Moon Tiger

by Penelope Lively

  The matron’s eyebrows have shot up now almost to her starched cap. Her tone is no longer quite so dispassionate. ‘I’m afraid,’ she says, ‘that Nature has a way of taking its course, in these cases.’

  ‘Then bloody well do something,’ roars Claudia. ‘I want this baby. If you don’t save this baby I’ll… I’ll…’ She sinks back, tears prick her eyes. ‘I’ll kill you,’ she mutters. ‘I’ll kill you, you cow.’

  And hours later, when they are doing things with bowls of water and pails and sheets she is aware of shouting again, shouting at them, swearing at them. ‘ ’Twas neither a girl nor a boy,’ says the Irish sister. ‘Over and done with now, it is. The best thing you can do is forget all about it.’

  11

  The aftermath of war is disorder. An example, incidentally, of the misuse of language: aftermath is a decent agricultural term, it has a precise meaning – the aftermath is the second crop of grass which appears after the mowing of the first. The aftermath of war should, correctly, be another war; it usually is. But the conventional aftermath is the struggle to set straight that which is awry: the taking stock, the counting of the living and the dead, the drift of the dispossessed back to their homelands, the apportioning of blame, the extraction of penalties and, at last, the writing of history. Once it is all written down we know what really happened.

  I visited, late in 1945, a camp for Displaced Persons. I was to write a piece on them for the New Statesman. The camp was somewhere on the German-Polish border, in one of those bits of Europe where national boundaries make no sense, where the landscape has an impersonality and uniformity that makes it a nowhere. You are in the middle of a land mass; there are no edges – just sky, horizon. This area had been disputed for hundreds of years, scuffed about by armies over and over again. Once, presumably, there had been hayfields and little farms, cows and chickens and children. Now, after five years of abuse, it was a wasteland; and in the middle of it was the camp – line upon line of concrete block-houses among which people disconsolately wandered or queued for yet another interview with yet another harassed official surrounded by card-index boxes. I sat in on some of these interviews. Most of the people were old, or they seemed old, their faces belying the figures on their cards; some, though, were young – peasant girls transported as slave labour, their plump country faces grey and scraggy, seventeen turned forty. And they spoke with tongues – you never knew which language would come next: Lithuanian, Serbo-Croat, Ukrainian, Polish, French… Interpreters bustled to and fro. I talked to an old woman whose given nationality was Polish but who spoke French – an elegant drawing-room French. She wore a battered grey coat, a shawl round her head and she smelled a little; but her speech was an echo of some gracious home, of cut glass and silver, of music lessons and governesses. Her husband had died of typhoid, one son had been shot by the Nazis, another had perished in a labour camp, her daughter-in-law and grandchildren had vanished. ‘Je suis seule au monde,’ she said, gazing at me. ‘Seule au monde…’ And all around us the people shuffled past or stood patiently in endless lines.

  I wrote my piece for the New Statesman, I suppose; perhaps I mentioned the old Polish woman. Presumably they tidied her away somewhere; sorted her out to an appropriate country, ticked off her card. She would not be one of those loose ends that cause trouble for years, those perennial matters for international reproach: a Volga German, a Crimean Tartar. At least they knew who she was and where she was.

  For a nation, it is a great historical convenience to have edges. Islands do disproportionately well. I remember thinking about this when I first saw the cliffs of Dover again in 1945. There they were, those cliffs, conjuring up Shakespeare, the dry squeak of chalk on school blackboards and that song about bluebirds. They had barbed wire at their feet and pill-boxes on their tops. There were demobbed soldiers everywhere, conspicuous in their ill-fitting new suits; everyone was grumbling about something. If this was victory, it hardly seemed worth it. I sat in a train that rocked its way slowly through the fields of Kent; the windows were still partially blacked-out, the paint scratched away in wide runnels so that the landscape flickered by in snatches. I thought about those potent cliffs.

  And Gordon was at Victoria to meet me. In a demob suit, with an aggressively short haircut and that mark on his cheek that only I would have noticed.

