Moon Tiger

by Penelope Lively

  Which of course was not so.

  ‘I am telephoning you,’ says a faint voice, through a blizzard of atmospherics.

  ‘I know you’re telephoning me,’ says Claudia.

  ‘The newspaper is giving me your telephone number.’

  Claudia sighs. The newspaper has no business to do any such thing. It knows that. Some stupid girl. And some tiresome nut pestering. ‘Look,’ she begins…

  ‘From Budapest I am telephoning you.’

  Claudia takes a breath. Oh. Oho… Hence the crackling. There is a noise now like a small bonfire somewhere along the line. ‘Hello?’ she says. ‘Hello? Can you talk louder?’

  ‘I am telephoning you for my son who is in Wimbledon. My son Laszlo.’

  ‘Wimbledon?’ cries Claudia. ‘Do you mean Wimbledon, London?’

  ‘My son is in Wimbledon, London for his studies.’

  ‘Who are you?’ says Claudia. ‘Please tell me your name. Please talk slowly and loudly.’

  And through the bonfire and the exploding fireworks and the oceanic gales there comes this voice – from another place but not, oh indeed not, from another time. ‘… I am university professor… my son Laszlo who is eighteen years old… student of art… visiting in your country before these events of which you write in your paper, do you know of what I speak?’ (‘Yes, yes,’ cries Claudia. ‘How did you…? No, never mind, go on, please go on, I can hear you fairly well.’) ‘… I am telling my son he must not come back to his home, I am telling him to stay in your country… I think I am not able to speak to you for long, you understand, I am sorry to ask you this but I have no friend in your country, I think you are a person who is perhaps interested in what happens here… no money… eighteen years old… must not come back to his home… people who perhaps can help my son?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Claudia. ‘There are people who will help your son.’ The bonfire is roaring now; the gales howl. ‘I can hardly hear you. Please give me the address. The address in Wimbledon. Please give me the address in… at your home. No – no, don’t do that. Will you telephone me again?’

  ‘I think that will not be possible. I think soon perhaps I shall not have address. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Claudia. ‘I’m afraid I do.’

  And so here is Laszlo, a child of his time, sitting in Claudia’s Fulham flat on an October afternoon. Outside are the unremarkable London noises of feet on pavements, a throbbing taxi, an aeroplane overhead; Laszlo sits on the edge of the sofa with a small kit-bag at his feet. He has lank black hair, acne and a heavy cold. He owns nothing but the clothes he wears, a change of shirt and socks, a map of London, a pocket Oxford English dictionary and a handful of postcards from the Tate Gallery. He has also, of course, a passport which nails him for who he is and whence he comes.

  ‘This is a terrible deciding,’ he says.

  ‘Decision,’ says Claudia. ‘Not deciding. I’m sorry…’ she adds, ‘… as though it mattered. Damn words.’

  ‘Words are not damn,’ says Laszlo. ‘English I must speak. Good English.’

  There he sits, in his baggy kneed trousers and his too-tight sweater. And Claudia is consumed by a surge of that most stark of all emotions: pity. You poor little sod, she thinks. You poor little wretch, you’re one of those for whom history really pulls out the stops. You are indeed someone who cannot call his life his own. Free will, right now, must have a hollow sound.

  ‘If you decide to stay I shall do whatever I can for you. You can live here, for a start. I’ll find out about places in art colleges.’

  There is a silence. ‘I shall never see again my father,’ says Laszlo. His mother, it appears, died when he was a child.

  ‘Never is perhaps too strong…’ murmurs Claudia.

  ‘Never. I have also aunt and grandmother and cousins.’

  Claudia nods. And what are you offered instead? she thinks. This airy concept called freedom which cannot at the moment seem anything of the kind. All the eighteen year olds I know are worrying about sex and examinations: that is freedom.

  ‘I think I go back to Budapest,’ he says. He looks at her with hang-dog eyes, beseeching her to prescribe.

  Claudia gets up. ‘I’m going to make some supper. You go and have a nice hot bath. Lie in it and think about nothing, if possible. You aren’t going to decide anything until the morning, anyway. Or the next day or the one after.’

