But What Did It All Mean???

                                              

     There was an image which would come to her from time to time in the middle of the night. It was of a high and narrow door made of grey and splintery planks. She was moving towards it and must go through. As she approached, it opened automatically. Her imagination took her no further than just over the threshold. She was inside. And she could not go back. Nor could she see forward. Then her mind would slip back and bring her again to that moment of entry. That she tortured herself with: the door would swing wide, and, willy-nilly, her feet clamped on time’s conveyer belt she would be carried through it. The movement would be steady, slow, and inexorable and there could be no clutching at the door frame, no racing backwards against time’s pull. As in a dream, she would have no control. Once on the other side, she would find herself metamorphosed:  somehow, in a twinkling, she would have become that most despised of human creatures, an old woman.  And then?

     What would then ensue she could not guess. From the ‘life’ side of the door, the terraine beyond was impenetrably misty. Her imagination dodged offering her anything at all specific. But she couldn’t help but be aware – again only in flashes at 2 am - that the mist hid bogs, sudden drop-offs, precipices impossible to scale. The air would be cold and at the same time stuffy and foetid. Such companions as would have entered just before or just after her – Daphne, Celia, Rachel, for example, all born the same year - would soon start falling out of her sight. One by one, they would be lost to crevasses, sucked down into swamps. Or she might be first. Her friends would turn and call out to her, ‘Anna, Anna! Stay!’ as she sank. She’d try to answer, and be unable, wet clay filling her mouth and her nostrils.

     Seventy, then, was both impossible, and inevitable.

                                                                       *

     The sixties had been a pleasant plateau. Traversing its sunny upland landscape, she’d got accustomed to being at first merely in late middle age and then, very gradually, elderly. Elderly turned out to be more than just possible. It could even be considered the best yet. One was beyond the bodily urges that had created so much havoc earlier; one could actually choose, consciously choose, what one did, and with whom.

     Old age would be another matter, however, and after seventy surely one was that thing, old. Old meant one had entered the final stage. Only a dwindling, a letting go of more and more, was ahead. One would have less and less choice, and about anything.

                                                                      *

     And then a day after the fateful event, she woke up feeling exactly the same as ever.

     The so-serious birthday had been marked by a party. All her friends expected her to have one and so she did, and the preparations for it and the having of it distracted her so she’d barely so much as glanced in the mirror to see the new, now old, self. Maybe that was the point of such parties. Snatched up in the laughter and music – Grant had brought his guitar and they’d all joined in the singing, the songs of their youth transporting them back: If I had  Hammer, Michelle, Ma Belle, Lemon Tree – she felt at most twenty-six. The year she’d run away from her first marriage, driven away actually, or motored (the car was a Wolsley).

     Lying in bed the next morning, at first she even forgot for some while that she’d crossed the dreaded threshold. ‘Here Comes the Sun’ sang in her head and she hummed along, and smiled, remembering how wild she’d been, those first years when she’d been out of her first marriage and on her own. It felt not long ago at all. She stretched her legs, enjoying the feel of her new linen sheets, and then sat up, stuffing another pillow under her head so she could lean back again yet see out the window.

     It was another lovely July day. The dawn sky was pale lemon. The sea, the triangle of it she could see between oak and chestnut branches, was smooth slate. Within an hour, sky and sea would be almost indistinguishable one from another, both a strong, bright blue. She loved very early mornings, always had. Even as a little girl she had jumped out of bed before anyone else to possess the world alone.

     It was as she walked in her bare feet over the cool floorboards and entered the dimness of her living room that she remembered. That was when it came over her: she had entered her new landscape. Yet she felt exactly as she always had.

     But could that be true? How much of who she was now was really the same person as the child, the girl, the young woman, and so on up to this threshold she’d just been carried through on that conveyer belt she’d imagined? 

     She made a cup of coffee and took it back with her to the bedroom, set it on the bedside table and climbed back into bed. The sky was already a clear, skim-milky blue.

    She thought, I am seventy years old. Me!

     But who exactly was she? She had been so many people, it sometimes seemed. Her life, if it were a novel, would be a disconnected one, much too choppy to satisfy a reader who wanted some deep meaning to be revealed before the tale was over, the book closed. It lacked a coherent theme, and more important and even odder, it lacked a consistent central character. The heroine moved through so many events. Relationships swept her up and then, a few pages later, dropped her.  Or she did the chucking herself and began a fresh page with a new chapter heading. A person, or a whole set of people and a whole complicated stage set, were left behind her. Our heroine stepped into a new scene and apparently became someone else. Even her name changed, not just her surname but her first, the one most her. Anne became Anyusha, and she became Annie. Eventually Annie became Anna.

     But that central character, Anne, Anyusha (she was the most remote of all), Annie, Anna she was the same person really. In her core she had to have been. – So who exactly was she? And who is she?  Now, today?

