Moon Tiger (5 page)

Presumably I am not the only one to find the marriage curious. There is Gordon, who has mutated from a golden lad to a successful man, shrewd, respected and handsome with it. Women fall for him from Singapore to Stanford. And there is Sylvia, whose girlish prettiness has given way to a plump and nondescript maturity, and whose conversation is of climate, the price of things and children’s schooling. I have watched others watching Sylvia trail in Gordon’s wake like some stumpy dinghy towed by a yacht, have observed hostesses tuck her safely away at the end of the table, seen the yawn in the eyes of Gordon’s high-flying friends. But I may well be the only one to know that Gordon has a deep seminal laziness. Oh, he works… he will work himself into the ground, when it is a matter of the intellect. His laziness is more subtle than that, it is a laziness of the soul, and Sylvia is its manifestation. Gordon needs Sylvia like some people need to spend an hour or two every day simply staring out of the window, or twiddling their fingers. Gordon’s intellectual energy is prodigious; his emotional energy is minimal. Those sharp clever women with whom, from time to time, he is seen, would never do as permanencies. Sylvia has always been more secure than perhaps she realises.

Long ago, when we were thirteen and fourteen and rivals in everything, we competed for the attention of a young man Mother hired one summer as tutor. He was supposed to coach Gordon in Greek and Latin. He was an undergraduate, nineteen or twenty, I suppose, a stocky dark young man called Malcolm whose skin turned a rich coffee brown during that interminable languid Dorset summer. At first we resented his presence and the erosion of our idle days. We were dragged scowling to the schoolroom; outside it we ignored him. And then something interesting happened. I came into the room one day when Gordon was alone with Malcolm, construing
Virgil, and I noticed two things: that Gordon was enjoying what he was doing and that there was an affinity between them. Malcolm’s hand rested on Gordon’s shoulder as he bent to look at an exercise book. I looked at the hand – a lean brown hand – and then at Malcolm’s face with its thick dark eyebrows and brown eyes intent upon Gordon and what Gordon was saying. And I was filled with hot jealousy; I wanted the hand on my shoulder; I wanted that adult, male, and suddenly infinitely attractive look trained upon me.

I went to find Mother, among her roses, and announced that I wanted to learn Latin.

You could say, I suppose, that the ease with which, several years later, I sailed through Matriculation, is due to the first stirrings of sexual desire. For the rest of that summer I laboured over Kennedy’s
Latin Primer
. I swept from nominatives and accusatives to the subjunctive, to conditional clauses, to Caesar and Gaul. There was no stopping me. I leaned against Malcolm’s warm sturdy thigh with my grammar in my hand, seeking explanations; I allowed my arm to brush against his as he corrected my exercises; I primped and posed and curried favour. Gordon, driven frantic, flew through
The Aeneid
and embarked on
The Iliad
. We goaded each other to more furious efforts. Poor Malcolm, who had thought to spend an undemanding summer earning a bit of pocket money, found himself devoured by relentless adolescent obsession. I was powered by nascent sexuality and the need to do better than Gordon; Gordon was powered by rivalry with me and the outrage of seeing Malcolm’s interest in him distracted and diluted. Malcolm, a decent conventional public schoolboy, probably had his fair share of homosexual leanings. He probably had decent conventional itchings after Gordon – until I started laying my pubescent paws on him – rubbing my newly swollen bosom against him in puppyish play, making eyes at him. I confused and alarmed him. By the end of the summer the wretched young man was as overheated as we were.

Mother, impervious, entered for both the Floribunda and Hybrid Tea classes of the Royal Horticultural Society’s southwest summer show and won a Reserve.

I didn’t, of course, at thirteen, know the mechanics of sex. Mother, poor thing, was putting off the evil day of explanation. All I knew was that clearly there was something very underhand that went on or it would not be so shrouded in mystery. I had my suspicions, too; not for nothing had I studied Gordon’s anatomy over the years, whenever I got the chance. And the feelings aroused in me by Malcolm’s chunky, golden, male-smelling body compounded my curiosity.

The summer ended, Malcolm left. I went back to Miss Lavenham’s and Gordon to Winchester where his housemaster, delicately approached by Mother with murmurings about his fatherless condition, had him into his study one evening for a chat.

He has hugged to himself, for the whole of the first week of the Christmas holidays, his superiority. And eventually, as he has always known he would, he can resist gloating no longer and out it comes, at a point where he is fed up with her, when she has been swanking insufferably.

‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘I know how babies are made.’

‘So do I,’ Claudia says. But there has been an infinitesimal, a fatally betraying pause.

‘Bet you don’t.’

‘Bet I do.’

‘How, then?’

‘I’m not going to say,’ says Claudia.

‘Because you don’t know.’

She hesitates, trapped. He watches her. Which way will she jump? She shrugs, at last, wonderfully casual. ‘It’s obvious. The man puts his – thing – into the lady’s tummy button and the baby goes inside her tummy until it’s big enough.’

Gordon collapses in glee. He rolls about on the sofa, howling. ‘In her tummy button! What an absolute ass you are, Claudia! In her tummy button…!’

She stands over him, scarlet not with embarrassment but with chagrin and rage. ‘He does! I know he does!’

