Moon Tiger (26 page)

‘I think I go back to Budapest,’ he says. He looks at her with hang-dog eyes, beseeching her to prescribe.

Claudia gets up. ‘I’m going to make some supper. You go and have a nice hot bath. Lie in it and think about nothing, if possible. You aren’t going to decide anything until the morning, anyway. Or the next day or the one after.’

For several days Laszlo agonised. He sat around the flat in a fog of misery, or walked the streets. His cold ripened. When I found myself irritated by his sniffing I knew that our relationship
would endure. Someone had evidently brought him up nicely; in the thick of that anguished time he remembered to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and kept trying to do the washing up. And when his father’s letter reached him, six closely-written sheets posted before the telephone call, he gave in. He spent three hours alone in my spare bedroom with the letter and then came out and said, ‘I stay here.’

‘Good,’ says Claudia briskly. ‘Then we must get on with seeing about things. Do you want to go to art college in London or somewhere else? I’ll take you to look at some places. There’s a committee collecting people like you. We’d better get in touch with them. There are quite a few of you, apparently. And you’d better go out and buy a coat and a thicker sweater before the weather gets any colder. You can’t go on walking around clad as for the central European summer.’

Good grief, she thinks, who is this talking?

Thus came Laszlo, washed into my life by the Kremlin. I remember feeling a curious satisfaction, as though one had been enabled to frustrate Fate. Hubris, of course; I too was Laszlo’s fate. And what did I – forty-six-year-old busy committed Claudia – want with a disturbed artistically inclined adolescent boy speaking fractured English?

‘I should be dead,’ says Laszlo. ‘I should better be dead like Hungarian people.’

He stands wearing the coat bought with money she made him take (a loan, it is called, entered sternly by him in a Woolworth’s notebook). The coat is a size too large and hangs down his thin shanks. The acne is worse than ever. He stands in the front hall of the flat, glowering.

‘You are very kind to me. Always you are being very kind to me. I am most grateful.’

‘That’s OK,’ says Claudia. ‘Hate me if you want to. You’re
perfectly entitled to hate someone, and I’m handy. Go ahead.’

‘What means handy?’ snarls Laszlo.

Laszlo gets drunk. He learns about pubs and goes one night to the King’s Road where he falls in with some gang of young sparks, returns to the flat after midnight and is copiously sick on the bathroom floor. The next morning he comes to Claudia with his kit-bag packed and offers to leave. Claudia says that will not be necessary.

Laszlo draws. He covers sheet after sheet of rough grainy paper from the grocer round the corner with huge wild charcoal drawings of guns, of tanks, of shattered buildings, of huddled people. Claudia pins some of them up on her walls. ‘These are good,’ she says.

‘No, they are not good,’ says Laszlo. ‘They are terrible, bad, awful.’ He takes them down when she is out and burns them in the kitchen bin. The flat reeks of charred paper. Claudia says, ‘Do what you like with your pictures but you’ve no damn business setting my flat on fire.’

Lisa, when she comes to the flat, is cool towards Laszlo. He offers to take her to Battersea, but she will not go. ‘Why not?’ says Claudia. ‘I thought you wanted to go on the Big Dipper.’ ‘I don’t like his spotty face,’ mutters Lisa. Claudia, through clenched teeth, says in that case she can do without the Big Dipper, once and for all.

Laszlo gets a letter, posted in Austria. It is from his aunt. His father is in prison. There is no address any more for his father. Laszlo tells this to Claudia, handing her the letter because he has forgotten for the moment that she cannot read Hungarian. He has been weeping, Claudia sees. Claudia asks him to translate the letter for her because it will give him something to do. As he does so she thinks intensely of this woman who is a whole life for Laszlo but just a voice for her, and of this faceless man, another whole unimaginable life.

*

Laszlo gets drunk again. Alone, this time, in the flat. Claudia invades his room, finds the empty whisky bottle and plonks it on the sitting-room table. ‘Next time you want to do that,’ she says, ‘tell me and I’ll join you. As it happens I’m not particularly partial to whisky but we have a tradition in this country that no one gets sloshed on their own. OK?’

Claudia sets Laszlo the task of learning London. She makes him ride bus routes from end to end, walk miles every day. Laszlo complains. ‘Do it,’ she orders. ‘It’s the only way you’re going to grow a new skin.’

On Claudia’s birthday Laszlo presents her with an enormous bunch of daffodils. He has picked them, it emerges, in Kensington Gardens. Amazingly, no one noticed.

Guided by me, Laszlo inspected London art colleges and eventually selected Camberwell. He could have gone wherever he wished; the whole of the western world wanted to compensate for the Russian tanks. Laszlo was made a fuss of by both teachers and fellow students. Within a few weeks he was wearing a French beret and a silk paisley scarf tucked into the neck of his shirt. He started smoking Gauloises and going to films at the Curzon. He had a grant now and some money from the committee set up to supervise the Hungarian students. Sometime in the spring he moved out of my flat to live with friends south of the river. Periodically he would quarrel with the friends, or they would all be thrown out for not paying the rent, and he would move back in with me again until some new arrangement was sorted out. I became used to late-night calls from phone boxes, to Laszlo’s lanky figure on the doorstep. My small spare room – as opposed to the one usually occupied by Lisa – became known as his room. He would drift away for weeks on end, neither writing nor telephoning, and then come bounding back.

It was to go on like that for ten years or so.

