by Unknown
‘Gracious!’ says Claudia. ‘You make us sound exotic. I don’t think we’ve ever felt particularly exotic, have we?’
‘Incestuous, don’t you mean?’ says Gordon, tucking into roast chicken. ‘Though come to think of it I suppose incest is a bit exotic. Classical, though. Very high class. Look at the Greeks.’
‘And look at Nellie Frobisher in the village,’ says Claudia. ‘Knocked up by her dad before she was seventeen. Dr Crabb used to say he could tell which village people came from in central Dorset from the shape of their heads.’
‘Claudia, really…’ exclaims Mrs Hampton.
And Sylvia can endure it no longer. Suddenly she isn’t feeling very well. She pushes her chair back, puts her hand on her tummy, says with dignity that she is going to lie down for a bit – she’s sure everyone will understand.
As she climbs the stairs she can hear Mrs Hampton scolding them.
12
‘Thank you,’ says Claudia. ‘It looks nice and expensive. Fortnum’s, I see. Put it on the table, will you. The nurse on florist duties will see to it later.’
She is propped up on pillows. A board is tilted at an angle in front of her; she has pen and paper.
‘You’re writing something,’ Jasper states. He lowers himself into the bedside chair, which creaks betrayingly. Jasper is a substantial figure nowadays in every way. ‘What are you writing?’
‘A book.’
He smiles. Indulgently? Disbelievingly? ‘What about?’
‘A history of the world,’ replies Claudia. She slides a look at him. ‘Pretentious, eh?’
‘Not at all,’ says Jasper. ‘I shall look forward to reading it.’
Claudia laughs. ‘I doubt that, for various reasons.’ There is a silence. She adds, ‘I prefer to remain occupied, even when allegedly dying.’
Jasper makes a gesture of dismissal. ‘Nonsense, Claudia.’
‘Well, we shall see. Or, more probably, you will. So… You’re still busy making expensive travesties of the truth, I gather. The Life of Christ in six episodes, is that right? With commercial breaks.’
Jasper starts to speak, takes a breath, stops. Starts again. ‘This isn’t the time or the place, Claudia. Pax, eh? I’ve come to see you, not to cross swords.’
‘As you like,’ says Claudia. ‘I thought it might be good therapy. This is one of my brighter days, they tell me. I always rather enjoyed our sword-crossings, didn’t you?’
He smiles – placatingly, charmingly. ‘I have never regretted anything, my dear. The times with you least of all.’
‘Ah,’ Claudia looks sharply at him. ‘Well, there I would agree with you. Regretting is always pointless, since there is no undoing. Only the sanctimonious go in for breast-beating. Do you want a cup of tea? Ring that bell if so.’
I suppose it is because I sense a compatibility that I have been fascinated by the exploiters of historical circumstance. Political adventurers – Tito, Napoleon. Medieval popes; crusaders; colonisers. I don’t like them, but I cannot help observing them. Traders and settlers have always intrigued me – those fearless ruthless opportunists inserting themselves into the cracks and crevices and channels created by politics and diplomacy. I cannot help taking a censorious interest in the spice trade, the fur trade, the East India Company. In all those beady-eyed, devious, amoral, indestructible fellows of the sixteenth and seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who risked their lives and lined their pockets in the wake of public events.
Greed is an interesting quality. Jasper is greedy; he has to have money for its own sake – not just for what it can buy but as pure possession: figures on pieces of paper. Cupidity centred on bank statements and shareholdings is more difficult to understand than the avarice of an Elizabethan trader with his haul of cinnamon, cloves, mace, nutmeg and, presumably, gold bars under the floorboards. Since no one, nowadays, gets closer to visible touchable wealth than their bank statement or the plastic rectangles in their wallet it is presumably atavistic instincts of this kind that are aroused by newspaper stories of treasure – coin hoards turned up by the plough, chests of doubloons at the bottom of the Solent. We all dribble a little at the thought of gold and silver, and make lust respectable by sermonising about concern for the past. Nonsense. It’s not Anglo-Saxons or medieval sailors people are interested in – it’s money, cash, guineas, pieces of eight, sovereigns, ingots, stuff you can run your hands through and count and feel the weight of and stash away under the bed.
