Moon Tiger

by Penelope Lively

  Claudia is really Mummy, but she does not like being Mummy so you have to say Claudia. Granny Hampton and Granny Branscombe both like being grannies so it is all right to say Granny. Mummy is a silly word, whereas Claudia is my name. Whereas is a funny word; you do not say it, you blow it. Whereas, whereas. Whereas Claudia is my name.

  Lisa is a better name. Claudia bangs, like the gong in the hall at Sotleigh. Bang – whoom! Lisa makes a nice silky noise, like streams or rain. Lisa. Lisa. If you say it over and over again it is not you any more, not me Lisa, I, me, but a word you never heard before. Lisa. Lisa.

  The thing with legs, the wood thing, it suddenly occurs to her, will probably bite. She drops it quickly. She would stamp on it to make sure, horrid thing, but Claudia is watching. Claudia’s eyes have black holes just like the eye in the tree, and inside Claudia there are little fierce animals that might come peeping out of those eyes, little biting animals, little animals with sharp teeth.

  She stands on tiptoes to see Claudia’s eyes better and Claudia’s face turns cross.

  Once upon a time a long time ago not as long ago as all that she went to the beach with Claudia. She went to the beach in Claudia’s car. The trees beside the road went past the car sha-sha-sha-sha and the hedges slid about and then there was the beach and the sea rushing at you, too wet too deep too rough. Claudia made you get inside a yellow rubber ring and go out of your depth. It’s all right, said Claudia, you’re perfectly all right, I’ve got you, I won’t let you go. And underneath you there is nothing but water deep deep water with fishes in it and if Claudia lets you go you will sink to the bottom. All that was a long time ago. Quite a long time ago.

  She will spread butter on Rex’s back and make him into a sandwich. A dog sandwich. First butter and then jam. The berries on that bush can be the jam. But first the butter… lots and lots of butter. If she does not listen to Claudia, if she does not answer, Claudia will stop asking things and disappear. Whoosh! Whoosh into the air she will disappear like magic, like the smoke from her cigarette melting melting going away into nothingness, emptiness. You can walk through the smoke, the yellow sunny smoke, you can push it away with your hands, walk through it like through water.

  She will magic Claudia away like the smoke. She tells Rex that she is magicking Claudia.

  That Lisa – that Lisa fettered by ignorance but also freed by it – is as dead now as ammonites and belemnites, as the figures in Victorian photographs, as the Plymouth settlers. Irretrievable also for the Lisa of today, who must grope with the rest of us for that distant self, that other self, that ephemeral teasing creature. The Lisa of today is an anxious busy woman going on for forty trying to cope with two truculent adolescent sons and a husband generally referred to as a prominent local estate agent and in my view a ripe example of British degeneracy between the Age of Macmillan and the Age of Thatcher. To these have we sunk. Harry Jamieson has a damp handshake, damp opinions steeped in the brine of the local Rotary Association and the Daily Telegraph, an appalling homestead on the outskirts of Henley with tennis court, swimming-pool and sweep of gravel that apes the country estate to which he aspires. I have not spent more than half a dozen hours in his company since the wedding. This, let me say, out of charity as much as self-preservation: the poor man is terrified of me. At the very sight of me his vowels falter, his forehead glistens, his hands dispensing gin and tonic or Pimms No. 1 fumble with ice-cubes, send glasses flying, cut themselves with the lemon knife. When I want to see Lisa I take her out to lunch in London, leaving Harry Jamieson to the tranquillity of Rotarian dinners, the golf club and the local Bench.

  Why did she marry him? Ah, why indeed. Here I go again – pondering the curious forces that weld two people together, send them clamped to one another down the years. I should imagine that in this instance the fault is mine as much as anyone’s. Had I not been as I am, Lisa would not have felt impelled, at nineteen, to grab at the status of marriage, at a world of her own, at the first likely young man to come along.

  Naturally, I attended the wedding. So did her father.

  Claudia stands face to face with Jasper, in the centre of a discreet vacuum; they are pruriently eyed by the other guests.

  ‘Well,’ she says. ‘So here you are.’

  ‘Here I am. And here are you. You’re looking very well, Claudia.’