  For several days Laszlo agonised. He sat around the flat in a fog of misery, or walked the streets. His cold ripened. When I found myself irritated by his sniffing I knew that our relationship would endure. Someone had evidently brought him up nicely; in the thick of that anguished time he remembered to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and kept trying to do the washing up. And when his father’s letter reached him, six closely-written sheets posted before the telephone call, he gave in. He spent three hours alone in my spare bedroom with the letter and then came out and said, ‘I stay here.’

  ‘Good,’ says Claudia briskly. ‘Then we must get on with seeing about things. Do you want to go to art college in London or somewhere else? I’ll take you to look at some places. There’s a committee collecting people like you. We’d better get in touch with them. There are quite a few of you, apparently. And you’d better go out and buy a coat and a thicker sweater before the weather gets any colder. You can’t go on walking around clad as for the central European summer.’

  Good grief, she thinks, who is this talking?

  Thus came Laszlo, washed into my life by the Kremlin. I remember feeling a curious satisfaction, as though one had been enabled to frustrate Fate. Hubris, of course; I too was Laszlo’s fate. And what did I – forty-six-year-old busy committed Claudia – want with a disturbed artistically inclined adolescent boy speaking fractured English?

  ‘I should be dead,’ says Laszlo. ‘I should better be dead like Hungarian people.’

  He stands wearing the coat bought with money she made him take (a loan, it is called, entered sternly by him in a Woolworth’s notebook). The coat is a size too large and hangs down his thin shanks. The acne is worse than ever. He stands in the front hall of the flat, glowering.

  ‘You are very kind to me. Always you are being very kind to me. I am most grateful.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ says Claudia. ‘Hate me if you want to. You’re perfectly entitled to hate someone, and I’m handy. Go ahead.’

  ‘What means handy?’ snarls Laszlo.

  Laszlo gets drunk. He learns about pubs and goes one night to the King’s Road where he falls in with some gang of young sparks, returns to the flat after midnight and is copiously sick on the bathroom floor. The next morning he comes to Claudia with his kit-bag packed and offers to leave. Claudia says that will not be necessary.

  Laszlo draws. He covers sheet after sheet of rough grainy paper from the grocer round the corner with huge wild charcoal drawings of guns, of tanks, of shattered buildings, of huddled people. Claudia pins some of them up on her walls. ‘These are good,’ she says.

  ‘No, they are not good,’ says Laszlo. ‘They are terrible, bad, awful.’ He takes them down when she is out and burns them in the kitchen bin. The flat reeks of charred paper. Claudia says, ‘Do what you like with your pictures but you’ve no damn business setting my flat on fire.’

  Lisa, when she comes to the flat, is cool towards Laszlo. He offers to take her to Battersea, but she will not go. ‘Why not?’ says Claudia. ‘I thought you wanted to go on the Big Dipper.’ ‘I don’t like his spotty face,’ mutters Lisa. Claudia, through clenched teeth, says in that case she can do without the Big Dipper, once and for all.

  Laszlo gets a letter, posted in Austria. It is from his aunt. His father is in prison. There is no address any more for his father. Laszlo tells this to Claudia, handing her the letter because he has forgotten for the moment that she cannot read Hungarian. He has been weeping, Claudia sees. Claudia asks him to translate the letter for her because it will give him something to do. As he does so she thinks intensely o
f this woman who is a whole life for Laszlo but just a voice for her, and of this faceless man, another whole unimaginable life.

  *

  Laszlo gets drunk again. Alone, this time, in the flat. Claudia invades his room, finds the empty whisky bottle and plonks it on the sitting-room table. ‘Next time you want to do that,’ she says, ‘tell me and I’ll join you. As it happens I’m not particularly partial to whisky but we have a tradition in this country that no one gets sloshed on their own. OK?’

  Claudia sets Laszlo the task of learning London. She makes him ride bus routes from end to end, walk miles every day. Laszlo complains. ‘Do it,’ she orders. ‘It’s the only way you’re going to grow a new skin.’

  On Claudia’s birthday Laszlo presents her with an enormous bunch of daffodils. He has picked them, it emerges, in Kensington Gardens. Amazingly, no one noticed.

