Moon Tiger

by Penelope Lively

  ‘It’s been said before.’

  ‘Unusual, perhaps, is what I mean.’

  ‘Peculiar will do.’

  The focus has switched to Claudia. Both recognise that this is unacceptable. ‘Greece,’ says Caxton, conditioned to take up a cue, ‘is a wonderful country. One of my favourite stamping grounds. Do you know Hydra?’

  Claudia does not, which enables him to tell her at length about this tedious piece of rock on which he considers buying a villa. She thinks about the Fates, cackling over their looms or, presumably nowadays, if they move with the times, over their self-operating machinery – cackling, anyway, as they set in train wars, famines, disasters and a million random unimportant conjunctions such as that between herself and this unexceptional but celebrated man.

  And so, eventually, the meal had ended and they had emerged from the restaurant into the hot and dusty afternoon and stepped into the limousine to be driven back over the mountains to the location valley. Claudia sits sunk into the squashy upholstery of the back seat, alongside Caxton, snuffing the leather and some esoteric after-shave of his. Talking. Listening. Observing from time to time the well-behaved landscape that slides past, this way and that, as the chauffeur negotiates the twists and turns of the road. And Caxton notices the time and asks the man to hurry, which he does so that the tyres screech now at the next corner, and at the next they are flung against each other and Caxton says ‘Watch it!’ but with a laugh so that the driver continues thus, swirling them down the mountainside.

  She does not know at first what it is that has happened. One moment the car is smoothly gliding round a bend, Caxton is saying something about bull-fighting – and an instant later the landscape is no longer well-behaved but spins sickeningly around them, uncontrollable trees and mountains swinging and lurching; she is thrown forward and back, there is a thump, a bang and at last nothing at all.

  She fights her way out of some deep buzzing sea. She is back in the car which is slewed right off the road into a bank. The chauffeur is hanging forward over the wheel; the windscreen is shattered; the engine is still running. Into Claudia’s head comes the single thought that she must turn it off – something to do with fire and petrol. She has forgotten James Caxton, and where she is or why. She heaves herself up and leans forward over the seat, groping round the chauffeur’s arm. She finds the ignition key. And now there is silence. She opens the door and staggers out on to the verge. She sits down. All is wonderfully peaceful; cicadas rasp and a bush rustles in the wind. She has no feelings or thoughts; there is a pain in her side but it does not seem important. She is in a state of suspension, and sits thus on a rocky platform staring at a little plant with tiny jewel-like flowers. She looks up; just above her head a bird floats against the deep blue backdrop of the sky. It hangs there, she can see the sheen of its wings; and then the sky becomes grey, the outline of the bird turns fuzzy, and just before she passes out she sees it slide away sideways and down into the valley.

  The chauffeur died. James Caxton fractured his skull, broke a collar-bone and an arm, and cost the insurers some million dollars in lost time. I had concussion and two broken ribs; the Fates were taking only a mild interest in me. The Evening Standard carried a headline – JAMES CAXTON IN CAR CRASH WITH WOMAN COMPANION. Jasper, with whom I was still living off and on, said various things on the telephone, not all of them sympathetic. I lay for a week in a Madrid hospital; on the fifth day Gordon walked into my room and I burst into tears.

  ‘If I’d known I’d have this effect,’ he says, ‘I wouldn’t have come.’ He takes out a handkerchief and wipes her eyes carefully. ‘Now blow…’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ says Claudia. She pushes his hand away, reaches violently towards the bedside table, yelps. ‘Christ…’

  ‘Then don’t thrash around so. Keep still. You don’t look too bad, anyway.’

  ‘Why are you here? You’re in Australia.’

  ‘Sylvia reported. I switched planes. For God’s sake stop crying, Claudia. I haven’t seen you cry since you were about six. What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘It’s called delayed shock. It’s what happens to people when they realise they’re not dead. Perfectly rational, if you think about it.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’ says Gordon. He sits down by the bed. He reaches out suddenly and takes her hand. Holds it. Looks at her. She feels the warmth of his hand, sees his eyes and what is in them until she cannot take it any longer and looks away. He has not touched her for years, except inadvertently. They do not kiss when they meet.

  He gets up and walks over to the window. ‘Not the most distinctive of views. But presumably that won’t have bothered you.’

  Claudia lies looking at him. He is more inaccessible than anyone in the world, she thinks; more intensely known and more inaccessible.

  She is sitting up in bed with a bruise on her forehead and no make-up on. She looks not like dauntless quarrelsome unquenchable Claudia but some pale unstable ghost of herself. And when he sees that she is crying the old proximity is there, it is years ago again, the time when there were only the two of them, before they noticed the rest of the world. He looks at her for a moment with the eyes of then, and she looks back. Neither wishes to return there; both celebrate, in silence, what will never be lost. Gordon stands up. He goes to the window and sees a boulevard with oleander trees, a crowd of people piling into a gaudy yellow bus, posters advertising cigars and washing powders. It occurs to him that Claudia is both closer to and further from him than anyone else, and that he wishes it were otherwise.

  14

  My body records certain events; an autopsy would show that I have had a child, broken some ribs, lost my appendix. Other physical assaults have left no trace; measles, mumps, malaria, suppurations and infections, coughs and colds, upheavals of the digestive system. When I was young I carried on my knee for many years a patch of delicately puckered pink skin preserving the time Gordon pushed me down a cliff at Lyme Regis (or, he would claim, did not); I can no longer find it – the body obliterates, also. A pathologist would learn little more than an archaeologist contemplating ancient bones. I once read an excavation report that described, in the precise and uncommitted language of such documents, the skeleton of an Anglo-Saxon woman found face down in a shallow grave with a heavy rock resting upon the spine; the contorted position of the body and the placing of the rock suggested that she had been buried alive. From far away, beyond bare descriptive words and the silence of bone and stone, comes the roar of pain and violence. On a lesser scale, my pathologist, if given to fancy, might spare a passing thought for the groans of that birth, or speculate about those ribs.

  My body records also a more impersonal history; it remembers Java Man and Australopithecus and the first mammals and strange creatures that flapped and crawled and swam. Its ancestries account, perhaps, for my passion for climbing trees when I was ten and my predilection for floating in warm seas. It has memories I share but cannot apprehend. It links me to the earthworm, to the lobster, to dogs and horses and lemurs and gibbons and the chimpanzee; there, but for the grace of God, went I. Being the raging agnostic that I am, of course, I consider that God had nothing to do with it.

  My body has conditioned things, to some extent. The life of an attractive woman is different from that of a plain one. My hair, my eyes, the shape of my mouth, the contours of breast and thigh have all contributed. The brain may be independent, but personality is not; when I was eight years old I realised that people considered me pretty – from that moment onwards a course was set. Intelligence made me one kind of being; intelligence allied to good looks made me another. This is self-assessment, not complacency.

  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 i
n 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. M
y 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.