Moon Tiger (21 page)

She lies on the grass of the river-bank, quite naked. The shadows of the willow leaves make fretted patterns on her body. Gordon rises from the water; he heaves himself up on the bank and comes to sit beside her. His thighs are streaked with mud, his hair plastered to his head. After a moment he reaches for his jacket, takes a pen from his pocket. He traces around the edges of the leaf shadows, on her stomach, her arms, legs, breasts; she is marbled all over in pale blue ink. ‘And how am I going to get all this off?’ she enquires. ‘Don’t be so prosaic,’ says Gordon. ‘This is Art. I’m turning you into an
objet trouvé
… Turn over.’ She turns onto her stomach and laughs into the grass; the pen wanders insect-like over her skin.

‘You’re both very silent this morning,’ says Mother. ‘Pass me
the marmalade please, Gordon. And Claudia dear, I don’t think that dress you had on last night is at all suitable for down here. Wear it when you’re in town if you must but it is simply not the thing for the country. People were looking at you.’

‘Good serve,’ says Gordon. ‘Forty-love.’ As they pass each other he murmurs, ‘Slam it at her backhand this time.’

They have trounced all. The rest of the tennis party sit around amid the rose-beds, watching them with dislike. Claudia saunters to the back of the court, admiring as she does so her bare sunburned legs. She turns; she takes her time over the serve, savouring for a moment Gordon’s back, the way his hair lies on his shirt collar, the shape of him.

‘The children are off to Paris for a few days,’ says Mother. ‘Mind, I do feel Claudia is young yet for this kind of thing but she has Gordon to look after her.’

‘It’s Pernod,’ says Gordon. ‘And you’d jolly well better get to like it. You can’t come here and not drink Pernod.’ And presently when they get up and move on she realises that she is floating, not walking but most agreeably floating down the street, holding his arm. ‘We must come here often,’ she says. ‘Naturally,’ says Gordon. ‘All civilised people spend a lot of time in France.’ It is his birthday; he is twenty today.

‘Claudia is going to Oxford,’ says Mother. ‘Of course quite a lot of girls do now and she has always been one for getting her own way.’

A summer. Two summers, perhaps, and a winter. Time out of mind ago – at least not out of mind but shrunk to a necklace of moments when we did this or that, when we said this or that, were here or there. When we were at home, sprawled side by side in the schoolroom, absorbed in one another while downstairs Mother sings to herself as she does the flowers. Or in Gordon’s rooms at Cambridge, or at a theatre in London or
roaming the Dorset landscape, arrogantly bored. I don’t wonder people looked at us with dislike. A year, perhaps two… And then we both began to look beyond each other, to wander away, to take an interest in the despised proletariat beyond. That time went; it is also forever there, conditioning how we are with one another. Because of it, other people are still excluded. Most of them never knew this; only Sylvia, poor stupid Sylvia, who got a whiff of it but never knew what it was she smelled. Later, much later.

There is roast chicken for Sunday lunch, bread sauce, bacon rolls, all the trimmings… Mother has done everything herself, valiantly, with little self-deprecating comments. She has taught herself to cook, brave Mother, since the defection of the last of the village helps. Claudia gave her Elizabeth David’s
French Country Cooking
for Christmas which was received politely but without enthusiam; no
coq au vin
or
quiche lorraine
has appeared on the table at Sturminster Newton.

‘It’s
lovely
, Mrs Hampton,’ gushes Sylvia, the good daughter-in-law. ‘Absolutely delicious. I do think you’re clever.’

Mother sits at the head of the table, Sylvia at her right. Claudia is opposite, Gordon at the end. Mother and Sylvia continue to discuss bread sauce, butchers, and, in more muted tones, the absorbing progress of Sylvia’s first pregnancy.

Claudia hears this as background noise: the buzzing of flies, a lawnmower. She has not seen Gordon for a couple of months. There is an unresolved argument to be taken up and a couple of scurrilous anecdotes to tell, one of which makes Gordon laugh uproariously. Sylvia breaks off what she is saying to Mother and turns. Her eyes are jumpy. She cries, ‘Oh, what’s the joke – do tell!’ and Gordon, getting up to carve himself more chicken, says it’s just something about someone we used to know, not all that funny really, anyone else want some more? ‘Meanie!’ pouts Sylvia. ‘Claudia, you tell me…’ and Claudia focuses for the first time on her sister-in-law, who is wearing what appears to be a vast billowing flowered pillow case from which sprouts her pink, pretty face, her golden hair.
Sylvia arouses, really, no emotions in Claudia at all, beyond a certain incredulity. She does occasionally wonder what Gordon talks to her about.

‘Oh – just a bit of gossip,’ she says. ‘Nothing really…’

Sylvia turns to her mother-in-law. ‘Were they always like this, Mrs Hampton? So… so
cliquey
?’

‘Oh no,’ says Mother tranquilly. ‘They squabbled dreadfully.’

‘So did we!’ cries Sylvia. ‘Desmond and I. We
loathed
each other. We were absolutely normal. We still are. I mean, I’m fond of Desmond but really we haven’t got a thing in common.’

Gordon sits down again with a plateful of food. ‘Claudia and I will do our best to be abnormal in privacy in future, then. OK, Claudia? We can stage a good fight for you now, if you like.’

Sylvia is flustered. Her hand flies to his arm, kneads it, her face becomes even pinker. ‘Oh heavens, I don’t mean you’re
peculiar
, just it’s funny a brother and sister being so kind of intimate. Lovely, really.’

All through what she was saying to Mrs Hampton she could hear them – or at least, maddeningly, not quite hear them. Gordon talking in that tone he uses to no one else. Claudia’s deep voice, a voice that can be so sarcastic, so unnerving, but to Gordon is so confidential. And when she tries to join in they clam up, fall silent, Gordon changes the subject, offers second helpings.

