Making It Up

by Penelope Lively

  And, after more impenetrable months and years, here I am in the Albert Hall, which is filled with music, dancing people, roving lights, streamers . . . I am wearing calf-length blue jeans, a green-and-white-checked shirt with its tails knotted so that my midriff is bare, a kerchief over my hair, vast hooped gold earrings, and I am carrying three herrings in a string bag. This is the Chelsea Arts Ball, and I am a fishergirl, I think. I am eighteen, so perhaps I am grown up. At any rate, I am in love. I am in love with the man who has brought me here, who is done up as a pirate. This man is thirty; I am besotted with his sophistication, his assurance, his flattering attention. Oh, this is the life. At midnight, a thousand balloons float down from the great domed roof. The floor is a mass of dancers; a singer is belting forth into a microphone:

  The years go by

  As quickly as a wink.

  Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself . . .

  It’s later than you think.

  We dance and dance, and sometime in the small hours we leave for his flat. There is only one way in which this night can end.

  I have had two children; they have been the light of my life. But what about the children who never were, the shadow children never born who lurk in the wings? One such must hover there in the Albert Hall, a person who might have been the product of that night. In those pre-pill days, girls diced with death. The backstreet abortionists were busy, along with others trading behind a respectable Harley Street name-plate. The single mother was not a recognized social category then, accepted and inviting sympathy. In 1951, those who got “caught” were discreetly tucked away, or faced it out in defiance of the prevailing mores, depending on circumstances. For me, the night of the Chelsea Arts Ball was just a heady rite of passage—but suppose it had been otherwise?

  On Swanage Beach, when Chloe was twelve years old, she gave her mother a piece of her mind. “You’re impossible,” she said. Loudly. She stood there with arms akimbo; half the beach must have heard her. And Miranda laughed. That was another thing. Other people did not have mothers with a stupid name that you had to use instead of Mum. Other people called their mothers Mum or Mummy. Other people’s mothers brought picnics to the beach—padded plastic bags full of sandwiches and apples and drinks. Other people’s mothers remembered swimming costumes; their children did not have to go into the sea in their knickers. Other families had a father, not someone called Mike with long hair who sat there on the sand playing his guitar, which was so embarrassing that Chloe wanted to scream. Miranda had met him last week.

  Years later, Chloe would remember that day. “I blame the zeitgeist,” she told her husband. “It was 1963. The sixties went to her head entirely. After all, she had been creating her own version of the sixties for years.”

  Chloe’s husband, a nice man who worked in local government, indicated polite agreement. There was a familiar agenda here, and one is not required to go to the stake for one’s mother-in-law. In any case, he did not recall the sixties, except for a vague impression of black leather and loud music; he had been into bird-watching and hiking as a teenager and hence was out of step with the times.

  John Bagnold, Chloe’s husband, was part of a life strategy and may have been subliminally aware of this. By the time Chloe was twenty she knew that she wanted a job, a mortgage, a pension scheme, and a husband—probably in that order. By the time she was thirty she had all of these.

  At forty-five Chloe was a chief inspector of schools, a career destination that was perhaps inevitable, given the circumstances. She herself had been at four different schools by the age of ten. Consequently, she had got the hang of schools very early on; she had schools all sorted out. She knew how to interpret playground politics and make the right friends; she knew how to enlist the support and sympathy of teachers. When Miranda forgot to send any dinner money, or was half an hour late at the school gates, Chloe looked forlornly helpless, to good effect. She also shone at her work, and applied herself with enthusiasm. At the comprehensive, she was in the top stream for everything. The head teacher begged Miranda to stay put for long enough to allow Chloe to do A levels. By now, Chloe had perfected certain negotiating skills, where her mother was concerned; she had learned how to outmaneuver Miranda. She talked darkly of child support agencies and helplines. Miranda festered in one place for two solid years; Chloe got her two A’s—and went to Warwick to read politics and economics. After that, it was just a question of setting off to become the kind of person she had always meant to be.

  As time went on, Chloe was less given to harping on her disadvantaged youth. Her reflections about her mother became less condemnatory and more analytical.

  “She reinvented herself, basically. She turned herself into your original Bohemian, to use an old-fashioned term. She hung out with arty-crafty people. Everyone we knew when I was a child painted or potted or wrote poetry. None of them had a bean. Nobody had ever heard of them, either. This wasn’t your Augustus John set.”

  Her husband wondered if perhaps Augustus John was dead by then, anyway. Chloe ignored this.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got plenty of time for art. I respect art. I admire art. I think that governments should subsidize art. It’s the artistic attitude that I detest. I grew up with the artistic attitude. I grew up among people who traded in artistic pretension. Most them weren’t any more artists than you and me.”

  John said he believed that T.S. Eliot worked in a bank at one time.

  “Quite so,” said Chloe. “And Larkin was a librarian. That’s the stuff. You can keep your Dylan Thomases.”

  In moments of irritation, she would pick on basics. “She even gave herself a new name. Said she’d always felt like a Miranda, and people should be allowed to choose their own names, rather than having them slapped on by parents. In which case I should have shed Chloe long ago. I’m a Jane or a Susan.”

