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.
Lisa thinks about love. She loves her sons. She loves her lover. She loves in an eery way her husband. Does she love Claudia? Does Claudia love her, come to that?
These are questions she cannot answer, or does not wish to answer. What is between her and Claudia is, after all, in
evitable. There is nothing to be done about it, nor ever has been. She knew that long ago, with the relentless vision of a child.
Lisa has read Claudia’s books; Claudia would be surprised to learn this. Lisa has, tucked away somewhere, a brown envelope with two or three newspaper pictures of Claudia. There is also a long article about Claudia. ‘Profile’ it is headed, and yes, there is Claudia’s profile, not pared down and yellow as it is today but delicate against a velvet hanging, elegantly posed and lit by some smart photographer. The text below is less carefully flattering: ‘Claudia Hampton attracts controversy. As a non-professional historian – a “populariser” – she has been loftily disdained by some academics, angrily refuted by others. The disdain enrages her – “Just because I’ve had the nerve to go it alone instead of settling for the comfortable insurance policy of an academic stipend they think they can patronise” – the refutations she enjoys, they give her the chance to fight back. “I love a good swashbuckle in print. Anyway, I usually win.” She cites her sales figures – “And who persuades the general public to read history? People like me – not the Eltons and the Trevor-Ropers.” Nevertheless, for all her defiance, Claudia Hampton has some literary scars to show. Reviewers have frequently condemned her out of her own lush and – it must be said – frequently imprecise and contradictory prose. “Technicolor history”, “the Elinor Glyn of historical biography”, “the preaching of an autodidact”; this is the language her critics have used.’
Lisa’s view of all this is an impartial one. She has in fact found the books more readable than she expected; that they are flawed she is quite prepared to believe. She knows Claudia, after all; she knows Claudia can be wrong about simple basic things. Claudia has always been wrong about Lisa.
For Claudia has never seen Lisa detached from Claudia. Lisa is extinguished by Claudia, always has been; even now, in the alien dispassionate hospital room she sits warily, awaiting Claudia’s next move. Claudia snuffs Lisa out – drains the colour from her cheeks, deprives her of speech or at least all speech to which anyone might pay attention, makes her shrink an inch or two, puts her in her place. The other Lisa is not like that. The other Lisa, the Lisa unknown to Claudia, is positive while not assertive, is prettier, sharper, a good cook, a competent mother, an adequate if not exemplary wife. She knows now that she married too young too quickly the wrong man, but has found ways of making the best of the situation. She has also discovered that she is good at deft unruffled organization; for the last five years she has been indispensable secretary to the private practice of a top-flight surgeon, which is how she met her lover, who is also a doctor. Eventually, one day, when the boys are older, Lisa and her lover may marry, if she can persuade herself that Harry would be all right, would get over it, would find himself someone else.
It is getting dark in the hospital room; the winter afternoon is lapping at the windows. Lisa gets up, puts the light on, wonders about drawing the curtains, starts to gather her belongings. As she puts an arm into her coat Claudia opens her eyes.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ says Claudia. ‘A preoccupation with God doesn’t mean I consider myself about to meet Him. It’s entirely abstract.’
Her face, suddenly, contorts. The lips pinch and tighten. A hand crawls across the sheet. Lisa says, ‘Are you all right?’
‘No,’ says Claudia. ‘But who is?’
Lisa is halted, one arm into her coat, the other out. She is seized by the oddest feeling. For a moment or two she cannot even identify it. She stands looking at Claudia. She recognises, now, the emotion. She is feeling sorry for Claudia; pity grabs her, like hunger, or illness. She has felt sorry for people before, naturally. But never for Claudia. She lays a hand, for a moment, on Claudia’s arm. ‘I’ll have to go,’ she says. ‘I’ll come in again on Friday.’
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.
It becomes more and more difficult to credit Lisa with being a quarter Russian. Somewhere within and behind this quintessentially middle-class middle-England figure in her Jaeger suit and floppy-bowed silk shirt and her neat polished shoes lies the most tormented people in the history of the world. Somewhere in Lisa’s soul, though she knows little of it and cares less, are whispers of St Petersburg, of the Crimea, of Pushkin, of Turgenev, of million upon million enduring peasants, of relentless winters and parched summers, of the most glorious language ever spoken, of samovars and droshkys and the sad sloe-eyed faces of a thousand icons. Blood will out – I believe that as profoundly though not as fearfully as poor Lady Branscombe, doing her best to forget her granddaughter’s unfortunate ancestry (and all her fault, too, poor Isabel, bearing for ever after the guilt of that youthful Parisian infatuation). Lisa carries in her spirit matters she knows not of. I find that interesting. I find that enthralling, indeed. I look at Lisa and wolves howl across the steppe, the blood flows at Borodino, Irina sighs for Moscow. All derivative, all in the mind – the confection of fact and fantasy that is how we know the world. Nevertheless, Lisa had a Russian grandfather, and that signifies.
