Moon Tiger

by Penelope Lively

‘I’m writing a history of the world,’ she says. And the hands of the nurse are arrested for a moment; she looks down at this old woman, this old ill woman. ‘Well, my goodness,’ the nurse says. ‘That’s quite a thing to be doing, isn’t it?’ And then she becomes busy again, she heaves and tucks and smooths – ‘Upsy a bit, dear, that’s a good girl – then we’ll get you a cup of tea.’

she does seem to have been someone,

There are plenty who would point to it as a typical presumption to align my own life with the history of the world. Let them. I’ve always had my followers, also. My readers know the story, of course. They know the general tendency.

I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy.

Beliefs are relative. Our connection with reality is always tenuous. I do not know by what magic a picture appears on my television screen, or how a crystal chip has apparently infinite capacities. I accept, simply. And yet I am by nature sceptical – a questioner, a doubter, an instinctive agnostic.

I was thirty-eight when Lisa was born, and doing nicely. Two books under my belt, some controversial journalism, a reputation for contentious provocative attention-seizing writing. I had something of a name. If feminism had been around then I’d have taken it up, I suppose; it would have needed me. As it was, I never felt its absence; being a woman seemed to me a valuable extra asset. My gender was never an impediment. And I must also reflect, now, that it perhaps saved my life. If I had been a man I might well have died in the war.

History is of course crammed with people like Mother, who are just sitting it out. It is the front-liners who are the exception – those who find themselves thus placed whether they like it or not and those who seek involvement.

Miss Lavenham, as I well know, does not welcome questions unless they are matters of dates or how to spell a name, and this one, I surmise though I do not quite know why, verges on the heretical. Miss Lavenham pauses for a moment, and looks at me with dislike.

Mother, poor thing, was putting off the evil day of explanation. All I knew was that clearly there was something very underhand that went on or it would not be so shrouded in mystery. I had my suspicions, too;

In life as in history the unexpected lies waiting, grinning from around corners. Only with hindsight are we wise about cause and effect.

You are public property – the received past. But you are also private; my view of you is my own, your relevance to me is personal. I like to reflect on the wavering tenuous line that runs from you to me, that leads from your shacks at Plymouth Plantation to me, Claudia, hopping the Atlantic courtesy of PanAm and TWA and BA to visit my brother in Harvard. This, you see, is the point of all this. Egocentric Claudia is once again subordinating history to her own puny existence. Well – don’t we all?

But you deserve and shall have a considerable space in my history of the world. I shall wander among you, indulgently, pointing out your orderliness, your sense of justice, your capacity for hard work. Your courage.

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.

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.

Today language abandoned me. I could not find the word for a simple object – a commonplace familiar furnishing. For an instant, I stared into a void. Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms. Later, I made an inventory of the room – a naming of parts: bed, chair, table, picture, vase, cupboard, window, curtain. Curtain. And I breathed again.

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes – our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.

Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.

Whereas is a funny word; you do not say it, you blow it. Whereas, whereas. Whereas Claudia is my name.

The story that she is watching has, now, a third dimension, that is both more indistinct and yet clearer by far. This dimension has smell and feel and touch. It smells of Moon Tiger, kerosene, dung and dust. Its feelings are so sharp that Claudia gets up, slams the television into silence and sits staring at the blank pane of glass, where the story rolls on.

I was talking earlier about language. I have put my faith in language – hence the panic when a simple word eludes me, when I stare at a piece of flowered material in front of a window and do not know what name to give it. Curtain. Thank God. I control the world so long as I can name it.

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.

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.

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.

When I look at Lisa now I see the shadow of middle age on her face. This is disconcerting. One’s child, after all, is forever young. A girl, perhaps, a young woman even – but that hardening of the features, that softening of the body, that hint that time past is levelling up with time ahead … dear me, no. I look with surprise at this home counties matron, wondering who she is – and then from the eyes round which spread little vulnerable fans of wrinkles there stares at me the eight-year-old, and the sixteen-year-old, and the one-year-wedded Lisa with red shrieking baby.

The point is, of course, that I have. What he brings is in my head, not his. But isn’t that interesting? Time and the universe lie around in our minds. We are sleeping histories of the world. ‘One of these days,’ she says, ‘I’m going to write a vastly pretentious book. I’m going to write a history of the world.’

