How It All Began

by Penelope Lively

  Am I?

  “What fun,” said Jeremy. “Well, let her suspect away—it’s no skin off our nose. Listen, darling, I’ve had an idea. Can you get up to town for a night this week? I thought we might do a show—I feel like a really cheesy musical. You could park the girls with friends, couldn’t

  you?”

  Goodness knows how long this can go on, he was thinking. Should we just have a good talk, she and I, and agree that I’m moving back home, all is forgiven? That’s what I wanted, isn’t it?

  Isn’t it?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Anton has changed his day,” says Charlotte. “He was coming tomorrow, but it seems he has an interview for a possible job. That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Mmn.” Rose is apparently immersed in the shopping list that she is compiling.

  “His reading really has come on in leaps and bounds. It’s remarkable.”

  “Mmn.”

  “I would think he has a good chance of a proper job now.”

  “Mmn. I dare say.” Rose frowns at the list, adds an item.

  Charlotte is puzzled. A miasma of embarrassment hangs in the air. What is this? Is she tired of having him come here for the lessons?

  “If we’re in the way,” says Charlotte, “I could always meet up with him somewhere. I can get to the library now, you know—we’d be fine there.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mum. And you shouldn’t be doing the library on your own—it’s too far. I’ve told you I’ll come with you.” She goes to the fridge. “Why are we always out of cheese?”

  “I just heard your mobile ping,” says Charlotte, trying to be helpful.

  I think Victoria and Albert Museum would be good, says Anton’s text. Irresistible. See, I know now this word. I dive every night in the dictionary. No, plunge. I plunge. So we plunge in Victoria and Albert Museum on Saturday.

  Charlotte feels that a return to her own home is perhaps now a viable possibility. Before too long. It is no good pretending that she is self-sufficient once more—she cannot get in and out of a bath, stairs remain an undertaking, shopping and cooking would be a challenge. But she is inching toward that complacent state before her life collided so briefly with that of that vanished stranger, the person who decided that he (or she) could not go a moment longer without taking possession of Charlotte’s bag.

  That state now seems complacent because she had been living in her own home, she could do all that was still within her powers, crutches were things you occasionally saw others using, and felt vaguely sorry for them. It also seems both yesterday, and quite a while ago. One thing old age does is play tricks with time. Time is no longer reliable, moving along at its inexorable pace, but has become febrile, erratic. Mostly, it accelerates. Charlotte read a book recently called Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older, by a psychologist, which attempted to explain the phenomenon—for phenomenon it is, apparently, universally reported. One persuasive explanation has to do with the changed nature of experience itself; when we are young, novelty abounds. We do, see, feel, taste, smell newly, day after day; this puts a brake on time. It hovers, while we savor each fresh moment. In old age, we’ve seen it all, to put it bluntly. Been there, done that. So time whisks by. Ah, that’s why—those interminable days of childhood.

  Whereas, now, Charlotte is stuck on this brisk conveyor belt that moves unstoppably ahead, and we know where it is going but no need to dwell on that. Suffice it that time is tediously predictable—except, of course, when it chooses not to be: in the wastes of a sleepless night, or on a day when pain has kicked in good and hard, and each hour is a test of endurance. And its performance means that she has been at Rose’s house for no time at all, but time that has been punctuated by perversely dragging hours.

  Today is one of those days, because pain is putting on a bravura act. Her back hurts, and her hip chimes in sympathy. Remember it is not always like this, she tells herself sternly. Tomorrow may be quite different. Tomorrow may be all song and dance, figuratively speaking. Think positive.

  It is lunchtime. Rose will not be back till later because she is meeting up with her friend Sarah. Charlotte makes herself a salad, sits down to eat it and attempts some positive thinking. Thought drifts into recollection, as it so often does. But that can indeed be positive. By and large, good memory eclipses bad memory. Tom arrives; they are in the car, he is driving, he reaches over and lays a hand on her knee, which means: here we are, off somewhere, what fun, and by the way, I love you. Where were they going? This thought segues into another, in some mysterious process of free association; now she is pushing an infant Rose in her pram back from the library—her attention is distracted, and when she looks down into the pram she sees that Rose has got hold of the greengrocer’s brown paper bag, there are squashed tomatoes all over Elizabeth Bowen and Iris Murdoch.