  There are touches of grey to his hair. He has still that slightly rumpled look – expensive suit in need of a press, tie askew, ash on his sleeve. She takes a deep whiff of him. ‘I hear you’ve got a new girl friend. And that they’re getting younger all the time. That’s a bad sign – you used to be more stylish.’

  This he ignores. He waves his glasses at the room. ‘Who are all these people?’

  ‘The jeunesse dorée of Henley,’ says Claudia.

  ‘We should circulate, I suppose.’

  ‘Circulate away.’

  He smiles, his sexual confiding smile, and she feels herself curdle with irritation and desire.

  Jasper sees, across this roomful of dowdy strangers, Claudia. Claudia in a red dress, unhatted amid the veils and feathers, wonderfully inappropriate. They advance upon each other. He stands considering her, remembering her, savouring her. ‘I see your last book all over the place, Claudia.’

  ‘So I should hope.’

  ‘Are you well?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Is this young man… adequate?’

  ‘He seems,’ says Claudia, ‘reasonable enough.’

  ‘Lisa looks splendid.’

  ‘No she doesn’t. She’s washed out, as usual, and that dress is a disaster. Your mother’s doing.’

  He glances over her shoulder and sees his mother, valiantly smiling and greeting. ‘We should circulate.’

  ‘Circulate away,’ says Claudia. She looks at him, and he decides suddenly that he will not go back to London tonight after all.

  ‘Have dinner with me?’

  ‘Not on your life,’ snaps Claudia.

  He shrugs. ‘Someone expecting you?’

  ‘Mind your own business, Jasper.’

  At which point what had been a whim becomes a necessity; he puts his hand on hers, to take her glass. ‘Let me get you another drink, Claudia.’

  And Lisa, so clenched that she feels she might well burst – out of her own thin body, out of the heavenly tussore silk dress Granny Branscombe ordered from Harrods – sees them standing together in the middle of the room (people furtively staring…) and her stomach churns. Are they having a row? If they are not having a row that is possibly even worse. She chews her lip and her heart thumps and the glory of the day is dimmed. She wishes they had not come, that they would go away, that they did not exist. Her mother hasn’t bothered to get a hat, and her father is not wearing morning dress like Harry’s father, just an ordinary suit. But even so they look more glamorous than everyone else, larger and brighter and more interesting.

  Jasper and I spent the night together in a hotel in Maidenhead, quarrelled over breakfast and did not see one another again for two years. Just like old times. The sex was prolonged and memorable; the quarrel also. It centred on Jasper’s current activities as a television mogul. He was the power behind the lavish series recently screened which presented a dramatised history of the last war. A fictional figure, a young officer, was followed in his progress through various theatres of war, from the Balkans to the Far East, against a background of enacted scenes of history – Churchill’s War Cabinet, D-Day, Yalta… The enterprise was much praised and discussed; it was to be the forerunner of many such glossy, expensive productions, meticulously reconstructing the recent past. Jasper was purring with satisfaction. He sought a tribute from me. I said ‘I detested it.’ He asked why. I told him: because it diminished the past, turned history into entertainment. Opinionated and dogmatic as ever, said Jasper, the trouble with you is you have no flexibility of mind; this is a new medium. The emotional temperature rose. I said that it was indeed, and it enabled people like him to make a lot of money
out of the suffering of others. You, snapped Jasper, take royalties on your books, which deal with similar matters. I held forth about the difference between history as reasoned analysis and history as spectacle. He said my books were overblown flashy stuff; he said I was jealous. He dragged in that film about Cortez. Different, I said, I was merely an onlooker. We slammed at each other to and fro across the starched white tablecloth of some flowery riverside pub while waitresses cowered against the walls. And eventually he said, ‘You’re absurdly overheated about this, Claudia. You seem to take the series as a personal affront. Why, one asks oneself.’ I got up and walked out. Stupid thing to do.