  John had met Chloe during a conference at which he had delivered a keynote speech on the crisis in education; he had been flattered when she had come up to compliment him and had subsequently married her because it became clear that he was now a part of her long-term arrangements. An obliging man, this was all right by him so long as he was allowed to pursue his own career plans and also go fishing on Saturdays. Actually, the marriage worked out rather well. There were three meticulously planned children, and a series of calculated moves to better jobs and improved housing. Nothing was left to chance. Chloe had no time at all for the serendipitous approach. Needless to say, she ran a tight ship where the children were concerned; but she strongly favored nature over nurture. Her own experience was the perfect illustration, as she was quick to point out.

  “If nurture rules, then I should be scraping a living out of handcrafted cushion covers, right now. I knew by the time I was eight that I’d been hatched in the wrong nest.”

  Her children, when older, were known to turn this argument to their advantage, requesting various freedoms on the grounds that they too needed to follow their own inclinations. Chloe was unimpressed.

  “You don’t know when you’re well off, you lot. Try a home life in which anything goes and there’s nothing for supper and no clean clothes and you’d soon be complaining.”

  Chloe’s infancy was a blank, of course. In her childhood memories, she seemed to emerge fully fledged at about five. No, exactly five, because it is her birthday and she does not have a white cake with her name in pink icing but a victoria sponge made by Miranda which has sagged dreadfully in the middle and is adorned with sprinkles and some silver balls that have rolled into the central dent. They were supposed to be spelling out Chloe’s name.

  Miranda did not want to be called Mum or Mummy because she said she never really felt like a mother. She was too young herself. In no way did this mean that she did not love Chloe—absolutely not; she adored Chloe, but she didn’t see the point of setting up as some kind of maternal wonder. They could have much more fun together just being natural, as though Miranda were a big sister.

  Miranda did not atte
nd parent-teacher meetings, nor did she join in the mothers’ race on school sports days. In her time, Chloe found herself at cozy village primary schools and inner-city jungle outfits, thus acquiring an insider view of the system, which could perhaps be seen later as a distinct career asset. At the time, this erratic progress merely served to hone a capacity for survival. She learned adaptation skills, and also how to turn circumstances to her advantage. At village primaries, she was a sweet-faced conformist; at cutthroat comprehensives, she was in there with sharp tongue and flailing fists. She always took care to stay on the right side of authority; Chloe’s school reports were euphoric.

  By the time she had got to O levels, she had long since realized that Miranda was no help when it came to homework. “She’d been to some crappy boarding school and had forgotten anything she learned there anyway. If she hadn’t had me when she was eighteen she would have gone to Oxford. At least, that was the story. Frankly, can you see her as a student? Buckling to and writing essays? No way!”

  When this point cropped up, John would murmur that one supposes that student life is in itself a formative experience. Like so much.

  Chloe was dismissive. “She wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. She hadn’t the temperament.”

  Chloe told her story frequently. She liked to tell her story, if only to demonstrate what can be done, if you are single-minded. Sometimes, the story was received in the wrong way. The new acquaintance would say, “But your mother does sound quite fun . . .”—or—“All the same, it must have been a wonderfully varied sort of childhood. . . .” Chloe would see that she had made a mistake here; the relationship would not be pursued.

  The story that she told was circumstantial. It established the background from which Chloe had emerged and had launched herself into achievement and citizenship. It touched on illustrative detail—the peripatetic lifestyle, her mother’s choice of associates, the absence of a role model. Told and retold, it had become a familiar mantra to her husband, who knew better than to do otherwise than provide the ritual prompts and endorsements. Their children went through several phases of response. When very young, they were entranced, for the wrong reasons: “She let you stay up as long as you liked! You had fish and chips nearly every evening! Oh, it’s not fair. . . .” In time, they learned that this was a cautionary tale, not the account of some lost arcadia. They listened with cynical resignation, occasionally rolling their eyes at each other. They did not see a great deal of their grandmother, who was by now living with a Spanish woodcarver somewhere in Catalonia. When she visited, they found her delightful, though perhaps not quite what you expect a grandmother to be. She had a mane of graying hair down to her shoulders, wore rather low-cut tops, painted her fingernails, and smoked. In their household, this last was the ultimate depravity; their father would go around with an expression of patient endurance, Chloe flung open the windows, coughing violently. Miranda ground out her stubs in saucers, since no ashtray was on offer.

  As the narrator of her story, Chloe of course controlled the supply of information. Occasionally, the listener would want to follow up certain themes, in which case Chloe was quite prepared to oblige, within reason.

  “Oh yes, my father did the decent thing. He arranged for an allowance. Cash—regular payments. But he moved offstage. We hardly ever saw him. No, no—he wasn’t an artistic type at all. He was a guy who owned espresso bars.”

  “Surely her parents . . . ?”

  “Yes—they stumped up too. We certainly didn’t starve. Truth to tell, most of the time she never worked. Well, she couldn’t have done when I was an infant, but after that . . . Not that she was qualified for anything, was she? But it was all part of the reinvention process. A free spirit, her own woman. Answerable to no one. Doing her own thing. Huh—the zeitgeist again.”

