Moon Tiger (9 page)

‘Go and read the book I gave you,’ says Claudia, her pen working to and fro across the paper.

‘I’ve been reading it.’

‘Then…’ Claudia pauses, scans what she has written, ponders. She looks up. At Lisa – intrusive distracting little shadow at the window. ‘Don’t bite your fingernails like that, darling. And don’t pull the curtain.’

Lisa is silent. Her finger falls from her mouth, her hand from the curtain. Otherwise she does not move.

Claudia reaches for another sheet of paper, writes. ‘Please, Lisa, go and find something to do. I’m busy. I have to deal with these letters. Later we’ll go out.’

‘I don’t know what to do,’ says Lisa, after a minute… two minutes.

No more of this, thinks Claudia, next time I’ll get a girl from an agency to take her to the park, the Zoo, anything… You need a certain mentality to cope with children. I don’t have it. Thank God.

Claudia’s fingernails are pink. Bright pink like sugar mice. If
you had fingernails like that you would be like Claudia; you could do what you liked and say what you liked and go where you liked. You would be busy busy all the time talking to your friends on the telephone, coming in going out back later tell the porter to get us a taxi darling, put your coat on hurry hurry.

If you bite your fingernails no one will want to marry you, Granny says. No one has ever married Claudia. Jasper and Claudia did not get married because they didn’t love each other enough, Claudia says. You have to love someone very much before you marry them. If they had bitten fingernails you wouldn’t want to marry them even if you loved them. You cannot paint your fingernails pink until you are grown-up, which is never. On Claudia’s dressing-table there are little bottles with different kinds of pink – Pink Clover and Blush Pink and Hot Pink and Hawaiian Red. On Granny’s dressing-table there is Eau de Cologne and Pond’s Cold Cream and the Maison Pearson hairbrush and the mirror with the silver handle.

‘Find something to do,’ says Claudia. I can’t, shouts Lisa, I can’t I can’t I can’t I don’t know where to find it I don’t know where to look I want pink fingernails like yours I want to be you not me I want to make you look at me I want you to say Lisa how pretty you are.

5

‘God,’ she says, ‘is an unprincipled bastard, wouldn’t you agree?’

And the nurses, who are aged twenty-one and twenty-four, freeze for an instant amid their deft tucking and folding and heaving. They exchange quick knowing glances. ‘Goodness,’ says the fair nurse. ‘That’s a funny thing to say. Do you want tea or coffee, Miss Hampton?’

‘Come,’ says Claudia. ‘You can’t work in a place like this and never have given the matter a thought. Is He or isn’t He?’

‘Oh, I’m not religious,’ says the dark nurse. ‘Not a bit. My mum is, though, she goes to church. Tea or coffee, dear?’

‘Well, I hope she knows what she’s about,’ says Claudia. ‘Tea. No sugar.’

I would never have agreed to Lisa being christened. Jasper wouldn’t have cared one way or the other. The grandmothers, in cunning collusion, had it done without mentioning the matter, smuggling her along to the vicar at Sotleigh (and a nice little tea-party for a few old friends after, I don’t doubt). I found out by accident, months later, and rounded on them both. ‘What’s this?’ I said. ‘Spiritual vaccination? A bit of crafty life insurance? And who asked me?’ They defended themselves according to their lights. ‘We didn’t ask you because you were so busy,’ said Mother. ‘And we knew you
wouldn’t want to come.’ Lady Branscombe sighed, ‘Claudia dear… We just thought it would be nice. The poor little pet – one wants to do everything one can for her. And the vicar would have been so hurt not to be asked.’ Lisa was enrolled in the Church of England in order not to give offence and so that Lady Branscombe could get out the family christening robe and the Crown Derby tea service. ‘Well,’ said Jasper, ‘it does no positive harm, I daresay.’ Oh no, none at all; just as well to belong to several clubs, you never know which may come in useful.

‘Incidentally,’ says Claudia, ‘have you ever resigned from the Church?’

Lisa jumps, and lowers the book she has been reading; her mother’s eyes are still closed, her sharp thin nose points still at the ceiling, but she is not, evidently, asleep.

‘You’re awake… I hadn’t realised.’

‘Ah,’ says Claudia. ‘Is that what I am? I sometimes wonder.’

Lisa closes the book. She rises, smooths her dress, and goes to stand looking down on Claudia. It occurs to her that she has not often before looked on Claudia from above. She asks if there is anything Claudia needs. Should she call the nurse?

‘No,’ says Claudia. ‘I see quite enough nurses. You haven’t answered my question.’

‘I don’t often go to church,’ says Lisa, ‘if that’s what you mean. Just occasionally – Christmas, special services at the boys’ school, that sort of thing.’

‘It isn’t what I meant,’ says Claudia.

Lisa considers Claudia’s face, which is the colour of yellowed ivory, in which the eyes lie within deep violet sockets; beneath the puckered skin she can see the bones of Claudia’s skull. ‘I’m not sure that I believe in God.’

‘Oh I do,’ says Claudia. ‘Who else could bugger things up so effectively?’

A nurse puts her head round the door – the fair nurse, aged twenty-one. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Fine,’ says Lisa. ‘Thank you.’

‘She’s having one of her good days. Nice and chatty.’

The door closes. Claudia opens one eye, checks the nurse’s departure, stares up at the ceiling. ‘Tell me what you’ve been doing.’