  Claudia, alone, sits before the television. The room is warm and quiet; the curtains are drawn, shutting out rain and traffic; she has a glass of wine to hand and her feet up, the day’s work is done. The titles roll, the story begins. It is both a public story and a private one; the young hero, called up in 1939, is seen saying farewell to his fiancée and his mother, the German army rolls into France, Churchill confers with his advisers. And the telling, too, has two dimensions. There is the expensive fiction, with its accomplished actors, its considered production, its attention to every detail from the precise sheen of the hair oil on the young hero’s head to the dents in the NAAFI tea-urns and the background rattle of a Jeep engine. And slotted into this are clips of film, looking in contrast somehow amateurish, quaint and not quite real – shots of bucking guns, silent running soldiers, lines of tanks or lorries trooping in at one side of the picture and out at the other. Fiction is in full warm colour, the actors have pink faces, there is green grass and blue sky; reality is black and white, the young soldiers grinning and waving on the deck of a ship have white faces, the sea is black and desert grey. Claudia sips her wine and watches intently – she notes the pack of Players cigarettes that the hero takes from his battle-dress pocket and the tilt of his fiancée’s saucer hat; the sticky scent of nostalgia is trapped there behind the glass screen. She observes a black file of Italian prisoners trudging through the grey desert, black smoke streaming from a crashed plane, white smoke puffing from the gun of a tank.

  The story that she is watching has, now, a third dimension, that is both more indistinct and yet clearer by far. This dimension has smell and feel and touch. It smells of Moon Tiger, kerosene, dung and dust. Its feelings are so sharp that Claudia gets up, slams the television into silence and sits staring at the blank pane of glass, where the story rolls on.

  ‘History,’ Jasper spat across the breakfast table in Maidenhead, ‘is after all in the public domain.’

  Oh, it is indeed. That’s just the trouble, as the wretched public has been finding out, century after century. And of course he has a point – historians reap their royalties so why not Jasper and his like? It is only opinionated dogmatic bitches like me who are going to argue that there are certain sanctities, that by the time we have reduced everything to entertainment we shall find that it was no joke after all.

  Jasper got rich. He had been comfortable enough before; now he was wealthy. On the boards of film companies and merchant banks, adviser to this and that, in demand everywhere; admired, disliked, fawned upon, mistrusted.

  I published my Tito book, five years’ work, and received much attention. Jasper wrote. ‘Congratulations, my dear. “People in glasshouses…” ’

  Enough of Jasper. It should be clear by now how he fits into the scheme of things. Lover to begin with, sparring partner always, father of my child; our lives sometimes fusing, sometimes straying apart, always connected. I loved him once, but cannot remember how that felt.

  I was talking earlier about language. I have put my faith in language – hence the panic when a simple word eludes me, when I stare at a piece of flowered material in front of a window and do not know what name to give it. Curtain. Thank God. I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred names. ‘What’s that called?’ Lisa used to ask me. ‘And that? And that?’

  What I could offer Lisa was not the conventional haven of maternal love and concern but my mind and my energy. If she had not acquired these genetically then I was quite prepared to show her how to think and act. I was no good at kissing away tears or telling bedtime stories – any mother can do that: my uses were potentially far more significant.

  She was a disappointment to me. And I, presumably, to her. I looked for my own alter ego, the querying rebellious maverick child I had been myself; Lisa looked for a reassuring clothes-shopping sherry-drinking figure like the mothers of her school friends. As she grew older I felt more and more her silent stare, each time I visited her at Sotleigh, took her over to Beaminster to stay with my mother, or had her in the flat in London for a couple of days. There, she would wander around, a skimpy pallid little figure standing in doorways or perching on a sofa. I bought her books. I took her to museums and art galleries; I tried to encourage opinion and curiosity. Lisa, growing longer of limb and less flexible of mind, became ordinary. She began to bore me. And I sensed her disapproval. I have attracted disapproval all my life. Usually it leaves me indifferent, occasionally it delights me. But the disapproval of a child is oddly unsettling. I would look up from my desk and see Lisa hanging on a curtain, chewing a fingernail, eyeing me. She is frozen thus in the mind’s eye, many times over, preserved in those hours that both our lives contain. Recollections that we barely share. My hours and Lisa’s are different; as different as I am different from Lisa.

  ‘Go and read the book I gave you,’ says Claudia, her pen working to and fro across the paper.