                                                                        *

     The year she came of age….that phrase slid into her head and then she pondered it. The truth was that she had no idea what it meant, in terms of herself. What was ‘coming of age’? What age? It must mean becoming grown up, that was obvious, but she had no sense that that had ever really happened. She’d never become ‘a grownup,’ not the way her parents and their generation had been grownups, not even now. Their personalities had coalesced long before she knew them into something with a nice, clear outline. Or so it had seemed to her. They were what they were. They did not change. They married young and stayed married to the same person, whom they loved forever as they had promised to do. They loved their children steadily too, despite those children’s different, and sometimes erring and disappointing, natures.

     Of the people she had been, Anna feels closest now to her young girl self. Her joys now are the same simple ones Anne loved at twelve: scrambling over rocks – never mind much less nimbly – swimming in the sea or in a pool, watching tree tops in any season. Wind and weather. Reading, puzzles. Music: lying in bed, the light from the hall falling in a yellow band into the bedroom she shared with her sister, and listening to her mother playing Beethoven Sonatas down in the living room.  Later, playing them herself. The rapture music can bring is the same, maybe even more piercing. Laughing with her sister. Experiencing through all the years the same mixture of protectiveness and deep pleasure at seeing her brother come towards her.  And always, the enormous satisfaction of entering other lives and landscapes, in books.

     As a girl she’d been intrepid. Alone, she’d prowled the woods, sailed her boat in stormy weather. Perched high above treetops, she’d helped a carpenter she adored shingle a roof. At eighteen, she’d been the first, and quite fearless, traveler to cross a particular border into Eastern Europe.  

     She often thought that it had been her joy in reading that undid her. All that reading, combined with her heroic loneliness – all those hours in the woods, out in a boat, or all alone abroad– she had become a romantic without realizing. That the books she read were classics disguised their fateful power. They were both enlarging her and fatally reducing her. How could she be, how could she even want to be, ultimately, different from Anna, from Emma (Bovary, that is, not Woodhouse), Natasha, Tess, or, later, Lady Chatterly? She’d simply had no idea how long life went on, that a dramatic embracing of Fate would lead to a long stretch of fear and entrapment.

     The two urges – to be the lone adventurer, and to submit herself utterly, utterly to love - were irreconcilable.

      Chapters. She attempted some headings. First, and easiest, Intrepid Girlhood. And then -  Womanhood. (a round soft word like a moan) and central to that, Becoming Anyusha,  or the Balkan bride.  Then, Motherhood, and gathering the strength to flee the Slavic trap. And then – Girlhood, yes, Girlhood Again, the rediscovery of her power. The best years came at that point. Single Motherhood. Meant to be bad but not being, not for her. Instead being adventure, financial independence.  Fun. And – the loss of it again. Again! How had she done that?  And Another Escape.

     It was love that undid her every time she was undone. Reaching for it, mistaking it, blindly holding on to a chimera of it. Perhaps it had been mere lust, each and every time, and she’d had to dress it up. There had been no sexual education at the time she grew up. She’d only had books to go by. She’d assumed that being entranced by a man’s a man’s profile, or his legs running across a tennis court, meant she loved him. And would forever. She had thought that every time.

    There were too many chapters. Too many chapters and still no clear theme.

     Or perhaps there was. Perhaps the theme was that she went for it with arms outstretched, every single time – danger. Whether in the shape of a man or a landscape, or a border or a continent to cross.  The adventure of it.

     And she couldn’t be sorry. Her life had been full. Rich. Scary sometimes. But she’d done what she most wanted to do, really. The key things. Raised her beautiful children, and done it alone – so much easier. Had oodles of grandchildren to love. Written a book that was praised and won prizes. Visited many, many countries, mostly alone: a person alone notices more and connects better with new people. She still swam a kilometre every day and walked at least a couple.

     Sitting up against her pillows, Anna watched dawn life carrying on outside in the trees, birds darting.  A bee buzzed into the room and out again. She heard a car pass slowly down the steep lane outside her hedge. She couldn’t see the lawn but she could imagine how the grass would be wet with dew. It still would be wet in an hour, under the trees. She would take her breakfast on a tray to eat on the verandah. The sun hit there first and would have already dried the table top and her wooden chair.

     Something funny occurred to her: how much she was the same. Old age looming as it had, her fear of it, was just the way her marriages had loomed in the lead up to them. She’d seen them, in advance, as large and certainly fatal disasters she still planned to jump into. As if that was all there was to it. As if it would be quick, the life thereafter. Each time she forgot how long the days and years would be once life got going on the other side of the plunge.

     And she had done the same thing about becoming seventy. Her image of the door, how she would transform into a crone from one day to the next. It wasn’t going to be like that. This time, she was free. The change hadn’t been to put herself at the mercy of someone else. This time she would be making the choices. And she might live for years – perhaps twenty, as her mother and grandmother had.

     She decided she’d stick with being elderly for a while yet. ‘Old’ could wait till eighty, unless she decided then that ninety was more like it.