  Guided by me, Laszlo inspected London art colleges and eventually selected Camberwell. He could have gone wherever he wished; the whole of the western world wanted to compensate for the Russian tanks. Laszlo was made a fuss of by both teachers and fellow students. Within a few weeks he was wearing a French beret and a silk paisley scarf tucked into the neck of his shirt. He started smoking Gauloises and going to films at the Curzon. He had a grant now and some money from the committee set up to supervise the Hungarian students. Sometime in the spring he moved out of my flat to live with friends south of the river. Periodically he would quarrel with the friends, or they would all be thrown out for not paying the rent, and he would move back in with me again until some new arrangement was sorted out. I became used to late-night calls from phone boxes, to Laszlo’s lanky figure on the doorstep. My small spare room – as opposed to the one usually occupied by Lisa – became known as his room. He would drift away for weeks on end, neither writing nor telephoning, and then come bounding back.

  It was to go on like that for ten years or so.

  I watched Laszlo mutate. I watched him turn from a disoriented boy to a volatile adult. To be honest, I have never been certain how much of Laszlo’s instability can be attributed to history and how much to temperament. Perhaps he would have been like that anyway. And to be fair he himself never for one moment blamed circumstances for anything. What he did do was cleave unto his adoptive country. Within two years Laszlo was speaking a more demotic English than his peers; he became aggressively insular. He cultivated the most English friends he could lay hands on – a bizarre mixture of working-class boys with strident London accents and laconic offcuts of the upper class, with double-barrelled names. He seldom talked about Hungary and became irritated when the subject came up; whatever was going on went on within. He avoided the overtures of fellow expatriates – that mildly louche and mysterious Eastern European sub-culture that lurked then in South Ken and Earls Court. He flirted for a while with Anglo-Catholicism. Then he dropped that and joined the Labour party. He took up, in turn, bird-watching, vegetarianism, judo, gliding and every passing artistic fashion. His attitude towards me varied from amiably patronising to effusively affectionate.

  Laszlo is a little tipsy. He lies on the sofa with his feet on the arm.

  Claudia says, ‘You might take your shoes off.’

  ‘You are being bourgeois,’ says Laszlo. He removes his shoes. ‘You are my mother, Claudia.’

  ‘No, I’m not, thank God. And you shouldn’t talk like that.’

  ‘No,’ says Laszlo, after a moment. ‘You are right. But I want to say something. Who else can I say it to? It is this. I like men. Not girls.’

  ‘So?’ says Claudia. ‘If that’s the way you are, then that’s the way you are.’

  Lisa never accepted Laszlo. When she was a child she watched him suspiciously. Was she jealous? Did she think of him as my surrogate son? Was he, indeed, my surrogate son? I think not. But who am I to say – all I can do is record what I felt about Laszlo. And what I felt was compunction, responsibility and, eventually, great affection. Which is quite a lot. But Lisa had no need to be jealous. When she was older – seventeen, eighteen – she was polite but distant with him. Nowadays, on the rare occasions when she meets him, she behaves as towards a second cousin who has fallen upon hard times and might be going to ask for a loan.

  By the time Laszlo was in his early thirties he had simmered down, insofar as he ever would. He went to live with an older man in Camden Town – an up-market antique dealer with one of those shops that has nothing in it but three pieces of expensive furniture and a couple of Chinese pots. I have never cared for the fellow but he has looked after Laszlo, endured his moods and provided him with somewhere to work. Laszlo is not a successful artist. I can quite understand why few people want to buy his paintings; they are too uncomfortable to live with. They howl of malaise; they jar the eye; they are discordant and disturbing. Nightmare creatures stalk through surreal landscapes; things fall apart; anguished people scurry in broken cities. They hang on my walls, but then I have no choice: if I won’t honour them, who will? Anyway, I’m used to them.

  15

  ‘For God’s sake…’ says Claudia. ‘You’re supposed to jolly me along, not sit there wringing your hands.’ It is a bad day; her voice comes out as a whisper.

  ‘They didn’t tell me,’ wails Laszlo. ‘We have been in France and then I went to New York and when I came back I telephoned you and there was no one there so I telephoned again later and still no one and then I telephoned Lisa. Why didn’t they tell me?’

  ‘They tried,’ says Claudia. ‘Lisa phoned you. As you say, you were away.’

  Laszlo leans forward and stares intently at her. ‘So how are you?’

  ‘Still here.’

  Laszlo prowls to the window. He is thin, his elbows poke out of holes in his sweater, his black hair is streaked with grey. Claudia watches him.

  ‘What can I do? What do you need? What can I get for you? Books? Papers? I shall come every day.’

