Moon Tiger (10 page)

Lisa thinks about love. She loves her sons. She loves her lover. She loves in an eery way her husband. Does she love Claudia? Does Claudia love her, come to that?

These are questions she cannot answer, or does not wish to answer. What is between her and Claudia is, after all, inevitable. There is nothing to be done about it, nor ever has been. She knew that long ago, with the relentless vision of a child.

Lisa has read Claudia’s books; Claudia would be surprised to learn this. Lisa has, tucked away somewhere, a brown envelope with two or three newspaper pictures of Claudia. There is also a long article about Claudia. ‘Profile’ it is headed, and yes, there is Claudia’s profile, not pared down and yellow as it is today but delicate against a velvet hanging, elegantly posed and lit by some smart photographer. The text below is less carefully flattering: ‘Claudia Hampton attracts controversy. As a non-professional historian – a “populariser” – she has been loftily disdained by some academics, angrily refuted by others. The disdain enrages her – “Just because I’ve had the nerve to go it alone instead of settling for the comfortable insurance policy of an academic stipend they think
they can patronise” – the refutations she enjoys, they give her the chance to fight back. “I love a good swashbuckle in print. Anyway, I usually win.” She cites her sales figures – “And who persuades the general public to read history? People like me – not the Eltons and the Trevor-Ropers.” Nevertheless, for all her defiance, Claudia Hampton has some literary scars to show. Reviewers have frequently condemned her out of her own lush and – it must be said – frequently imprecise and contradictory prose. “Technicolor history”, “the Elinor Glyn of historical biography”, “the preaching of an autodidact”; this is the language her critics have used.’

Lisa’s view of all this is an impartial one. She has in fact found the books more readable than she expected; that they are flawed she is quite prepared to believe. She knows Claudia, after all; she knows Claudia can be wrong about simple basic things. Claudia has always been wrong about Lisa.

For Claudia has never seen Lisa detached from Claudia. Lisa is extinguished by Claudia, always has been; even now, in the alien dispassionate hospital room she sits warily, awaiting Claudia’s next move. Claudia snuffs Lisa out – drains the colour from her cheeks, deprives her of speech or at least all speech to which anyone might pay attention, makes her shrink an inch or two, puts her in her place. The other Lisa is not like that. The other Lisa, the Lisa unknown to Claudia, is positive while not assertive, is prettier, sharper, a good cook, a competent mother, an adequate if not exemplary wife. She knows now that she married too young too quickly the wrong man, but has found ways of making the best of the situation. She has also discovered that she is good at deft unruffled organization; for the last five years she has been indispensable secretary to the private practice of a top-flight surgeon, which is how she met her lover, who is also a doctor. Eventually, one day, when the boys are older, Lisa and her lover may marry, if she can persuade herself that Harry would be all right, would get over it, would find himself someone else.

It is getting dark in the hospital room; the winter afternoon is lapping at the windows. Lisa gets up, puts the light on,
wonders about drawing the curtains, starts to gather her belongings. As she puts an arm into her coat Claudia opens her eyes.

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ says Claudia. ‘A preoccupation with God doesn’t mean I consider myself about to meet Him. It’s entirely abstract.’

Her face, suddenly, contorts. The lips pinch and tighten. A hand crawls across the sheet. Lisa says, ‘Are you all right?’

‘No,’ says Claudia. ‘But who is?’

Lisa is halted, one arm into her coat, the other out. She is seized by the oddest feeling. For a moment or two she cannot even identify it. She stands looking at Claudia. She recognises, now, the emotion. She is feeling sorry for Claudia; pity grabs her, like hunger, or illness. She has felt sorry for people before, naturally. But never for Claudia. She lays a hand, for a moment, on Claudia’s arm. ‘I’ll have to go,’ she says. ‘I’ll come in again on Friday.’

When I look at Lisa now I see the shadow of middle age on her face. This is disconcerting. One’s child, after all, is forever young. A girl, perhaps, a young woman even – but that hardening of the features, that softening of the body, that hint that time past is levelling up with time ahead… dear me, no. I look with surprise at this home counties matron, wondering who she is – and then from the eyes round which spread little vulnerable fans of wrinkles there stares at me the eight-year-old, and the sixteen-year-old, and the one-year-wedded Lisa with red shrieking baby.

It becomes more and more difficult to credit Lisa with being a quarter Russian. Somewhere within and behind this quintessentially middle-class middle-England figure in her Jaeger suit and floppy-bowed silk shirt and her neat polished shoes lies the most tormented people in the history of the world. Somewhere in Lisa’s soul, though she knows little of it and cares less, are whispers of St Petersburg, of the Crimea, of Pushkin, of Turgenev, of million upon million enduring peasants, of relentless winters and parched summers, of the most glorious
language ever spoken, of samovars and droshkys and the sad sloe-eyed faces of a thousand icons. Blood will out – I believe that as profoundly though not as fearfully as poor Lady Branscombe, doing her best to forget her granddaughter’s unfortunate ancestry (and all her fault, too, poor Isabel, bearing for ever after the guilt of that youthful Parisian infatuation). Lisa carries in her spirit matters she knows not of. I find that interesting. I find that enthralling, indeed. I look at Lisa and wolves howl across the steppe, the blood flows at Borodino, Irina sighs for Moscow. All derivative, all in the mind – the confection of fact and fantasy that is how we know the world. Nevertheless, Lisa had a Russian grandfather, and that signifies.

