Free Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively Page A

language. I have put my faith in language – hence the panic when a simple word eludes me, when I stare at a piece of flowered material in front of a window and do not know what name to give it. Curtain. Thank God. I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred names. ‘What’s that called?’ Lisa used to ask me. ‘And that? And that?’
    What I could offer Lisa was not the conventional haven of maternal love and concern but my mind and my energy. If she had not acquired these genetically then I was quite prepared to show her how to think and act. I was no good at kissing away tears or telling bedtime stories – any mother can do that: my uses were potentially far more significant.
    She was a disappointment to me. And I, presumably, to her. I looked for my own alter ego , the querying rebellious maverick child I had been myself; Lisa looked for a reassuring clothes-shopping sherry-drinking figure like the mothers of her school friends. As she grew older I felt more and more her silent stare,each time I visited her at Sotleigh, took her over to Beaminster to stay with my mother, or had her in the flat in London for a couple of days. There, she would wander around, a skimpy pallid little figure standing in doorways or perching on a sofa. I bought her books. I took her to museums and art galleries; I tried to encourage opinion and curiosity. Lisa, growing longer of limb and less flexible of mind, became ordinary. She began to bore me. And I sensed her disapproval. I have attracted disapproval all my life. Usually it leaves me indifferent, occasionally it delights me. But the disapproval of a child is oddly unsettling. I would look up from my desk and see Lisa hanging on a curtain, chewing a fingernail, eyeing me. She is frozen thus in the mind’s eye, many times over, preserved in those hours that both our lives contain. Recollections that we barely share. My hours and Lisa’s are different; as different as I am different from Lisa.
    ‘Go and read the book I gave you,’ says Claudia, her pen working to and fro across the paper.
    ‘I’ve been reading it.’
    ‘Then…’ Claudia pauses, scans what she has written, ponders. She looks up. At Lisa – intrusive distracting little shadow at the window. ‘Don’t bite your fingernails like that, darling. And don’t pull the curtain.’
    Lisa is silent. Her finger falls from her mouth, her hand from the curtain. Otherwise she does not move.
    Claudia reaches for another sheet of paper, writes. ‘Please, Lisa, go and find something to do. I’m busy. I have to deal with these letters. Later we’ll go out.’
    ‘I don’t know what to do,’ says Lisa, after a minute… two minutes.
    No more of this, thinks Claudia, next time I’ll get a girl from an agency to take her to the park, the Zoo, anything… You need a certain mentality to cope with children. I don’t have it. Thank God.
    Claudia’s fingernails are pink. Bright pink like sugar mice. Ifyou had fingernails like that you would be like Claudia; you could do what you liked and say what you liked and go where you liked. You would be busy busy all the time talking to your friends on the telephone, coming in going out back later tell the porter to get us a taxi darling, put your coat on hurry hurry.
    If you bite your fingernails no one will want to marry you, Granny says. No one has ever married Claudia. Jasper and Claudia did not get married because they didn’t love each other enough, Claudia says. You have to love someone very much before you marry them. If they had bitten fingernails you wouldn’t want to marry them even if you loved them. You cannot paint your fingernails pink until you are grown-up, which is never. On Claudia’s dressing-table there are little bottles with different kinds of pink – Pink Clover and Blush Pink and Hot Pink and Hawaiian Red. On