Gordon stops laughing. He sits up. ‘Don’t be such a cretin. You don’t know
anything
. He puts his thing – and it’s called a penis, you didn’t know that either, did you? –
there
…’ And he stabs with a finger at Claudia’s crotch, pushing the stuff of her dress between her thighs. Her eyes widen – in surprise? In outrage? They stare at each other. Somewhere downstairs, out of sight, in her own world, they can hear the tranquil hum of their mother’s sewing-machine.

‘I’m not going to tell you,’ she says.

‘Because you don’t know.’

She could gladly hit him, lolling there complacent on the sofa. And anyway she does know – she’s almost sure she does. She says defiantly, ‘I do know. He puts his thing in the lady’s tummy button.’ She does not add that the inadequacy of her own navel for such a performance bothers her – she assumes that it must be going to expand when she is older.

He hurls himself around in laughter. He is speechless. Then he leans forward. ‘I knew you didn’t know,’ he says. ‘Listen. He puts his penis – it’s called a penis incidentally –
there
…’ And he stabs with his finger against her dress, between her legs.

And her anger, strangely, evaporates; eclipsed by something different, equally forceful, baffling. Something mysterious is present, something she cannot nail or name. She stares in wonder at her grey-flannelled brother.

3

The cast is assembling; the plot thickens. Mother, Gordon, Sylvia. Jasper. Lisa. Mother will drop out before long, retiring gracefully and with minimum fuss after an illness in 1962. Others, as yet unnamed, will come and go. Some more than others; one above all. In life as in history the unexpected lies waiting, grinning from around corners. Only with hindsight are we wise about cause and effect.

For a moment we are still concerned with structures, with the setting of the stage. I have always been interested in beginnings. We all scrutinise our childhoods, go about the interesting business of apportioning blame. I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates. I like to contemplate their unknowing inhabitants, busy with prosaic matters of hunger, thirst, tides, keeping the ship on course, quarrels and wet feet, their minds on anything but destiny. Those quaint figures of the Bayeux tapestry, far from quaint within their proper context, rough tough efficient fellows wrestling with ropes and sails and frenzied horses and the bawling of ill-tempered superiors. Caesar, contemplating the Sussex coast. Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama, Captain Cook… all those mundane travellers preoccupied with personal gain or seized by congenital restlessness, studying compasses and dealing with the natives while they make themselves immortal.

And that most interesting arrival of all, a creaking top-heavy vessel named from an English hedgerow, crammed with pots and pans, fish-hooks, muskets, butter, meal and pig-headed, idealistic, ambitious, foolhardy people nosing its way into the embracing arm of Cape Cod. Little did you know what you were setting in motion – William Bradford, Edward Winslow, William Brewster, Myles Standish, Steven Hopkins, Elizabeth his wife and all the rest of you. How could you envisage slavery and secession, the Gold Rush, the Alamo, Transcendentalism, Hollywood, the Model T Ford, Sacco and Vanzetti, Joe McCarthy? Vietnam. Ronald Reagan, for heaven’s sake. You were worried about God, the climate, the Indians, and those querulous speculators back in London. But I like to think about you all the same, searching out a place for habitation, chopping, building, planting, praying. Marrying and dying. Stomping around the wilderness noting sorrel, yarrow, liverwort, watercresses and an excellent strong kind of flax and hemp. Unimaginative folk, probably, and just as well. The sixteen-twenties in Massachusetts were no time for airy exercise of the imagination – that’s a luxury for the likes of me, thinking of you.

You are public property – the received past. But you are also private; my view of you is my own, your relevance to me is personal. I like to reflect on the wavering tenuous line that runs from you to me, that leads from your shacks at Plymouth Plantation to me, Claudia, hopping the Atlantic courtesy of PanAm and TWA and BA to visit my brother in Harvard. This, you see, is the point of all this. Egocentric Claudia is once again subordinating history to her own puny existence. Well – don’t we all? And in any case what I am doing is to slot myself into the historical process, hitch myself to its coat-tails, see where I come in. The axes and muskets of Plymouth in 1620 reverberate dimly in my own slice of time; they have conditioned my life, in general and in particular.

I like to pick out the shards of opinion that link your minds to mine – a few sturdy views about the rule of law, distribution of property, decent behaviour and regard for one’s fellow men.
But the shards are few; I am peering for the most part into a mysterious impenetrable fog in which what I would call intolerance is sanctified as belief, in which you can cheerfully spike the head of a slaughtered Indian outside your fort, in which you endure privations that would kill me off in a week or so but in which also you believe in witchcraft, in which you do not merely believe but
know
that there is a life hereafter.

In one sense, of course, you were right, though not in the way you had in mind. I am the life hereafter. I, Claudia. Squinting backwards; recording and assessing. Not that you would care for me at all – ungodly foulmouthed old woman with a bloodcurdling record of adultery and blasphemy. No, you wouldn’t like me one little bit; I’d confirm all your worst fears of the way things might go.

But you deserve and shall have a considerable space in my history of the world. I shall wander among you, indulgently, pointing out your orderliness, your sense of justice, your capacity for hard work. Your courage. The Indians, you had been told, ‘delight to torment men in the most bloody manner that may be, flaying men alive with the shells of fishes, cutting off the joints and members of others by piecemeals, and broiling them on the coals, and causing men to eat the collops of their flesh in their sight whilst they live…’ And still you set sail. It is the Indians, of course, who bite the dust in the end, poor sods. And you might equally well have had your ears or noses sliced off in the home counties, given the prevailing climate of opinion. In a raw world maybe courage has to be differently assessed. Nevertheless, you command respect.