  Why had these particular moments lodged? Well, lodge they have, and thanks be. Without them, one would be—untethered. What we add up to, in the end, is a handful of images, apparently unrelated and unselected. Chaos, you would think, except that it is the chaos that makes each of us a person. Identity, it is called in professional speak.

  Savoring identity, Charlotte defies pain, which snarls on, but sulkily. She decides on a fruit yogurt, for afters.

  “Do you remember being in love?” says Rose.

  Sarah reflects. “Dimly. Temporary loss of sanity, as I recall. One is well out of it.”

  Rose nods.

  “Why? Oh, I know. You’re going to write a chick lit novel.”

  “If only,” says Rose. “No, just thinking . . . of things I had forgotten about.”

  “How many times, for you?”

  Rose considers. “Two and a half. You?”

  “I hope Gerry wasn’t the half. Let me see . . . Three and two-thirds, probably. The two-thirds was the PE teacher at school, and I had glandular fever at the time, which may account for it.”

  “My half was my best friend’s boyfriend at college. I succeeded in smothering the passion, for the sake of my relationship with her.”

  “What else have we forgotten about?” says Sarah thoughtfully. “Childbirth? Yes. Definitely. No idea what that felt like.”

  “Being a child?”

  “Oh, that, absolutely. Aliens—children. We can’t ever have been them. Goodness—most of life goes down some plughole.”

  “Just as well,” says Rose briskly. “Overload—if you had to carry it all around.”

  “Instead of which—a few bits and pieces. How did all this arise? Oh—love. That.”

  “That,” says Rose. “Idle thoughts. Whose turn is it to pay for the coffee?”

  “I think I have not this job,” said Anton. “It is with a small firm and they have other people they see. But the interview go quite well, I am not ashamed.”

  Charlotte beamed. “Good. Excellent. You’d hardly expect to strike lucky first time. Put it down to experience. So what have you been reading?”

  Anton pulled a face. “Not interesting reading. I am reading tax regulations. I must know more about UK tax if I am to be a good accountant. So it is goodbye to stories, for now.”

  They had moved from children’s fiction to short stories. “The trouble with the novel,” Charlotte had told him, “is that it goes on and on. Your reading improves by the day, but you still have to work hard at it. You aren’t ready yet for on and on. War and Peace all in good time, but not yet. You need—actually we all need—to achieve a conclusion, an ending.” She had provided an anthology, with suggestions.

  “But first I have finish a story, before I start the tax,” Anton went on. “The Demon Lover. There is an ending, but you are not quite sure what happen.”

  “Quite,” said Charlotte. “A ghost story, of a kind. Clever, isn’t it? And ambiguity can be effective, for an ending.”

  “I am sorry? Ambi . . . ambiguity?”

  “Where there can be more than one interpretation—understanding of what is meant.”

&n
bsp; “Ah. Of course.” Anton considered. “And that is how it is in how we live—there are always more than one way to look at what happen.”

  “Exactly. And you don’t come across endings, as such. There’s a fearful term that’s in fashion at the moment—closure. People apparently believe it is desirable, and attainable.”

  He smiled. “I think I would like closure with the building site.”

  “Ah. That’s different. You want to move on—and away. And you will. But you won’t get rid of the building site—it will remain part of your experience, always.”

  “That is fine,” said Anton. “If I not have to lift and dig anymore, and get dirty, and if I have closure with the site manager.”

  “You will. You’re practically there. And with that in mind, I thought that today we’d tackle something even more exacting than tax regulations. The Conservative Party Manifesto, which I happened to notice in the recycling box. If you are going to spend much longer in this country you need to know something of the language of politics.”

  “The trouble with the V and A,” said Rose, “is that one never knows where to begin. There’s so much.”

  They stood in the entrance hall, their bags checked, their voluntary contributions contributed.

  “Together we can do anything,” said Anton.

