A VERY PRIVATE LIFE
Michael Frayn
Contents
Title Page
A Note on the New Edition
Once upon a time…
A rich childhood
The facts of life
What happens when you die?
Animals
Out
And outer still
Blue skin
You never know who you may meet
Dark glasses
She won’t take her medicine
She sulks while everyone is merry
How it was in days gone by
Waste
She should advertise for someone
How she consoles herself
A trip to the mountains
A picture of the mountaineers
BUT, one day …
Nek taomoro Noli …
The physical transportation of the human body
In the travelling house
People
The ancient trackways of the air
In the dark
To the palace
Her prince appears
Her first night with him
Papoom
A serious talk
Just as her father said
Another trouble
Out and about
Life
The king strikes a blow
Sisni
Alone together at last
A close inspection of his pate
The dancing-floor
A happy time
That
On the road
The second day
A moral
The green men
Quasil quenquenya!
At last, someone who understands
More fun with numbers
Don’t think of this as punishment
Something in the air
Family reunion
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
A note on the new edition
“Once upon a time …”
And with these four familiar words we’re away into a different world. We expect the people we meet here to have some of the same emotions as ourselves – love and hatred, gratitude and ingratitude, anger and jealousy. But we also expect to come across things we have never met in life – giants and dragons, talking fishes, frogs that turn into princes, girls with hair twenty or thirty feet long.
So when is this time that we’re upon? Somewhere in the past, obviously. There are no computers or even electric light, no cars or even trains. No social workers or school attendance officers, no psychiatrists or hedge-fund managers. But when in the past? Before the Industrial Revolution, certainly. But not before there were roads, not before there were bakers and tailors. The roads are unsurfaced and dusty – but there are coaches on them. There is glass in the windows and mirrors.
You ought to be able to tell from the clothes that people are wearing. You meet men wearing doublet and hose, which suggests the sixteenth or seventeenth century – and others in knee-breeches and wigs from a hundred or two hundred years later. There are women demure in mediaeval wimples, others flaunting eighteenth-century pompadours. So we’re not exactly in a time, perhaps, but, yes, upon it – floating free above the particularities of history.
Even when modern authors write fairy tales for the flourishing children’s market they still seem to be set in the same indeterminate past. Countries are ruled by kings and princes rather than presidents and democratically elected assemblies. There are still witches casting spells and dragons breathing fire, even if these days the witches are whimsical old biddies and the dragons soft-hearted and misunderstood creatures who want only to be loved.
Nowadays, though, there are also fairy stories written for adults. They are just as removed from observable reality, and just as full of magic. But the magic is of a different sort. It involves not talking frogs but death rays, not seven-league boots but spacecraft travelling faster than light to other galaxies, not spells with bats’ blood but tricks with supposed warps and wormholes in the fabric of space–time. Science fiction, in other words – though the science is usually as dodgy as the flying broomsticks and spells of the traditional tales. The time upon which these stories are set is not the past but the future. The future is now our fairy-tale kingdom, the land where anything can happen.
So I thought I might try exploring the parallel by writing a simple once-upon-a-time story, seen in the traditional way through the eyes of a child, but set in a world where technological magic is both as far-fetched yet as taken for granted as the circuitry supporting the traditional speaking mirrors and granting of wishes; and I thought I’d make the whereabouts in time of this world clear by writing the story entirely in the future tense.
Sustaining this unfamiliar narrative tense throughout even a short novel, it seemed to me, would be a bit overinsistent, so after I’d got the idea going the future usages would slip, as the past constructions so often do in traditional narratives, into the historic present.
Or, more accurately, if you don’t mind a new grammatical category, the predictive present.
What first set me thinking about the subject matter of this narrative was walking round the residential streets of Phoenix, Arizona, one hot fall afternoon in 1966. I recall oranges in the trees along the sidewalk, and the occasional gleam of water from lawns beyond them. But the houses themselves were hidden, and there was almost literally no one to be seen. I seemed to be the only living being in the outside world. Everyone else was inside, in air-conditioned rooms where the glare of the afternoon sun was filtered through screens and shutters. This, it occurred to me, was the future. Now that everyone in the world who could afford them had phones to communicate with and TVs to entertain them, there was no need to come outside and risk skin cancer and mugging, or be expected to make small talk with the neighbours. The world, or as much of it as you chose to admit, would come to you.
Communications technology has got vastly more pervasive and sophisticated since then, of course. Many people spend long hours every day in front of their computer screens, seeing only selected electronic shadows of the world and each other. They live as avatars of themselves in constructed artificial universes. They have sexual relations with pixels. The future, as it still was in 1966, has in the half-century since become the present.
