‘From the wrath of the Northmen, O Lord deliver us…’ Doesn’t that give you a twinge, reading there on your sofa, the light on, the door locked, the twentieth century tucked cosily around you? And of course He didn’t, or not always. He never does, but they weren’t to know. He delivered, merely, the words; the poor monk who wrote them probably got a chunk of Viking iron through the throat, or went up in flames with his church.
When I was about nine I asked God to eliminate my brother Gordon. Painlessly but irreversibly. At Lindisfarne, as it happens, to which we had been taken not to reflect upon the Viking raids of which probably Mother had never heard but to walk out to the island along the causeway and have a picnic thereon. And Gordon and I raced across that spit of land, and Gordon being one year older and quite a bit faster was all set to win, of course. And I gasped up this prayer, in fury and passion, meaning it – oh, quite meaning it. Never again, I said, will I ask You for anything. Anything at all. Just grant this. Now. Instantly. It is interesting to note that I had to demand Gordon’s extinction, not that I should be made a faster runner. And of course God did nothing of the kind and I sulked throughout a glorious windswept sea-smelling afternoon and became an agnostic.
Years later we went there again, Gordon and I. Not racing this time. Soberly walking; discussing, I recall, the Third Reich and the coming war. And I remembered that monastic prayer and said that it was as though the Vikings were here again, the blood-red sails on the horizon, the tread of men heavy with weapons. And the sea-birds called and the turf on the cliffs was sponge-springy under our feet and full of wild flowers, as no doubt it was in the ninth century. We ate sandwiches and drank ginger beer amid the ruins and afterwards lay in the sun in a hollow. Jasper was unknown to us, and Lisa. Sylvia. Laszlo. Egypt. India. Strata as yet unformed.
We talked about what we wanted to do, in the war and after, if there was an after. Gordon was trying to wangle himself into the Intelligence (everyone wangled in those days – wangled and pulled strings). I knew what I intended. I was going to be a war correspondent. Gordon laughed. He said he didn’t give much for my chances. Have a go, he said, and good luck to you, but frankly… And I strode on ahead. You’ll see, I said. You’ll see. And he had to catch up with me and propitiate. We were still rivals. Among other things. Alongside other things. Then, and later.
The doctor pauses and glances through the glass port-hole in the door. ‘Who’s she talking to? Has she got a visitor?’ The nurse shakes her head; for a moment they watch the patient, whose lips move, whose expression is… intent. There does not appear to be anything clinically amiss; they scrunch and squeak away on down the corridor.
Claudia confronts Gordon, not on the sea-blown Lindisfarne shore but in the pink alcoholic atmosphere of The Gargoyle in 1946. She feels incandescent, aflame with private triumphs.
Gordon is scowling. ‘He’s a creep,’ he says.
‘Shut up.’
‘He can’t hear. He’s busy furthering his career.’
Jasper, a couple of yards away, stands at another table, talking to its occupants. His tanned face is lit by the candle below it: expressive, handsome. He gestures, delivers a punch-line, laughter rings out.
‘You always did have dubious taste in men,’ Gordon continues.
‘Really?’ says Claudia. ‘Now that’s an interesting remark.’
They stare at one another.
‘Oh, stop it, you two,’ says Sylvia. ‘This is supposed to be a celebration.’
‘So it is,’ says Gordon. ‘So it is. Come on, Claudia, celebrate.’ He upends the bottle into her glass.
‘It really is terrific,’ says Sylvia. ‘An Oxford fellowship! I still can’t quite believe it.’ Her eyes never leave Gordon, who does not look at her. She twitches a thread from the sleeve of his jacket, touches his hand, gets out a packet of cigarettes, drops them, retrieves them from the floor.
Claudia continues to observe Gordon. Out of the corner of an eye, from time to time, she takes stock of Jasper. Others also note Jasper; he is a person people see. She raises her glass: ‘Congrats! Again. Remind me to come and dine at your High Table.’
‘You can’t,’ says Gordon. ‘No ladies.’
‘Oh, what a shame,’ says Claudia.
‘Where did you find him?’
‘Find who?’
‘You know damn well who I mean.’
‘Oh – Jasper. Um, now… where was it? I went to interview him for a book.’