It is in these words that reality survives.

This is the record; this is what history comes down to in the end; this is the language of war. Not that other language – that lunatic language that lays a smokescreen of fantasy – that crazy language of generals and politicians: Plan Barbarossa, with its Wagnerian invocations; Operations Snowdrop, Hyacinth, Daffodil and Tulip dancing feyly towards Tobruk. That was the language I used to hear in Cairo, on the lips of the Eighth Army buccaneers – the laconic chat about Matildas and Honeys, coy disguise for several tons of mobile death-dealing metal, and the amiable euphemism whereby such things when hit did not explode (roasting alive their crew) but ‘brewed up’. And it was a picnic, too, of course, and men did not die but bought it, were not shot but stopped one. The eccentricity of it occurs only with hindsight; at the time it seemed normal, even acceptable. Words were my business, but it wasn’t the moment for close analysis of their implications – or at least not that kind of analysis.

Those were the words I dealt in – a language that seems fossilised now, superseded by new jargons, new camouflages. I have lived since in the world of overkill and second strike and negative capability; the scenarios of future wars or probably the final war are preceded by their distracting code-words.

Speech regenerates itself like the landscape; words die and others are born, just as buildings melt away and others take their place, as the sand blew over the carcasses of the Matildas and the Honeys and the Crusaders.

The place didn’t look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

What happened there happens now only inside my head – no one else sees the same landscape, hears the same sounds, knows the sequence of events. There is another voice, but it is one that only I hear. Mine – ours – is the only evidence.

The only private evidence, that is. So far as public matters go – history – there is plenty. Most of it is in print now; all those accounts of which general comes out of it best, who had how many tanks, who advanced where at which point and why. I’ve read them all; they seem to have little to do with anything I remember.

I didn’t see him for over four years and by the time I did we had both been jolted into another incarnation of ourselves.

Claudia types. She has to pause from time to time to shake sand from the typewriter. She types partly from expediency and partly to exorcise what is now printed on her eyeballs. She tries to reduce to words what she has seen and thought. She types also because she is dog-tired, thirsty, aching and bad-tempered and if she does not occupy herself she might give away some of this, and be ashamed.

I wasn’t thinking of Tom but of myself. And of a self who seemed to be not ‘me’ but ‘she’. An innocent, moving fecklessly through the days, knowing nothing, whom I saw now with awful wisdom. This is how I have felt – how surely anyone must feel – contemplating those poised moments of the past:

For there are moments, out here in this place and at this time, when she feels that she is untethered, no longer hitched to past or future or to a known universe but adrift in the cosmos. At night she looks at the sizzling stars, which cannot be the same stars that glimmer in English skies, and she feels eternal, which, far from being tranquil, is like some hideous fever – a psychological version of the malaria, typhoid, dysentery and jaundice that smite each and all at some point in this continent.

You lived from day to day. That of course is a banality but it had a prosaic truth to it then. Death was unmentionable and kept at bay with code-words and the careless understated style of the playing fields.

‘Sorry – I’m not doing very well. It’s like the whole of life in a single appalling concentration. It does lunatic things with time. An hour can seem like a day or a day like an hour. When you’re flung from one state of mind to another with such speed the physical world takes on an extraordinary clarity. I have spent whole minutes gazing at the structure of a rock or the behaviour of an insect.’

You drive towards the things and as you do so they disappear, melt away before your eyes. But somewhere there is this mirror place going about its business in perfect impervious detachment.

Wars are fought by children. Conceived by their mad demonic elders and fought by boys. I say that now, caught out in surprise at how young people are, forgetting that it is not they who are young but I who am old.

Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realise that? It’s the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.’

The difficulty though is not one of credulity but of experience.

Write for me from time to time, he said. Write for me when you feel like it. Write when you like about whatever you like, and make it as cussed as you like. Provoke. Fly kites. Start hares. You can do it, I can tell.

History is disorder, I wanted to scream at them – death and muddle and waste. And here you sit cashing in on it and making patterns in the sand.

Sights one can conjure up in the head; sound is more elusive. My readers shall hear, at this point – they shall become listeners.

It might be easier if I believed in God, but I don’t. All I can think, when I hear your voice, is that the past is true, which both appals and uplifts me.