Making It Up (7 page)

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.”

She did not blame Miranda for her untimely pregnancy or, indeed, her father for his role: “I mean, that would be a bit rich, given that I was the outcome.” No, Miranda's failing had been her slide into what Chloe referred to as the alternative lifestyle, and moreover one which flouted every kind of aspiration or regularity.

“I'd take a more kindly view if something rich and rare had been the product. I've said it before and I'll say it again—I bow to none in my respect for art. But what her chums were into was the style alone. All you ever saw was batik and macramé. I grew up wearing tie-dyed shifts.”

Chloe's refrain about taking control of her life was not just an exhortation: she felt strongly that this can and should be done—a belief that did not spring solely from her rejection of the laissez-faire circumstances of her upbringing. Her education had taught her that people are pitted against misfortune and ever have been: poverty, disease, and history itself with its malevolent strikes. Well, if you have a war flung at you, that is indeed a major set-back, but even so a degree of manipulation is usually possible. You cannot sidestep the cancer cell, admittedly, but whereas market forces are the undoing of many, there again expedient action can keep you buoyant.

People are themselves the central problem, of course. Other people. Here, Chloe drew upon experience, starting off with the rich seam of her childhood and all those fly-by-night associates of Miranda's—the creators of batik and macramé and aromatic candles and herbal soaps, the families who lived in tumbledown out-buildings down muddy lanes, the craft market stallholders and the traveling theatrical groups. Plus the shifting cast of boyfriends, live-in and live-out. Here were people who operated according to whim, who seldom made plans, who lived in the moment. Which is all very fine provided that you do not have to deal with them if you yourself are of a different persuasion. Chloe had been able to break free of all this as soon as she had grown up and was her own woman, but then the people problem rears up again in different guises, she discovered. The trouble with them is that they are not always going to do what you want them to do; they will persist in their own opinions and intentions, they constantly obstruct your carefully designed route. Employers, colleagues, subordinates—none could be relied on for absolute cooperation. Friends must be judiciously selected.

People management was therefore a prime consideration, a central feature of this business of exercising control. Chloe considered that she had got pretty good at it. There were occasional failures of course—irreparable differences of opinion with work-mates, unfortunate collisions with some teaching associate—but on the whole she usually managed to achieve her aims without running into altercation or causing offense. Perhaps it was a matter of personality as well.

That was working life. Private life was another matter. John was never a major obstacle; a naturally compliant man, he was usually prepared to come to an agreement so long as there was no interference with certain sacrosanct areas, mainly to do with Saturday-afternoon fishing and rugby matches on television.

Children were something else.

Confronted with her first baby, Chloe was stopped in her tracks—scuppered, floored. This was the most intransigent being she had encountered, bar none. She faced anarchy, on a daily basis. Nothing she had learned or experienced had prepared her for this—this collapse of all expectations of order. Sophie performed as babies do, and had her mother on the ropes, glassy-eyed.

Second time round, Chloe was grimly prepared. She knew the battle lines, she knew the limits of her endurance, she knew that even in this ultimate test of the human spirit there is a little room for maneuver, even for some travesty of negotiation. When the third baby arrived, Chloe was ready and waiting—trained, hardened, a combat veteran. She knew how to do babies, insofar as that is possible.

But this was only the beginning. Beyond the intransigence of infants there lies the guile of childhood—the awesome powers of manipulation, the tenacity, the volatility, the flight from anything approaching consistency or rationality. Chloe saw that a successful parent required the skills of an industrial arbitrator—the patience, the craft, the ability to identify and push forward a cohesive argument. Along with qualities of leadership and a taste for coercion. Well, she could supply all of that, given time and practice.

It is of course an uneven contest, in every way. Adults dictate, in the last resort, but children hold the insidious card of vulnerability. Chloe had normal maternal instincts: she beheld her offspring at their most appalling moments, and loved them, quite against her better judgment.

There thus ensued a precarious balance of power, with the upper hand swinging from one side to the other depending on the age and capacities of the child in question or on Chloe's stamina at that particular moment. And, indeed, as time went on, it seemed to Chloe that although she would sometimes have to concede an individual battle, the long-term offensive had on the whole been won. She did not like to think about parental life in those terms, but they seemed distressingly apt.

She came to see her own contests with Miranda in a different light. Except that “contest” was not the right word. Since Miranda had made no rules and set no behavioral parameters, there was nothing to fight about. And Chloe had not wanted to ride a bike on the main road, or consort with undesirable friends, or stay at a disco till after midnight. She wanted regularity, on a daily basis; she considered her mother's friends undesirable. There had been a sense in which the situation was reversed, with Chloe the sweet voice of reason and Miranda the force of anarchy.