I’m not claiming any credit for foreseeing a little of this – it was obvious to everyone. The book was never intended to be a forecast, any more than a traditional fairy tale is intended to be history. Things have anyway not turned out quite as I and everyone else expected. Dystopias never do, any more than utopias. What we always forget is Newton’s third law of motion, which applies to human beings just as much as to physical objects: to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
For a start, although we have become more and more dependent on images to understand the world, we have also become more and more dependent upon the written word. We watch stories played out for us as dramas on the screen, but we also still read them as books – ever longer books, and ever more of them, not only printed on paper but usurping the pictures on the screens.
And we don’t only read the words – we also write them. Who, in the 1960s, outside an educated elite, ever wrote social messages to friends and relations that said anything much more complex than “Happy Birthday” or “Wish you were here”? (As I discovered on that same trip to the US in 1966, Western Union was at the time offering a range of pre-composed messages for their telegrams to spare customers even this minimal literary effort. “Well done! Your excellent speech was convincing and to the point,” “Your performance was magnificent. I shall never forget it,” etc.) But what’s
happened? Even the supposedly semi-literate young have their thumbs flying over their virtual keyboards from dawn to dusk. Or at any rate from about lunchtime onwards.
And people still insist upon emerging from their electronic isolation to herd together in the flesh. They pack grandstands to watch football and athletics. They choose to feel real rain soaking their skins and real mud engulfing their feet while they jam together to listen to rock music. They even do much the same for classical music. They read books – then they meet in each other’s living rooms to discuss them. They fill church halls and marquees to meet the authors of the books at the literary festivals that have sprung up in every town in Britain, in every large village.
I didn’t foresee any of this. I don’t think anybody did.
I did understand one thing, though, when I wrote this book: that even if everyone who can manage it withdraws into their private world, that world will still need to be serviced. Someone will have to build the walls that keep out external reality. Someone will have to install the wires that bring the images. Someone will have to produce the food to sustain the inhabitants, even if it’s delivered through tubes like the water. Someone will have to maintain this elaborate fabric, and repair it when it goes wrong.
So, however many people there are cocooned away in the darkness, there will still be others out there in the heat of summer and the cold of winter doing the physical work. There will continue to be two classes of people in the world, and their lives will continue to be very different.
And will become not less so, as we all once hoped, but more.
The girl in my story, Uncumber, is eventually tempted into emerging from her private world to explore this other world outside, of rain and mud, of deprivation and physical labour.
When you sit down to write something you rarely see any similarities with what has been written before, which is perhaps just as well, or you’d never start. It’s only with hindsight that I realize my story is a version of an archetype that recurs again and again in mythology and literature. The Little Mermaid gives up the comfort of her familiar underwater world to follow her lover, at appalling cost, into the harsh and unfamiliar world of dry land. The unnamed housewife in the old ballad forsakes husband, children, and fine feather bed to run off with the raggle-taggle gypsies. The Lady of Shalott cannot resist turning to confront the real original of the virtual image she has seen in her mirror, even though she knows it will kill her. In Roth’s American Pastoral the rich girl is forcibly abducted from her home – but converts to the outlaw life of her abductors and refuses to return.
The idea that we are separated from some true world beyond our reach also underlies a lot of traditional philosophy. According to Kant, we have knowledge only of the appearances of things, not of the things-in-themselves that produce those appearances. Plato pictures us all as sitting in the darkness of a cave and seeing the world outside not, like the Lady of Shalott, as reflections in a mirror, but as the even less substantial shadows cast upon the walls by a flickering fire. And in Plato’s cave our heads are locked in place; we can’t even choose, like the Lady of Shalott, to risk looking at that tantalizing real world directly.
This kind of simple idealism has long been out of fashion in philosophy. Now that so many of us increasingly live in a virtual world, though, we can imagine an intriguing technological variant of it. What would it be like if you never emerged into the sunshine – if you never had any direct experience of the world that the images represent? I suppose this question isn’t necessarily new. You could project it back in time, to the earliest representations people made of what they’d seen. Imagine you were a palaeolithic child never allowed out of the cave by your overprotective parents. Would the two-dimensional motionless stags and mammoths on the walls constitute a comprehensible world? Even if you’d never seen so much as a three-dimensional rabbit running?
I suppose so. But it would be a different world from the one that the children who were turned out to play by their happy-go-lucky parents in the cave next door would experience. Just as different as the America that I first got to know when I was about ten through the delicious pictures in a children’s book turned out to be from the one I saw when I finally got there and walked around the streets of Phoenix.
Perhaps I intended some reference to existing mythologies with my choice of names for the members of my protagonist’s family and their friends. Expeditus, Pherbutha, Dympna – they’re all called after early Christian saints and martyrs. Pelagius was a noted heretic. The original of Uncumber herself, aka Wilgefortis, was another martyr, the patron saint of women who wished to be rid of abusive husbands, and easily distinguished from her fellow female saints because she had a beard. A bearded woman! What was I trying to say with that?