Jasper’s father appears to have been an excellent reason for the Russians to have a revolution: a man of total moral fecklessness who never did a day’s work in his life and disposed of the family fortunes – as much of them as had been left by his own father – before he was thirty. He spent the early part of his life in Paris, Baden Baden and Venice, with occasional sorties to Russia to sell off a few more versts or the St Petersburg mansion; after the divorce he lived in somewhat reduced circumstances on the Riviera, augmenting his funds as best he could by gambling or attaching himself to rich women. Jasper’s late adolescent fascination with him soon declined: Jasper meant to be a success; Sasha, a glamorously bohemian figure to a sixteen-year-old schoolboy, was seen differently by the twenty-year-old undergraduate – as a seedy sponger impressive only to naïve American heiresses and minor French society hostesses. After 1925 Jasper rarely saw his father. I met him only once. It was in 1946. Sasha had turned up in London, having spent as comfortable a war as he could manage in Menton, somehow avoiding internment, and now in search of funds and useful contacts of which his mildly celebrated son seemed the most promising. Jasper gave him lunch at his club and asked me to join them. Sasha was seventy, and beginning to look it: a face crumpling into folds, ravaged hooded eyes, the foxy smile of the professional charmer. He kissed my hand and said the things he had been saying to every woman he met for fifty years. And I, maliciously, insisted he take the most comfortable chair and asked with concern if the cold weather was bothering him. Sasha, no fool, adjusted his approach to that of gallant father-figure – called me ‘my dear’, applauded Jasper’s successes with sycophantic gusto, invited us both to the villa on the Riviera. We never went, needless to say. Jasper found his father an embarrassment; I thought him creepy. But I can see him still, in his carefully preserved pre-war cashmere overcoat and his Hermès scarf, a down-at-heel survivor, the ashes of a class and of an age. And after that lunch Jasper and I had a disagreement: an interesting skirmish, a preliminary to our later more full-blooded engagements.
‘So…’ says Jasper. ‘That’s him, the old fraud. What you expected?’ Claudia, brilliant in emerald green, sails along Pall Mall, attracting discreet glances; he takes her arm, parrying the glances.
‘Up to a point.’
‘I slipped him a cheque for a hundred quid,’ says Jasper. ‘Let’s hope he’ll take himself off quietly now, at least for a year or two.’
‘Hm,’ says Claudia.
‘What?’ r />
‘I said – hm.’ She looks ahead blandly. Not at Jasper, who feels that tingle of exasperation that only Claudia can induce. A frisson that is inextricably mixed with the creep of sexual desire.
They pause at the corner of St James’s. ‘You have his hands,’ says Claudia. ‘And something about the mouth.’
‘I hardly think so.’
Claudia shrugs. ‘You can’t dismiss ancestry.’
‘I am what I make myself,’ says Jasper, stepping into the road. ‘Come on, we can cross.’ Claudia has dropped his arm to take something from her bag. He walks ahead. Claudia remains. Cars and taxis divide them. Jasper halts on the opposite pavement. Claudia, blowing her nose, strolls across.
‘Plus,’ she says, ‘what you have been endowed with. Sasha has endowed you with a rather dramatic past. Don’t you find that interesting?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘You’re not interested in a thousand turbulent years of history?’
Claudia’s voice – clear, carrying – rings out. One or two bowler-hatted heads turn.
‘It has nothing to do with me,’ says Jasper. ‘And you’re being portentous.’
‘I do not see,’ says Claudia, forging now up St James’s a step or two ahead, ‘how you can be so majestically egotistical as to place yourself in total detachment from your antecedents just because you find your father inadequate.’
Jasper is now suddenly glowing hot, although the day is chill December. He catches her up. ‘You’re talking rather loudly, if you don’t mind me saying so, Claudia. And if I have to take on the whole of Russia, then you presumably bear the cross of generations of torpid Dorset farmers. Hardly your style, darling.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says Claudia. ‘They probably account for certain qualities of endurance.’ She smiles sweetly at Jasper, who is scowling.
‘And what have you ever endured?’
‘More than you’ll ever know.’