Gordon died five years ago. I am separate from him now. No day passes in which I do not think of him, but I can do so
with detachment. He is complete; he has beginning and end. The times in which we were together are complete. I do not mourn him any the less, but I have had to move away: there is no choice. We were children together; we made narcissistic love; we grew up and depended upon one another. From time to time we loathed each other but even in hatred we were united, exclusive, a community of two. I knew Gordon as ruthlessly as I know myself – and as indulgently. What I felt for Gordon was classifiable as love for lack of a better word: he was my sense of identity, my mirror, my critic, judge and ally. Without him I am diminished.

In the beginning there was myself; my own body set the frontiers, physical and emotional, there was simply me and not-me; the egotism of infancy has grandeur. And when I became a child there was Claudia, who was the centre of all things, and there was what pertained to Claudia, out at which I looked, the world of others, observed but not apprehended, a Berkeleyan landscape which existed only at my whim – when it ceased to interest me it no longer existed. And eventually, or so I am claiming, I grew up and saw myself in the awful context of time and place: everything and nothing.

She swims up from some tumultuous netherworld. She sees Laszlo, sitting beside the bed, his brown gaze fixed upon her. ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘You again. Sylvia’s gone, then?’

‘That was three days ago,’ says Laszlo. ‘You are confused, dear.’

Claudia sighs. ‘I shall have to take your word for it. And don’t call me dear – it sounds unnatural, you never have before.’

‘I am sorry,’ says Laszlo humbly. ‘Is there anything you would like?’

‘Lots of things,’ says Claudia. ‘But it’s too late for them now.’

‘You mustn’t talk like that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because… Because it isn’t like you.’

Claudia eyes him. ‘I’m dying, you know.’

‘No!’ says Laszlo violently.

‘Yes. So don’t pretend. You’re just like Lisa. If I can cope with it, so can you. Not that I am going particularly quietly.’

‘What do you mean?’ enquires Laszlo, with caution.

‘Nothing. All in the mind. I’m not proposing to attack the nice kind doctors.’ She closes her eyes and there is a silence. Laszlo gets up and roams the room. He examines the flowers ranged on the table – the scarlet poinsettia, the shock-headed chrysanthemums, the red roses with unnatural long thornless stems. ‘Lovely roses.’

‘Jasper.’

Laszlo turns his back on the roses with a sniff. ‘He has been then?’

‘He has.’

Laszlo dumps himself down in the chair again. ‘Jasper I have never understood. When you could have had… any man.’ He raises his eyes to the ceiling, spreads his hands, sheds his English top-dressing.

‘So you’ve said before.’

‘Anyone. You who were so beautiful… Are,’ he adds, hastily.

‘And I don’t much care for Henry,’ says Claudia. ‘That’s life, isn’t it? Anyway, Jasper was a long time ago.’

‘How many men have asked you to marry them?’

‘Not a lot. Most had too strong an instinct for self-preservation.’

Laszlo pulls a face. ‘Always you make yourself out so… formidable. To me you are not formidable. You are wonderful, simply.’

‘Thanks,’ says Claudia; she has closed her eyes again. Laszlo sits watching her: the profile with the high sharp nose, almost translucent at this moment in the light from the afternoon sun that pours through the window, and in which the flowers blaze, brilliant red and orange. She turns suddenly towards
him: ‘There is one thing I should like, if you are coming again.’

‘Of course.’

‘At the flat,’ she says carefully, ‘in the top drawer of my desk. A brown envelope tied up with string. Addressed to me. Quite thick. Just something I’d like to look through again, if you could bring it along.’

I can’t exactly say that Laszlo has been a comfort to me in my later life: he has been alternately a liability and a source of interest. Also we are fond of each other. I have subsidised him, baled him out, consoled him; he has given me affection and entertainment. I have found his temperament, which sends a lot of people running, more intriguing than alarming. Laszlo’s histrionics, which induce pursed lips and heavy silences in Lisa or in Sylvia, have been for me the breath of alien other worlds; they evoke the tumultuous unfettered society of Eastern Europe – languages I do not speak, cities I do not know, saints and tyrants and forests and vampires, a past that is more myth than history and all the better for it. When Laszlo was in his roaring twenties I used to put my feet up and become an appreciative spectator as he ranted up and down the sitting-room of the Fulham flat, bewailing his latest love affair, quarrel, betrayal, his creative struggles, the casuistry of critics and art gallery owners. He was always in a state of triumph or despair; he always arrived with a bottle of champagne or to tell me that he proposed suicide. I can’t help respecting such responses; they seem an appropriate commitment to life.