  From halfway along the platform she can see him. It is as though no one else were there. She halts six feet from him; he is the same and not the same, this is the face she knows better than any face but it is also the face of a stranger. It has new strata; there are accretions and adjustments. The space between them acknowledges this – the six feet of grey station platform; she cannot cross it. To do so is to step back – back into other Claudias, back towards other Gordons. But those Claudias and Gordons are no longer there; they are wiped out just as that known face has been wiped out and another substituted. She is fascinated and alarmed. She searches herself for familiar signals. And then she steps across the six feet of platform, touches him, and the signals flash. But distantly now, distantly, overlaid by too much else.

  He sees that she is smaller and thinner and she has red hair. She is wearing clothes that are not the dingy shoddy garb of everyone else around; her coat is glowing orange, distinctly un-English, she wears a little feathered hat. He was looking at her before he realised this was Claudia (others also glance, or openly stare). She advances towards him, neither smiling nor waving, and then stops. He would think she had not recognised him if it were not that her eyes are fixed upon him.

  And then she steps forward and kisses him. She smells foreign and expensive, but beneath the Chanel or whatever it is there is a whiff – a rich emotive whiff – of unreachable moments. Within him something stirs, raises its head and sniffs. And Claudia is talking about a mark on his face.

  ‘That’s my war wound. Some repellent Indian skin disease. Is it that conspicuous? You, I’m glad to see, are quite unscarred.’

  ‘Am I?’ she says. ‘Good.’

  ‘But your hair’s red. I remembered it brown.’

  ‘My hair was always considered red. It was one of the things Mother held against me, from infancy. How is she?’

  We went to some café and drank dense reeking tea out of those cups half an inch thick. I kept staring round me; London, the buildings, the people, the buses and taxis, had the same unreal quality as Gordon himself – as though it were an invented landscape suddenly made manifest. Only when I saw bomb-sites, and the gutted interior of a house with fireplaces airily exposed and the marks of ghostly staircases, did it strike home that time had passed here also. But I felt like a visitor, not the returning native.

  We talked. We told each other as much as we were ever going to tell of what we had seen and done, of where we had been and with whom. I peered into the spaces in Gordon’s account and he, I suppose, listened to the silences in mine. After an hour or so we were back five years – skirmishing and competing, bidding for one another’s attention. Gordon, I gathered, had been involved with an American girl in Delhi. I asked ‘Why didn’t you get married?’ He laughed and said he hadn’t time to get married. He was going back to the research project he was involved in before the war, there were offers of jobs from all sides, he was going to be in the thick of things.

  A year later he met Sylvia. I was never jealous of Sylvia. It would have been ridiculous. That unknown American girl, though, gave me a nasty twinge. For a year or so I used to imagine her.

  Until I was in my late twenties I never knew a man who interested me as much as Gordon did. That was why it was as it was between us. I measured each man I met against him, and they fell short: less intelligent, less witty, less attractive. I tested myself for the frisson that Gordon induced, and it was not there. It seemed profoundly unfortunate that there was no one else in the world to match up to me except my brother.

  Incest is closely related to narcissism. When Gordon and I were at our most self-conscious – afire with the sexuality and egotism of
late adolescence – we looked at one another and saw ourselves translated. I saw in Gordon’s maleness an erotic flicker of myself; and when he looked at me I saw in his eyes that he too saw some beckoning reflection. We confronted each other like mirrors, flinging back reflections in endless recession. We spoke to each other in code. Other people became, for a while, for a couple of contemptuous years, a proletariat. We were an aristocracy of two.

  The schoolroom has been turned into a dance studio. The sofa and chairs are pushed back against the walls, the carpet rolled up, the gramophone stands upon the old baize-covered table.

  Gordon smells now of man. In her nostrils, as she presses up against him, breasts to his shirt-front, hair brushing his cheek, is a full-blown male scent, almost anonymous, no longer Gordon but something else. It is delicious, and there flows through Claudia the most strange and interesting feeling.

  ‘Slow, quick, quick, slow… Other foot, you idiot… Start again.’

  People at Cambridge are all doing rag-time now, Gordon says. But that is boring. So is the Charleston. Hopping about like loonies, says Gordon. No – the only thing worth doing is a slow foxtrot. And a quickstep. And you have to be better at it than anyone else, that is the whole point. You have to be so expert that you stop the room – you are left alone on the dance floor. That is what they plan – at the Molesworths’ do next week.