Jasper’s father appears to have been an excellent reason for the Russians to have a revolution: a man of total moral fecklessness who never did a day’s work in his life and disposed of the family fortunes – as much of them as had been left by his own father – before he was thirty. He spent the early part of his life in Paris, Baden Baden and Venice, with occasional sorties to Russia to sell off a few more versts or the St Petersburg mansion; after the divorce he lived in somewhat reduced circumstances on the Riviera, augmenting his funds as best he could by gambling or attaching himself to rich women. Jasper’s late adolescent fascination with him soon declined: Jasper meant to be a success; Sasha, a glamorously bohemian figure to a sixteen-year-old schoolboy, was seen differently by the twenty-year-old undergraduate – as a seedy sponger impressive only to naïve American heiresses and minor French society hostesses. After 1925 Jasper rarely saw his father. I met him only once. It was in 1946. Sasha had turned up in London, having spent as comfortable a war as he could manage in Menton, somehow avoiding internment, and now in search of funds and useful contacts of which his mildly celebrated son seemed the most promising. Jasper gave him lunch at his club and asked me to join them. Sasha was seventy, and beginning to look it: a face crumpling into folds, ravaged hooded eyes, the foxy smile of the professional charmer. He kissed my hand
and said the things he had been saying to every woman he met for fifty years. And I, maliciously, insisted he take the most comfortable chair and asked with concern if the cold weather was bothering him. Sasha, no fool, adjusted his approach to that of gallant father-figure – called me ‘my dear’, applauded Jasper’s successes with sycophantic gusto, invited us both to the villa on the Riviera. We never went, needless to say. Jasper found his father an embarrassment; I thought him creepy. But I can see him still, in his carefully preserved pre-war cashmere overcoat and his Hermès scarf, a down-at-heel survivor, the ashes of a class and of an age. And after that lunch Jasper and I had a disagreement: an interesting skirmish, a preliminary to our later more full-blooded engagements.

‘So…’ says Jasper. ‘That’s him, the old fraud. What you expected?’ Claudia, brilliant in emerald green, sails along Pall Mall, attracting discreet glances; he takes her arm, parrying the glances.

‘Up to a point.’

‘I slipped him a cheque for a hundred quid,’ says Jasper. ‘Let’s hope he’ll take himself off quietly now, at least for a year or two.’

‘Hm,’ says Claudia.

‘What?’

‘I said – hm.’ She looks ahead blandly. Not at Jasper, who feels that tingle of exasperation that only Claudia can induce. A
frisson
that is inextricably mixed with the creep of sexual desire.

They pause at the corner of St James’s. ‘You have his hands,’ says Claudia. ‘And something about the mouth.’

‘I hardly think so.’

Claudia shrugs. ‘You can’t dismiss ancestry.’

‘I am what I make myself,’ says Jasper, stepping into the road. ‘Come on, we can cross.’ Claudia has dropped his arm to take something from her bag. He walks ahead. Claudia remains. Cars and taxis divide them. Jasper halts on the opposite pavement. Claudia, blowing her nose, strolls across.

‘Plus,’ she says, ‘what you have been endowed with. Sasha has endowed you with a rather dramatic past. Don’t you find that interesting?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘You’re not interested in a thousand turbulent years of history?’

Claudia’s voice – clear, carrying – rings out. One or two bowler-hatted heads turn.

‘It has nothing to do with me,’ says Jasper. ‘And you’re being portentous.’

‘I do not see,’ says Claudia, forging now up St James’s a step or two ahead, ‘how you can be so majestically egotistical as to place yourself in total detachment from your antecedents just because you find your father inadequate.’

Jasper is now suddenly glowing hot, although the day is chill December. He catches her up. ‘You’re talking rather loudly, if you don’t mind me saying so, Claudia. And if I have to take on the whole of Russia, then you presumably bear the cross of generations of torpid Dorset farmers. Hardly your style, darling.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says Claudia. ‘They probably account for certain qualities of endurance.’ She smiles sweetly at Jasper, who is scowling.

‘And what have you ever endured?’

‘More than you’ll ever know.’

And Jasper, who has known Claudia now eight months and nine days, struggles furiously with his feelings. She maddens him; she is the most interesting woman he has ever met; he would gladly be without her; he cannot wait to be in bed with her again.

‘Thank you for my nice lunch,’ says Claudia.

Why have the winds of all the Russias blown into the brown leather brown curtained brown floored dining-room of Jasper’s club? How is it that this spurious devious old tramp from Monte Carlo bears with him a whiff of genuine incense, an eery echo of another time another place? Of things the old sham
knows nothing about, thinks Claudia. What does he know of history? And I bet he’s never read Tolstoy.

The point is, of course, that I have. What he brings is in my head, not his. But isn’t that interesting? Time and the universe lie around in our minds. We are sleeping histories of the world.

‘One of these days,’ she says, ‘I’m going to write a vastly pretentious book. I’m going to write a history of the world.’

But Jasper is already half way across St Jame’s, striding imperiously ahead. She pauses on the traffic island, blowing her nose, considering Jasper’s arrogance, Jasper’s obstinacy, Jasper’s potent body. She joins Jasper on the pavement and continues the discussion, which is amusing because Jasper is getting annoyed. Jasper will have none of either nature or nurture because Jasper is sublimely egotistical, and the egotist of course sees himself as self-propagated, he can afford no debts or attributions. His achievements are his own.

‘Thank you for my nice lunch,’ she says.

‘Don’t mention it.’

‘I must be off,’ she says. ‘Lots to do…’

‘When will I see you?’

‘Mm…’ says Claudia. ‘Give me a ring…’ She is tempting providence; Jasper if sufficiently irritated may not ring for a day, two days, three four days, and that would be bad – oh very bad. But
amour-propre
is more central than anxiety; never will Claudia allow Jasper to have her at a disadvantage.

‘Dinner tomorrow,’ says Jasper. It is a statement, not a question.

‘Maybe…’ says Claudia.

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