Moon Tiger (6 page)

It seems like a fantasy world, yours. A malevolent Garden of Eden with oaks, pines, walnuts and beech among which howl wolves and lions. You never even mention the poison ivy, which did for me once on a picnic in Connecticut. The environment dominates: no nonsense then about conserving it; the all-important question is whether it will be so kind as to conserve you. Indirectly, it picks off a good many of you from malnutrition and disease. Those who struggle through that fearful first winter do their best to interfere with nature.
You fell trees by the thousand; you manure your fields with herrings, improbably, arranging them heads up in little mounds of earth like Cornish stargazy pies; you are as historically calamitous for the beaver and the otter as for the Wampanaug and the Narragansett. You affected the lives of the periwinkle and the quahaug, quiet clean-living sea-creatures who found themselves turned into money, polished and drilled to become wampum, Indian hard currency in the fur trade. The price of beaver on the London market determined the value of wampum; an agreeably bizarre economic circumstance – that a hat worn under a rainy Middlesex sky should be a matter of life and death for sea-shells creeping in the shallows of Cape Cod.

There was a spaniel on board the
Mayflower
. This little dog, once, was chased by wolves not far from the plantation and ran to crouch between its master’s legs ‘for succour’. Smart dog – it knew that muskets are sharper than teeth. What I find remarkable about this animal is that I should know of its existence at all, that its unimportant passage through time should be recorded. It becomes one of those vital inessentials that convince one that history is true.

I know about the little spaniel. I know what the weather was like in Massachusetts on Wednesday March 7th 1620 (cold but fair, with the wind in the east). I know the names of those who died that winter and of those who did not. I know what you ate and drank, how you furnished your houses, which of you were men of conscience and application and which were not. And I know, also, nothing. Because I cannot shed my skin and put on yours, cannot strip my mind of its knowledge and its prejudices, cannot look cleanly at the world with the eyes of a child, am as imprisoned by my time as you were by yours.

Well, that can’t be helped. Even so, I get a
frisson
from contemplating you, innocents at large in that Garden of Eden (well, as innocent as any product of seventeenth-century Europe). It doesn’t do, though, to push the analogy much further. What I relish is to set you against what is to come, against the unthinkable, against the teeming continent I know
marriage of all that is admirable with all that is appalling.

I like America. Gordon likes America. Sylvia does not like America. Poor Sylvia. She floundered there, flapping and lumbering like a turtle out of its element. She never learned the language, the style, the customs. There are those who have chameleon qualities (I have them, so does Gordon, so – naturally – does Jasper) and there are those who were set hard sometime in youth. Sylvia’s response to circumstances froze when she was about sixteen; she aspired to a nice time, children, a nice home, nice friends. She achieved all those things and expected then to live happily ever after. She had not reckoned with external factors. Gordon’s career prospered. In middle age Sylvia found herself living for half of every year on the other side of the Atlantic while Gordon carried out his Harvard duties.

Sylvia, of course, is consigned to the back of the car. She brings it upon herself, laying her hand on the door and saying ‘I’ll get in back, Claudia’, the Americanism rising to her lips and rapidly corrected – faucet and apartment and sidewalk and so forth one has come to willy-nilly but there are limits. Only sometimes, when she is flustered, as of course she is flustered now, she no longer it seems can control her speech and what slithers out is some horrid hybrid, neither the language that is hers nor the language of America. She has become disoriented, and knows it. Neither her feet nor her tongue are any longer firmly anywhere. She never gets things right over here – is always out of kilter, shaking hands when she should have embraced, embracing when she should have shaken hands, saying too much or too little, unable to gauge status, relationships, implications. Unlike Gordon, who slides from Oxford to Harvard without modification of speech, dress or approach and is equally at home in either, equally welcomed, equally regarded.

Claudia does not say ‘Oh no – I will, Sylvia.’ She simply gets in the front with Gordon while Sylvia, puffing a little, squeezes herself into the back of the compact, wishing
you still had those lovely big squashy cars in the States.

She settles, resignedly, for the long drive. ‘Don’t come, you don’t have to,’ Gordon has said, but of course she must, even on this appalling steaming midsummer Massachusetts day, the temperature sign beside the freeway flashing 98°, her dress sticking to her, sweat trickling between her shoulder-blades. If she had not come she would have sat in the cool house all day feeling left out, unwanted, thinking of them laughing and enjoying without her, feeling them walking away from her, disregarding her. And already she is compelled to make her presence felt, leaning uncomfortably forward to ask Gordon if they can’t have the windows shut and put the air-conditioning on, trying to hear what it is Claudia is saying.