I watched Laszlo mutate. I watched him turn from a
disoriented boy to a volatile adult. To be honest, I have never been certain how much of Laszlo’s instability can be attributed to history and how much to temperament. Perhaps he would have been like that anyway. And to be fair he himself never for one moment blamed circumstances for anything. What he did do was cleave unto his adoptive country. Within two years Laszlo was speaking a more demotic English than his peers; he became aggressively insular. He cultivated the most English friends he could lay hands on – a bizarre mixture of working-class boys with strident London accents and laconic offcuts of the upper class, with double-barrelled names. He seldom talked about Hungary and became irritated when the subject came up; whatever was going on went on within. He avoided the overtures of fellow expatriates – that mildly
louche
and mysterious Eastern European sub-culture that lurked then in South Ken and Earls Court. He flirted for a while with Anglo-Catholicism. Then he dropped that and joined the Labour party. He took up, in turn, bird-watching, vegetarianism, judo, gliding and every passing artistic fashion. His attitude towards me varied from amiably patronising to effusively affectionate.

Laszlo is a little tipsy. He lies on the sofa with his feet on the arm.

Claudia says, ‘You might take your shoes off.’

‘You are being bourgeois,’ says Laszlo. He removes his shoes. ‘You are my mother, Claudia.’

‘No, I’m not, thank God. And you shouldn’t talk like that.’

‘No,’ says Laszlo, after a moment. ‘You are right. But I want to say something. Who else can I say it to? It is this. I like men. Not girls.’

‘So?’ says Claudia. ‘If that’s the way you are, then that’s the way you are.’

Lisa never accepted Laszlo. When she was a child she watched him suspiciously. Was she jealous? Did she think of him as my surrogate son? Was he, indeed, my surrogate son? I
think not. But who am I to say – all I can do is record what I felt about Laszlo. And what I felt was compunction, responsibility and, eventually, great affection. Which is quite a lot. But Lisa had no need to be jealous. When she was older – seventeen, eighteen – she was polite but distant with him. Nowadays, on the rare occasions when she meets him, she behaves as towards a second cousin who has fallen upon hard times and might be going to ask for a loan.

By the time Laszlo was in his early thirties he had simmered down, insofar as he ever would. He went to live with an older man in Camden Town – an up-market antique dealer with one of those shops that has nothing in it but three pieces of expensive furniture and a couple of Chinese pots. I have never cared for the fellow but he has looked after Laszlo, endured his moods and provided him with somewhere to work. Laszlo is not a successful artist. I can quite understand why few people want to buy his paintings; they are too uncomfortable to live with. They howl of
malaise
; they jar the eye; they are discordant and disturbing. Nightmare creatures stalk through surreal landscapes; things fall apart; anguished people scurry in broken cities. They hang on my walls, but then I have no choice: if I won’t honour them, who will? Anyway, I’m used to them.

15

‘For God’s sake…’ says Claudia. ‘You’re supposed to jolly me along, not sit there wringing your hands.’ It is a bad day; her voice comes out as a whisper.

‘They didn’t tell me,’ wails Laszlo. ‘We have been in France and then I went to New York and when I came back I telephoned you and there was no one there so I telephoned again later and still no one and then I telephoned Lisa. Why didn’t they tell me?’

‘They tried,’ says Claudia. ‘Lisa phoned you. As you say, you were away.’

Laszlo leans forward and stares intently at her. ‘So how are you?’

‘Still here.’

Laszlo prowls to the window. He is thin, his elbows poke out of holes in his sweater, his black hair is streaked with grey. Claudia watches him.

‘What can I do? What do you need? What can I get for you? Books? Papers? I shall come every day.’

‘No,’ says Claudia, rather too promptly. ‘Every now and then will do fine. Tell me about France.’

Laszlo makes a dismissive gesture. ‘France… France was for Henry. Fireplaces. Everything now is old fireplaces for rich silly women who pay the earth.’

‘New York?’

‘I had an exhibition.’

‘Aha. Sell much?’

The door opens. ‘Visitor for you!’ cries the nurse.

Claudia turns her head. ‘Hello, Sylvia,’ she murmurs.

And no, no, no, she thinks, it is my privilege now to turn away from inappropriate conjunctions. She closes her eyes and leaves them to it, Sylvia and Laszlo. Who have never, in any positive sense, inhabited the same world. She hears Sylvia saying that actually she’s never been
desperately
fond of New York; she hears Laszlo muttering that no, he didn’t go to the theatre much and yes, it was quite cold.

We all act as hinges – fortuitous links between other people. I link Sylvia to Laszlo, Lisa to Laszlo; Gordon links me to Sylvia. Sylvia always retreated from Laszlo by saying he was rather a difficult boy and Claudia was awfully good with him. Laszlo, in his frenetic twenties, used to imitate Sylvia, cruelly and accurately. Gordon found him interesting but exasperating; Laszlo has always allowed his soul to hang out like his shirt-tails and Gordon found this uncongenial. He did not object to people having souls but preferred them tucked away out of sight where they ought to be. But he took Laszlo on, in his way. He left Laszlo a small legacy.

Claudia opens her eyes. Lisa is there, taking off her jacket and hanging it tidily over the back of the chair.

Claudia contemplates her. ‘It’s all go today. Laszlo came. And Sylvia. Now you.’

‘No,’ says Lisa. ‘That was two days ago. You’re a bit muddled up. You’ve not been too good.’

‘What have I been doing for two days, I wonder?’ says Claudia. ‘They seem to have passed me by. Or taken me with them.’

‘You look better,’ says Lisa.

Claudia raises a hand and studies the back of it. ‘I wouldn’t say so. I’ve never got used to the fact that they have brown
spots all over them. They look to me like someone else’s, to be frank.’

Lisa, who does not like the turn things are taking, asks after Laszlo.