  ‘I’ve been reading it.’

  ‘Then…’ Claudia pauses, scans what she has written, ponders. She looks up. At Lisa – intrusive distracting little shadow at the window. ‘Don’t bite your fingernails like that, darling. And don’t pull the curtain.’

  Lisa is silent. Her finger falls from her mouth, her hand from the curtain. Otherwise she does not move.

  Claudia reaches for another sheet of paper, writes. ‘Please, Lisa, go and find something to do. I’m busy. I have to deal with these letters. Later we’ll go out.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ says Lisa, after a minute… two minutes.

  No more of this, thinks Claudia, next time I’ll get a girl from an agency to take her to the park, the Zoo, anything… You need a certain mentality to cope with children. I don’t have it. Thank God.

  Claudia’s fingernails are pink. Bright pink like sugar mice. If you had fingernails like that you would be like Claudia; you could do what you liked and say what you liked and go where you liked. You would be busy busy all the time talking to your friends on the telephone, coming in going out back later tell the porter to get us a taxi darling, put your coat on hurry hurry.

  If you bite your fingernails no one will want to marry you, Granny says. No one has ever married Claudia. Jasper and Claudia did not get married because they didn’t love each other enough, Claudia says. You have to love someone very much before you marry them. If they had bitten fingernails you wouldn’t want to marry them even if you loved them. You cannot paint your fingernails pink until you are grown-up, which is never. On Claudia’s dressing-table there are little bottles with different kinds of pink – Pink Clover and Blush Pink and Hot Pink and Hawaiian Red. On Granny’s dressing-table there is Eau de Cologne and Pond’s Cold Cream and the Maison Pearson hairbrush and the mirror with the silver handle.

  ‘Find something to do,’ says Claudia. I can’t, shouts Lisa, I can’t I can’t I can’t I don’t know where to find it I don’t know where to look I want pink fingernails like yours I want to be you not me I want to make you look at me I want you to say Lisa how pretty you are.

  5

  ‘God,’ she says, ‘is an unprincipled bastard, wouldn’t you agree?’

  And the nurses, who are aged twenty-one and twenty-four, freeze for an instant amid their deft tucking and folding and heaving
. They exchange quick knowing glances. ‘Goodness,’ says the fair nurse. ‘That’s a funny thing to say. Do you want tea or coffee, Miss Hampton?’

  ‘Come,’ says Claudia. ‘You can’t work in a place like this and never have given the matter a thought. Is He or isn’t He?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not religious,’ says the dark nurse. ‘Not a bit. My mum is, though, she goes to church. Tea or coffee, dear?’

  ‘Well, I hope she knows what she’s about,’ says Claudia. ‘Tea. No sugar.’

  I would never have agreed to Lisa being christened. Jasper wouldn’t have cared one way or the other. The grandmothers, in cunning collusion, had it done without mentioning the matter, smuggling her along to the vicar at Sotleigh (and a nice little tea-party for a few old friends after, I don’t doubt). I found out by accident, months later, and rounded on them both. ‘What’s this?’ I said. ‘Spiritual vaccination? A bit of crafty life insurance? And who asked me?’ They defended themselves according to their lights. ‘We didn’t ask you because you were so busy,’ said Mother. ‘And we knew you wouldn’t want to come.’ Lady Branscombe sighed, ‘Claudia dear… We just thought it would be nice. The poor little pet – one wants to do everything one can for her. And the vicar would have been so hurt not to be asked.’ Lisa was enrolled in the Church of England in order not to give offence and so that Lady Branscombe could get out the family christening robe and the Crown Derby tea service. ‘Well,’ said Jasper, ‘it does no positive harm, I daresay.’ Oh no, none at all; just as well to belong to several clubs, you never know which may come in useful.

  ‘Incidentally,’ says Claudia, ‘have you ever resigned from the Church?’

  Lisa jumps, and lowers the book she has been reading; her mother’s eyes are still closed, her sharp thin nose points still at the ceiling, but she is not, evidently, asleep.

  ‘You’re awake… I hadn’t realised.’

  ‘Ah,’ says Claudia. ‘Is that what I am? I sometimes wonder.’