‘Ah,’ says Sylvia brightly. ‘How’s the book going?’
They ignore her. And Jasper returns to the table. He sits down, puts his hand on Claudia’s. ‘I’ve told them to bring a bottle of champers. So drink up.’
Sylvia tries to get out a cigarette, drops the packet, grovels for it on the floor and feels her expensive hairdo falling to pieces. And the dress is not a success, too pink and pretty and girlish. Claudia is in black, very low-cut, with a turquoise belt.
‘How is the book going?’ she asks. And Claudia does not answer, so Sylvia must fill the gap lighting her cigarette, puffing, looking round the room as though she hadn’t expected a reply anyway.
It has been like that all evening. Like it always is when Claudia is there. That electric feeling, whether they are fighting or not (and goodness knows she never fought with her brother like that), as though no one else existed. Making you feel intrusive, as though you should leave the room. And Gordon hasn’t touched her once.
Jasper returns and she exclaims in relief, ‘Where did you get that marvellous tan?’
‘Swanning around the South of France?’ says Gordon. ‘I thought you people were kept so busy?’ I know your type, he thinks: cavalry twill trousers and an eye to the main chance.
The champagne arrives. Explodes. Is poured. Jasper raises his glass. ‘Here’s to you, Gordon! I popped down to the South of France for a few days to see my father.’
‘I suppose you’ll be posted to some glamorous place soon?’ says Sylvia.
Jasper spreads his hands, pulls a face. ‘My dear girl, the FO will probably dump me in Addis Ababa, who knows?’
Gordon drinks his champagne in two gulps. ‘Surely a career diplomat expects to take a bit of the rough with the smooth? Or don’t you see yourself as that? Incidentally how did you get into the FO at your age?’ He eyes Jasper’s hand, which lies on Claudia’s.
‘Gordon…’ murmurs Sylvia. ‘That sounds awfully rude.’
‘Not rude at all,’ says Jasper, smiling. ‘Astute. You may well ask. Late entry, it’s called. A word or two from the right people helped.’
‘No doubt,’ says Gordon. The hands, now, are lightly entwined. ‘And this is for keeps, is it? I understand you’ve had quite a varied career hitherto.’
Jasper shrugs. ‘I believe in being flexible, don’t you? The world’s much too interesting a place to let oneself get stuck with one aspect of it.’
Gordon cannot, for the moment, think of anything to say that is sufficiently biting; the champagne is having its effect. Sylvia nuzzles a knee against his. He cannot quite account for the scale of his dislike for this man; Claudia has produced men before, often enough. One has resented them all, naturally. Jasper, for some reason, is of a different order. He helps himself to some more champagne, drinks, glowers at Jasper: ‘Very adroit of you to have a father living in the south of France.’
Claudia laughs. ‘You’re plastered, Gordon,’ she says.
The strata of faces. Mine, now, is an appalling caricature of what it once was. I can see, just, that firm jaw-line and those handsome eyes and a hint of the pale smooth complexion that so nicely set off my hair. But the whole thing is crumpled and sagged and folded, like an expensive garment ruined by the laundry. The eyes have sunk almost to vanishing point, the skin is webbed, reptilian pouches hang from the jaw; the hair is so thin that the pink scalp shines through it.
Gordon’s face always mirrored, eerily, mine. We were not considered alike, but I could see myself in him and him in me. A look of the eye, a
turn of the mouth, a shadow. Genes declaring themselves. It is an odd sensation. I have it occasionally with Lisa, who also resembles me not at all (nor her father, for that matter – she might be a changeling, poor thing; has, indeed, all the classic changeling pallor and physical sparsity). But I look at her and for an instant my own face flickers back. Gordon’s hair was thick and fair, not red; his eyes grey not green; at eighteen he was six feet tall, and had that lank, casual, attenuated look of those who go through life with their hands in their pockets, whistling. A golden lad, Gordon. Winning prizes and making friends.
A handsome pair, they used to say, to Mother. Who murmured, deprecatingly. Not at all the thing, to admire your own children. And anyway Mother had reservations.
