We expect Armageddon; the Bible has trained us well. We assume either annihilation or salvation, perhaps both. Millennarian beliefs are as old as time; the apocalypse has always been at hand. People have lain quaking in their beds waiting for the year one thousand, have cowered at the passage of comets, have prayed their way through eclipses. Our particular anxieties would seem on the face of things more rational, but they have an inescapable ancestry. The notion that things go on for ever is recent, and evidently too recent to attract much of a following. The world being what it is, it has always been tempting to assume that something would be done about it, sooner or later. When I went to Jerusalem in 1941 I stayed in a small pension run by American Seventh Day Adventists, elderly people who had sold up in Iowa or Nebraska in the ’twenties and taken themselves off to the Holy Land with all their savings to be on the spot for the Second Coming, due in 1933. The Second Coming never came; the savings ran out; there they still were, sensibly making the best of it by managing a hotel. It was a delightful place with a shady courtyard in which tortoises ambled among rosemary bushes and pots of geraniums.
Gordon and I, over the years, have argued about disarmament more than about anything else. When I was a member of CND he was not; his pragmatism has always been an antidote to my pessimism; he has always been able to produce arguments and figures when I have brandished emotions and struck attitudes. I can say this now. The last time we were together, in a taxi in London, two days before he died, he looked down at the headlines of the evening paper on his knee and said, ‘One resents being axed from the narrative, apart from anything else. I’d have liked to know the outcome.’
Gordon, of course, has been one of those who have a share in outcomes. He has made things happen, from time to time. It is given unto economists to interfere with the narrative, in their small way; peasants in Zambia, small shopkeepers in Bogota, factory workers in Huddersfield have been, at one time or another, affected by Gordon’s professional activities.
Gordon, a week before he died, gave evidence before a Royal Commission on Broadcasting whose report he knew he would never see. Sylvia and I took him there in a taxi, Sylvia squeaking and clucking, her eyes pink-rimmed, shreds of damp Kleenex all over her clothes; Gordon was ill-tempered, impatient, pumped full of drugs and slung around with plastic tubing. The doctors said, ‘If he wants to, he should do it’; I agreed. He gave his evidence, staggered back into another taxi and sat there talking about the forthcoming election. He set out to provoke and I took the bait, knowing that I must not do otherwise. We argued. Sylvia burst into tears.
She sits beside Gordon and Claudia sits opposite, on the jump-seat. He shouldn’t have come, those wretched doctors should never have let him come, none of them should be here at such a time bumping through horrid December London in a taxi. Gordon’s breath rasps and he has these tube-things strapped to his leg at which she cannot bear to look, they make her feel so woozy. And he is talking talking which cannot be good for him, getting worked up about the stupid election when who in the middle of all this cares about the election? Gordon will not be… By the time the election comes Gordon will have…
Sylvia stares out of the window, biting her lip.
She is going to be terribly brave about it. She is not going to break down. When it happens. She is going to be brave and sensible and see to all the things that will have to be seen to and keep calm and dignified.
And as she thinks this there stream through her head other thoughts that ought not to be there she knows but that she cannot keep out… thoughts about afterwards and selling the house, she’s never really liked north Oxford anyway, one could move to somewhere more countryish, not right in the country which could be a problem but a nice little market town with the sort of people one would get on with, and one need never ever go to the States again, one might even find a little job, voluntary work maybe, an Oxfam shop or something like that, just to have an interest…
‘Rubbish!’ says Claudia. ‘Absolute rubbish!’ And Sylvia jumps, staunches the flow of thought, turns to here and now. In which Gordon and Claudia are arguing. To and fro, just like the old days: but listen you don’t really mean to tell me… you only say that because you know nothing about… let me finish what I’m saying… you’re simply wrong there Claudia.
How can Claudia! Coming back at him like that when he’s so ill. Interrupting. Raising her voice. Typical Claudia. It’s appalling. When he’s… when he’s going to die.
And the tears come welling up, spilling over, so that she has to turn to the window again and rummage for her hankie, and she sees her own face in the glass, superimposed on shop fronts and pavements, a round pink old face with puffy eyes and streaked cheeks.
