Read Online Making It Up by Penelope Lively - Free Book Online

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.
    â€œOh 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.”
    â€œSurely her parents . . . ?”
    â€œYes—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?
    â€œWe 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