Making It Up (19 page)

She said, “When we were evacuated, in the war, Mummy took us somewhere that felt rather like this.”

“Well, lucky for you,” said Aunt Margaret. “I never could understand Virginia's fixation on London.”

There were bluebells here under the trees, and the smell of wild garlic—a place of contrived informality. The two of them stood at a fence that shielded it from the open fields and their occupants. Carol thought of woodland in Massachusetts, which goes on and on, deeper and deeper, secondary growth that has obliterated the patterns of earlier settlement. That would happen here also, she supposed, if by some quirk of history everyone moved away. She imagined oak, ash, and thorn surging across those manicured hillsides.

“Mummy was unusual. Most people have an atavistic feeling that the country is where they really belong. Which makes sense, in a way—most of us are descended from peasants.”

Aunt Margaret gave a startled laugh. “What on earth makes you think so?”

“Well—eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migration to the cities. The Industrial Revolution.”

“I wouldn't know about that. Our people came from the south coast, I believe.”

“Your grandparents?”

“Mmm . . . ,” said Aunt Margaret vaguely. “So one was told.”

“What were they called?”

“Oh, heavens,” said Aunt Margaret. “Carey—my mother's mother. Mildred. And she married Walter Notcutt. And the other side were Harpers, of course. My grandfather Lawrence and . . . I can't think . . . Oh, Edith. They've all been dead since goodness knows when. Why do you ask?”

“I just wondered.” With relief, Carol heard voices behind them. “Here come Uncle Clive and Ben.”

The Colonel was armed with a walking stick, which he used to slash at nettles. Ben had his arm round Carol: “Hi, there! Your uncle has been giving me a lesson in British politics. The Cavaliers and Roundheads become the Tories and the Whigs, in the fullness of time, it seems.” He was wearing a beneficent grin—the one Carol recognized as concealing secret merriment.

“Exactly,” said the Colonel, equally benign, as though approving an assiduous pupil. “Simple, once you get the hang of it. Not much different now, either, by and large.”

“With a few minor adjustments, to take into consideration universal suffrage and social change, maybe?” suggested Ben.

“Eh? Well, we know where we are with Mrs. T, that's for sure.”

Aunt Margaret was getting a trifle impatient. “I hope he's shown you the garden, as well as all this talk.”

“He has indeed,” said Ben. “Delightful.”

“You don't see anything like this on your side of the Atlantic, I imagine. Gardening is definitely an English thing.”

Ben nodded gravely. “Quite so. A national strength.”

I can't take much more of this, thought Carol. They were standing in a group now, in this little belt of woodland, the Colonel occasionally reaching out to swipe at some unwelcome growth. Birds sang continuously, in turns, it seemed, as disciplined as the tidy fields and hedges and the elegant contours of the hills. That childhood experience of country resurfaced, and she knew now that in fact it bore no resemblance to this ordered place: back then, there had been some latent sense of threat, of menace. The mouse in the trap had been bloodstained; she had lain in bed wide-eyed, hearing the owls.

Aunt Margaret was talking about fertilizer. “We try to be entirely organic, but of course the farmers spray with anything and everything. Disastrous for the wildflowers. You see hardly any orchids these days.”

The Colonel had wandered off, and was decapitating thistles.

Ben wore an expression of polite attention but was probably concerned with something entirely different. He would have slid off into a private train of thought; he would be doing some work, or contemplating current affairs, or wondering what breed of sheep those were. He was a man with an inordinate range of interest, and one who never wasted time.

He might, of course, be studying Aunt Margaret's diction. The variety of accents over here fascinated him, but also gave him trouble. He said, “Excuse me?” quite often. Asking directions, he was sometimes defeated by the reply, or he would stand at a shop counter with furrowed brow: “I'm sorry?” He found Cockney difficult, Cumbrian had been impenetrable; in these parts he sometimes had trouble with that soft, blurred west-country speech. Carol translated, and was surprised to find that her own ear could still make the adjustment without effort—she simply heard familiar words differently spoken. Indeed, the speech itself was familiar; it chimed in with the language. This was how people spoke English and ever had. She had said as much, earlier today, after Ben struggled over an exchange with an elderly man at a small petrol station.

“And what is it that I am speaking, then?” Ben said. They both laughed.

But now Carol was hearing Aunt Margaret's speech as strange, alien, even off-putting. Oh, she could understand well enough, but it all seemed to come from a long way away—that bell-like clarity, those pinched vowels. In that other life of hers, in her youth, at college, she had had a friend from the north, a blunt Yorkshire girl, who had a word for that kind of speech—pound-note voices, she called them. Back when a pound was something to be reckoned with. Lots of pounds in Aunt Margaret's voice—old pounds.

Perhaps this was what Ben was listening to, for he turned suddenly to Aunt Margaret with a smile. “Back home we have a yard—Carol does her best to achieve British standards, but I have to admit that we fall short.”

