Making It Up by Penelope Lively

Author:Penelope Lively
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

Transatlantic

A few years ago, I met up with a woman I had known when we were both young. She had gone to work in the United States when she was twenty, had married there, and never came back. Now, she was a California matron, with children and grandchildren, her voice and mannerisms entirely American except that here and there was just a hint, a flavor, of the English girl that she had been—like those elderly GI brides one sometimes sees on television programs, reminiscing against a backdrop of their former selves lined up on the quayside over half a century ago. Looking at her, listening to her, it was as though she had undergone some metamorphosis. She had not just grown older; she had shed one skin and assumed another.

After I left university, I worked for a couple of years as research assistant to the then professor of race relations at Oxford. One day, he was visited by an American academic colleague. Maybe they ran out of professional small talk, or maybe my employer had other commitments—anyway, he brought this man into my office after a while with the suggestion that I take him for a conducted tour of Oxford. Fine by me; it was one of those golden October days—far preferable to be out and about rather than moldering at a desk. I did the visitor proud: a choice selection of colleges, the Bodleian, the Ashmolean, Christ Church meadow, the river. He was entranced. We got on famously. I was twenty-two; he was—oh, old, forty at least, an avuncular figure. Let’s be clear, this is not a tale of lost romance. Over a farewell drink in the Mitre he asked what I had in mind for the future—noting, presumably, that my present job was a pretty dead-end affair. I think I said something about wanting to travel at some point. He gave me his card: “My university has postgraduate programs that might appeal to you. Let me know if you’re interested.”

I didn’t. That road not taken vanishes into mist. Not long after, I met the man I would marry.

In America, I have frequently experienced a sea change. Suddenly—on a plane, in a city, talking to a stranger—I have felt as though I brushed shoulders with some other self, a person that I am not but easily could have been. It is to do with a transatlantic sense of expansion, of license, of possibility, the way in which people seem more relaxed, freed up, at one with the world. They talk to anyone; they talk to me. I have felt, sometimes, a sense of energy, of empathy. I have taken a sidestep and found myself acting differently, becoming a person who is still entirely me but also some extra self that I don’t quite recognize. Is this a hint of an alternative destiny, an alternative persona responding to the requirements of another environment?

Equally, once in a while, hearing an American voice, I know a peculiar nostalgia, as though I am

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