Moon Tiger (12 page)

Eventually, at dusk, we got up and dressed and went down for a drink on the terrace overlooking the Nile. Maybe that was the point when I spoke to Gordon’s acquaintance. If so, he is gone now; all that remains is the long low fawn shoulder of the hill above the Valley of the Kings with the sun going down behind it in a smoulder of gold and pink and turquoise. And the bland Egyptian evening sounds of ice chinking in glasses, the slap of the suffragis’ slippers on the stone of the hotel terrace, the buzz of voices, laughter – the sounds of a hundred other evenings, at Gezira Sporting Club, the Turf Club, Shepheard’s. But that evening – or the next or the next – is isolated in my head. I know that I sat on a cane chair, the pattern of the cane printing my flesh through my cotton dress, looking at the river, the white swooping sails of feluccas, the sunset sky in which presently glittered the brilliant enhanced stars of the desert. I know how I felt – richer, happier, more alive than ever before or ever since. It is feeling that survives; feeling and the place. There is no sequence now for those days, no chronology – I couldn’t say at which point we went to Karnak, to the Colossus, to the tombs – they are simultaneous. It is a time that is both instant and frozen, like a village scene in a Breughel painting, like the walls of the tombs on which fly,
swim and walk the same geese, ducks, fish, cattle that live in, on and beside the Nile today.

‘The Pharaoh…’ says the guide, indicating. ‘See the pharaoh making sacrifice to the gods and godses. See the sacred
ankh
. See the wife of pharaoh. The wife of pharaoh is also sister of pharaoh. He is loving his sister.’

There is a faint stir of interest. The heat is appalling and the tomb stifling. ‘Incest,’ says the army padre. ‘Quite acceptable in those days, apparently.’ The two ATS girls announce that they will die if they stay in here much longer. ‘Right then, Mustapha, let’s push on, shall we?’ says the padre. The small group shuffles through the sandy torch-lit gloom.

Claudia lingers. She looks at the handsome boyish figure of the pharaoh and his slim, sloe-eyed high-breasted consort.

‘Fine couple,’ says Tom.

‘Yes.’

The beam of Tom’s torch slides over a team of oxen, slaves carrying dead gazelles, a flight of duck erupting from a reed bed.

‘Let’s see them again,’ says Claudia. The torch beam swoops and hovers. ‘She’s lovely. Is your sister pretty?’

‘Jennifer? Good Lord – I’ve never thought about it. Yes, I suppose she is.’ He laughs. ‘But I shouldn’t feel
that
way inclined.’

He puts his arm round her. ‘Please be coming,’ cries the guide from further along the dark corridor of the tomb. ‘Lady and gentleman… please be coming now.’

Claudia continues to stare at the brilliant impervious figures, forever young, forever coupled.

‘What are you thinking about?’ he asks.

‘Mm… nothing.’ His arm is round her shoulders, the heat of him against her breast. She is so erotically possessed that she feels she may quite possibly take all her clothes off and lie down in the dust. He turns and kisses her, his tongue searching her mouth.

It had seemed, for the year or so in which I had been there, merely a backcloth, that country. I had been dropped into its heat and dust and smells and they became a fortuitous appendage to the more urgent matter of the war. You learned to cope with it – the discomforts and obstructions and hazards – and got on with what mattered. The British army superimposed itself on the landscape and the society: its lorries jammed the roads, its depots littered the delta from Cairo to Alexandria, its personnel filled the streets and cafés of Cairo with English voices. The speech of Lancashire, of Dorset, of the East End, of Eton and Winchester, rang around the mosques and bazaars, the Pyramids and the Citadel. Cairo, polyglot and multi-racial, both absorbed and ignored what had happened. At one level the place exploited and manipulated the situation, at another it simply went on doing what it had always done. The rich got richer; the poor continued to wade in the mud of the canals, make fuel out of buffalo dung and beg in the streets.