  ‘No,’ says Claudia, rather too promptly. ‘Every now and then will do fine. Tell me about France.’

  Laszlo makes a dismissive gesture. ‘France… France was for Henry. Fireplaces. Everything now is old fireplaces for rich silly women who pay the earth.’

  ‘New York?’

  ‘I had an exhibition.’

  ‘Aha. Sell much?’

  The door opens. ‘Visitor for you!’ cries the nurse.

  Claudia turns her head. ‘Hello, Sylvia,’ she murmurs.

  And no, no, no, she thinks, it is my privilege now to turn away from inappropriate conjunctions. She closes her eyes and leaves them to it, Sylvia and Laszlo. Who have never, in any positive sense, inhabited the same world. She hears Sylvia saying that actually she’s never been desperately fond of New York; she hears Laszlo muttering that no, he didn’t go to the theatre much and yes, it was quite cold.

  We all act as hinges – fortuitous links between other people. I link Sylvia to Laszlo, Lisa to Laszlo; Gordon links me to Sylvia. Sylvia always retreated from Laszlo by saying he was rather a difficult boy and Claudia was awfully good with him. Laszlo, in his frenetic twenties, used to imitate Sylvia, cruelly and accurately. Gordon found him interesting but exasperating; Laszlo has always allowed his soul to hang out like his shirt-tails and Gordon found this uncongenial. He did not object to people having souls but preferred them tucked away out of sight where they ought to be. But he took Laszlo on, in his way. He left Laszlo a small legacy.

  Claudia opens her eyes. Lisa is there, taking off her jacket and hanging it tidily over the back of the chair.

  Claudia contemplates her. ‘It’s all go today. Laszlo came. And Sylvia. Now you.’

  ‘No,’ says Lisa. ‘That was two days ago. You’re a bit muddled up. You’ve not been too good.’

  ‘What have I been doing for two days, I wonder?’ says Claudia. ‘They seem to have passed me by. Or taken me with them.’

  ‘You look better,’ says Lisa.

  Claudia raises a hand and studies the back of it. ‘I wouldn’t say so. I’ve never got used to the
fact that they have brown spots all over them. They look to me like someone else’s, to be frank.’

  Lisa, who does not like the turn things are taking, asks after Laszlo.

  ‘Laszlo was as ever. He has always been consistent, that you must admit.’

  Lisa inclines her head, noncommittal.

  ‘I’m sorry, you know,’ says Claudia.

  ‘Sorry about what?’ enquires Lisa, cautiously.

  ‘Sorry I was such an inadequate mother.’

  ‘Oh.’ Lisa searches for a response. ‘Well… I wouldn’t exactly say… You were… Well, you were who you were.’

  ‘We’re all that,’ says Claudia. ‘It’s something one has to overcome. By conventional standards I made a bad job of being a mother. So I apologise. Not that that’s much use now. I just wanted to put it on record.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says Lisa at last. She has no idea, she realises, what she means by this. She wishes Claudia had not said what she has; now it will always be there, complicating things.

  I never expected to see Lisa grow up. For years, when she was a child, I waited for the Bomb to drop. As the world lurched from Korea to Laos to Cuba to Vietnam I was simply sitting it out. And Lisa’s existence sharpened the horror. What might happen to the whole of humanity became concentrated on Lisa’s small limbs, her unknowing eyes, her blithe aspirations. I may have been an inadequate mother, but I was still a mother; through Lisa, I raged and feared. I would never have admitted to those dark nights of the soul. Publicly, I behaved like a rational responsible being – I argued the pros and cons of unilateralism, I wrote my column, I marched and demonstrated when I felt it appropriate. I kept to myself that curdling of the stomach I felt during the nine days of Cuba, and at a dozen other times over those years. On some days I could not turn on the radio or pick up the newspaper, as though ignorance might insulate me from reality.

  Lisa has grown up. Her sons are growing up. From time to time my stomach still curdles, but not as it used to; I no longer shrink from the newspapers. Now why should this be? The world is no safer than it was twenty years ago. But we are still here; the monster has been contained, so far – with every year that passes the hope grows that it might continue to be contained, somehow; daily expectation of calamity is too exhausting to sustain. The monks at Lindisfarne must have whistled while they worked when they stopped looking out to sea; people made love in cities under siege.