‘Well,’ says Lisa. ‘It was the boys’ half-term last weekend so Harry took them to a rugger match. And on the Saturday evening we all went to the theatre – the RSC
King Lear
. Very good. And dinner after at Rules – a treat for Tim’s birthday. And… um… let’s see…’

And on Monday afternoon I visited the man who has been my lover for four years now and of whom you know nothing nor ever will. Not because you would disapprove but because you would not. And because since I was a small child I have hidden things from you: a silver button found on a path, a lipstick pilfered from your handbag, thoughts, feelings, opinions, intentions, my lover. You are not, as you think, omniscient. You do not know everything; you certainly do not know me. You judge and pronounce; you are never wrong. I do not argue with you; I simply watch you, knowing what I know. Knowing what you do not know.

My lover is called Paul. I have told him about you, and about Jasper; up to a point, insofar as it is possible for another person to do so, he understands. He would like to meet you, out of interest. Perhaps one day I will bring him here, just to look – through that round glass porthole in the door. You would not see him.

‘ “Let us pray…” ’ says Claudia. ‘Huh! Twice in my life have I prayed, and a fat lot of good it did me. Or anyone.’

God shall have a starring role in my history of the world. How could it be otherwise? If He exists, then He is responsible for the whole marvellous appalling narrative. If He does not, then the very proposition that He might has killed more people and exercised more minds than anything else. He dominates the stage. In His name have been devised the rack, the thumbscrew, the Iron Maiden, the stake; for Him have people been crucified, flayed alive, fried, boiled, flattened; He has
generated the Crusades, the pogroms, the Inquisition and more wars than I can number. But for Him there would not be the
St Matthew Passion
, the works of Michelangelo and Chartres Cathedral.

So how am I to present Him – this invisible all-pervasive catalyst? How am I to suggest to my reader (no informed enlightened reader – a visitor from outer space, let us say) the extraordinary fact that for much of recorded time most people have been prepared to believe in the presidency over all things of an indefinable unassuageable Power?

I shall take a building. A building shaped like a cross, furnished neither for habitation nor defence. I shall multiply this building by a thousand, by ten thousand, by a hundred thousand. It may be as small as a single room; it may soar into the sky. It may be old or it may be new; it may be plain or it may be rich; it may be of stone or it may be of wood or it may be of brick or of mud. This building is in the heart of cities and it is in the wild places of the earth. It is on islands and in deserts and upon mountains. It is in Provence and Suffolk and Tuscany and Alsace and in Vermont and Bolivia and the Lebanon. The walls and furnishings of this building tell stories; they talk of kings and queens and angels and devils; they instruct and they threaten. They are intended to uplift and to terrify. They are an argument made manifest.

The argument is another matter. What I am trying to demonstrate at this point is the amazing legacy of God – or the possibility of God – by way not of ideas but of manipulation of the landscape. Churches have always seemed to me almost irrefutable evidence. They make me wonder if – just possibly – I might be wrong.

Which is how I came once to pray. To kneel down in St George’s Pro-Cathedral, Cairo and ask a putative God for forgiveness and help. I was thirty-one.

She comes in from the glare and disorder outside – the heat, the rattle of trams and gharries, the people and carts and animals, the Cairo smell of dung and kerosene – into the calm
and relative cool of the cathedral. Women in silk and crêpe-de-chine, gloved and hatted, smile discreetly at one another. Army officers – big bold moustached buccaneers crackling with khaki and leather – lay their caps on adjoining seats and bend for a moment with knee to ground and hand before eyes. Claudia, alone, furtive, reluctant and wretched, takes a place at the back, in the shadow of a pillar. She keeps on her sunglasses – defiant disguise.

The rituals of the Church of England are observed. The Lord is praised and besought and worshipped. Chairs scrape, dresses rustle, shoes squeak on the stone floor. Flies crawl upon sweating skin and are surreptitiously slapped. The Bishop seeks God’s protection for British soldiers, sailors and airmen and a speedy victory in the Western Desert. ‘Amen…’ murmur the bowed heads – firm male voices, clear genteel female ones.

And Claudia makes her own silent isolated squirming intercession. O God, she says, or Whoever or Whatever, to this have I come, in my misery. I do not know what You are or if You are, but I am no longer sufficient unto myself and someone has got to do something for me. I can bear it no longer. Let him not be dead. Let him not be lying blown apart in the desert. Let him not be rotting out there in the sun. Above all let him not be dying slowly of thirst and wounds, unable to call out, overlooked by the ambulance units. If necessary, let him be taken prisoner. That I will tolerate. But please, O please, let him no longer be missing believed killed.

‘Forgive us our trespasses…’

Claudia’s silent voice hesitates. All right then, even that. Forgive me my trespasses. If such they are.

‘I believe in God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost…’

Even that. All that. If You do Your part.

And a collection is taken for the children of the Coptic Orphanage in Heliopolis and the congregation prays once more (‘Grant us Victory, O Lord, and enlighten our enemies…’) and rises to its feet. They pass out of the cathedral, the silk and cotton dresses, the uniforms, the tropical suits, and into
the tree-lined boulevard by the Nile. Claudia walks quickly through them, looking at no one, and crosses the road to be alone. She walks towards the bridge. She stands for a few moments staring across the river towards Gezira, at the grey-green feathering of palms and casuarinas, the glittering water, the white curve of a felucca sail. This is a land ridden by gods, she thinks. A god for every need. She adds, now, some further prayers. She casts prayers to the dry desert wind, indiscriminately.

Lisa sits watching Claudia, who may or may not be asleep. There is no telling; Claudia’s eyes are closed but once or twice her lips twitch. When before has Claudia ever been thus? Lisa cannot remember illness, incapacity; it is as though you saw a familiar tree felled. Lisa does not think about possible outcomes because a world in which Claudia is not cannot be imagined. Claudia simply is, ever has been and always will be.