  ‘When I press your back we’ll go into reverse. Now…’

  And firmly, warmly, Gordon’s hand manipulates the small of her back and they swing expertly sideways, hip to hip. Slow, quick, quick, slow. ‘Oh, very nice…’ says Gordon. ‘Very stylish… And again…’ Slow, quick, quick, slow. Across and across the room, again and again, more adept each time, moving as one… A dash to the gramophone when it begins to run down… then body to body again, thigh to thigh… oh, heavenly, this is… let’s go on for ever, we’re getting better and better, let’s never stop…

  And so, for a long time, they don’t. Dusk creeps into the room; they break off only to change the record or wind up the gramophone; neither says a word. Oh bliss, thinks Claudia… Goodness what bliss… She savours this extraordinary feeling, this excitement… She has never felt like this before. What is it?

  They stop, eventually, by the window, in the blue cool twilight, and look at each other. Their faces are so close they nearly touch. And then they do touch – his mouth against hers, his tongue between her lips, her mouth opening. The gramophone needle sticks in the groove, the same note hiccupping out over and over, again and again.

  ‘And another thing,’ says Mother. ‘Apparently at the Molesworths’ on Thursday you danced with Gordon the entire evening. Mrs Molesworth says it wasn’t that you hadn’t other partners, either – she says Nicholas asked you at least twice, and Roger Strong. It’s so rude. And apparently Gordon never asked Cynthia Molesworth once. You’re too old to behave like that now.’

  She lies on the grass of the river-bank, quite naked. The shadows of the willow leaves make fretted patterns on her body. Gordon rises from the water; he heaves himself up on the bank and comes to sit beside her. His thighs are streaked with mud, his hair plastered to his head. After a moment he reaches for his jacket, takes a pen from his pocket. He traces around the edges of the leaf shadows, on her stomach, her arms, legs, breasts; she is marbled all over in pale blue ink. ‘And how am I going to get all this off?’ she enquires. ‘Don’t be so prosaic,’ says Gordon. ‘This is Art. I’m turning you into an objet trouvé… Turn over.’ She turns onto her stomach and laughs into the grass; the pen wanders insect-like over her skin.

  ‘You’re both very silent this morning,’ says Mother. ‘Pass me the marmalade please, Gordon. And Claudia dear, I don’t think that dress you had on last night is at all suitable for down here. Wear it when you’re in town if you must but it is simply not the thing for the country. People were looking at you.’

  ‘Good serve,’ says Gordon. ‘Forty-love.’ As they pass each other he murmurs, ‘Slam it at her backhand this time.’

  They have trounced all. The rest of the tennis party sit around amid the rose-beds, watching them with dislike. Claudia saunters to the back of the court, admiring as she does so her bare sunburned legs. She turns; she takes her time over the serve, savouring for a moment Gordon’s back, the way his hair lies on his shirt collar, the shape of him.

  ‘The children are off to Paris for a few days,’ says Mother. ‘Mind, I do feel Claudia is young yet for this kind of thing but she has Gordon to look after her.’

  ‘It’s Pernod,’ says Gordon. ‘And you’d jolly well better get to like it. You can’t come here and not drink Pernod.’ And presently when they get up and move on she realises that she is floating, not walking but most agreeably floating down the street, holding his arm. ‘We must come here often,’ she says. ‘Naturally,’ says Gordon. ‘All civilised people spend a lot of time in France.’ It is his birthday; he is twenty today.

  ‘Claudia is going to Oxford,’ says Mother. ‘Of course quite a lot of girls do now and she has always been one for getting her own way.’

  A summer. Two summers, perhaps, and a winter. Time out of mind ago – at least not out of mind but shrunk to a necklace of moments when we did this or that, when we said this or that, were here or there. When we were at home, sprawled side by side in the schoolroom, absorbed in one another while downstairs Mother sings to herself as she does the flowers. Or in Gordon’s rooms at Cambridge, or at a theatre in London or roaming the Dorset landscape, arrogantly bored. I don’t wonder people looked at us with dislike. A year, perhaps two… And then we both began to look beyond each other, to wander away, to take an interest in the despised proletariat beyond. That time went; it is also forever there, conditioning how we are with one another. Because of it, other people are still excluded. Most of them never knew this; only Sylvia, poor stupid Sylvia, who got a whiff of it but never knew what it was she smelled. Later, much later.

