Moon Tiger (20 page)

Claudia moves away. She stands for a moment as though in thought and then turns to the bowl of sand in which people are supposed to put out their cigarettes; she is violently sick into it, in paroxysms that go on for several minutes.

‘You’re having a miscarriage my dear,’ says the matron. ‘As I imagine you realise. We’ll make you as comfortable as we can.’ She looks down at Claudia; her expression is blandly impersonal – a professional face. ‘I imagine,’ she goes on, ‘that
under the circumstances you may be feeling it’s the best thing. Doctor will be along to see you again in a few minutes.’

Claudia is lying with her legs clenched together. Some animal is gnawing her within. She stares at the woman and then rears herself up in the bed. ‘No,’ she whispers. She has intended to shout but her voice comes out as a hoarse breath. ‘I’m not going to have a miscarriage. It is not the best thing and it is not for you to say so. You must
do
something.’

The matron’s eyebrows have shot up now almost to her starched cap. Her tone is no longer quite so dispassionate. ‘I’m afraid,’ she says, ‘that Nature has a way of taking its course, in these cases.’

‘Then bloody well do something,’ roars Claudia. ‘I want this baby. If you don’t save this baby I’ll… I’ll…’ She sinks back, tears prick her eyes. ‘I’ll kill you,’ she mutters. ‘I’ll kill you, you cow.’

And hours later, when they are doing things with bowls of water and pails and sheets she is aware of shouting again, shouting at them, swearing at them. ‘ ’Twas neither a girl nor a boy,’ says the Irish sister. ‘Over and done with now, it is. The best thing you can do is forget all about it.’

11

The aftermath of war is disorder. An example, incidentally, of the misuse of language: aftermath is a decent agricultural term, it has a precise meaning – the aftermath is the second crop of grass which appears after the mowing of the first. The aftermath of war should, correctly, be another war; it usually is. But the conventional aftermath is the struggle to set straight that which is awry: the taking stock, the counting of the living and the dead, the drift of the dispossessed back to their homelands, the apportioning of blame, the extraction of penalties and, at last, the writing of history. Once it is all written down we know what really happened.

I visited, late in 1945, a camp for Displaced Persons. I was to write a piece on them for the
New Statesman
. The camp was somewhere on the German-Polish border, in one of those bits of Europe where national boundaries make no sense, where the landscape has an impersonality and uniformity that makes it a nowhere. You are in the middle of a land mass; there are no edges – just sky, horizon. This area had been disputed for hundreds of years, scuffed about by armies over and over again. Once, presumably, there had been hayfields and little farms, cows and chickens and children. Now, after five years of abuse, it was a wasteland; and in the middle of it was the camp – line upon line of concrete block-houses among which people disconsolately wandered or queued for yet another interview
with yet another harassed official surrounded by card-index boxes. I sat in on some of these interviews. Most of the people were old, or they seemed old, their faces belying the figures on their cards; some, though, were young – peasant girls transported as slave labour, their plump country faces grey and scraggy, seventeen turned forty. And they spoke with tongues – you never knew which language would come next: Lithuanian, Serbo-Croat, Ukrainian, Polish, French… Interpreters bustled to and fro. I talked to an old woman whose given nationality was Polish but who spoke French – an elegant drawing-room French. She wore a battered grey coat, a shawl round her head and she smelled a little; but her speech was an echo of some gracious home, of cut glass and silver, of music lessons and governesses. Her husband had died of typhoid, one son had been shot by the Nazis, another had perished in a labour camp, her daughter-in-law and grandchildren had vanished. ‘
Je suis seule au monde
,’ she said, gazing at me. ‘
Seule au monde
…’ And all around us the people shuffled past or stood patiently in endless lines.

I wrote my piece for the
New Statesman
, I suppose; perhaps I mentioned the old Polish woman. Presumably they tidied her away somewhere; sorted her out to an appropriate country, ticked off her card. She would not be one of those loose ends that cause trouble for years, those perennial matters for international reproach: a Volga German, a Crimean Tartar. At least they knew who she was and where she was.

For a nation, it is a great historical convenience to have edges. Islands do disproportionately well. I remember thinking about this when I first saw the cliffs of Dover again in 1945. There they were, those cliffs, conjuring up Shakespeare, the dry squeak of chalk on school blackboards and that song about bluebirds. They had barbed wire at their feet and pill-boxes on their tops. There were demobbed soldiers everywhere, conspicuous in their ill-fitting new suits; everyone was grumbling about something. If this was victory, it hardly seemed worth it. I sat in a train that rocked its way slowly through the fields of Kent; the windows were still partially blacked-out, the paint
scratched away in wide runnels so that the landscape flickered by in snatches. I thought about those potent cliffs.

And Gordon was at Victoria to meet me. In a demob suit, with an aggressively short haircut and that mark on his cheek that only I would have noticed.

From halfway along the platform she can see him. It is as though no one else were there. She halts six feet from him; he is the same and not the same, this is the face she knows better than any face but it is also the face of a stranger. It has new strata; there are accretions and adjustments. The space between them acknowledges this – the six feet of grey station platform; she cannot cross it. To do so is to step back – back into other Claudias, back towards other Gordons. But those Claudias and Gordons are no longer there; they are wiped out just as that known face has been wiped out and another substituted. She is fascinated and alarmed. She searches herself for familiar signals. And then she steps across the six feet of platform, touches him, and the signals flash. But distantly now, distantly, overlaid by too much else.