Aunt Margaret stared at him. “A yard? Oh . . .”

Carol knew what she was seeing: some fetid urban square of concrete. Probably Ben knew also; that particular smile was his tease smile, but Aunt Margaret was not to know that. She was seeing a washing line, dustbins.

Carol said, “It's mainly just lawn—the easy option.” She squeezed Ben's arm. “You know, I really think we should be on our way. It's been so good to visit with you, Aunt Margaret.”

Aunt Margaret inclined her head. “Lovely to see you again, and to meet”—she groped unsuccessfully for Ben's name—“your husband.”

“My pleasure,” said Ben. “A most enlightening afternoon.”

Aunt Margaret appeared gratified by this comment. The four of them moved back to the house. Carol retrieved her purse. At the front door, they exchanged kisses and handshakes, their farewells erupting simultaneously so that nobody much heard what anyone else said. Later, only the Colonel's emphatic bass would lie around in Carol's head: “Tell your president to keep on backing up our Mrs. T.”

In the car, heading for the pub in which they had booked a room for the night, Ben said, “So? Did your aunt fill you in on the family tree?”

“Up to a point. But I rather think I may have fallen off the family tree after today. Or jumped.”

“Come now, they weren't so bad. A different climate of mind, put it that way.”

“You can say that again!”

He laughed, and reached across to hold her knee. “Look at it as life experience. I don't often get to meet a guy like your uncle. It's an education. A man of firm views and a fine contempt for the evils of book learning. I was careful to play down my trade.”

“He patronized you,” said Carol.

“Of course, what else? A raw colonial.”

“I was embarrassed.”

“People are not responsible for their relatives. And in any case, you're making too much of it. Personally, I enjoyed myself.”

“It's all very well for you,” she said. “You're detached.”

But that evening, in the pub, she felt an interesting surge of liberation. They drank a lot of wine over dinner; Ben came up with a rather crude imitation of the Colonel which had them both convulsed with laughter. She saw that her uncle would become an icon, one of those private jokes that are the bedrock of a marriage. She felt an absurd gratitude to him.

She said to Ben, “You know, this trip has had a peculiar effect. Maybe it was not just you who is detached.” An image kept coming into her head—she kept seeing those geological maps in which land masses are shown in a state of fission, splitting apart into the familiar shapes of the modern globe: continental drift, America shaping up, floating free of its anchorage. Maybe people do that too, she thought, maybe it's what they have to do.

A few days later, they flew out of Heathrow. I am going home, Carol thought. On previous visits, over the years, she had always experienced at this point a faint sense of loss, as though in lifting off into the sky—taking out her book, glancing at the menu—she left a shadowy fragment of herself behind, down there among the boxy houses, the checkerboard fields. This time, she knew that she was whole. Whatever it had been, that shadow self, it was gone now—gone with her parents, perhaps. She was heading home.

 

 

A
faithful exercise in confabulation would proliferate like an
evolutionary tree. I should write not one book but hundreds; I should pursue each idiosyncratic path. Not an option, clearly, and to follow a single outcome seemed like a constriction: more inviting to pounce on remembered climactic points and let speculation run free. And how they do cluster within a particular time frame, those portentous moments. When we were young. When we were least well equipped to make rational and expedient decisions, when we blew with the wind, when we lived for the day.

There was an explosion of choice, back then. The paths do not so much fork as flourish. Up here? Over there? This way? Or that? In the mind's eye, they mirror the evolutionary tree in which a brief central trunk throws out a series of branches, each of which divides yet again, and none of which is the inevitable course, arriving eventually at
Homo sapiens.
Contingency: the great manipulator. Under the laws of contingency, human evolution is an overwhelming improbability. In the Burgess Shale of British Colombia, there has been found a range of fossil animals about 570 million years old, most of which are unrelated to any existing fauna: dead ends, victims of evolutionary contingency. There is a creature with a nozzle like a vacuum
cleaner, another that appears to be an animated bath mat, another like a lotus flower, another that resembles a feather duster. Bizarre elaborations; the routes that evolution might have taken, the alternative scenarios. I look at these and find myself thinking of the lives I have not had. Shall I be the lotus flower, the bath mat, the feather duster? What if I had followed the advice of the University Appointments Board and applied for a job with Shell? Or got serious and taken the civil service exam? Or gone abroad as a teacher of English?

 

Two boys are out shooting birds on an Italian hillside. Two boys, two guns, four dogs. They have strayed far from the village, up into the hills, farther than they have ever been before, high into the rocky, scrubby bird haunts of the high slopes, where they blast off happily at all and sundry. Few people come here; it is a barren place, and treacherous, with deep unexpected gullies and crevasses. And now, at the end of the day, one of the dogs has got itself into one of these clefts and cannot scramble out. They can hear it, whining and yelping, down there in a morass of twiggy, prickly growth, invisible and insistent.