By the time we were both at university Mother was well into her retirement from history. She had drawn south Dorset around her like a shawl and blocked out as many aspects of our times as she could. The war, of course, was tiresome. It called for stoicism, though, and stoicism was one thing she was quite good at. She didn’t mind going without petrol and putting up blackout curtains and bathing in two inches of hot water. The departure of cooks and gardeners was endurable, too. What she was retreating from was any profundity of feeling and therefore any commitment more intense than light church attendance and an interest in roses. She had no opinions and she loved no one, was merely fond of a few people, including I suppose Gordon and myself. She acquired a Highland terrier which had been trained to roll over on its back at the command ‘Die for your country!’; apparently Mother did not find this disturbing.
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. Gordon and I were front-liners, in our different ways. Jasper eminently so. Sylvia would have sat it out if she could and up to a point did, except that she had hitched herself to Gordon and therefore was towed, from time to time, into the front line. To America, of which she would happily have remained in ignorance.
Sylvia came to see me last week. Or yesterday. I pretended I wasn’t here.
‘Oh dear,’ says the nurse. ‘I’m afraid it’s one of her bad days. You never know, with her…’ She leans over the bed. ‘Here’s your sister-in-law, dear, aren’t you going to say hello? Wake up, dear.’ She shakes her head, regretfully. ‘Well, why don’t you sit with her for a bit anyway, Mrs Hampton, she’ll appreciate it, I’m sure. I’ll bring you a cup of tea.’
And Sylvia, gingerly, sits. She watches the high bed with its apparatus of hoists and wires and tubes, and the figure marooned upon it. The closed eyes, the thin beaky face. She is reminded of those figures on stone tombs in country churches. There are flowers in a vase beside the bed, and others on the windowsill. Sylvia rises with an effort (the chair is low and she is stouter than she would like, alas) and goes across to have a peek at the card alongside. She glances, nervously, over her shoulder; ‘Claudia? It’s me – Sylvia.’ But the figure on the bed is silent. Sylvia sniffs the flowers, picks up the card. ‘Best wishes from…’ She cannot read the squiggle, and puts on her glasses. There is a twitch from the bed. Sylvia drops the card and scuttles back to her chair. Claudia’s eyes are still closed, but there comes the sound, unmistakably, of a fart. Sylvia, red in the face, busies herself with her handbag, hunting for a comb, a hankie…
‘Please, Miss Lavenham,’ I said, when I was fourteen, all guile and innocence. ‘Why is it a good thing to learn about history?’ We have got to the Indian Mutiny now, and the Black Hole of Calcutta, and are suitably appalled. 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. But she is equal to the occasion, surprisingly. ‘Because that is how you can understand why England became a great nation.’ Well done, Miss Lavenham. I’m sure you never heard of the Whig interpretation of history, and wouldn’t have known what it meant, but breeding will out.
The teachers all disliked me. ‘I’m afraid,’ wrote someone on a school report, ‘that Claudia’s intelligence may well prove a stumbling-block unless she learns how to control her enthusiasms and channel her talents.’ Of course, intelligence is always a disadvantage. Parental hearts should sink at the first signs of it. It was an immense relief to me to observe that Lisa’s was merely average. Her life has been the more comfortable. Neither her father nor I have had comfortable lives, though whether we would have wished them different is another matter. Gordon’s life has also been intermittently uncomfortable, but then so, come to that, has Sylvia’s, which would appear to destroy my theory about intelligence and happiness. Sylvia is profoundly stupid.
Gordon met her after the war. She was someone’s sister (naturally – just as she is now someone’s wife). He met her at a dance, found her pretty (she was), made a pass at her, took her home, started sleeping with her and, in the fullness of time, announced his engagement to her.
I said ‘Why?’
He shrugged. ‘Why not?’
‘Why that one, for heaven’s sake?’
‘I love her,’ he said.
I laughed.
She has given little trouble. She has devoted herself to children and houses. A nice old-fashioned girl, Mother called her, at their third meeting, seeing quite correctly through the superficial disguise of pink fingernails, swirling New Look skirts and a cloud of Mitsouko cologne spray. There was a proper wedding, which Mother loved, with arum lilies, little bridesmaids and a marquee on the lawn of Sylvia’s parents’ home at Farnham. I declined to be matron of honour and Gordon got rather drunk at the reception. They spent their honeymoon in Spain and Sylvia settled down to live, as she thought, happily ever after in north Oxford.