He sees that she is smaller and thinner and she has red hair. She is wearing clothes that are not the dingy shoddy garb of everyone else around; her coat is glowing orange, distinctly un-English, she wears a little feathered hat. He was looking at her before he realised this was Claudia (others also glance, or openly stare). She advances towards him, neither smiling nor waving, and then stops. He would think she had not recognised him if it were not that her eyes are fixed upon him.

And then she steps forward and kisses him. She smells foreign and expensive, but beneath the Chanel or whatever it is there is a whiff – a rich emotive whiff – of unreachable moments. Within him something stirs, raises its head and sniffs. And Claudia is talking about a mark on his face.

‘That’s my war wound. Some repellent Indian skin disease. Is it that conspicuous? You, I’m glad to see, are quite unscarred.’

‘Am I?’ she says. ‘Good.’

‘But your hair’s red. I remembered it brown.’

‘My hair was always considered red. It was one of the things Mother held against me, from infancy. How is she?’

We went to some café and drank dense reeking tea out of those cups half an inch thick. I kept staring round me; London, the buildings, the people, the buses and taxis, had the same unreal quality as Gordon himself – as though it were an invented landscape suddenly made manifest. Only when I saw bomb-sites, and the gutted interior of a house with fireplaces airily exposed and the marks of ghostly staircases, did it strike home that time had passed here also. But I felt like a visitor, not the returning native.

We talked. We told each other as much as we were ever going to tell of what we had seen and done, of where we had been and with whom. I peered into the spaces in Gordon’s account and he, I suppose, listened to the silences in mine. After an hour or so we were back five years – skirmishing and competing, bidding for one another’s attention. Gordon, I gathered, had been involved with an American girl in Delhi. I asked ‘Why didn’t you get married?’ He laughed and said he hadn’t time to get married. He was going back to the research project he was involved in before the war, there were offers of jobs from all sides, he was going to be in the thick of things.

A year later he met Sylvia. I was never jealous of Sylvia. It would have been ridiculous. That unknown American girl, though, gave me a nasty twinge. For a year or so I used to imagine her.

Until I was in my late twenties I never knew a man who interested me as much as Gordon did. That was why it was as it was between us. I measured each man I met against him, and they fell short: less intelligent, less witty, less attractive. I tested myself for the
frisson
that Gordon induced, and it was not there. It seemed profoundly unfortunate that there was no one else in the world to match up to me except my brother.

Incest is closely related to narcissism. When Gordon and I
were at our most self-conscious – afire with the sexuality and egotism of late adolescence – we looked at one another and saw ourselves translated. I saw in Gordon’s maleness an erotic flicker of myself; and when he looked at me I saw in his eyes that he too saw some beckoning reflection. We confronted each other like mirrors, flinging back reflections in endless recession. We spoke to each other in code. Other people became, for a while, for a couple of contemptuous years, a proletariat. We were an aristocracy of two.

The schoolroom has been turned into a dance studio. The sofa and chairs are pushed back against the walls, the carpet rolled up, the gramophone stands upon the old baize-covered table.

Gordon smells now of man. In her nostrils, as she presses up against him, breasts to his shirt-front, hair brushing his cheek, is a full-blown male scent, almost anonymous, no longer Gordon but something else. It is delicious, and there flows through Claudia the most strange and interesting feeling.

‘Slow, quick, quick, slow… Other foot, you idiot… Start again.’

People at Cambridge are all doing rag-time now, Gordon says. But that is boring. So is the Charleston. Hopping about like loonies, says Gordon. No – the only thing worth doing is a slow foxtrot. And a quickstep. And you have to be better at it than anyone else, that is the whole point. You have to be so expert that you stop the room – you are left alone on the dance floor. That is what they plan – at the Molesworths’ do next week.

‘When I press your back we’ll go into reverse. Now…’

And firmly, warmly, Gordon’s hand manipulates the small of her back and they swing expertly sideways, hip to hip. Slow, quick, quick, slow. ‘Oh,
very
nice…’ says Gordon. ‘
Very
stylish… And again…’ Slow, quick, quick, slow. Across and across the room, again and again, more adept each time, moving as one… A dash to the gramophone when it begins to run down… then body to body again, thigh to thigh… oh,
heavenly, this is… let’s go on for ever, we’re getting better and better, let’s never stop…

And so, for a long time, they don’t. Dusk creeps into the room; they break off only to change the record or wind up the gramophone; neither says a word. Oh bliss, thinks Claudia… Goodness what bliss… She savours this extraordinary feeling, this excitement… She has never felt like this before. What is it?

They stop, eventually, by the window, in the blue cool twilight, and look at each other. Their faces are so close they nearly touch. And then they do touch – his mouth against hers, his tongue between her lips, her mouth opening. The gramophone needle sticks in the groove, the same note hiccupping out over and over, again and again.

‘And another thing,’ says Mother. ‘Apparently at the Molesworths’ on Thursday you danced with Gordon the entire evening. Mrs Molesworth says it wasn’t that you hadn’t other partners, either – she says Nicholas asked you at least twice, and Roger Strong. It’s so rude. And apparently Gordon never asked Cynthia Molesworth once. You’re too old to behave like that now.’