  She stared at him. “What?”

  “I’m sorry. It is in my head. What I read with your mother. Political speak. In those rooms are Japanese and Chinese—perhaps we start there? Yes, this is ambitious. Yes, it is optimistic.”

  Rose laughed. “I hope I’m not going to spend all afternoon with David Cameron. My mum has the oddest ideas.”

  “No, it is good. I learn a new way of talking. But I think politicians talk the same everywhere. They make promise.”

  The museum teemed with visitors. “Actually,” said Rose, “we need to get up into one of the quieter areas—maybe leave Japanese, for the moment. Textiles? That’s costumes, and stuff like that.”

  Anton looked dubious.

  “Ceramics? Pots and china.”

  “That I would like. I have a friend at home who makes pots.”

  The ceramics galleries did indeed turn out to be less frequented. Rose and Anton wandered alone past case after case, in which were gathered the crockery and the ornaments from everywhere, and every age, the plates, bowls, jars, tureens, vases, figures. The eye was caught by color, by shape, by glaze, by all this variety and ingenuity. They stopped, time and again, to admire, to comment, and came to rest at last in a far room which offered a comfortable seat from which you could contemplate more homely and local material—seventeenth-century English. Light flooded down from a domed skylight above; it was very quiet, there was no one else around.

  “This is a good place,” said Anton. “It is just for us.” In front of them was a case in which were ranged, it seemed, whole dinner services—plate upon flowered plate, someone’s once familiar domestic furnishings. “People have use these, do you think?” he went on. “Or they just have for to look at?”

  “Some extremely careful washing-up must have gone on,” said Rose.

  “They are beautiful. All the flowers, and the painted people. That bird. My friend make only brown pots. Nice. Nice shape, but only brown.”

  “The seventeenth century did brown too,” said Rose. “Look—over there.”

  “I feel as though there are many people in here,” said Anton. “All the people who make these things, and use them. Very quiet people, like ghost.”

  “And just the things left. Much tougher than we are. Even china. Odd to think that my Habitat mugs will outlast me—not that they’ll end up in a museum.”

  “The mugs with blue and gray pattern? I drink tea in one yesterday, with your mother.”

  Rose nodded. After a moment she said, not looking at him, “In fact, I didn’t say to my mother that we were going to meet up here today.”

  “I think I know that, so I did not say.” Then, quietly, with reluctance, it seemed: “She would not—understand?”

  A silence. Rose said, at last, “No. It’s that she would understand.”

  And then they looked at one another.

  Rose said, “Maybe we should move on. Enough ceramics.”

  “You do not want to talk . . . about this?”

  She shook her head.

  “No.” He took a sharp breath; he laid a finger for a moment on her wrist. “No. It is perhaps better not to talk. Only—I want to tell you that when I am with you I begin to feel that I can perhaps live in this country, make a new life here. So I thank you for that. I thank you for . . .”—he smiled—“You are kind to a foreigner, and I thank you.”

  “Don’t,” said Rose. “You know it’s not like that.”

  A silence. “No, I think it is not. But I must tell myself that.”

  Footsteps. They were no longer alone. Two women were inspecting salt-glazed dishes. Rose got up: “Let’s go—we’ve hardly seen anything yet.”

  In Jewelry, they considered art nouveau brooches. Rose thought: It is out now—not spoken, but out—and so nothing can be the same. She wanted to take his arm, to behave like other couples, and that was out of the question, quite out of the question. How can you feel happy, but also entirely sad? she wondered. Well evidently you can.

  In Glass, they studied an engraved Venetian goblet, and Anton thought fleetingly of his wife, who had been irrelevant for a long while now. She hung there for a moment, a reminder of lost emotion. I had forgotten how to feel, he thought. Until now. I had forgotten what it was like to feel. And now I am feeling what I must not feel.

  Later, they sat in the courtyard, with coffee and a snack. It was sunny, warm; Victorian brick glowed all around, children paddled and shouted in the great central pool, people sprawled on the grass. Voices rang out.

  Anton said, “So many people. So many language. So far, I hear French, German, Japanese, Italian.”