Jasper turned the war to his own advantage. He made sure that he was never in any danger nor indeed greatly inconvenienced and set about furthering his career. He shot up ladders, outstripped his contemporaries and, I daresay, contributed his mite to victory. Jasper is a patriot, of course, in his own way.
It could well be asked why, since I talk like this of Jasper, I ever became, and remained, involved with him. When are sexual choices ever rational or expedient? Jasper was excellent to go to bed with, and entertaining out of it. By the time he was Lisa’s father we were linked for good. And for bad.
‘I’m leaving the Foreign Office,’ says Jasper.
They are driving through Normandy. This landscape, Claudia thinks, is surely mythical, some collective dream of Frenchness, of farms and cows and apples, of the past, of how the world ought to be but is not. It is surely invented, yet here am I sitting in Jasper’s not-quite-new Jaguar while it flows past the windows: medieval, aromatic, complete with chateaux and petrol stations and tractors and old Citroens held together with string. ‘Are you indeed? Why?’
‘They were proposing that I should go to Djakarta.’
‘Dear me. As Ambassador, I take it?’
‘Not as Ambassador,’ says Jasper, sweeping past a farm cart and a lorry, aiming the Jaguar up an avenue of poplars; a church with Romanesque door flies by on the right, a hoarding advertising Pernod on the left.
Claudia laughs. ‘I can see that Commercial Secretary in Djakarta wouldn’t do. Whose nose have you been getting up at the FO, then?’
‘My dear girl, that is not how it works. There is a progression. A laborious progression for which I am not prepared to hang around.’
‘I see. So what are you going to do?’
‘I’m looking into various things. One should be thinking about television. I may do a column for The Times. NATO is a possibility.’
‘Ah,’ says Claudia. ‘NATO. Which is why we’re here.’
‘Up to a point.’ He takes his hand from the wheel and squeezes her knee. ‘It’s also an excuse for a jaunt with you, of which I don’t get enough. Here we are, I suspect.’
He swings the car off the main road and through wide gates into a tree-lined drive through parkland. Gravel spits up from the wheels. A sign at the gate, so discreet and tastefully lettered that Claudia only glimpses it, says something in French, English and German about Château de Something Conference Centre.
‘What are you, precisely, when we get there?’
‘I’m an observer. I’m doing a piece for the Spectator.’
‘And what am I?’
‘You’re my secretary.’
‘No I’m bloody not,’ says Claudia. ‘You can stop the car right away.’ She opens the door. The Jaguar swerves, slows.
Jasper reaches across her. ‘Don’t be an idiot. Shut that door. I’m joking. Well, I had to put you down as something, didn’t I? Friend? Mistress?’
The car, now, has come to a halt, with Claudia half in and half out. He has her by the arm.
‘I have a name, don’t I?’ snaps Claudia. ‘Let go of me.’
He pulls. She pulls. And all of a sudden he glimpses in the driving mirror the interested faces of driver and passenger in a car behind them. He yanks Claudia into her seat, slams the door and starts the car off with a jerk that flattens her. ‘Darling, you’re being absurd. What does it matter? We’re here to amuse ourselves a bit, that’s all.’
‘Well right now I’m not particularly amused,’ says Claudia, but she is calming down, he sees (shoo
ting a quick glance), with one of those typically Claudia switches of mood. Indeed, she becomes suddenly quiet, her attention grabbed it seems by the chateau, which comes into view now as the avenue takes a turn. Very handsome it is too, complete with moat, water-lilies, swans, and a lot of glossy official cars parked on the gravel sweep in front. Jasper feels his spirits lift; the sight of chauffeurs, uniforms, cars unavailable to the common man, national flags and the apparatus of power takes him back to the war years, when one had been in the thick of all that. Perhaps a NATO job is indeed the thing to be going after. By all accounts there are some satisfactorily unspecific senior positions, in which one could rove around and generally carve out something rather interesting. And he could undoubtedly land one, if he puts his mind to it. He starts to make a mental list of people to have a word with when he gets back to London. And this will be an excellent occasion to make oneself known in other influential circles – to parade discreetly one’s record, to talk knowledgeably, amusingly and confidently in four different languages. He begins to tingle at the prospect. He is going to be busy. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all to bring Claudia along. Except that Claudia, provided that she doesn’t turn recalcitrant, is an asset. People notice Claudia. People notice one’s association with Claudia; men are envious – women are impressed.