Perhaps I saw it for the first time that weekend in Luxor. It seems to me now that I did. I saw suddenly that it was beautiful. I saw the cluttered intense life of the fields and villages – a world of dust and water, straw and leaves, people and animals – and I saw the stark textural immensity of the desert, the sand carved by the wind, the glittering mirages. It had the delicacy of a water-colour – all soft grey-greens and pale blues and fawns and bright browns. Beautiful and indifferent; when you began to see it you saw also the sores round the mouths of children, the flies crawling on the sightless eyes of a baby, the bare ulcerated flesh on a donkey’s back.

I saw it through him and with him. Now, he and that place are one, fused in the head to a single presence of his voice and his touch, those sights and those smells.

She lies awake in the small hours. On the bedside table is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing, simply
being, her whole body content. Another inch of the Moon Tiger feathers down into the saucer.

Tom stirs. Claudia murmurs, ‘Are you awake?’

‘I’m awake.’

‘You should have said. We could be talking.’

He lays a hand on her thigh. ‘What should we talk about?’

‘All the things there’s never been time for. Practically everything.’

‘We’ve spent about fifty hours together now. Since we met.’

‘Forty-two,’ says Claudia.

‘You’ve counted?’

‘Of course.’

There is a silence. ‘I love you,’ he says.

‘Well, good,’ says Claudia. ‘So do I. Love you, I mean. Talk to me. Tell me things.’

‘Very well. What sort of thing do you want me to tell you? Do you want my opinion of Aldous Huxley? My views on the League of Nations? We could find an area of disagreement – I know you enjoy a good dust-up.’

‘Not right now. Let’s talk about each other, that’s all I’m interested in at the moment.’

‘Me too,’ says Tom. He takes her hand. They lie, side by side. Like, thinks Claudia, figures on tombs, or the bundled shapes of sarcophagi. The Moon Tiger gently fumes and glows; beyond the shuttered window is the hot black velvet night – the river, the desert.

Tom lights a cigarette. Two red eyes glow now in the dark room – the Moon Tiger and the Camel. ‘People in our situation always think themselves unique. All the same… That we should both have fetched up out here…’

‘Hostages to fortune,’ says Claudia. ‘Orphans of the storm.’

‘Quite so. But what luck. I owe Hitler for you. What a thought.’

‘Let’s not think it,’ says Claudia. ‘Give it a more respectable name. Fate. Life. That sort of stuff.’

They lie, for a while, in silence. ‘You tell me things,’ says Tom. ‘What a lot I don’t know… Can you play the piano?
When did you learn to speak French? Why is there a scar on your knee?’

‘Those are boring things. I don’t want to. I want to be pampered. I want to lie here – for ever – listening to
you
talking. I want to fall asleep with you talking. You could tell me a story.’

‘I don’t know any stories,’ says Tom. ‘I’m a profoundly unimaginative fellow. I only know my own.’

‘That’ll do nicely,’ says Claudia.

