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Authors: Penelope Lively
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whereas. Whereas Claudia is my name.
Lisa is a better name. Claudia bangs, like the gong in the hall at Sotleigh. Bang – whoom! Lisa makes a nice silky noise, like streams or rain. Lisa. Lisa. If you say it over and over again it is not you any more, not me Lisa, I, me, but a word you never heard before. Lisa. Lisa.
The thing with legs, the wood thing, it suddenly occurs to her, will probably bite. She drops it quickly. She would stamp on it to make sure, horrid thing, but Claudia is watching. Claudia’s eyes have black holes just like the eye in the tree, and inside Claudia there are little fierce animals that might come peeping out of those eyes, little biting animals, little animals with sharp teeth.
She stands on tiptoes to see Claudia’s eyes better and Claudia’s face turns cross.
Once upon a time a long time ago not as long ago as all that she went to the beach with Claudia. She went to the beach in Claudia’s car. The trees beside the road went past the car sha-sha-sha-sha and the hedges slid about and then there was the beach and the sea rushing at you, too wet too deep too rough. Claudia made you get inside a yellow rubber ring and go out of your depth. It’s all right, said Claudia, you’re perfectly all right, I’ve got you, I won’t let you go. And underneath you there is nothing but water deep deep water with fishes in it and if Claudia lets you go you will sink to the bottom. All that was a long time ago. Quite a long time ago.
She will spread butter on Rex’s back and make him into a sandwich. A dog sandwich. First butter and then jam. The berries on that bush can be the jam. But first the butter… lots and lots of butter. If she does not listen to Claudia, if she does not answer, Claudia will stop asking things and disappear. Whoosh! Whoosh into the air she will disappear like magic, like the smoke from her cigarette melting melting going away into nothingness, emptiness. You can walk through the smoke, the yellow sunny smoke, you can push it away with your hands, walk through it like through water.
She will magic Claudia away like the smoke. She tells Rex that she is magicking Claudia.
That Lisa – that Lisa fettered by ignorance but also freed by it – is as dead now as ammonites and belemnites, as the figures in Victorian photographs, as the Plymouth settlers. Irretrievable also for the Lisa of today, who must grope with the rest of us for that distant self, that other self, that ephemeral teasing creature. The Lisa of today is an anxious busy woman going on for forty trying to cope with two truculent adolescent sons and a husband generally referred to as a prominent local estate agent and in my view a ripe example of British degeneracy between the Age of Macmillan and the Age of Thatcher. To these have we sunk. Harry Jamieson has a damp handshake,damp opinions steeped in the brine of the local Rotary Association and the Daily Telegraph , an appalling homestead on the outskirts of Henley with tennis court, swimming-pool and sweep of gravel that apes the country estate to which he aspires. I have not spent more than half a dozen hours in his company since the wedding. This, let me say, out of charity as much as self-preservation: the poor man is terrified of me. At the very sight of me his vowels falter, his forehead glistens, his hands dispensing gin and tonic or Pimms No. 1 fumble with ice-cubes, send glasses flying, cut themselves with the lemon knife. When I want to see Lisa I take her out to lunch in London, leaving Harry Jamieson to the tranquillity of Rotarian dinners, the golf club and the local Bench.
Why did she marry him? Ah, why indeed. Here I go again – pondering the curious forces that weld two people together, send them clamped to one another down the years. I should imagine that in this instance the fault is mine as much as anyone’s. Had I not been as I am, Lisa would not have felt impelled, at nineteen, to grab at the status of marriage, at a world of her own, at
Lisa is a better name. Claudia bangs, like the gong in the hall at Sotleigh. Bang – whoom! Lisa makes a nice silky noise, like streams or rain. Lisa. Lisa. If you say it over and over again it is not you any more, not me Lisa, I, me, but a word you never heard before. Lisa. Lisa.
The thing with legs, the wood thing, it suddenly occurs to her, will probably bite. She drops it quickly. She would stamp on it to make sure, horrid thing, but Claudia is watching. Claudia’s eyes have black holes just like the eye in the tree, and inside Claudia there are little fierce animals that might come peeping out of those eyes, little biting animals, little animals with sharp teeth.
She stands on tiptoes to see Claudia’s eyes better and Claudia’s face turns cross.
Once upon a time a long time ago not as long ago as all that she went to the beach with Claudia. She went to the beach in Claudia’s car. The trees beside the road went past the car sha-sha-sha-sha and the hedges slid about and then there was the beach and the sea rushing at you, too wet too deep too rough. Claudia made you get inside a yellow rubber ring and go out of your depth. It’s all right, said Claudia, you’re perfectly all right, I’ve got you, I won’t let you go. And underneath you there is nothing but water deep deep water with fishes in it and if Claudia lets you go you will sink to the bottom. All that was a long time ago. Quite a long time ago.
She will spread butter on Rex’s back and make him into a sandwich. A dog sandwich. First butter and then jam. The berries on that bush can be the jam. But first the butter… lots and lots of butter. If she does not listen to Claudia, if she does not answer, Claudia will stop asking things and disappear. Whoosh! Whoosh into the air she will disappear like magic, like the smoke from her cigarette melting melting going away into nothingness, emptiness. You can walk through the smoke, the yellow sunny smoke, you can push it away with your hands, walk through it like through water.
She will magic Claudia away like the smoke. She tells Rex that she is magicking Claudia.
That Lisa – that Lisa fettered by ignorance but also freed by it – is as dead now as ammonites and belemnites, as the figures in Victorian photographs, as the Plymouth settlers. Irretrievable also for the Lisa of today, who must grope with the rest of us for that distant self, that other self, that ephemeral teasing creature. The Lisa of today is an anxious busy woman going on for forty trying to cope with two truculent adolescent sons and a husband generally referred to as a prominent local estate agent and in my view a ripe example of British degeneracy between the Age of Macmillan and the Age of Thatcher. To these have we sunk. Harry Jamieson has a damp handshake,damp opinions steeped in the brine of the local Rotary Association and the Daily Telegraph , an appalling homestead on the outskirts of Henley with tennis court, swimming-pool and sweep of gravel that apes the country estate to which he aspires. I have not spent more than half a dozen hours in his company since the wedding. This, let me say, out of charity as much as self-preservation: the poor man is terrified of me. At the very sight of me his vowels falter, his forehead glistens, his hands dispensing gin and tonic or Pimms No. 1 fumble with ice-cubes, send glasses flying, cut themselves with the lemon knife. When I want to see Lisa I take her out to lunch in London, leaving Harry Jamieson to the tranquillity of Rotarian dinners, the golf club and the local Bench.
Why did she marry him? Ah, why indeed. Here I go again – pondering the curious forces that weld two people together, send them clamped to one another down the years. I should imagine that in this instance the fault is mine as much as anyone’s. Had I not been as I am, Lisa would not have felt impelled, at nineteen, to grab at the status of marriage, at a world of her own, at
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