‘Shut?’ says Claudia. ‘We need some fresh air, for heaven’s sake!’

So the fresh hot air roars through the car and green scorching Massachusetts flows past and Sylvia presently gives up and slumps back. Claudia’s hair, she notes, is now three colours – grey and white and swatches of the old dark red. It is clipped short and carelessly combed but contrives to look (of course) smart. Sylvia’s own, skilfully set and highlighted every month, is still ash-blonde and is currently taking wicked punishment from the howling gale of freeway wind. She rummages for a scarf. Claudia is wearing denim trousers and matching jacket with a skimpy French-looking striped top. How, at her age, she can get away with this Sylvia cannot imagine – it looks (of course) not mutton dressed as lamb but merely dashing.

‘All right?’ says Gordon, over his shoulder.

‘It’s frightfully windy,’ says Sylvia. Gordon winds up his window a foot and Claudia hers two inches.

Sylvia thinks about food. At least there will be a lovely air-conditioned restaurant at this place and she will have, um, well she will sort of half stick to her diet and resist ice-cream or club sandwiches but she will definitely have an absolutely enormous tuna salad with loads of dressing. One thing about America is the food. That has been one compensation in the ten
years of their schizophrenic life, to and fro, six months at Oxford and six months at Cambridge, Mass. Always packing up and putting away and unpacking and readjusting. What a marvellous way to live! people say and Sylvia gamely agrees. She resolutely contemplates her two nice houses and thinks what lots of interesting and well-known people she knows, on either side of the Atlantic, though somehow not a lot of them are her close friends, not people you sit down and have a natter with, just people who come to dinner or drinks or invite you to dinner or drinks, always greeting Gordon first and then saying hello Sylvia afterwards. Gordon, she has been told, is one of the highest paid academics in the business. The size of her housekeeping account still startles her; she can no longer think of anything more to spend it on. Gordon, of course, is frequently away; that is the price of fame. She sometimes wonders, in the watches of the night, if he still has, from time to time, other women. Possibly. Probably. But if he does she does not want to know. He will not, now, leave her for them because it would be a nuisance and interfere with his work. And she learned, long ago, at the time of the Indian woman statistician, that to make a fuss was not expedient. If you sat it out it would pass.

‘How much longer?’ she enquires, plaintively. Claudia, glancing at the road-map, says another half hour or so. She flings this over her shoulder, a mite impatiently. She is arguing (of course) with Gordon and then suddenly the argument ends and they both explode in laughter. ‘What’s the joke?’ cries Sylvia. ‘Tell you later,’ says Gordon, still laughing.

And, at last, they arrive. They park the car. Sylvia stares around. ‘I can’t see any log cabins,’ she says. ‘Or all these people in fancy dress.’ She doesn’t see either why Claudia has insisted on this trip – a place where people dress up and pretend to be living in history sounds too silly for words and not Claudia’s sort of thing at all. Or Gordon’s. Claudia and Gordon are already heading across the tarmac of the car park to something called the Orientation Center; Sylvia gratefully plunges into the air-conditioned cool and makes for the
Ladies’. She does her hair and her face and glances at the information sheet she has been given. Plimoth Plantation, she reads, is a re-creation of the Pilgrim Village in 1627. You are about to leave your own time and step back into the seventh year of colonial settlement. The people you will meet portray through dress, speech, manner and attitudes known residents of the colony. They are always eager for conversation. Feel free to ask questions; and remember, the answers you receive will reflect each individual’s seventeenth-century identity.

Sylvia giggles. She feels a bit better now, powdered and relieved. She rejoins the others. ‘This place sounds quite mad,’ she says.

‘Another half hour,’ says Claudia. Sylvia, throughout the drive, has been wanting windows put up or put down, interrupting and asking how much further. Like a child, for God’s sake, thinks Claudia, just like having Lisa or one of Gordon’s brats in the back. But Sylvia is best dealt with by ignoring her, as one usually has. And it is months since she and Gordon have seen one another. She disposes of Sylvia and goes on talking to Gordon. They are disagreeing, vehemently and enjoyably, about the politics of Malawi, where Gordon has recently been. Gordon advises the ministers of such places on how to manage their economies. ‘Rubbish, Claudia,’ he says. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve never been to the damn place.’ ‘Since when,’ says Claudia, ‘did I depend on personal experience for an informed opinion?’ And they both laugh. Sylvia, behind, is bleating away.

