Free Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

it enabled people like him to make a lot of money out of the suffering of others. You, snapped Jasper, take royalties on your books, which deal with similar matters. I held forth about the difference between history as reasoned analysis and history as spectacle. He said my books were overblown flashy stuff; he said I was jealous. He dragged in that film about Cortez. Different, I said, I was merely an onlooker. We slammed at each other to and fro across the starched white tablecloth of some flowery riverside pub while waitresses cowered against the walls. And eventually he said, ‘You’re absurdly overheated about this, Claudia. You seem to take the series as a personal affront. Why, one asks oneself.’ I got up and walked out. Stupid thing to do.
    Claudia, alone, sits before the television. The room is warm and quiet; the curtains are drawn, shutting out rain and traffic; she has a glass of wine to hand and her feet up, the day’s work is done. The titles roll, the story begins. It is both a public story and a private one; the young hero, called up in 1939, is seen saying farewell to his fiancée and his mother, the German army rolls into France, Churchill confers with his advisers. And the telling, too, has two dimensions. There is the expensive fiction, with its accomplished actors, its considered production, its attention to every detail from the precise sheen of the hair oil on the young hero’s head to the dents in the NAAFI tea-urns and the background rattle of a Jeep engine. And slotted into this are clips of film, looking in contrast somehow amateurish, quaint and not quite real – shots of bucking guns, silent running soldiers, lines of tanks or lorries trooping in at one side of the picture and out at the other. Fiction is in full warm colour, the actors have pink faces, there is green grass and blue sky; reality is black and white, the young soldiers grinning and waving on the deck of a ship have white faces, the sea is black and desert grey. Claudia sips her wine and watches intently – she notes the pack of Players cigarettes that the hero takes from his battle-dress pocket and the tilt of his fiancée’s saucer hat; the sticky scent of nostalgia is trapped there behind the glass screen. She observes a black file of Italian prisoners trudging through the grey desert, black smoke streaming from a crashed plane, white smoke puffing from the gun of a tank.
    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.
    ‘History,’ Jasper spat across the breakfast table in Maidenhead, ‘is after all in the public domain.’
    Oh, it is indeed. That’s just the trouble, as the wretched public has been finding out, century after century. And ofcourse he has a point – historians reap their royalties so why not Jasper and his like? It is only opinionated dogmatic bitches like me who are going to argue that there are certain sanctities, that by the time we have reduced everything to entertainment we shall find that it was no joke after all.
    Jasper got rich. He had been comfortable enough before; now he was wealthy. On the boards of film companies and merchant banks, adviser to this and that, in demand everywhere; admired, disliked, fawned upon, mistrusted.
    I published my Tito book, five years’ work, and received much attention. Jasper wrote. ‘Congratulations, my dear. “People in glasshouses…” ’
    Enough of Jasper. It should be clear by now how he fits into the scheme of things. Lover to begin with, sparring partner always, father of my child; our lives sometimes fusing, sometimes straying apart, always connected. I loved him once, but cannot remember how that felt.
    I was talking earlier about