‘Rubbish!’ says Claudia. It sounds vehement enough; it sounds almost as though she means it. Her eyes meet Gordon’s, and she sees that he is not fooled, but he goes on talking and she goes on talking and interrupting and beneath what is said they tell each other something entirely different.
I love you, she thinks. Always have. More than I’ve loved anyone, bar one. That word is overstretched; it cannot be made to do service for so many different things – love of children, love of friends, love of God, carnal love and cupidity and saintliness. I do not need to tell you, any more than you need to tell me. I have seldom even thought it. You have been my alter ego, and I have been yours. And soon there will only be me, and I shall not know what to do.
Sylvia, she sees, is weeping again. Not quite silently enough. If you don’t stop that, thinks Claudia, I may simply push you out of this taxi.
It is a grey winter afternoon, glittering with car lights, street lights, gold, red, emerald, the black rainy pavements gleaming, the shop windows glowing Wagnerian caverns. Gordon, talking, sees and takes note of all this. He talks of events that have not yet come about and sees light and texture, the kaleidoscope of fruit outside a greengrocer, the mist of rain on a girl’s cheek. A newspaper kiosk is a portrait gallery of pop stars and royalty; the traffic glides like shoals of shining fish. And all this will go on, he thinks. And on, and on. What do I feel about it? What do I care?
His eyes meet Claudia’s. ‘Rubbish,’ she says. ‘I’ve always given theory its due. It’s just that I have preferred to write about action.’ ‘Mad opportunists,’ says Gordon. ‘Tito. Napoleon. That’s not real history. History is grey stuff. Products. Systems of government. Climates of opinion. It moves slowly. That’s why you get impatient with it. You look for spectacle.’ ‘There is spectacle,’ says Claudia. ‘All too much of it.’ ‘Indeed yes,’ says Gordon, shifting on the seat, wincing. ‘Of course there’s spectacle. But the spectacle may mislead. What’s really happening may be going on elsewhere.’ ‘Oh come on,’ cries Claudia. ‘You’d tell the prisoner on the guillotine that the action is really somewhere else?’ And as she speaks he hears and sees a hundred other Claudias, going back and back, woman and girl and child. You, he thinks. You. There has always been you. And soon no longer will be.
He feels, beside him, Sylvia’s turned head, her shuddering shoulders. He reaches out and puts a hand on hers. It is the least he can do. And the most.
Gordon died five years ago. I am separate from him now. No day passes in which I do not think of him, but I can do so with detachment. He is complete; he has beginning and end. The times in which we were together are complete. I do not mourn him any the less, but I have had to move away: there is no choice. We were children together; we made narcissistic love; we grew up and depended upon one another. From time to time we loathed each other but even in hatred we were united, exclusive, a community of two. I knew Gordon as ruthlessly as I know myself – and as indulgently. What I felt for Gordon was classifiable as love for lack of a better word: he was my sense of identity, my mirror, my critic, judge and ally. Without him I am diminished.
In the beginning there was myself; my own body set the frontiers, physical and emotional, there was simply me and not-me; the egotism of infancy has grandeur. And when I became a child the
re was Claudia, who was the centre of all things, and there was what pertained to Claudia, out at which I looked, the world of others, observed but not apprehended, a Berkeleyan landscape which existed only at my whim – when it ceased to interest me it no longer existed. And eventually, or so I am claiming, I grew up and saw myself in the awful context of time and place: everything and nothing.
She swims up from some tumultuous netherworld. She sees Laszlo, sitting beside the bed, his brown gaze fixed upon her. ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘You again. Sylvia’s gone, then?’
‘That was three days ago,’ says Laszlo. ‘You are confused, dear.’
Claudia sighs. ‘I shall have to take your word for it. And don’t call me dear – it sounds unnatural, you never have before.’
‘I am sorry,’ says Laszlo humbly. ‘Is there anything you would like?’
‘Lots of things,’ says Claudia. ‘But it’s too late for them now.’
‘You mustn’t talk like that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because… Because it isn’t like you.’
Claudia eyes him. ‘I’m dying, you know.’
‘No!’ says Laszlo violently.
‘Yes. So don’t pretend. You’re just like Lisa. If I can cope with it, so can you. Not that I am going particularly quietly.’
‘What do you mean?’ enquires Laszlo, with caution.
