Making It Up (6 page)

Occasionally she heard Mrs. Leech talking incoherently. People said she was hallucinating—didn't understand where she was or what was happening. Which could be a mercy. For the rest of them, who understood only too well, there was nothing but the grim passage of time. The officer was constantly watching the sky and the horizon, his eyes screwed up against the glare; you knew what he was searching for.

The sun crept down the sky. The water ration came round again. The teacher had been given some brandy; she was in a lot of pain from her arm. At one point, a girl passed out; they managed to lie her down for a bit in the well of the boat, but you couldn't do that for long—they were so tightly packed, there simply wasn't room.

In the early evening, Jean died. Shirley knew at once: the stillness, the sense that something vital was gone from the body across her lap.

She sat on, as the sun sank, as the light began to drain from the sky, as the moon's disk rose above the horizon. She was so tired that she felt numb; sometimes she drifted into a kind of floating state, and then would come to with a lurch, aware again of the people crowded around her, of Jean inert across her knees.

In the wastes of the night she must have slid deeply into this condition—some sort of mockery of sleep. And then people's voices came rooting in—she heard them but seemed unable to respond, to feel anything at all. They were saying that there was a destroyer, that it had seen them. It's over, they were saying, it's over, we're going to be picked up.

But it isn't over, she thought. It has only just begun. She knew that the sinking ship had taken with it a whole life that she would never live, a time that would never be. Jean's cold little body lay across her knees, and all she could think was that Jean hadn't known about death, she didn't even know what death was.

 

 

I
came to England at the age of twelve, just before the end of the
war, to an alien place of astonishing cold and a social system that was mysterious to me. I had spent my childhood in African sunshine, in the polyglot and cosmopolitan ambience of Cairo. The next few years were a time of grim adjustment, passed mainly at a boarding school on the south coast. I remember a fair amount about that stultifying institution, but for the most part those adolescent years are long periods of darkness, into which occasionally a light shines.

 

 

 

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 attend 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.