The unfortunate thing, from her point of view, was that Gordon’s academic discipline is frontline stuff, from the point of view of history. Economists are in the thick of things. Sylvia would have been better off with a classicist, rooting around in Greece and Rome. Gordon is concerned not only with here and now but with tomorrow, which is what governments are interested in. They need people like Gordon at their beck and call, to confirm their worst fears, to bolster their confidence. Gordon began to leave north Oxford, for longer and longer periods; he was ‘loaned’ to emergent African states, to New Zealand, to Washington. Sylvia stopped saying how exciting it was Gordon being so much in demand and began to wonder how good it was for the children being moved around to different schools so often. She tried remaining in north Oxford, where she worried about what she might be missing, or what Gordon might be doing. She started eating too much, and got fat. She put a good face on things, which was the best she could do, and wiser than I would have given her credit for.
Presumably I am not the only one to find the marriage curious. There is Gordon, who has mutated from a golden lad to a successful man, shrewd, respected and handsome with it. Women fall for him from Singapore to Stanford. And there is Sylvia, whose girlish prettiness has given way to a plump and nondescript maturity, and whose conversation is of climate, the price of things and children’s schooling. I have watched others watching Sylvia trail in Gordon’s wake like some stumpy dinghy towed by a yacht, have observed hostesses tuck her safely away at the end of the table, seen the yawn in the eyes of Gordon’s high-flying friends. But I may well be the only one to know that Gordon has a deep seminal laziness. Oh, he works… he will work himself into the ground, when it is a matter of the intellect. His laziness is more subtle than that, it is a laziness of the soul, and Sylvia is its manifestation. Gordon needs Sylvia like some people need to spend an hour or two every day simply staring out of the window, or twiddling their fingers. Gordon’s intellectual energy is prodigious; his emotional energy is minimal. Those sharp clever women with whom, from time to time, he is seen, would never do as permanencies. Sylvia has always been more secure th
an perhaps she realises.
Long ago, when we were thirteen and fourteen and rivals in everything, we competed for the attention of a young man Mother hired one summer as tutor. He was supposed to coach Gordon in Greek and Latin. He was an undergraduate, nineteen or twenty, I suppose, a stocky dark young man called Malcolm whose skin turned a rich coffee brown during that interminable languid Dorset summer. At first we resented his presence and the erosion of our idle days. We were dragged scowling to the schoolroom; outside it we ignored him. And then something interesting happened. I came into the room one day when Gordon was alone with Malcolm, construing Virgil, and I noticed two things: that Gordon was enjoying what he was doing and that there was an affinity between them. Malcolm’s hand rested on Gordon’s shoulder as he bent to look at an exercise book. I looked at the hand – a lean brown hand – and then at Malcolm’s face with its thick dark eyebrows and brown eyes intent upon Gordon and what Gordon was saying. And I was filled with hot jealousy; I wanted the hand on my shoulder; I wanted that adult, male, and suddenly infinitely attractive look trained upon me.
I went to find Mother, among her roses, and announced that I wanted to learn Latin.
You could say, I suppose, that the ease with which, several years later, I sailed through Matriculation, is due to the first stirrings of sexual desire. For the rest of that summer I laboured over Kennedy’s Latin Primer. I swept from nominatives and accusatives to the subjunctive, to conditional clauses, to Caesar and Gaul. There was no stopping me. I leaned against Malcolm’s warm sturdy thigh with my grammar in my hand, seeking explanations; I allowed my arm to brush against his as he corrected my exercises; I primped and posed and curried favour. Gordon, driven frantic, flew through The Aeneid and embarked on The Iliad. We goaded each other to more furious efforts. Poor Malcolm, who had thought to spend an undemanding summer earning a bit of pocket money, found himself devoured by relentless adolescent obsession. I was powered by nascent sexuality and the need to do better than Gordon; Gordon was powered by rivalry with me and the outrage of seeing Malcolm’s interest in him distracted and diluted. Malcolm, a decent conventional public schoolboy, probably had his fair share of homosexual leanings. He probably had decent conventional itchings after Gordon – until I started laying my pubescent paws on him – rubbing my newly swollen bosom against him in puppyish play, making eyes at him. I confused and alarmed him. By the end of the summer the wretched young man was as overheated as we were.