‘If you insist. It’s an unexceptional story, at that. Born in the home counties to parents of moderate but sufficient means. Father a schoolmaster, mother a… mother. Childhood marred only by unconfessed fear of large dogs and the patronage of my sister. Schooldays distinguished for inability to construe Latin and ineptitude with a cricket bat. Youth… Well, youth becomes perhaps marginally more interesting, our hero is seen to become somewhat less torpid, egocentric, introverted etc. – in fact to start paying a bit of attention to other people and indeed to show vaguely idealistic tendencies, desire to reform the world and so forth.’ ‘Ah,’ sighs Claudia. ‘One of those…’ ‘One of those. Do you disapprove?’ ‘Certainly not. Go on. What did you do about it?’ ‘All the usual innocent enthusiastic things. Joining worthy organisations. Attending political meetings. Reading books. Talking late into the night with like-minded cronies.’ ‘Innocent?’ says Claudia. ‘What’s innocent about that? Practical, I’d call it.’ ‘Hush – this is my story, and I’ll tell it my way. Autobiographers are entitled to editorial comment. So… Period of youthful social indignation culminating in a stint as reporter on a northern provincial paper – did you ever visit the north-east during the Depression?’ Claudia ponders. ‘If you have to think about it,’ says Tom, ‘then you didn’t. It wonderfully concentrated the mind, I’ll tell you that. Hampshire was never the same again. So anyway, fired by the dole queues I decided politics was the only career – I mean, it was obvious, at twenty-three, one would be able to set the world to rights in a trice, given the opportunity, quite simple, I had it all tied up, my personal manifesto –
education, opportunity, social welfare, re-distribution of income.’ ‘So…’ says Claudia. ’Why…?’ ‘Why didn’t it work out like that? Because as you and I both know now that is not how things are. Our feckless hero bites the dust as aspiring politician and looks around to see what comes next. Having grown older by a year or two and learned a little wisdom if not a lot. In fact, having realised that he is by and large an ignorant so-and-so and there is no prospect of confounding your enemies until you have the arguments with which to do it. So I thought I’d better keep my mouth shut and my eyes and ears open for a bit. An aunt left me a small legacy and I blew it on the fare to America. Have a look at the land of the free, I thought. Learn a thing or two. Look and listen. Earn a few bob writing the odd article. So I did. And came back older and wiser still.’ ‘Look here,’ says Claudia. ‘You’re missing out great chunks of this story.’ ‘I know. We haven’t got time for all of it. Not now. We’re sticking to essentials. America. The mid-west. The south. Social outrage again, but more reflective now. Journalism. Sober, considered journalism. A few small successes in that line.’ ‘You should be doing what I’m doing,’ says Claudia. ‘In fact why didn’t you…?’ ‘I wish you wouldn’t anticipate. We haven’t got to that bit yet. The Nazis are nothing more than a disagreeable noise across the Channel at the moment. And our hero rather fancies himself now as a traveller.’ ‘Stop saying our hero,’ says Claudia. ‘It sounds like the
Boy’s Own Paper
.’ ‘What a well-read girl you are. I thought the reference might escape you. As I say, I fancied myself as a traveller. I sold pieces on the plight of the Greek peasantry or chicanery among Italian politicians and when I couldn’t do that I hawked myself around travel agencies as a courier. Got around most of Europe that way. Went once to Russia. Was thinking it was about time to turn my attention to Africa, see how one’s dreams come true? And then the disagreeable noises from across the Channel began to get louder. To become distinctly disturbing.’ ‘Yes,’ says Claudia, ‘I want to say something.’ ‘I thought you wanted me to do the talking?’ ‘I do. It’s just that you leave out the interesting part.’
‘I thought all this might be reasonably interesting.’ ‘It is,’ says Claudia. ‘But it’s not very personal. I don’t know much about how you’re feeling. And,’ she adds lightly, ‘I don’t know if you’re doing all this on your own or with someone else.’

‘Oh,’ says Tom. ‘Aha. I see. Well, I’ll try to do better. I think I can tell you why it doesn’t sound all that personal. All this time our hero… sorry, sorry. All this time I had these grandiose ideas about public life and being hitched to one’s times and so forth. I tended to think impersonally – a luxury of comfortable circumstances, as I’m well aware. But let me assure you’ – and he slides a hand down her bare body – ‘… let me assure you all that has utterly changed. There’s nothing like being hitched to one’s times in a way one never anticipated to make one think very personally indeed. I think I’ve had enough of all this. Look, it’s beginning to get light. There – you’ve had your story.’ He turns towards her.

‘Not quite,’ says Claudia. ‘You didn’t say if…’

‘Entirely on my own,’ says Tom. ‘So far. Not for much longer, I rather hope.’ He puts out a hand, traces the outline of her face with one finger. Claudia can just see, now, in the dawn glimmer, his eyes, his nose, his lips. ‘I like this part of the story best,’ she says.

‘Me too,’ says Tom. ‘Oh, me too.’

And oh God, thinks Claudia, may it have a happy ending. Please may it have a happy ending. The Moon Tiger is almost entirely burned away now; its green spiral is mirrored by a grey ash spiral in the saucer. The shutters are striped with light; the world has turned again.

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