The chateau seems to stem from the world of Disney rather than Louis Treize. Claudia studies it as they approach – its silly pepperpot turrets and its clean creamy walls and its moat with water-lilies – and continues to do so as they climb stone staircases to find their rooms. There are immense salons, lavishly carpeted, and an echoing dining-hall hung about with archaic weaponry, and a bathroom with shower and bidet to each bedroom. She dumps her case on the bed and goes to look through the mullioned window; a swan with wake of cygnets cruises the moat.
‘All right, darling?’ says Jasper. ‘Good place, eh? I’ll just go and check up on a few things – meet me downstairs when you’re ready.’
Claudia picks up the brochure that has been placed on her dressing-table and reads that the chateau, home of the Ducs de Rocqueville for four hundred years, has been converted (with the minimum interference to its historic features) into the Rocqueville Conference Centre. Rocqueville, she learns, is a study centre for the problems of the post-war world, specialising in conferences attended by experts in academic, military, diplomatic and political spheres. The wording of the brochure is both high-flown and evasive: it hints at powerful international backing, attempts some mild intimidation by way of economic jargon, and throws in a lot about peace and understanding and the hopes of mankind. Distinguished visitors to Rocqueville since the centre opened in 1948 include Winston Churchill, John Foster Dulles, General de Gaulle, Professor John Kenneth Galbraith and Dag Hammarskjold.
Claudia changes her clothes and descends the stone staircases. This week’s experts from various spheres are by now gathered in the main reception room drinking pre-lunch aperitifs beneath crystal chandeliers and a billowing ceiling fresco of the seizième in which cherubs tow ladies in déshabille around on powder-puff clouds. She stands in the entrance for a few moments, taking in first the ceiling and the spindly gilt-limbed furniture and then the experts: there are military uniforms (uniforms so high-ranking that they admit only the occasional scrap of ribbon or chaste insignia), academic tweeds, political and diplomatic pinstripes. There are not many women – a few severely clothed donnish figures, various secretarial-looking girls who hover self-effacingly around the edges of the room, a recognisable Italian woman politician, and an administrative figure who steps forward now, with hostess smile. Claudia sidesteps neatly and moves off into the crowd, at the opposite side of the room to Jasper whom she can see with some uniformed Americans. She heads purposefully towards the window and comes to rest beside a solitary man who is contemplating the ceiling.
‘Inappropriate,’ says Claudia. She takes a glass from a proffered tray.
‘On the contrary,’ says the man. ‘It is we who are inappropriate. The painting was here first.’
Claudia looks at him more closely. He is nondescript, a short dapper man with toothbrush moustache, the sort of person who goes unnoticed in a crowd, which is perhaps why no one is talking to him. ‘You’re right. Incongruous, I should have said.’
The man tosses back his drink, reaches for another from the retreating tray. ‘And who are you?’
Claudia starts to bristle. But there is something about him to which she responds; the demand is direct rather than rude, and Claudia approves of direction. She tells him her name.
‘I’ve read your book. The Tito thing.’
Claudia glows. She is vain enough (oh, quite vain enough), and new enough to mild fame, to appreciate recognition. She bestows on this man her full attention, to the exclusion of the babbling room, the cherubs and the ladies in déshabille. His appearance, she now realises, is deceptive; he has about him a sense of unswerving purpose. He is also a man used to asking questions, getting answers, and telling people what to do. She asks his name.
Jasper talks late in smoke-filled rooms. He shares a bottle of whisky with two Americans, an Englishman, an Italian and a Belgian, all of them men of influence and many connections. He has made, he knows, a good impression. When eventually they get up and leave the empty glasses, the stub-filled ashtrays, the deep leather armchairs, he is feeling good, very good indeed. He wants Claudia, who disappeared earlier. He saw her at dinner in animated conversation with some chap (a chap of such sexual anonymity as to be no threat, so that one could smile benignly) but when he caught up with her later on she murmured something about going to bed early.
Jasper, work over for the day, makes his way – a touch unsteadily – along the chateau’s wide passages.
Claudia lies in bed with the light on and a book in her hand. The book is a pretence that is not working, and presently she lets it fall. She lies in this alien room and aches. Her mind and body howl. All that she can normally keep tamped down springs into life. She aches and howls for Tom. It is not that he is ever forgotten, but mostly emotion is dormant; it lies quiet, biding its time. And then every so often something brings it raging forth, and she is back ten years ago, back in that Cairo summer, back with the raw new truth of it.