‘Nothing. All in the mind. I’m not proposing to attack the nice kind doctors.’ She closes her eyes and there is a silence. Laszlo gets up and roams the room. He examines the flowers ranged on the table – the scarlet poinsettia, the shock-headed chrysanthemums, the red roses with unnatural long thornless stems. ‘Lovely roses.’
‘Jasper.’
Laszlo turns his back on the roses with a sniff. ‘He has been then?’
‘He has.’
Laszlo dumps himself down in the chair again. ‘Jasper I have never understood. When you could have had… any man.’ He raises his eyes to the ceiling, spreads his hands, sheds his English top-dressing.
‘So you’ve said before.’
‘Anyone. You who were so beautiful… Are,’ he adds, hastily.
‘And I don’t much care for Henry,’ says Claudia. ‘That’s life, isn’t it? Anyway, Jasper was a long time ago.’
‘How many men have asked you to marry them?’
‘Not a lot. Most had too strong an instinct for self-preservation.’
Laszlo pulls a face. ‘Always you make yourself out so… formidable. To me you are not formidable. You are wonderful, simply.’
‘Thanks,’ says Claudia; she has closed her eyes again. Laszlo sits watching her: the profile with the high sharp nose, almost translucent at this moment in the light from the afternoon sun that pours through the window, and in which the flowers blaze, brilliant red and orange. She turns suddenly towards him: ‘There is one thing I should like, if you are coming again.’
‘Of course.’
‘At the flat,’ she says carefully, ‘in the top drawer of my desk. A brown envelope tied up with string. Addressed to me. Quite thick. Just something I’d like to look through again, if you could bring it along.’
I can’t exactly say that Laszlo has been a comfort to me in my later life: he has been alternately a liability and a source of interest. Also we are fond of each other. I have subsidised him, baled him out, consoled him; he has given me affection and entertainment. I have found his temperament, which sends a lot of people running, more intriguing than alarming. Laszlo’s histrionics, which induce pursed lips and heavy silences in Lisa or in Sylvia, have been for me the breath of alien other worlds; they evoke the tumultuous unfettered society of Eastern Europe – languages I do not speak, cities I do not know, saints and tyrants and forests and vampires, a past that is more myth than history and all the better for it. When Laszlo was in his roaring twenties I used to put my feet up and become an appreciative spectator as he ranted up and down the sitting-room of the Fulham flat, bewailing his latest love affair, quarrel, betrayal, his creative struggles, the casuistry of critics and art gallery owners. He was always in a state of triumph or despair; he always arrived with a bottle of champagne or to tell me that he proposed suicide. I can’t help respecting such responses; they seem an appropriate commitment to life.
Lisa, though, finds his personality excessive and embarrassing; despite (or maybe because of) her own ancestry. When she was young and obliged to consort with him from time to time because still within my orbit, she was as stiff and aloof as she could get away with. After her marriage she distanced herself firmly from him, and saw him only at unavoidable family events: birthdays, weddings and funerals. Laszlo, who would like to love and be loved by her, always leaps at her like a friendly puppy, and withdraws bewildered and hurt; he never learns.
*
‘Many happy returns of the day,’ says Lisa. She lays the parcel on the table and puts her cheek, for a moment, against Claudia’s, drawing back even as she does so.
Claudia opens the parcel. ‘Just what I need. Thank you.’
‘I hope the colour is right.’
‘The colour is perfect. Black goes with everything, after all.’ They both consider the sensible matronly handbag.
Lisa sits down. ‘I thought Laszlo was coming.’
‘He is. He’ll be here any minute. I’ve booked a table at the Greek place.’
Lisa looks around the room, infinitely familiar and in which she has never felt at home. It is Claudia’s room, full of Claudia’s things, thick with Claudia’s presence; as a child, she used to feel as though she might stifle in it.
‘What are all those enormous boxes in the hall?’
‘Wine,’ says Claudia.
‘Wine?’
Laszlo’s present. Seventy bottles. One for each year.
Lisa feels outrage well up within her. ‘But you’ll never…’
‘I’ll never get through it? I daresay not.’
Lisa flushes. ‘Typical Laszlo.’
‘Quite. But stylish, you must admit. It’s rather good wine, too. Perhaps you should take a bottle back for Harry.’