  There is roast chicken for Sunday lunch, bread sauce, bacon rolls, all the trimmings… Mother has done everything herself, valiantly, with little self-deprecating comments. She has taught herself to cook, brave Mother, since the defection of the last of the village helps. Claudia gave her Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking for Christmas which was received politely but without enthusiam; no coq au vin or quiche lorraine has appeared on the table at Sturminster Newton.

  ‘It’s lovely, Mrs Hampton,’ gushes Sylvia, the good daughter-in-law. ‘Absolutely delicious. I do think you’re clever.’

  Mother sits at the head of the table, Sylvia at her right. Claudia is opposite, Gordon at the end. Mother and Sylvia continue to discuss bread sauce, butchers, and, in more muted tones, the absorbing progress of Sylvia’s first pregnancy.

  Claudia hears this as background noise: the buzzing of flies, a lawnmower. She has not seen Gordon for a couple of months. There is an unresolved argument to be taken up and a couple of scurrilous anecdotes to tell, one of which makes Gordon laugh uproariously. Sylvia breaks off what she is saying to Mother and turns. Her eyes are jumpy. She cries, ‘Oh, what’s the joke – do tell!’ and Gordon, getting up to carve himself more chicken, says it’s just something about someone we used to know, not all that funny really, anyone else want some more? ‘Meanie!’ pouts Sylvia. ‘Claudia, you tell me…’ and Claudia focuses for the first time on her sister-in-law, who is wearing what appears to be a vast billowing flowered pillow case from which sprouts her pink, pretty face, her golden hair. Sylvia arouses, really, no emotions in Claudia at all, beyond a certain incredulity. She does occasionally wonder what Gordon talks to her about.

  ‘Oh – just a bit of gossip,’ she says. ‘Nothing really…’

  Sylvia turns to her mother-in-law. ‘Were they always like this, Mrs Hampton? So… so cliquey?’

  ‘Oh no,’ says Mother tranquilly. ‘They squabbled dreadfully.’

  ‘So did we!’ cries Sylvia. ‘Desmond and I. We loathed each other. We were absolutely normal. We still are. I mean, I’m fond of
Desmond but really we haven’t got a thing in common.’

  Gordon sits down again with a plateful of food. ‘Claudia and I will do our best to be abnormal in privacy in future, then. OK, Claudia? We can stage a good fight for you now, if you like.’

  Sylvia is flustered. Her hand flies to his arm, kneads it, her face becomes even pinker. ‘Oh heavens, I don’t mean you’re peculiar, just it’s funny a brother and sister being so kind of intimate. Lovely, really.’

  All through what she was saying to Mrs Hampton she could hear them – or at least, maddeningly, not quite hear them. Gordon talking in that tone he uses to no one else. Claudia’s deep voice, a voice that can be so sarcastic, so unnerving, but to Gordon is so confidential. And when she tries to join in they clam up, fall silent, Gordon changes the subject, offers second helpings.

  Claudia is wearing a red dress, very tight round the waist and hips. She is skinny thin these days. ‘I love your frock,’ says Sylvia determinedly. ‘I wish I could get into things like that.’ She pats her tummy and eyes Claudia: Claudia who is not married, not going to have a baby. She feels a little comforting glow of complacency. Thus bolstered, she is able to become gay and joky, to ask Mrs Hampton – who has been sweet, with whom there is never any problem – about when Claudia and Gordon were children, to chatter amusingly about herself and Desmond. And then Gordon says something in his shutting-out voice, his cool as-though-to-a-casual-acquaintance voice, and she is no longer bolstered, no longer glowing. ‘I don’t mean you’re peculiar,’ she wails. ‘It’s lovely, really.’ She has not got it right. They are both looking at her now, Gordon and Claudia; she has got their attention all right, but not in the way she wanted. Are they laughing at her? Is that the tilt of little smiles at the corners of their mouths?