Perhaps the names were intended to suggest something about the way things of apparently overwhelming significance sometimes disappear from view, as the more obscure early martyrs have – and then reappear from nowhere, with their original meaning changed or forgotten. The gang of bandits that Uncumber meets in the forest speak demotic French, but she doesn’t notice. French, like so much else, has been forgotten in her world.
Or perhaps I was just being flippant. I can’t remember! It’s sometimes as difficult to reconstruct why one did what one did fifty years ago as to understand the motivation of some complete stranger. Year by year, moment by moment, we slip away into the past ourselves, just like everything else. Most of what we are has turned into myth. Once upon a time is when we were. And are. And, I suppose, ever will be.
MICHAEL FRAYN
A VERY PRIVATE LIFE
Once upon a time…
Once upon a time there will be a little girl called Uncumber.
Uncumber will have a younger brother called Sulpice, and they will live with their parents in a house in the middle of the woods. There will be no windows in the house, because there will be nothing to see outside except the forest. While inside there will be all kinds of interesting things—strange animals, processions, jewels, battles, mazes, convolutions of pure shapes and pure colours—which materialize in the air at will, solid and brilliant and almost touchable. For this will be in the good new days a long, long while ahead, and it will be like that in people’s houses then. So the sight of the mud and grimy leaves outside would scarcely be of much interest.
Then again, windows might let the air in, and no one would want the congenial atmosphere of the house contaminated by the stale, untempered air of the forest, laden with dust and disease. From one year’s end to the next they won’t go outside, and the outside world won’t come in. There will be no need; all their food and medicine and jewellery and toys will be on tap from the mains; everything they could possibly require will come to the house through the network of pipes and tubes and wires and electromagnetic beams which tangle the forest. Out along the wires and beams their wishes will go. Back, by return, will come the fulfillment of them.
A rich childhood
The fact that no one goes out and no one comes in doesn’t mean that they won’t see anyone, of course. They’ll be seeing people all the time. Their relations, their friends, the various official representatives of society—they’ll be materializing before them in the special reception chambers, transmitted by way of the wires and beams, and reproduced by the three-dimensional holovision system in all their natural solidity, at all hours of the day and night. Particularly Aunt Symphorosa with the sad life and the perpetual smile; and Great-Great-Grandfather, who will make rather a habit of falling asleep while on transmission, so that Uncumber’s father won’t know whether he can politely switch him off or not. “How can I watch the Battle of Borodino on the history channel while your blasted mother’s Great-Grandfather is occupying the reception chamber?” he complains to his wife—a family joke.
If anything, in fact, they will see too much of their friends and relations. There will be days when the whole family remains in conclave for hours at a time—Great-Great-Grandfather, Uncle Expeditus, Gre
at-Great-Great-Aunt Pherbutha, Cousin Offa, Great Second Cousin Kenulf, the lot—none of them feeling that he is imposing upon the others, because he is still sitting quietly in his own home, and each of them feeling gravely imposed upon, because all the others are in his home too. In fact, there will be scarcely any excuse left for not seeing everyone one ought to see, since seeing them will involve no more than selecting a number and pressing a switch.
Then there will be endless days when their parents’ old friends Pelagius and Dympna materialize, together with their tiresome children. Their tiresome children are switched into Uncumber’s and Sulpice’s room, of course. Sulpice plays with them happily, because Sulpice is good and Sulpice likes everyone. But Uncumber gets spiteful, and reduces the visitors to tears by constantly switching them off. Uncumber will be a difficult child, there’s no doubt about it.
And they’ll see a lot of the world. They’ll have memorable family holidays together—weeks on a lonely shore where the sun shines all day, on and on, and the surf booms, and the fine salt spray drifts over them in the wind, riming their brown skins with white. On these holidays they hear peasants singing in the fields when the wind drops in the evening. Far out to sea at midday squadrons of tall yachts cross the track of the sun and spread out with dreamy slowness. One holiday they see a schooner with a black hull creep in just before sunset, its rusty brown sails flapping in the evening calm, the pop-pop-pop of its engine clearly audible over the still water. It anchors in the roads, and when it sails again the following morning it’s riding higher in the water; the children will believe they heard the splash of oars during the night, and the scrunch of a small boat on the sand….
It’s always sad at the end of these holidays. Uncumber hates the moment when the hot sun and the spume blower are turned off and the whole salt, open white-and-blue world collapses into nothingness, leaving them alone in their rooms again with the empty Imaginin packets and holovision chambers vacant for the arrival of Great-Great-Great-Aunt Pherbutha.
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