Claudia is wearing a red dress, very tight round the waist and hips. She is skinny thin these days. ‘I love your frock,’ says Sylvia determinedly. ‘I wish I could get into things like that.’ She pats her tummy and eyes Claudia: Claudia who is not married, not going to have a baby. She feels a little comforting glow of complacency. Thus bolstered, she is able to become gay and joky, to ask Mrs Hampton – who has been sweet, with whom there is never any problem – about when Claudia and Gordon were children, to chatter amusingly about herself and Desmond. And then Gordon says something in his shutting-out
voice, his cool as-though-to-a-casual-acquaintance voice, and she is no longer bolstered, no longer glowing. ‘I don’t mean you’re
peculiar
,’ she wails. ‘It’s lovely, really.’ She has not got it right. They are both looking at her now, Gordon and Claudia; she has got their attention all right, but not in the way she wanted. Are they laughing at her? Is that the tilt of little smiles at the corners of their mouths?

‘Gracious!’ says Claudia. ‘You make us sound exotic. I don’t think we’ve ever felt particularly exotic, have we?’

‘Incestuous, don’t you mean?’ says Gordon, tucking into roast chicken. ‘Though come to think of it I suppose incest is a bit exotic. Classical, though. Very high class. Look at the Greeks.’

‘And look at Nellie Frobisher in the village,’ says Claudia. ‘Knocked up by her dad before she was seventeen. Dr Crabb used to say he could tell which village people came from in central Dorset from the shape of their heads.’

‘Claudia,
really
…’ exclaims Mrs Hampton.

And Sylvia can endure it no longer. Suddenly she isn’t feeling very well. She pushes her chair back, puts her hand on her tummy, says with dignity that she is going to lie down for a bit – she’s sure everyone will understand.

As she climbs the stairs she can hear Mrs Hampton scolding them.

12

‘Thank you,’ says Claudia. ‘It looks nice and expensive. Fortnum’s, I see. Put it on the table, will you. The nurse on florist duties will see to it later.’

She is propped up on pillows. A board is tilted at an angle in front of her; she has pen and paper.

‘You’re writing something,’ Jasper states. He lowers himself into the bedside chair, which creaks betrayingly. Jasper is a substantial figure nowadays in every way. ‘What are you writing?’

‘A book.’

He smiles. Indulgently? Disbelievingly? ‘What about?’

‘A history of the world,’ replies Claudia. She slides a look at him. ‘Pretentious, eh?’

‘Not at all,’ says Jasper. ‘I shall look forward to reading it.’

Claudia laughs. ‘I doubt that, for various reasons.’ There is a silence. She adds, ‘I prefer to remain occupied, even when allegedly dying.’

Jasper makes a gesture of dismissal. ‘Nonsense, Claudia.’

‘Well, we shall see. Or, more probably, you will. So… You’re still busy making expensive travesties of the truth, I gather.
The Life of Christ
in six episodes, is that right? With commercial breaks.’

Jasper starts to speak, takes a breath, stops. Starts again. ‘This isn’t the time or the place, Claudia. Pax, eh? I’ve come to see you, not to cross swords.’

‘As you like,’ says Claudia. ‘I thought it might be good therapy. This is one of my brighter days, they tell me. I always rather enjoyed our sword-crossings, didn’t you?’

He smiles – placatingly, charmingly. ‘I have never regretted anything, my dear. The times with you least of all.’

‘Ah,’ Claudia looks sharply at him. ‘Well, there I would agree with you. Regretting is always pointless, since there is no undoing. Only the sanctimonious go in for breast-beating. Do you want a cup of tea? Ring that bell if so.’

I suppose it is because I sense a compatibility that I have been fascinated by the exploiters of historical circumstance. Political adventurers – Tito, Napoleon. Medieval popes; crusaders; colonisers. I don’t like them, but I cannot help observing them. Traders and settlers have always intrigued me – those fearless ruthless opportunists inserting themselves into the cracks and crevices and channels created by politics and diplomacy. I cannot help taking a censorious interest in the spice trade, the fur trade, the East India Company. In all those beady-eyed, devious, amoral, indestructible fellows of the sixteenth and seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who risked their lives and lined their pockets in the wake of public events.

Greed is an interesting quality. Jasper is greedy; he has to have money for its own sake – not just for what it can buy but as pure possession: figures on pieces of paper. Cupidity centred on bank statements and shareholdings is more difficult to understand than the avarice of an Elizabethan trader with his haul of cinnamon, cloves, mace, nutmeg and, presumably, gold bars under the floorboards. Since no one, nowadays, gets closer to visible touchable wealth than their bank statement or the plastic rectangles in their wallet it is presumably atavistic instincts of this kind that are aroused by newspaper stories of treasure – coin hoards turned up by the plough, chests of doubloons at the bottom of the Solent. We all dribble a little at the thought of gold and silver, and make lust respectable by sermonising about concern for the past. Nonsense. It’s not
Anglo-Saxons or medieval sailors people are interested in – it’s money, cash, guineas, pieces of eight, sovereigns, ingots, stuff you can run your hands through and count and feel the weight of and stash away under the bed.

Jasper turned the war to his own advantage. He made sure that he was never in any danger nor indeed greatly inconvenienced and set about furthering his career. He shot up ladders, outstripped his contemporaries and, I daresay, contributed his mite to victory. Jasper is a patriot, of course, in his own way.

It could well be asked why, since I talk like this of Jasper, I ever became, and remained, involved with him. When are sexual choices ever rational or expedient? Jasper was excellent to go to bed with, and entertaining out of it. By the time he was Lisa’s father we were linked for good. And for bad.