  Chloe was impatient with fashionable stances. Her childhood had taught her to be resourceful, and to act expediently. At the same time, she had developed a tendency to query orthodox attitudes, along with a taste for the combative approach. She also believed strongly in self-sufficiency. When Mrs. Thatcher came along, Chloe found herself quite out of sympathy with the distaste inspired by the Prime Minister in most others of Chloe’s generation. Here was a sensible woman doing sensible things, in Chloe’s view. She maintained a lone defense, not popular in educational circles, and wondered what Mrs. Thatcher had been like as a mother.

  She was quite astute enough to be aware of the orthodoxy of her own reaction. We all blame our parents; that is the universal self-justification. No, no—she would say, it’s not a question of blaming, it’s more a matter of inspection and analysis. One blames at the time—later on, for anyone with a degree of sense, the thing is to detach yourself and take stock. Good therapy, too.

  She would never have had any truck with professional therapists, of course. No way; if you can’t sort yourself out, it’s unlikely that anyone else is going to be able to do it for you. She had been contemptuous of the counseling on offer in her student days: “If a person can’t write an essay because they’ve bust up with their boyfriend, they should give up either higher education or sex.”

  Her own children understood from an early age that whingeing would get them nowhere. Domestic drill required them to get their school things ready the night before, put their pocket money into the post office, and account for their friends. Needless to say, they took pleasure in flouting these demands as often as possible and spent much time in skirmishes with their mother. Their father—a softer touch—would sometimes plead their case. This did not cut much ice with Chloe, who would listen with apparent impartiality and then explain why she was right. In time, John rather gave up, and told the children privately that their mother was a woman with high standards and that in any case they could hardly claim child abuse, could they?

  “We all object to the parental regime,” said Chloe. “Some with more reason than others, if I may say so.”

  She had spent her childhood deploring her own circumstances and equally those of her mother’s friends, who on the whole lived as Miranda did, moving from one rented flat or cottage to another, with occasional interludes in such light-hearted accommodation as a canal narrowboat or a trailer. When Chloe began to visit school friends, she discovered home ownership, washing machines, and fitted carpets. As she grew up, she perceived that other people’s parents were a part of the social fabric: they were policemen or postmen, or they ran a business or worked in offices or shops. They were not useless adjuncts. Their contributions were necessary; they did not drift or improvise. She became a figure of silent adolescent disapproval at raffish and jolly gatherings of Miranda’s cronies, for whom hippie culture was tailor made.

  Chloe had a favorite refrain: “It’s a question of taking control of your own life, that’s all.”

  When the children heard this said, they would get a picture of life as a dusty rug being given a brisk shake. The remark was usually made in connection with some acquaintance seen by Chloe as behaving in a feckless or ill-considered way: they were in arrears with their mortgage, or at odds with their partner, or in the wrong job. Chloe’s views were expressed with detachment, but the particular instance would be used as an admonition: take note of what is to be avoided. The two boys, Philip and Paul, let this sort of thing wash over them, on the whole; they had perfected a strategy of morose apparent attention whereby they could not be accused of never listening to a word that their mother said but at the same time were doing more or less exactly that. Sophie, the eldest, was unable to do this because natural curiosity about people and what they got up to obliged her to listen. Chloe did not believe in concealing from the young the rash excesses of the adult world. It was only through awareness of what’s out there waiting that they would learn to take evasive action. Accordingly, Sophie heard a lot about people who had dropped out of school or college or run up enormous debts and others who had fallen into drugs or drink or mere apathy. She and her brothers—who weren’t really listening anyway—were presented
with a vision of the good life which reflected the Whig interpretation of history: the idea was that everything got better and better as you ascended the ladder of the years. You moved from respectable A levels to a degree to satisfactory employment. You notched up salary increases and extensions of power and responsibility and eventually you reached the safe haven of your retirement from which you contemplated your successful progress.

  By the time she was seventeen, Sophie was familiar with the general message, which she heard as the background noise of her home life, subsumed into the whole ambience and roughly on a par with the creaking floorboard on the landing and her father’s habit of humming Mozart in the bath. There was a bit more to it than that, of course: she was aware that there was a cautionary element, but saw that as on a par with the other warnings with which she had grown up, to do with crossing roads and being circumspect about friendly strangers.

  But Sophie was of course growing up in a culture resonant with warnings and advice. Fatherly police officers came to school, sat down in their shirtsleeves and told everyone about the perils of crack and coke and heroin. Brisk, approachable women dealt with sex and contraception: they drew diagrams of the reproductive system on the board and handed condoms around the class. If you had a problem you got counseled, and if you were at all flaky over your career intentions you were given a good talking-to about UCAS forms and job prospects.

  Chloe approved. All this had been around in her youth, but in a more muted and amateurish way. As for Miranda’s time . . . Chloe would sigh wearily: “It was the dark ages, wasn’t it? The kids were left to fend for themselves. Of course, drugs weren’t there yet, but there was everything else.”