‘He has a regular order with the Wine Society.’
‘Ah,’ says Claudia. ‘Then best not to interfere.’
The doorbell rings. Lisa sits tensely listening to the sounds of Laszlo’s arrival, his greeting of Claudia, their laughter. He comes in, cries, ‘Lisa darling it is so long since I saw you, and looking so… so fine in that pretty dress.’ He advances on her to embrace but she has withdrawn behind the fence of a long low coffee table and he is reduced to blowing a kiss across it. Lisa says, ‘Oh, hello, Laszlo. How are you?’
‘I am well. But never mind about me today – it is for the birthday we are here, the celebration of seventy Claudia years! Isn’t she terrific!’ He flings his arms out towards Claudia, like an impresario with a discovery.
‘Yes,’ says Lisa, looking at the floor.
‘So we are this nice cosy party,’ says Laszlo. ‘Just us three. Excellent. And this wonderful article in the Sunday paper, Henry brought it for me – did you see it, Lisa? Your mother writing so wonderfully of the war, of Egypt, all these things of which you talk so little, Claudia. Practically never do you talk of that time. And now this article. And this photograph. Young Claudia, so beautiful, sitting on a lorry in the sand. Wonderful!’
Lisa, who has also read the article with attention, looks at her mother. ‘I’d never seen that photo.’
‘I found it at the back of a drawer,’ says Claudia. ‘Thought they might as well use it.’
Laszlo carefully folds the crumpled sheet of newspaper. ‘I was very proud. I have shown it to everyone. It is so long since you wrote a piece like this.’
‘Why did you?’ asks Lisa.
‘Oh, an editor had been badgering me,’ says Claudia. ‘And I felt like it. All my generation seem to be busy turning their pasts to good account, so why not me?’
‘So now you will tell us more,’ says Laszlo gaily. ‘Over dinner. All the interesting
things you did not write for the newspaper. All the officers who were running after you, all the boyfriends. Promise!’
Lisa clears her throat. ‘Oughtn’t we to be getting to the restaurant?’ She rises, gathers up her possessions. ‘Have you had any other nice presents, mother?’
Mother. Thus, in mid-life, has Lisa won a small victory. Claudia prickles with irritation but is amused all the same. Lisa is conferring dowager status, determinedly. Well, if it gives her pleasure…
But no, she thinks, as they walk to the restaurant, I am not going to tell you about my other present, my undreamed of present, not now nor ever, not you or anyone. Nice is certainly not the word, though what the word would be I do not know, because I am still swept up by it, I can’t yet think coherently about it, I am disordered.
And to fend off Laszlo’s teasing, to forestall his questions, she talks loudly of other things, becomes involved with waiters and menus, with who is going to have what and what there is to be had; if I am to be cast as a matriarch, she thinks, I may as well do the thing properly. And somewhere beyond or within, another Claudia looks on with amusement. And regret. And disbelief. Is this true? This strident bossy old woman; these blotched veined hands opening a napkin; and these companions – who are they?
For a moment she is someone else, and then she returns and sees Laszlo looking across the table at her, asking something.
‘So who took the photograph?’ he says. ‘Which of the handsome officers? Who is it you are smiling at so beautifully?’
She is smiling now, she has the look of the girl in the photograph, now in the dim warm light of the restaurant, but as he speaks the smile is switched off and she becomes another Claudia – oh, a Claudia he knows all too well – tart dismissive Claudia, and she says, ‘I forget,’ and turns to Lisa and asks about the grandsons, the dreadful grandsons who thank goodness are away at school so cannot be here, and boring Harry cannot be here either because Claudia probably did not ask him so there is just poor pale Lisa in her safe prim dress, all on edge as she always is with her mother. Better it were just Claudia and me, thinks Laszlo, but never mind. Lisa is after all the daughter, though goodness knows how, never would you think it, so mousy, like a shadow beside Claudia, but of course that is the trouble. And he remembers, kindly, indulgently, spiky fifteen-year-old Lisa and distracted maternal Lisa with her yowling babies. You could not imagine Claudia with a yowling baby, and perhaps that too is the trouble, he thinks wisely, Lisa of course was looked after by the grandmothers, perhaps there is a problem there too.