  “And Scandinavian of some kind, just behind us. The museum is polyglot. There’s a good word for you—speaking lots of languages. I’d forgotten I knew it.”

  “So I say to the site manager that his building site is polyglot. I think he will tell me to—get stuffed. And that I learn from my nephew. It is rude, I think?”

  “Fairly rude,” said Rose. “It depends who says it to whom. Between friends it would be acceptable, just about, if joking.”

  “The site manager is not my friend, and he does not do joking. So it would be rude. But there is so much rude on the site nobody would notice.”

  “If I may say so, I think you’ve become slightly obsessed with this site manager—with how much you don’t like him.”

  “That is because he is somebody who have come into my life by accident—he should not be there.”

  “You could say that of me, too,” said Rose, staring out across the courtyard, at the arched windows, the twisted columns, the Grecian frieze figures.

  “He is a bad accident. You are . . . you are the good thing that has happen.” He smiled.

  That smile. She had to look away again. “All meetings are accidents really, I suppose. They might never have happened.” Marriages, she thought.

  “Oh yes, unless you believe in . . . how do you say? . . . what is going to happen anyway, it is going to come, it have to come.”

  “Fate. Destiny.”

  “Is that how you say it? And no—I think I do not believe in that.”

  “I suppose it would be worse if one did. No escape. As it is, you can always hope for a bit of luck.”

  “And I have luck. Today. That I am with you at this nice museum, and I think that there is much we have not yet look at.” He pushed his chair back. “So perhaps we see some more? And I will forget the site manager and perhaps next week I will have luck with the job interview. There is another—I told you, I think.”

  She got up. “Yes. You did.”

  They moved away. Into Islamic, into Chinese. With all that was now unde
rstood, but unspoken.

  Rose stares at her mother, not seeing her. Rose is elsewhere, floating free.

  “Lucy rang,” says Charlotte. “She wants you to ring back.”

  “Lucy?”

  “Lucy.”

  Rose stares on. A second. Two seconds. Then she crashes back into her own kitchen, her life. “Oh,” she says. “Did she?” She gulps down her breakfast tea, gets up. “Thanks. I’ll ring her.”

  The house closes in on her. The family. All of it.

  “And another thing . . .” says Charlotte. But Rose has left the room. Two minutes later she returns—coat on, bag in hand.

  “Another thing . . . I’m so sorry, but I’ve broken a mug. One of the Habitat blue and gray ones.”

  Rose laughs.

  “Well, I’m relieved it’s funny. I was afraid you treasured them.”

  “Not particularly. I had no desire to bequeath them to Lucy.” Another laugh. “I must dash, Mum. I’m late, and Henry’s always sitting there waiting. So much fuss about My Memoirs—huh! That Mark has been a pain. See you later.”

  Charlotte bins the broken mug. Why the laugh? She’s odd these days—some Rose I don’t know has surfaced. But who knows their own child? You know bits—certain predictable reactions, a handful of familiar qualities. The rest is impenetrable. And quite right too. You give birth to them. You do not design them.

  Is she worried about something? Probably—most of us worry much of the time. The human condition. Lucy? James? Some problem there? No, she’d have said. A minor worry, let me hope. And now here am I worrying about her. Of course—human condition stuff again. On the Richter scale of worry, child-worry peaks at ten. Money noses in at five or six. Health zooms up and down, depending on severity of threat. The one or two of household inconvenience is mere indulgence. Give me a leaking pipe any day.

  Old age worry is its own climate, she reflects. Up against the wire, as you are, the proverbial bus is less of a concern: it is heading for you anyway. The assault upon health is inevitable, rather than an unanticipated outrage. You remain solipsistic—we are all of us that—but the focus of worry is further from the self. You worry about loved ones—that tiresome term, as bad as closure—you worry about the state of the nation, about sixteen-year-olds sticking knives into one another, about twenty-year-olds who can’t find a job, you worry about the absence of sparrows and the paucity of butterflies, about destruction of habitats, you worry about the decline of the language, about the books that are no longer read, about the people who don’t read.