They arrive. They watch, in a cool and darkened auditorium, slides; a commentary gives a brief, simplified but lucid account of the colonisation of the eastern seaboard. Not bad, Claudia thinks, not bad at all.

They emerge into the glare and into, evidently, 1627. They enter the stockaded settlement and tour the little fort. They pass out and into the long sloping village street with log cabins at either side. Chickens and geese scratch in the dirt. A figure in a leather jerkin and large-brimmed hat sits mending a hurdle,
surrounded by bare-limbed T-shirted onlookers. A sun-bonneted woman chivvies fowls with a broom; someone takes her photograph.

Claudia walks into the first of the log cabins. Within is a fire on which a black cookpot bubbles, elementary furniture, dried plants hung upside-down from beams, a rag-covered bed curtained off by a hanging. And a young man, in breeches and white shirt, who is contemplated in silence by a cluster of visitors. Claudia asks him if he came over in the
Mayflower
. No, he says, in the
Anne
, a couple of years later. Why did you come? enquires Claudia. The young man explains his religious convictions and consequent difficulties in England. Claudia asks if he hopes to get rich in the New World. The young man replies that many of the colonists have expectations of ultimate reward, after the struggles of these early years. You stick it out, advises Claudia, I’ll tell you one thing – it works out very interestingly in the end. The young man gives her a quizzical look and says that they have faith in the Lord. You’ll need it, says Claudia. He starts spreading His patronage around in a while, I’ll tell you that too. Ask him if that dried stuff is marjoram, says Sylvia, I’ve never seen it growing over here. Ask him yourself, says Claudia, he speaks English. Oh I can’t, says Sylvia, it feels so silly. The young man is busy mending a fishing-line and ignores her. Well, says Claudia, good luck in the Indian Wars. She leaves the cabin, followed by Sylvia, and stalks down the street and into the next, where Gordon is talking to a burly fellow with an Irish accent. The Irishman is explaining that he was headed for Virginia and fetched up here accidentally. He intends, in the fullness of time, to go south where, he hears, there are good prospects growing this crop tobacco. Gordon sagely nods; you might well be on to something there, he says. Take my advice though, adds Claudia, don’t start importing labour, you’ll avoid a whole lot of trouble later on that way. You’re spoiling the story, says Gordon. Perhaps there’s an alternative story, says Claudia. And what about the theory of manifest destiny? enquires Gordon. Claudia shrugs; I’ve always thought that was dangerous
stuff. Pardon, ma’am? says the Irishman. Destiny, says Claudia, overrated, to my mind. I don’t imagine you’re giving it a thought, right now? Well… says the Irishman. Exactly, Claudia continues, any more than I am. It’s only later on that people start preaching about destiny. Oh dear, complains Sylvia, I’m getting out of my depth. Now you people, says Claudia to the Irishman, live in stirring times. Ideologically speaking. Mind, you may feel that sort of thing is passing you by rather, right now, but believe me the consequences are far-reaching. Some might feel it’s downhill all the way thereafter. The Irishman, at this point, is beginning to look slightly alarmed. Other bystanders shift awkwardly. Oh come now, says Gordon, there’s the Enlightenment to follow. And look what that led to, says Claudia. ‘A tide in the affairs of men…’ says Gordon. Another overworked idea, says Claudia. It’s awfully hot in here, murmurs Sylvia. Anyway, it’s a thought, says Claudia to the Irishman, stay with subsistence agriculture and see what happens. Yes Ma’am, says the Irishman, a touch wearily. He turns, with some relief, to a woman who wants to know how he lights his fire without matches.

They emerge from the cabin. Sylvia takes a Kleenex from her bag and wipes her face. Claudia bears down upon the man mending a hurdle under a tree and asks him his name. Winslow, he replies, Edward Winslow. I know one of your descendants, says Claudia. Stop name-dropping, says Gordon. The young man inclines his head graciously. They’re extremely rich, says Claudia. The young man looks disapproving. He’s no more interested in prosperity than you or I, says Gordon. On the contrary, retorts Claudia, he’s very interested.
Après moi le déluge
is a corrupt and relatively modern notion – you were always short on historical sensitivity. And you, says Gordon, have never been interested in ideas, merely addicted to sweeping and inaccurate opinions. You have always dismissed anything that does not interest you. Ideology. Industrial history. Economics.