She should not have allowed herself to talk about the war. She should not have let herself be made unwary by wine, flattering attention, questions and the temptation to expand on her own achievements.
And now here is a knock on the door that can only be Jasper. She stiffens. Jasper’s body, tonight, would be an offence. The body of any man would be an offence. Any man who is not Tom. And Tom is dead. Ten years dead.
Jasper comes in. He is in his dressing-gown. ‘I was afraid you’d be asleep. I got talking to some people. Sorry to desert you, darling, but I got caught up with that NATO general at dinner. Who was your pal?’
‘A man,’ says Claudia, staring at the ceiling.
Jasper, by now, has his dressing-gown off and is pulling back the sheet.
‘No,’ says Claudia. ‘Sorry, Jasper – not tonight.’
‘What’s the matter? Have you got the curse?’
‘Yes,’ says Claudia. Simpler like that.
He continues to get into the bed. ‘I don’t mind.’
‘Well I do,’ says Claudia. ‘Leave me alone, Jasper, please.’
Jasper prepares to raise objections and then suddenly capitulates; his head is foggy with whisky anyway, desire is beginning to ebb. He yawns; ‘All right, sweetie, I understand. See you in the morning. I must say, it was well worth coming. I think I may have landed a thing or two.’
‘Really?’ says Claudia, without looking at him.
But it was I, as it happened, who had landed something. And quite without setting out to do so. Hamilton – anonymous Hamilton whom Jasper dismissed at a glance and never spoke to throughout the weekend – was a newspaper proprietor. Not one of the flashier Fleet Street figures of the time, he was a man more reticent but none the less
forceful, and blessed with the kind of physical greyness that allowed him to move about unrecognised. Hence Jasper’s failure to curry favour.
Hamilton said, ‘And what are you going to do now?’ I had talked of Egypt; he had read, it turned out, some of my despatches. I said I was going to write history books. He said, ‘You’re not going to find yourself more wars? There should be a fair supply in the next few years.’ I said I never wanted to see a war again; I said also that I didn’t want to be a journalist. ‘Pity,’ said Hamilton. ‘I was going to offer you a job.’
Write for me from time to time, he said. Write for me when you feel like it. Write when you like about whatever you like, and make it as cussed as you like. Provoke. Fly kites. Start hares. You can do it, I can tell.
When the first of my pieces came out – an attack on the latest work of a leading academic historian – Jasper was astonished. He felt upstaged, too. There was my name in big letters across the centre page of one of the quality national papers. How, he demanded, had I managed that? Jasper was himself doing quite a bit of journalism at the time. ‘Hamilton asked me,’ I said. ‘How the hell do you know Hamilton?’ ‘Oh,’ I said airily, ‘I ran into him that weekend at Rocqueville. Man I was talking to at dinner, remember?’
Jasper never did get a job in NATO. It occurred to him in time that while this might be a route to power, of a kind, it was not a route to riches. He did the opportunist thing and put a finger in the television pie, got on to the board of a merchant bank and began generally to spread himself around. He was jealous of my successes. Men like Jasper do not really favour women like me; they are fascinated by them and obliged to associate with them, but their real taste is for compliance and subservience. Jasper should have had a Sylvia.
Enough of Jasper. But it is a satisfying irony that it should have been Jasper who inadvertently supplied me with a public pulpit, and was thus indirectly responsible for a great deal else. At the time, it was neither Jasper nor Hamilton who were the central features of that odd visit, but something quite other – the place itself, and the way in which it seemed, at that particular moment, a physical manifestation of history as illusion. I experienced there the most violent outrage. I lay in bed mourning for Tom, but during the hours of daylight, the hours in which I listened to well-fed complacent men and women designing the future and re-arranging the past, I was infuriated. Now, I would be cynically amused. Then, young – well, relatively young – I wanted to assault them with their own blueprints and statistics and assessments. And the chateau itself, as fake as a film set, seemed to make a mockery of its own past, as frivolous as the cherubs and wantons on the salon ceiling. History is disorder, I wanted to scream at them – death and muddle and waste. And here you sit cashing in on it and making patterns in the sand.